Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services and Digital Transformation) Share this | Hansard source

I'm not going to take lectures from the Labor Party, whose policy approach is to pick the pockets of older Australians who've been out there working hard to save for their own retirement. That's the Labor Party's approach to older Australians, and I personally think it's disgraceful.

I quite like the shadow minister, I hate to say—I'm happy to make that confession to the House—but he is woefully uninformed about this portfolio. He has absolutely no idea what is going on within the Department of Human Services. People who apply for the age pension are people who deserve our support. They are people who have built this country, who have worked hard, and when they come to retirement age they are entitled to get the best possible service from their government. We are working to ensure that that is the case.

When we came to office, we inherited a department that had had 20 per cent of the frontline workforce cut out of it by the Labor Party between 2007 and 2013. There had been 4,800 people cut out of the Department of Human Services between 2007 and 2013. What happened to call waiting times when the Howard government left office? Call waiting times in 2007 were 90 seconds—a minute and a half. When the Labor Party left office in 2013, their waiting was, what, 12½ minutes? It had blown out to 12½ minutes because of their savage cuts to the front line of the Department of Human Services. They're happy to talk the talk, but, when they have the opportunity, of course, they never walk the walk.

I am very proud of the work my department does. It's a very large department and it provides an extensive range of services to the Australian people. We pay five million Australians' payments every single year, and the total we expend is $174 billion, which is roughly 40 per cent of the government's total expenditure. In the 2017-18 year my department took 48 million phone calls. We dealt with Australians face to face 18 million times, and Australians transacted 900 million times on our digital platforms. We run the largest call centre in the Southern Hemisphere, and last year there were nearly 3½ million claims of income support, payments and concessions. The vast majority of this 3½ million were processed within four weeks.

Already this financial year my department has supported many Australians in need. We've taken 17.3 million phone calls, we've had 5.7 million face-to-face transactions and Australians have transacted on our digital platforms 164 million times. So far this year my department has processed more than 1.2 million social security and welfare claims, and we remain committed to making sure that Australians can get services as quickly as possible. As I said, the vast majority of claims are processed within four weeks. We are focused relentlessly on the customer experience when people come to us for assistance. We're spending $1.2 billion to upgrade the ICT platforms, which improve staff productivity, and develop new and innovative ways that people can claim welfare online. We're also using data analytics in a much more effective way to manage our core volume.

Most importantly, we're putting on an additional 2,750 people. These additional operators are going to improve my department's ability to answer calls, they're going to allow us to process more applications and they're going to make sure that we can continue to deliver a service in line with our customers' expectations. As a result of this very significant investment—and not all of these new contractors are on yet; we're putting on an extra couple hundred a month, and the full total will be on by April next year—busy signals are now down by 40 per cent, call waiting times are significantly down, processing times are significantly down and we will continue every single month to put on more people and to make sure our service offering continues to improve.

The shadow minister has an affliction against employing people in the private sector. He thinks it's terrible that people in the private sector would get work, but what I would say to him—and I offer him this invitation—is that we have call centres now operational in Brisbane, in Melbourne, in Adelaide and in Perth. He wants to sack these people for the crime of working in the private sector. I've gone and seen all of our new call centres with the exception of the one in Adelaide, which I'll be visiting next week, and this contractor workforce is a very good workforce. They specialise in taking people who are long-term unemployed. They have special programs for people who find it hard to get into employment such as Indigenous Australians and Australians with a disability. I would like the shadow minister to go down, look those people in the eye and say, 'If we win the election in May, we're going to throw you all on the scrap heap because we don't like people working in the private sector.' That's Labor's policy: throw people on the scrap heap because they work in the private sector. If Labor get into office, they plan to get rid of these 2,750 people—

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