QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr BUTLER (Hindmarsh—Minister for Disability and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Minister for Health and Ageing and Deputy Leader of the House) (15:03): I'm happy to take the question on behalf of the government, and I acknowledge the member's interest in this area and our many conversations about public health issues, around obesity. But the way in which the member has framed it today is around childhood tooth decay.

First of all, I'd like to give a shout-out to the work the member for Sydney did, when she was health minister, to put in place the childhood dental benefits scheme—a great advance around oral health for young children. We've been consistently struggling with the low uptake, frankly, of that program. I think it's still less than 40 per cent of eligible children that are taking advantage of significant free dental services that they're eligible for, if they're from a family with family tax benefit.

I'd love to talk with the member and anyone else about ideas to lift that uptake, and I've talked to the dental industry about that. The member raises the question of sugar consumption, which is a very significant public health issue. I can indicate as a short answer to the member's question that there are no plans to introduce a tax on sweetened beverages, if you like, of the type that the UK and some other countries have done.

But I do want to indicate a couple of other things that we're doing here. One of the challenges for parents, as I think we all know, is understanding what is in the food that is on the shelves of the supermarkets. Although there are different views about a tax in the community, there is overwhelming support for better front-of-packet labelling.

We introduced that scheme back when I was the assistant minister for health, well over a decade and a half ago. It was on a voluntary basis, with an expectation that uptake by industry would have reached about 70 per cent by this year. It's about half of that.

So the assistant minister for health, working with her colleagues, has indicated that that front-of-packet labelling that tells parents exactly what is in the food that they're putting in the trolley will be made mandatory. There's a process under way right now, and that will return to health ministers, I think, early next year. There's also, frankly, the question of formulation of foods, including sweetened beverages.

One way of changing that is through a tax. We are conscious of the fact, for example, that a can of Fanta in Australia might have more than six teaspoons of sugar in it; it now has less than four teaspoons of sugar in the UK. But we want to continue to talk with industry about whether there are different ways to skin that cat.

I would like to see a reformulation of a range of products that have high levels of sugar in them that particularly children consume. The assistant minister will be meeting again with industry later this month to put together a work plan to work through some of that. I think industry frankly needs to consider the question of why they voluntarily could not reduce the sugar content of some of these sweetened beverages down to the level you do see in other countries, without the imposition of a tax.