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

One of the most important elements of welfare policy is a safety net, but right now it seems that the most important safety net of all is that for the Australian Labor Party’s welfare policy. Nowhere has that party been more vacuous and more equivocating than with its position on the Human Services access card announced in this year’s budget. We have a Minister for Human Services and a Minister for Community Services with the courage to take on the issue of streamlining services and the provision of welfare for Australians. I would like to quote today a few salient statistics: 670 million contacts in Human Services each year; each day 250,000 face-to-face contacts; 150,000 phone calls; and 100,000 letters sent out by Centrelink. It is an enormous operation. During the average 15-minute phone call that clients make to Centrelink, a full three minutes can be spent on attempting to identify the person on the other end of the phone. For this system the advent of an access card offers enormous efficiencies.

Concession card holders are already at the mercy of up to 17 different forms of health and welfare cards in this country. The access card offers an opportunity to pull all those together. This single card has a photograph and a signature on the front, and on the back is a number that allows people to access welfare services quickly and more effectively. The other great strength of this card is that a single change of address can be reflected across all the agencies under Human Services. Most importantly of all, this card is going to offer, via a 64-kilobyte chip, the chance for Australians to carry on that card essential details such as major illnesses, next of kin, doctor details and immunisation status, and even organ donation consent, which is a vital piece of information so often missing at just the moment it is required in our hospitals around the country.

Let us make no mistake: Australia is by no means a world leader in this area. Already France, eight years into this, has found enormous gains for its welfare system, and is even moving into the area of biometry and face recognition. But it is also in Germany, Finland, Taiwan, South Africa, the Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Hungary and, soon, Ireland—so by no means are we a laggard either. But the $1.09 billion announcement that will see these access cards being rolled out in 2008 is a really promising move, and it took the vision of the Howard government to finally make it happen after decades of it being talked about.

It has been at least 20 years since the infamous Australia Card was proposed. I want to say one thing: the access card is a completely different proposition both in what it does and in its reception by the community. The warmth of the embrace for the access card has been significant in my electorate. There is a lot of excitement about what it can offer, mostly because young Australians particularly have become quite used to access to technology. They are a networked community. Those under 30 have lived in the interactive age where the PC, the game console and the mobile phone are all converging. Younger Australians are more familiar with those kinds of advantages. In addition, we have the regular engagement of technology, the regular use of this sort of thing, and that is why there will be a great deal more comfort with the advent of the access card. Let me lay out the—

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