Russell Matheson (Macarthur, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before if I delve into my question in relation to welfare cheats, I would like to congratulate the Minister for Social Services on delivering good, strong, fair and responsible policy. It is what the community—the Australian people—has been looking for, for a long, long time. Great policy.

During my 25 years of service in the New South Wales Police Force, I had to deal with all manner of criminals, from petty thieves, druggies to bikies and organised crime figures. One of the things that quickly becomes apparent from police work is that criminals rarely choose their destiny. They are either born into a life of crime or they commit crime through need or necessity.

Welfare cheats are in that unique category that receives almost universal condemnation because the community recognises that these people are essentially stealing from the poor and disadvantaged, akin to taking money from a charity box or defrauding the elderly. As any police officer will tell you, criminals will always think of new ways to beat the system. It is therefore vital to use as many resources as possible to catch the crooks and create sophisticated systems to deter crimes happening in the first place.

In April, I joined the Minister for Social Services, the Hon. Scott Morrison, and the Minister for Human Services, Senator Marise Payne, to announce the overhaul of the Human Services' 1980s-era computer system at Campbelltown. The Department of Human Services is responsible for delivering welfare payments through Centrelink to 7.3 million people per year, many of whom are vulnerable and heavily dependent on Centrelink payments.

New systems will help the government automatically match Centrelink information with the Australian Taxation Office databases to look for areas of high-risk fraud and recovery of old debts. The pressing need for further measures was made clearly apparent earlier this year when a team from the AFP-led multi-agency Fraud and Anti-Corruption Centre, which was established by the coalition government last year, moved on a suspected racket in the family day care industry. Investigators from the FACC team, including AFP, Department of Social Services and the Department of Human Services were called in when anomalies exceeding $3 million were identified in government benefit payments to a family day care provider. A number of search warrants were executed and a 27-year-old woman was arrested and charged with three counts of obtaining a financial benefit by deception. AFP officers seized approximately $2.1 million in cash and a vehicle worth roughly $90,000.

In our first year of office, the coalition government's increased focus on compliance has prevented an estimated $70 million to $90 million in fraudulent claims by nearly 60 family day care centres nationwide. However, the problem of welfare cheats is significant and widespread. In 2013, Centrelink recovered $1.5 billion worth of outstanding debts and investigated 3,200 people. Of the money recovered and those investigated that year, $39 million were fraudulent claims and 1,200 people were prosecuted. In 2013 the government spent $132 billion on welfare, which amounts to $250,000 every minute.

Thanks to the years of ruinous economic mismanagement by the former Labor government and the fact that one in four Australian families now receive some form of welfare, we can no longer maintain current levels of expenditure. It is therefore imperative—both financially and morally—that the government has a zero tolerance approach to welfare fraud. We must significantly build our capacity to catch cheats who are in this environment, and to encourage customers to comply to assist the Department of Human Services in keeping non-compliance to a minimum.

We have to be smarter and faster, and more sophisticated systems have to be put in place to identify, investigate and manage potential cases of fraud. There need to be better prevention, better detection and better deterrence measures to counteract all activities ranging from inadvertent non-compliance to outright fraud. Greater intelligence and investigative capabilities will, in the end, require more support from other government agencies such as the AFP and the ATO. I would like to ask the minister—and I know he is going to respond with the good policy he has been delivering—what is the government going to do to crack down on welfare cheats and make sure our welfare system is not abused?

See this speech in context