Page 2831 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 August 1991
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submissions that came in from professional people, from doctors, from scientists, from government inquiries and so on, were not opinion polls; they were submissions and they presented very well indeed the case for not forcing the people to take fluoridation.
One of the things this Bill does, which has hardly been mentioned by anybody in this Assembly, is remove the section that talks about the people of Canberra having the right to a referendum on fluoridation. Sir Stanton Hicks, director of nutrition of the Australian armed services during World War II, wrote this in the Medical Journal of Australia on 11 November 1961, and the principle holds true to this day:
... as an often misquoted opponent of fluoridation of public water supplies ... I am not ... and never have been, opposed to the use of fluoride either internally or externally for dental purposes. I am however, opposed on principle to the deliberate addition of any substance whatever to a public water supply with the avowed intention of influencing any physiological function of the human body.
When I ask my dental friends why they do not advocate the supply to and use by parents of fluoride tablets, and the control of the dental effect by the school dental service, I am invariably told that parents could not be relied upon to co-operate. How do they know? I am unaware of any intensive campaign having been undertaken to advocate such a procedure in Australia.
I attended an address to a recent Australian Dental Conference in Adelaide by a leading fluoridation expert of the United States Department of Health. He advised his listeners to press for fluoridation by influencing councils and governments. He warned them not to permit the subject of fluoridation to become a matter for public debate because, he said, plebiscites were invariably against the proposal owing to the influence of crackpots. In itself this is a remarkable tribute to the influence of crackpots, and at the same time a contemptuous insult to the intelligence of the average citizen. It discloses, however, what in my opinion is a dangerous trend in our day and age. This is the tendency of the pseudo-scientific expert to use authority to impose his views.
It is my conviction that if a medico-social measure cannot be sufficiently clearly explained to one's fellow men to win their confidence that it is honestly presented and that there is no other alternative to its adoption, there is
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