Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to address a couple of those points which the member for Barton raised, and two in particular that she asked me about—call wait times and the removal of face-to-face Medicare claims.

If I could start with the second one. I know the Labor Party has been saying this for some time, but there has been no removal of face-to-face Medicare claims. I would like to point out a few facts. On 96 per cent of occasions, a patient will go to a doctor or a specialist and they will literally swipe their Medicare card and have to do no more—all of the rebates are processed electronically. We hope to get that figure up even higher. With the remaining four per cent of claims, it is typically because a doctor or a specialist will not have that Medicare facility in his or her clinic and so they will be given an invoice and they will have to take that to Medicare office—post it or take it in in person. Nothing has changed in relation to that. People can still post it or upload it on the app or they can take it to anyone of the service centres or agents around Australia—there are 700 of them—to put in their Medicare claim. That Medicare claim 99 per cent of the time will be processed within 10 days. We have made some administrative changes to our back office, which I know the member for Barton has raised, but that makes no difference to that metric—99 per cent will still be addressed and dealt with within 10 days so that the money is back into the patient's pocket.

Let me address the issue of call wait times in the time I have available. The current call wait time is 11 minutes. I appreciate that that is the average call-waiting time when a person rings the Centrelink number and, of course, there is a distribution across that when you have an average. Some people are waiting a short amount of time; some people are waiting a lot longer than 11 minutes. The member for Barton made the accusation that the reason this is happening is that we have pulled out so many staff. I would simply point out to the member for Barton who admittedly as a new member of parliament—she was not part of the Labor government at this particular time—but in 2010-11, when the Labor Party was in government, the call wait time was three minutes and five seconds. The times ballooned out to 11 minutes and 45 seconds in 2011-12. Why did they balloon out at that particular time? This was documented by the Australian National Audit Office: the Labor Party ripped 1100 telephone staff out.

Again, I appreciate that the member for Barton was not part of that government, which we had to endure for six long years, but I ask her to understand a little bit of the history of this issue. We take this issue seriously; we do want to reduce call wait times so that people do not have to wait any longer than necessary. We have just invested $600 million in a new telephony system which helps to manage the phone calls across the nation and, of course, we are investing, as we speak, up to $1 billion on a new overall welfare payments system.

Once this new system is fully installed it will mean that so few people will have to call the call centre or go into a Medicare office in order to find out the status of their claim, because that information will often be seamless. You will be able to apply online; it will be straight-through processing; and you will have the answer almost instantaneously. For example, if you think about a student claim at the moment—they will put in an online claim; it will be looked at a Centrelink office; they will have to interrogate an ATO file; then interrogate a university file; and in the meantime the student is ringing up to find out the status of their claim. In the not-too-distant future, because of this government's decision to invest in the welfare payments structure, that could be an instantaneous decision because our systems will automatically interrogate the ATO and automatically link into the university's course load data and that student could know instantaneously or within 24 hours. That is what will reduce the call volumes and make a big difference to service quality. Only this government has been prepared to bite the bullet and make that type of investment.

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