David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Human Services. Will the minister update the House on action the coalition government has taken to improve access to Medicare services in my electorate of Banks, in Bennelong and across Sydney? How does this compare with alternative approaches?

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

I thank the member for Banks for his question. Last year, my department processed 399 million Medicare claims, totalling $22 billion, which is $4 billion more than when we first came to office. In Bennelong, 88 per cent of those claims are bulk-billed, which is up from 82 per cent when Labor was in office, and 99 per cent of the time they are processed digitally, which means that very rarely does a person ever need to go into a Medicare or Centrelink office. So in Bennelong people are accessing more services, they're getting more bulk-billing and they're doing it more conveniently.

I'm asked about alternatives. We all know that the Labor Party cannot be trusted in relation to saying anything about Medicare truthfully. The Labor candidate for Bennelong, Kristina Keneally, is cut from exactly the same cloth, because from day one of her campaign she has been misleading the people of Bennelong about Medicare. First, for example, she condemned the merger of the Eastwood Medicare office with the Ryde service centre. Little did she tell the people of Bennelong that the Labor Party actually started this program. They merged 128 Medicare offices and had plans to merge every single one. The member for Sydney herself stated this in 2010, when she was the human services minister, and I can quote from her press release. She said:

… by the end of 2014 all Centrelink, Medicare and Child Support offices will be co-located …

The rank hypocrisy of the Labor Party on this issue!

But this is not the only time that Kristina Keneally has misled the people of Bennelong. She also claimed that in the last week of September 2017 she was going to have to wait more than an hour at the Ryde service centre. However, little does Kristina Keneally know that we keep very detailed records of the wait times at the service centres, and the average wait time for the particular week in question was only 12 minutes. But I went through every single day. On the first day of the week, on the Monday, there were 307 people who went to that service centre. How many waited for 60 minutes, for an hour? Zero. On Tuesday there were 278 people and zero waited for an hour; on Wednesday, 304 people and zero waited for an hour; on Thursday, 208 people and zero waited for an hour. And on Friday, the last day, 274 people went through the Ryde service centre, and guess how many waited for an hour?

Government members: Zero!

Absolutely zero! Not a single person in the entire week in question waited for more than an hour, according to our official record. This is Labor hypocrisy. Again, it is Labor misleading the Australian people. (Time expired)