Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I begin in what is essentially a discussion of Australia’s welfare system and the work that this government is doing to improve the interface between welfare and work by highlighting the announcement just yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in which their headline measures were, in the main, extremely complimentary about the improvements that Australia has achieved over the last decade. The member for Reid, who spoke just prior to me, provided a number of statistics. It is always difficult to respond to every single percentage, and that is why it is often incumbent upon us speaking here in this chamber to use headline statistics—that is, an overall figure that incorporates a whole range of these lesser statistics that are often grasped at by the opposition and held up as if they are completely watertight. The headline statistics that came to us just yesterday from the Bureau of Statistics show that national wealth, net income and the levels of education and the number of Australians of working age who have non-school degrees have climbed considerably over the last 10 years. Those figures are available this morning. They are a resounding acknowledgment of the work done by this government to get Australians participating and working in the economy and doing so more productively.

The member for Reid discussed disparity between federal electorates and then compared average wages versus CEO wages. These figures make fascinating reading for some, but in the end we need to remember that in a globalised economy every OECD country is fighting just these same battles. The point is that Australia is doing it exceptionally well. The ABS just yesterday showed that equivalised disposable household income has increased in real terms over and above inflation by 22 per cent for the lowest income earners, the lowest income quintiles, and also for middle-earning Australia. Australia is one of the few countries where that gap has not been widening. I point out that that equivalised income is an adjustment made by the ABS to allow for people living in different sized households, who have different levels of expense, to obtain the same level of wellbeing. That has been taken care of by that ABS analysis.

One always feels that, whenever we get on to the subject of the economy and have a discussion with the other side of the chamber, it is like being whipped around the head with a kleenex. They take one figure and, as soon as we seek to explain that figure in the overall context, they simply choose another. Essentially, what we had today was a criticism using OECD figures of Australia’s R&D. We may well be 15th in the OECD on one figure; we are fifth on another and 10th on another. Barlow just last week released a fascinating book on Australia’s R&D. As I think any reasonable Australian would expect, Australia punches around its weight, according to the size of its economy and the level of its population. We are a small economy, a medium political sized power and fairly influential within the region, and our R&D reflects that. It is no great surprise. We often like to talk of Australia as being extremely self-reliant and looking out for the underdog, but when you strip all that away and the selection of percentages that suit the opposition, in essence, Australia is doing reasonably well compared to other OECD countries.

There are areas where we do well and there are areas where we could do better. One area where we lag—and there is no argument about this—is the proportion of Australians aged between 25 and 64 years who are on a disability pension. I have said before that I am not about to make any judgment on any individual Australians, but, when we have close to double the proportion of people on disability pensions of some other OECD economies, it is incumbent upon the government to ask, just as a century ago Beveridge raised that very same issue, about the integrity of a welfare system that is partially reliant on the middle class. Those who pay into the system should see some benefits in the form of participation, mutual responsibility and social cohesion. To me that is just a very simple tenet of welfare.

Another tenet of welfare, of course, is that welfare must be available to those who need it—not a cent more and not a cent less—at precisely the time they need it, and it must be available in a form they can use. This brings me to the key area I want to touch on today, which is: should welfare be one large, almost impenetrable, monolith or should it be something that responds to the individual needs of a person who enters a Centrelink office? The answer is somewhere in between. The answer is that we can do better than we have done. The key strategy that came up in the budget just gone was, over the forward estimates, the billion dollar investment into an access card.

Government is employing a range of strategies to improve the way we engage individual citizens. Examples do abound. There is Job Network and Australians Working Together, where those seeking work are directly linked to job providers. There are the health management plans being developed by the health minister and the increase in conditionality in welfare payments. Even the recent discussion on Indigenous affairs shows that we cannot allow antisocial behaviour to sink beneath some miasma of cultural acceptability, that we need to pierce through that and hold individuals accountable for their actions but still remember that there are causal determinants and that only by their being addressed will we be provided with a long-term solution. There is a range of these areas: even the growth of the independent school sector is an indication that this government is saying, ‘This is not just about one size fits all.’ I would like to devote a couple of minutes to this topic.

We know that globally we have an increasing level of interconnection and access to information flows. But at the same time we are seeing a generational shift—which interests me greatly—that is, for the first time we have people aged 18 to 30 who have been, for their entire life, completely connected by information technology. They have their mobile phone and their laptop computer. These people insist they are completely encultured with access to information flows. They will be asking the very same questions: how do I remain connected to the sources of information that I wish to be connected to, and how do I cut off those in which I am not interested? That is why a one-size-fits-all welfare system will begin to struggle under the expectations of the community. It is also why I predict that the welcome for the access card will be considerably warmer than it was two decades ago, and I am going to outline some of the reasons.

