Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This document relates to the performance audit of the disability support pension. It seems appropriate that we are discussing this on International Day of Persons with Disabilities, given that this is an audit around access and the way the Department of Social Services and the Department of Human Services are handling the disability support pension. It's a follow-on audit from previous audits. It is a pretty damning report about the way that the Department of Human Services and the way the Department of Social Services have been handling aspects of the disability support pension.

To put this in context, I, as the spokesperson on family and community services, am responsible in the Greens for all the programs around income support, so I'm responsible for the DSP, in terms of looking at it and the way it's implemented. I get a lot of complaints to my office, particularly lately, about the slowness of the application process and of people waiting for a very long time. When I ask for estimates about that, I'm told, 'Oh, no, Senator. That's not the case. There's not a long waiting time. They must just be an outlier.' Of course, this report throws light on this issue. It talks about the fact that, if an application takes more than 84 days to process, it's taken out of the calculations of their performance. Fancy that! That explains why the department can seemingly get away with the fact that they don't have a problem with waiting times in terms of assessment processes and what is actually happening on the ground.

Furthermore, people say, 'We've been told "no" in our application,' but get no detail about it. What did the audit find? There are 'insufficient reasons' given to people. The report says, in conclusion:

Social Services and Human Services use data and information from multiple sources to drive performance improvements to the DSP program. The exception is that internal and external performance measures are not fully effective.

It also finds:

Human Services does not comprehensively monitor if officers are communicating the reasons for access decisions to DSP applicants in a timely and accurate manner.

I can tell you they're not, because those are the complaints that we are getting into our office. People don't know why they are being rejected. The report also says:

Social Services and Human Services monitor, evaluate and report on delivery of the DSP program, but improvements should be made to the effectiveness of approaches across all three domains. The assessment of performance against outcomes is not complete as the departments do not have a comprehensive set of key performance measures for interdepartmental and external reporting.

In other words, they are not communicating adequately with people with disability who are applying for income support—the very people they should be supporting and working to. The report goes on:

The interdepartmental timeliness key performance measure is biased, as it excludes DSP claims with processing times over 84 days. Evaluations focussed primarily on effectiveness and should be broadened to also address efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

It then talks about the need to develop a more complete set of internal and external performance measures and says Human Services and the department are not adequately addressing these issues. The report then looks at the internal review of the impairment tables. Remember, when the impairment tables were changed—which is a whole other issue—they excluded a lot of people. The report says:

Social Services also commissioned an evaluation of the 2015 changes to the DSP claims process which altered medical evidence requirements and introduced an assessment by Government-contracted doctors. The latter evaluation drew upon data from only the first nine months of implementation.

That was quite some time ago. The report continues:

Given the availability of an additional two years of data, it would be timely for Social Services to further review—

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.