Page 1800 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 18 October 1989
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The consultation process is in place, it can stay in place, and the Residents Rally has indicated that it will be prepared to reconsider its policy. The four Residents Rally members of this Assembly have agreed that they will abide by the evidence Dr Kinloch takes in the Assembly committee and they will bring back to their own membership the evidence that Dr Kinloch finds and, if necessary, seek to have the membership change their policy. We do not believe that will happen, but we are prepared and we are open-minded enough to say that, if that is the case, then that is what we will do.
When that policy was put into the Residents Rally platform we had some new evidence. We had statistical evidence that indicated that fluoride in the water was not achieving the goal that it had set out to do. We had evidence of harm, which has been presented to you; and we also had very new evidence that rinsing with fluoride, without swallowing, without ingestion, delivered the benefits of fluoride without delivering any of the harm. It was in that light that we considered it was appropriate for us to try to find a way to maximise the benefits and minimise the harm.
The evidence from Brisbane was particularly interesting. I notice that Mr Berry has compared Brisbane and Canberra and said, "Well, there you are, Brisbane has no fluoride, Canberra does have fluoride, that is the end of it". Had he gone and looked a little further, and had the people who presented that view been a little more honest, they would have presented for this Assembly comparative figures for Brisbane and all the other major capital cities in Australia. On that evidence, when you compare it particularly to Melbourne, because that is the one that is closest, there appears to be very little difference.
We are not on about banning fluoride. We are on about delivering it in a way that maximises the benefits and minimises the harm. The Brisbane experience indicates that something strange is going on about fluoride being in the water. We are about fluoride delivery to our children. We are talking about the delivery of fluoride to the mouths of the citizens of the ACT.
How is it then, I have been asking myself for several months, that the benefits of fluoride appear to be getting to the people of Brisbane, even though it is not in the water? Along this line, I phoned Dr Selinger, following his excellent article in the Canberra Times, and said to him, "When I read on my toothpaste tube that it contains 0.75 per cent per weight of monosodium fluorophosphate, how does that relate in parts per million to fluoride in the water?". He said that it was an interesting question, that he had come up with the same question himself a week earlier and had decided to look into it. Because of the nature of the combination of the chemicals and because of a series of other factors, it took him much longer to work out than he expected, but he felt that it related to
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