Before I do, I want to quote Jonathan Levitt, who asked a fascinating question in one of his most recent books on economics: why do most drug dealers live at home with mum? It is a provocative question that asks why what is perceived to be an enormous sector of the black economy actually leaves most people still living at home with their parents. I would like to ask a similarly provocative question, not at all related to the illicit drug trade: if education is such a touchstone issue in Australia, so important for the early development of our children, why are P&Cs almost completely depopulated in some of the areas where I have been? Those of us in this chamber have often been to 20 or 30 different P&Cs, and half of them have single-figure turnouts at their meetings. Either everyone is completely happy with education and outcomes or they feel that being a member of a P&C makes no difference. But I put to you that there is a real sense that we are still not able to have a great deal of input into and control of the welfare system that is laid out for us as Australians. That is why I am predicting that over time there will be increasing tailoring of services. That may well start with an access card.

Social assistance is absolutely essential for those who are in the lower income quintiles in particular. What surprises me, when I look at how many concession cards there are, is that 80 per cent of all prescriptions in this country are written on PBS discounts. Clearly people are using concession cards to which they are not entitled. As long as this fraudulent activity persists and we have no way of identifying people and their access to services, those who fund the services can expect that there will be that sense of water running out of the leaking bucket. What the access card is going to offer—in relation to the $92 billion that is dispersed every year, those 250,000 face-to-face meetings, the half a million people who go to Centrelink offices each year and have to turn around and go home because they did not have the right form, the 100,000 letters that are sent out every day by Centrelink, and the 150,000 phone calls received every day—is that we are not going to be spending the first three minutes of the average 15-minute phone call trying to verify the identity of the person on the other end of the phone.

This is a $4 billion identity fraud sector, at best estimates, that stands to be reduced slowly with the use of an access card. Until we can do basic verification, technology will certainly be working on the other side to make things easier for those who are going to abuse the system. Isn’t it time we started to fight back?

I would like to pitch it to you in a slightly different way. There is concern out there about privacy, and a lot of work has been done with the Privacy Commissioner and privacy experts. But in the end the way we are viewing information should not be so much, ‘Are they collecting information on me?’ but remembering, ‘I’ve already given that information over in a completely consensual way. Every time I open my wallet and use my credit card I am giving my financial information to an entity’—not a trusted government entity either, I add.

So the information has already, with my approval, been provided to a third party. The issue here of access to the information is that I want it back. I want to know what information they hold about me, and I want to control, to the best of my ability, who accesses it. With a chip on an access card with a PIN-restricted secure area, that battle can begin to be fought, with an individual having some awareness—even if not complete control—of the information that is held about them. That is the objective of the access card.

These cards are going to be enormously expensive to roll out, but we need to remember that over the forward estimates, with $1 trillion being disbursed, one only needs a fraction of one per cent to be tightened up in the performance of Australia’s welfare system and we are looking at multibillion-dollar savings. That is welfare; we have not even begun to talk about health benefits. I think the great sleeper in this debate is the health benefits of a recall system in health. This is not yet part of government policy, but I see that there will be a time when health follow-up and health maintenance will become part of an access card. That may be a reminder to come back for a diabetes check or a way of supporting individuals with complex diseases. Advanced work is already being done overseas to set up support systems for people as reminders—‘Have you taken your tablet this morning?’—in households where there is not a loved one who can help with that. It may be a phone call to say, ‘Have you checked your blood pressure at home?’ or, ‘Have you come in for your monthly check?’ without having to rely on a very busy medical receptionist.

The access card will make life easy for those who are using government services because there will only be the need to register once. There will be access to multiple agencies, so every time you change details that information is passed to all agencies with which you have a relationship. A fantastic illustration of the potential for an access card is when all services go down in an area of disaster, like a cyclone. There is a possibility there for instant card readers on the back of a Woolworths truck, full of food. Where banks are not working and where cash is not available, the ability to instantly transfer funds for needy families is a significant additional benefit of having an access card.

Let us not confuse that with an ID card. This is not a card with an address or date of birth on it. We are not talking about a card that people present to establish their identity. This is a card that allows them to access the services that they deserve, and as I said in my first couple of sentences: not a penny more and not a penny less, but exactly what they deserve. You cannot ask for anything fairer than that. On the card would be a photographic verification and a name, but the rest of it would be encoded in a chip—not an easy-to-access magnetic strip but a chip that can hold 30,000 to 60,000 pages of information, which is added to that card with the consent of the individual, who can add a whole range of additional information and determine its level of security.

