Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Nettle for the question. We did have very thorough questioning on these issues at the recent Senate estimates committee hearing, and I thank Senator Nettle for taking an interest in this. As I have said on previous occasions, the reason we want to bring in modern technology to a card that delivers Medicare payments, Centrelink payments and Veterans Affairs payments is that the existing card based systems, which are plastic cards—in fact, some of them are paper cards—are easily copied. If you have a colour photocopier, you can photocopy a Medicare card, get it laminated and potentially defraud taxpayers of billions of dollars.

There was a recent case in Queensland where a doctor ripped off Australian taxpayers to the tune of $2 million. There are a whole range of cases because, effectively, what occurred when the previous Labor government handed out Medicare cards—which, as I have said, are very easy to create copies of at very cheap prices—was they formed the basis of a lot of the proof of identity that is required within the Australian system. As I have said, the head of the Australian Federal Police has said that identity fraud costs Australia—that is, taxpayers, the mums and dads who pay their taxes—up to $4 billion a year. And about 50 per cent of that identity fraud—that is, creating a false identity, stealing someone else’s identity, borrowing their identity or manipulating your own identity—occurs very easily using the current system. There is no doubt we do need a new card that is high quality. Most Australians also know that there are many cards that exist at the moment with photographs on them. Photographs are a constructive way and a practical way for people to identify themselves. I think virtually all states now have photographs on their drivers licences. That is something that Australians understand is useful in terms of their security.

The database that will be created under the new card proposal, which will provide Medicare, Centrelink and Veterans’ Affairs payments and services to people, will have a high-quality photograph on it which will help us to recognise the person who is claiming the Medicare payment and ensure that they can identify themselves. It will make it much, much tougher, if not impossible, for a fraudster or a rorter to get access to the nearly $100 billion in payments that the Australian taxpayers make available to people at the rate of about $3,000 per second—that will probably make the finance minister shudder, but we pay out $3,000 a second. We want to make sure that that money goes to the people who deserve it and who are entitled to it. We want to make sure that the taxpayers do not get ripped off to the tune of billions of dollars.

The senator asked about ASIO. Access by security agencies to this information is controlled by the laws that govern those agencies. My understanding is that ASIO and the Australian Federal Police will be coming before the Senate committee—I think the hearings are next week; the senator may know better than I do—to explain exactly the interaction there. From the briefings I have obtained, my understanding is that they will require, as they require at the moment, warrants issued by a court to get access to that sort of data. There will be no centralised megadatabase associated with the card. The card is effectively a key to allow the Australian people to access their Medicare payments, their Centrelink payments and their Veterans’ Affairs payments. (Time expired)