M ichael 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

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