So areas that are highly sensitive would remain in a password-protected area that can only be read, for instance, at a medical practitioner’s office, in the room with the PIN being inserted by the patient. That information is there. You do not have to go to too many hospitals to see the reams and reams of paper records of blood tests and X-rays that sit in dusty rooms in the backs of hospitals and are lost forever. There is potential for that information to be on a card: the follow-up of the chest X-ray that demonstrates the lung cancer; the early photographs of an evolving suspicious spot that turns out to be a melanoma. These benefits are yet to even be considered in the great equation of an access card.

Obtaining an access card would be relatively easy. We have a minister who is doing everything to reduce the amount of paperwork involved, and there is no need for the card to change any benefits. In fact it is quite likely to make people aware of benefits of which they have not been told before. If the card gets lost, it is easy to cancel over the phone, across the counter or over the internet so we do not have the current situation of people using other people’s benefit cards. The card can be used as proof of ID, if people insist, in certain other offices, but as I said it does not hold obvious date of birth or address and other personal details. There will be three mandatory fields, but they are not necessarily shown on the front of the card. I think it is very important to finish that section of my speech by saying that this card is not one that you have to present compulsorily as proof of age. This is not a card that is used to obtain vital ID details from other people. It is purely to establish your eligibility for Centrelink services.

That interconnectedness that I talked about and the potential to use an access card also delivers people’s desire to keep information from others. What we are seeing with younger people, who are showing less and less inclination to get involved in community groups in some cases, less and less desire to lock into long-term services and more demand for services now—more real-time consumption—may well be a generational change. It may well just be that younger people have always been slightly more technologically minded than those who are a generation older. But, in the end, what I am witnessing in Bowman is a fall away in the engagement with non-profit groups and the community sector. This is a great concern for me and I believe that as long as we have the one-size-fits-all information system, as I have talked about before, we cannot begin to access and unlock some of the people who wish to help in the community sector.

Some will say that the desire to volunteer is inversely proportional to your ability to earn a wage doing something else. It is time that that changed and that people who genuinely care about the community have a way to do it. If I were about to have children attending kindergarten, I am sure I would be galvanised to help set up my community kindergarten. But then that interest wanes very quickly, that conditional social capital where I will help the group, I will help my own congregation and those nearest to me.

How can government help to unlock that potential assistance, the human capacity to help organisations most in need? I would put to groups like Volunteering Australia that we have still not yet unlocked that potential. One way to do it, of course, is to tailor the services by being able to identify exactly what a community group needs and match it, using the internet, to precisely what, for example, my colleague here the member for Lindsay is prepared to offer. She might well say, ‘In my spare time, I’d like to give my legal skills to an animal rights non-profit organisation, and I’m only available on Thursday nights.’ You would be flat out finding an animal rights non-profit organisation in the west of Sydney that needs legal advice—certainly the legal advice of someone who has not been in the law for some time—from the member for Lindsay. But with the power of the internet that connection could well be achieved across the country, because the member for Lindsay might be able to help a group in Western Australia who could never have hoped to have found her without an internet matching system.

You simply need five fields: what your skill is, where you would like to offer it, to what type of group, when you can offer it and some additional comments and information that will assist with the match. I do not for a moment want to say that the member for Lindsay is going to be the perfect fit for that non-profit organisation, but remember that, at the moment, the non-profit organisation lodges a request with Volunteering Australia and waits for a phone call, hoping that someone’s New Year’s resolution is to help an animal support group in Western Sydney. What we need is real-time assistance, and that is where the tailoring of services can really help, where using access to information can make an enormous advance.

My view is that eventually there would be a bank of skills, a bank of people, be they retired or otherwise—perhaps in the workforce—with additional time and a desire to help the non-profit community. Why should we not have a system that brings them together? That is something I will be launching in my electorate in the next two months, with the interest of Volunteering Queensland but not yet with them as a partner. There are concerns about information security, obviously. There are concerns about whether we will have enough people to volunteer and whether we will have the confidence of and the capacity in the non-profit sector to lodge all of their needs on the internet.

Can we be sure that, when you bring people together over the internet, there is actually a perfect match? As we know from the explosion of dating agencies that we see on the net, of course we cannot. But, when a volunteer knocks on the door of a non-profit organisation, walks in and offers their help, that agency has the capacity to work out whether that person has the skills they need. This is only bringing people together, but at the moment that is the limiting factor for volunteering in many communities. So the objective here with the service called Red-e-vol is to bring together the non-profit sector with the skills that they so desperately need. It is an example of tailoring services for the community. The access card is another good example of that, and I would urge both sides of this chamber to engage in that debate and not use the fears of the past but talk about the potential for the future.

See this speech in context