Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I have a number of questions, and I would not expect the minister to be able to answer all of them now but to take them on notice. I am taking a keen interest in this area only because I used to be the Minister for Human Services. I believe that there is a mutual interest in having better service delivery from the government and, therefore, a very bipartisan approach to it. So I hope that a number of the initiatives that were undertaken when I was the Minister for Human Services have continued. I will go through a few of them. If the minister at the table is able to provide information—not immediately but certainly over time—on those initiatives, that would be helpful.

Firstly, in relation to the allocation of funding, I have always had the strong view, even when I was the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, that the funding for Human Services should be both capital and recurrent funding. This is a very important fact, because there was resistance from some of the policy agencies, the policy departments, to funding going directly to Human Services for various initiatives. I always, even in the policy department of Employment and Workplace Relations, wanted to give Human Services full control of their budget. So I suspect with a budget allocation of only $1.8 billion there is still an argument between the policy departments and Human Services about funding allocations. I really hope that Human Services gets the full funding allocation. I ask the minister to bear with me while I go through these things. I know her colleagues want to chat, but going through some of these issues might take more than the initial five minutes.

Secondly, in relation to information technology, I am keen to know what the total budget spend for IT is in Centrelink and across the Human Services agencies and what money is being allocated to the access card mark 2. I still believe in the access card. I know that the government are looking at smartcard technology; they have already announced it, but in a limited form. I think it is a stored value card or some variation of that. I would be interested to know more about that.

Thirdly, sharing is a very important issue. The comments of the Minister for Human Services in an article on 14 June seem rather bizarre to me. The article states: ‘About $1 million in overdue child support payments will be recovered from more than 500 parents as a result of the merger of the health fund MBF with Bupa Australia’—owner of several health funds. Bupa is required to pay ‘$2.41 billion to MBF’ as a result of the merger and ‘cross-agency data was used to identify the MBF members who were also in the sights of the Child Support Agency’. I am intrigued to know the background of that. This involves two private sector businesses merging. How can they have data-sharing arrangements? I was also one who believed strongly in the right of Centrelink, Medicare and the Child Support Agency to have full, unfettered data sharing to help address welfare fraud. A classic example of that is Centrelink being unable to identify whether people were genuinely disabled when they were claiming a disability pension. I know there are significant privacy issues here, but I am interested to know what is happening with that.

I understand that, under the changes to Welfare to Work, there are no longer any face-to-face interviews with people to make sure that they actually do go to interviews. I hope and expect that Centrelink is not going soft on people who should be breached for not attending job interviews. I am also interested to know whether there has been any diminution in the job report program that was set up, where people actually had to carry a book with written evidence that they actually went to job interviews. I think that is very important and I would appreciate the minister finding out the answer to that.

Something that is near and dear to all of our hearts is red tape. The former government made, I thought, valiant efforts to reduce the size and length of forms that Centrelink had. (Extension of time granted) The greatest battle I had in Human Services was trying to reduce the number of letters and the forms that people had to fill out and, particularly, the detail required in those forms. I recall one particular form where in order to claim the baby bonus, even though it was at that time non means tested, people actually had to list not only their income—which Centrelink should not have captured as information—but, significantly, all the times over the previous few years that they had been into and out of the country and the exact dates. How that was related to the baby bonus God knows but somehow it had been. The original form to claim the baby bonus was something like 32 pages, which was ridiculous. I really hope Centrelink have not drifted back to the 32-page form, when we got it down to four pages. There was an entire program that we set up to address and reduce the amount of paperwork associated with Centrelink in particular—where the greatest amount of paperwork is—and also some of the others. I would really like to know where that program of reducing the number of forms and letters has gone.

In relation to the Child Support Agency, I am keen to know how it is going with the 1 July reform, which is a very significant reform—and I know it is a very difficult thing. The Child Support Agency does a very good job in very challenging circumstances. There is a huge number of issues that need to be dealt with. I also understand that there is a debt of $1 billion to the Child Support Agency, which is a huge debt. I am keen to know how it is anticipated that that money will be recovered. That is a very tough ask; I recognise that. Also, the Child Support Agency was in need of significant upgrades to its IT systems, from recollection—I am going back 2½ years. I really hope there is a responsible allocation for the upgrades of its IT systems.

Some very good officials from Human Services have just arrived in the chamber—I say to them that I was just reminding the House that I really hope Human Services is getting the full budget allocation, both capital and recurrent, and that the policy agencies are not taking that money. In fact in the previous government I instructed my policy agency to start arrangements to ensure that Human Services received all the funding, not just the capital associated with its obligations.

In relation to the Child Support Agency, I am very keen to know how that $1 billion is being recovered. If I can give some gratuitous advice to the Minister for Human Services, it is to be very up-front about some of the challenges that he is facing in the implementation of the bipartisan changes to the child support formula. It was bipartisan policy at the time, and I always found it was useful to continue with that approach. Certainly it should be recognised in relation to the Child Support Agency that it does a very good job and it should meet that challenge in a bipartisan way.

In relation to Medicare, I would be very keen to know how e-claiming is going. I understand that it is quite poor. There was resistance from some parts of Medicare but also from some doctors to e-claiming of Medicare. That is a very significant initiative in reducing the day-to-day operational costs of Medicare. Medicare was also undergoing significant transition in their offices so that the Medicare offices were also family assistance offices. The end goal we had—if I can indulge for a moment—was to have the harder, more difficult welfare cases in Centrelink and the family payments essentially in Medicare offices. The reason why we wanted to have the family payments in Medicare offices is that they are better located in shopping centres, but also it is a different type of demographic that goes into those Medicare offices. That was very important. That is why they became family assistance offices. Also, they are a different type of staff in the Medicare offices, so it was very important to try to get them to handle some of those more difficult family cases. If you were not aware of this as ministers, the best illustration of that was the rebate for the LPG scheme, which was run by Centrelink but was actually going through the Medicare offices. (Time expired)

See this speech in context