Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service and Integrity) Share this | Hansard source

There are a couple of points there. The first is whether Mr Henry on a 'swinger' list—I do not know. You would need to ask other people if he is on such a list. I doubt it. The Oakeshott staffing matter I have addressed. As for DPMC and Amanda Lampe, we made clear that Ms Lampe's continued presence on the staffing arrangements of the government was because it was part of her handover in that critical role as chief of staff for the Prime Minister.

I mentioned in my earlier comments the importance of the work which the government is doing on service delivery reforms, particularly those aimed at improving the delivery of Australian government services. The government's preliminary work on possible service delivery reforms is aimed at providing more personalised, convenient and quicker services to people. Advances in IT mean that we are able to provide innovative ways to improve service delivery to citizens and better meet the public's expectations of personalised services that are convenient and quick. It is the case that today our citizens are used to rapid services delivered from banking systems, airline booking systems and they expect the same sort of speed and quality of service from government departments. Worldwide, governments are looking at ways of delivering services that better meet the needs of individuals and that make it easier for individuals to interact with government. Today, Australians expect government services to be as intuitively easy to use, to understand and to access as they can be.

As a government we are constantly looking to see what we can do better and how we can effectively harness technological advances to improve what we are doing. Important reforms currently underway include the merging of Medicare, Centrelink and the Department of Human Services to provide a more connected and seamless service to people in the community. We are at the first step of a process of investigating the capacity for people to provide their personal information such as name and contact details, but potentially more complex information such as income and employment, to one government agency and to consent to it being used by other nominated agencies—a kind of 'tell us once' capability.

The early work is focused on testing concepts and scoping the environment for possible options. We have asked the Department of Finance and Deregulation to explore options that would allow people to communicate updated details to multiple agencies simultaneously, to prefill in forms using information previously submitted to other government agencies and to view all government communications in one place. The aim is to do away with some cumbersome processes such as those which require individuals to resubmit the same details multiple times to gain access to services. This could provide great benefits, for example, for people in crisis and emergency situations such as those affected by the recent floods and cyclones and for all Australians who may need to change their address details when moving house.

In exploring these capabilities, individual privacy is at the forefront of our minds. This exploratory work will focus on only frameworks that operate on the basis of individual consent so that any flow of the information will be controlled by the individual and not by the agencies involved. Individuals will be able to opt in and out of the facility at any time. People could choose not to opt in and could be selective about how much they make use of such a facility.

There will be no central database of people's personal information. Agencies would not be able to swap or match client information; rather, such an account would enable people to share their own information with each individual agency, should they choose to do so. We will not be merging agency databases. We are not looking to create a centralised national identity database and there is no hidden agenda.

We are exploring frameworks that will put greater control in the hands of individuals. The reason for this is to create greater efficiency and intuition in government information management systems to make more efficient for our citizens the information distribution that they provide, to create a more current and up-to-date information set about key metrics available for good public policy making and to ensure that our citizens obtain those benefits and rights that they are due to receive under our various rules for such entitlements. It is also the case that we will be doing this over time and in a way that is as effective as possible. (Time expired)

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