John McVeigh (Groom, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Minister for Government Services. Will the minister update the House on what the Morrison government has done to ensure Australians get the support they need during the corona crisis, particularly through Services Australia?

Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Groom for all his hard work over the last few months as we have dealt with unprecedented demand and significant new challenges that everyone in this House is having to step up to. Staff from Services Australia likewise have stepped up to this challenge and have been working around the clock to deliver new and improved income support measures and fast-tracking our coronavirus financial support. This extraordinary effort by Services Australia has seen an additional 12,000 staff from either outside or within—as in redeployed within the Australian Public Service—recruited and trained in call centres and claims processing, and indeed even in this building, as the Speaker said yesterday.

We've worked to ensure stability of core systems. myGov has now increased in current capacity from 6,000 to 300,000 users—work that was done in a matter of days. We've made it much simpler for Australians to get financial support and crucially reduced the need for Australian citizens to pop into a Services Australia shopfront.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, 570,000 Australians used to access myGov every day; today, it's 1.7 million. Indeed, from 16 March to 21 April, there were 50 million logins to myGov by Australian citizens. The biggest day to date has seen three million logins to myGov. The preceding biggest day was tax time last year at 1.8 million.

We've also taken massive strides in process simplification and updating digital processes. From 25 March you could lodge your intent to claim online. Over the last three weeks we've allowed people to establish their digital identity and get a customer reference number—normally having to go into a shop centre, that can now be done online. Indeed, as at last night, 204,000 Australians had created a customer reference number online.

We've streamlined the jobseeker payment to just 20 questions, halving the time it takes someone to complete that. And, in a bit over 50 days from 16 March, Services Australia processed 1.1 million claims, which is the same number of claims the agency normally does in a two-year period.

The agency's paid $5.2 billion in the first round of $750 economic support payments to seven million Australians, and the $550 supplement has now been paid to more than 1.9 million recipients. On top of this, all of the business-as-usual work has continued and yesterday BAU claims were less than the same period in the preceding year.

All of this is due to the extraordinary hard work of public servants in Services Australia, and can I say a very large thank you to all of them for the hard work that they've done.