Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

A gold smartcard! The minister for health held up a Medicare smartcard, a successful trial of which has been held in Tasmania over the last two years. There has been extensive community consultation in the lead-up to the development of this proposal. The creative proposal went to the government together with a proposed budget. KPMG did an independent assessment of the business case, and their strong advice was that the business case is essentially overwhelming for the card to be implemented. I particularly appreciate the public support from members of the Labor Party for the smartcard. There were a number of them, including the member for Lalor and the member for Wills. In fact, the Premier of Queensland has already beaten us to it and is implementing a Queensland smartcard drivers licence, and I particularly appreciate his support for that. We are happy to be as open and as transparent as possible on this project.

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