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

They would put in a claim, and they might even put that claim in online. Then that claim would be printed out at the other end, then manually entered into somewhere else. A person would have to pick up that claim. They would have to interrogate the ATO database to ensure that that person's parents' income did not go above a certain threshold. They might have to interrogate a university system to ensure their course load was equally truthful according to what was being said.

That might take several weeks to do. In the meantime, of course, the student is ringing up and trying to find out where their claim is at. That is understandable. That creates a lot of time and a lot of effort. In the process, 40 per cent of those claims get rejected, in large part because the student does not understand their parental income. So a large part of those are automatically rejected once that is understood. But of course we have gone through that whole process to get that.

In the near future, because of the investment which this government is making—which the Labor Party refused to make, despite knowing about these issues which were going on—a student will be able to put in a claim online. That claim will automatically interrogate the ATO database to find out what their income is and what their parents' income might be. It will also interrogate the university's course system so that the system itself understands what the course load is of that student. Then—literally, for many people—you will get an automatic response in terms of whether that claim is successful or otherwise.

That is the picture of the future. And that is in the not too distant future, and that will occur because this government had the decency, the courage and the foresight to be investing in upgrading these Medicare payment systems.

Of course, this builds upon the work which we have done in the myGov space. We now have 10 million people who are registered on myGov and who can now tell our system once and have those details updated not only for their Centrelink records but potentially for their Medicare records, their Child Support Agency records and elsewhere. It builds on the work we have done in the Medicare space, where 96 per cent of all claims are now done digitally. Swipe your card—that is all you have to do in order for your rebate to occur.

We take these service standards very seriously. We are constantly trying to improve them and, in the future, there are going to be great steps forward in this. (Time expired)

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