Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the senator very much for his question, because we are involved in a transformation of the delivery of government services around Australia with a continually growing network of myGov shopfronts.

In January this year we opened the new myGov shopfront in Martin Place in Sydney and, previously, in Brisbane in June of last year. These shopfronts are a serious innovation in the provision of government services. We bring together Medicare; Centrelink; the Australian Tax Office, the PCEHR—the personally controlled electronic health record; the Department of Veterans' Affairs—I say to my colleague Senator Ronaldson; the NDIS; and also, most recently, Australian JobSearch. So we are continually adding to the number of services that Australians are able to obtain access to by visiting the single myGov shopfront. We are going to roll out more of those, I am pleased to say, in other capital cities around Australia—in Adelaide, in Perth and in Melbourne. Those three will come in during the rest of this calendar year.

They do not just deliver more integrated services for customers because that is what customers are looking for; they want to be able to do the business that they transact with government in one place at the one time, as far as possible. But we are also able to help our customers engage in the online space with us. In the myGov shopfronts in Sydney and in Brisbane we have a set of app bars with iPads, where customers can acquaint themselves with the use of apps and then replicate that on their smartphones or their own other devices. We have a whole range of self-service terminals. In fact, the senator will recall from our visit to Woden earlier this year that the take-up of that sort of self-service engagement is ever increasing. The growing demand shows us that there is in fact a requirement for more and more services to be coordinated, to be integrated like that so that customers are able to access them where they want and when they want.