Michael Foley remembers working as a Queensland dentist in the era before fluoridation. He worked in the public system from the 1980s, and later became the head of the state’s dental association. Practising in prisons and in rural and remote Queensland, Foley saw the issue where it was most acute; poor dental health is closely associated with poverty.
He says he could tell patients were from Queensland based on their teeth: if they had a full set but came from poverty, it was almost guaranteed that they’d grown up somewhere else.
“I was doing dental general anaesthetics at QEII hospital and ripping out kids’ teeth, anything from six to a dozen. Once, it was all 20 teeth in a little kid’s head. I used to see severe decay every day of the week,” he says.
“That’s what life was like in disadvantaged communities.”
The statistics bear this out. A 2010-12 study found children in the sunshine state had consistently bad teeth, except in Townsville.
Until 2008, when the Bligh government mandated fluoride be added to drinking water, it was considered a local government issue. In 2012, LNP premier Campbell Newman reversed Bligh’s move.
At the time, health minister Lawrence Springborg told parliament: “There is little doubt that nothing stirs up sentiment and emotion in the community as much as debate and discussion around the benefits or otherwise of the fluoridation of the water supply.”
Since then, council after council has rolled back fluoridation.
The latest, in a decision announced last week, was Gympie Regional Council. Outside south east Queensland, only five councils now add fluoride to their water supply, with another five relying on naturally occurring fluoride in parts of the Great Artesian Basin. Fifty-six regional councils do not use fluoride.
Gympie followed the Cook Shire council, which voted to remove fluoride in Cooktown in February; Cairns voted the same way last December.
Gympie councillor Allona Lahn moved the motion to remove fluoride from the local water supply.
Lahn ran in state and federal elections on the Informed Medical Options Party ticket, and for years paid for a filter to remove fluoride from her household water.
Lahn says she put the motion partly to save council money – chemicals and labour cost Gympie about $255,000 a year – but she says that even if the state government offered to pay the entire cost, she still wouldn’t vote to bring it back.
“People should have choice,” she says. “If you want to eat bad foods, if you want to have fluoride, if you want to have, let’s say, vaccines, then you choose that. But there should be no coercion, bullying, bribery. It needs to be a choice.”
Lahn claims the science is not settled on fluoride.
“If you want fluoride, buy toothpaste. It’s inexpensive, it’s on the shelves, it’s everywhere,” she says.
Council staff recommended the change after receiving a 651-signature petition sponsored by former council candidate Marcel Claassens. It did so despite a briefing by the state’s chief dental officer and other public health experts, and acknowledging that “every reputable medical, dental and scientific agency in Australia … strongly endorse water fluoridation”.
Councillor Dolly Jensen, who defeated Claassens at the last council election, spoke against the motion.
“I can hear the banjos playing. We are just putting ourselves back into the hell town era,” she told a council meeting.
“Here we are, going against the science to appease a few conspiracy theorists and sovereign citizens.”
For decades, a small army of health professionals and representative groups has campaigned for the state government to intervene. But Labor and Liberal premiers have resisted taking action.
“We don’t often get reasons why,” Australian Medical Association Queensland branch president Nick Yim says.
“There’s been significant amounts of misinformation … in social media and also sometimes mainstream media, that influences the public and also those decision makers. The research and the evidence is clear cut – it supports fluoridation to improve health care, and it should be a basic right.”
Premier David Crisafulli has previously said local government should make the decision.
A 2016 paper by the National Health and Medical Research Council states that water fluoridation reduces tooth decay by between 26% and 44% in children and adolescents, and by about 27% in adults. “There is no reliable evidence that water fluoridation at current Australian levels causes health problems,” it says.
About 72% of Queenslanders receive fluoridated drinking water, and most of them live in Brisbane.
Foley says people living in areas without fluoride are also the least likely to have access to a dentist. Most Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory have fluoridated water, but only one in Queensland does, he says.
“We should hang our heads in shame.”
“Over the next decade, the children who are growing up in places like Gympie now will get significantly more tooth decay than the children in nearby Sunshine Coast who have fluoride in their drinking water.”
Original article online at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/04/something-not-in-the-water-why-are-queensland-councils-voting-to-remove-fluoride