Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to bring to the attention of the House problems that my constituents are having when they visit Medicare and Centrelink offices. And I suspect that it is not just constituents in the Shortland electorate who are experiencing these problems. It was brought to my mind very graphically this morning when a constituent, Brian McLean from Swansea, rang my office. He was particularly upset. He had just been to the Medicare office and was told he had to either fill in a form and put it in a box or use a computer to fill in the claim online. Mr McLean is not computer literate and really did not understand the whole process. He and his wife were told to fill in the form and then put it in a drop box in Medicare. He was not quite sure what a drop box was. He ended up going home and ringing the Medicare hotline. When he rang the Medicare hotline he was advised by the person on the other end of the hotline that this was one of hundreds of calls that he had had already today.

This morning we also had another phone call from a constituent on exactly the same issue. In addition, we have had numerous phone calls during the week and over the preceding weeks about this one issue. We are getting a number of complaints from constituents who go to the Centrelink office, are told to go away and are directed to a computer—and the same sort of problems exist there. They ring the Centrelink line and, once again, they have to wait. Invariably, after an hour and a half, the call would drop out.

Back to Medicare. Shortland electorate is rather an old electorate. There are a lot of elderly people and they do not know how to use computers. It is very difficult. In addition, there are some people that are actually illiterate. You may have a young mother there with children and she finds it difficult to fill in these forms and put them in a drop box in the Medicare office. Medicare has advised people to try to get their GP to lodge their claims electronically, but not all GPs do it. Podiatrists use a different system, which works by a person using their debit card. They must either log online or use the drop box. That really is not good enough.

Another constituent contacted me a couple of weeks ago. He was so upset that he rang the office a couple times. I met him in a coffee shop to discuss the matter with him. He had been to both Charlestown and Kotara Medicare offices. The second time he complained about the completion of the online forms and the fact that they did not work, he was told to try again. He went home but had difficulty downloading it. And this is a man who is an executive teacher—a very well educated and highly intelligent man. Both he and his wife tried to register the birth of their child and update their records so that they could claim paid parental leave. In both locations they were told to go away and to do it online.

If a couple as well educated as these people have trouble dealing with the online registration and in dealing with the Medicare office, I can assure you that there would be a lot of other people in the community who also do. A shopfront with person-to-person contact is needed so an older person can go in and have their Medicare claim processed by a person whom they talk to, where a family can go in and talk to somebody in the Medicare office. They should not be directed to a computer or asked to fill in a form and put it in a drop box. They should not have to wait on a telephone line for hours to talk to a person on the other end—be it at Centrelink or Medicare. This is not good enough and the government needs to do something about it.