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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (8 April) . . Page.. 686 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

advertised. Again, information went out to schools and to people who had accessed the service before. We also let community groups know. ACTCOSS and all those sorts of people knew about the public meetings and about the process. My understanding is that for the second meeting two people turned up. They were both therapists in the area. If we had gone to a third one, we could have got four people. It would have been an absolute breakthrough at that stage.

The issue here is that significant public consultation did occur. The documents that were sent out were very user friendly. They were certainly sent to everybody who requested them. I think everybody in this place got copies, plus briefings on them. A couple of months ago we got 18 submissions back. They were predominantly from professionals or organisations operating in the area. All of those submissions and the input from the public meeting have been taken on board. We have looked at the options available to us and have come up with a final document which will be implemented.

The situation with school dentistry is very interesting. As those opposite, certainly Mr Moore, will know, Mr Moore and I have argued in this place that the move to cluster clinics and fewer and fewer cluster clinics was, in the end, going to impact badly on the children at school who most needed the service. In other words, parents who did not tend to send their children to regular dental appointments off their own bat would also tend not to take them to the cluster clinics. We believed very strongly that the only way to overcome that was to get a mobile service back out to the schools. The only way we could do that, of course, was to implement a user charge, but not on people on low incomes and not on pensioners. That amount of money is significantly less than the cost of even one visit to a dentist for one member of the family. It is actually a very low figure. For large families, I think the maximum is $100. It does not matter how many kids you have. If it is only one child, the figure is significantly less than that. By implementing a quite small user fee, only for those families that are not low income or on social security benefits, we have managed to get a mobile service back out to the schools so that we can ensure that the people who most need the service are actually getting access to the service. I think that is a good balance.

This all came about because, as many of the people in this house will know - and many of us have been very negative about the whole situation - in last year's Commonwealth budget the Commonwealth removed the special dental program. That cost the ACT Government some $1.3m. We had to look for the best possible way that we could maintain the service following that significant reduction from the Commonwealth. We have done that by implementing low fees in our adult dental area and some fees in the school area for families that are not low-income earners or on social security benefits. As well as that, we have improved our service delivery. I think that is the sort of balance that you need to achieve in what is a very difficult circumstance.

MS TUCKER: I ask a supplementary question. Mrs Carnell thinks the difference between January and the beginning of April is six months. I do not make it out to be of that duration.

MR SPEAKER: There must be no preamble to a supplementary question.

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