Local Liberals make pitch for seniors’ votes in ACT

Five hundred older Canberrans will get free dental work worth up to $1,000 each year under a Liberal ACT Government, as reported in the Canberra Times.

Opposition Leader Zed Seselja said on 11 September,  that the four-year $1.745million program was for people with a Commonwealth seniors health card.

”It is designed to address the backlog, and at this stage will be done through a waiting-list process,” he said.

”This won’t solve all the problems for dental care we don’t pretend that but it will go some of the way,” he said.

Liberals spokeswoman on ageing, Vicki Dunne, said the program would be aimed at priority cases.

”People who are older often have to replace their dentures quite frequently because their bones shrink, and they don’t wear their dentures because it is too uncomfortable, and it is addressing those sort of urgent needs,” she said.

The Liberals are also proposing a waiting list for aged accommodation. It would allow people to put their names down for ACT Housing aged person’s units while still working. The Liberals would work with the private sector, which provides much of the ACT’s aged accommodation.

Mrs Dunne said this would work with a long-term ”land bank” of sites for future retirement villages and aged-care accommodation.

”What we have found with planning for aged care is that there is a big lag between when people want to start a process and when they finally open the doors on a new facility, and what we want to be doing is identifying spaces across the territory in every regional area,” she said.

ACT Council of Social Service director, Ara Creswell, welcomed the dental plan as an important initiative. She wanted more information on how the waiting list would work, but said it would help with planning.

”Older people who are in the workforce can’t currently register for an ACT Housing aged person’s unit if their income is too high, so it is important that we are able to look at long-term planning and that we can ensure that people who know that they will be needing that kind of support are able to register,” she said.