Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You miss him too, I know. We all miss him. This is not a valedictory for the previous member for Bruce, but of course we all, I am sure, miss his free character assessments, which he would provide to you without a Medicare rebate. As the Minister for Health is sitting opposite, I will say that any health treatment without a rebate that is properly done is a good thing. I learnt 20 years ago—I was a staffer here before I stepped out of politics for many years, and we learnt pretty much straightaway—when I started working for the previous member for Bruce in his electorate office when I was at uni that one of the mortal sins that any staffer could commit was not to give gold-plated service to any veteran who rang the office or came in. It did not matter whether they were happy or grumpy. It did not matter how they voted. Anyone who did not pay immediate and close attention to the issues that a veteran raised would have the free character assessment provided to them rapidly, and their behaviour would be corrected. There were a lot of mortal sins of course, as you can imagine, but that was certainly high up there. So that respect for the service of veterans and people who have donned the uniform for our country was ingrained early.

Like many people here, I myself have never served. I myself have never served in any capacity. I have taken extra steps since being elected to try to connect and learn more about the Australian defence forces, those who serve and those who served. In that regard, I participated in the Australian Defence Force Parliamentary Program last year and have enrolled in some more activities to try to do my bit—

Mr Tehan interjecting—

hello, Minister for Veterans' Affairs—to bridge the divide in mutual understanding. I think that probably post-World War II—I do not have the precise percentage—there was a very high percentage of members of this House, 40 per cent, 50 per cent or more, who had served in the military and had that intimate and personal experience and understanding of what it is to serve. And yet, as society has changed and the size of the military has fallen and so on and so forth, the percentage of members in this parliament who have served actively in the military is very, very low, well under 10 per cent. We are talking about a few per cent. There are a few on both sides of the House. I think that as members of the national parliament, given that the military is an important part of our national power and our apparatus of state, if you like, in the Commonwealth, we have both a practical obligation and a moral obligation to spend some time and put a human face to those who serve our country and put their lives at risk.

I returned from the Middle East last year, from Afghanistan and elsewhere, from the sojourn with the military with an even deeper appreciation of the women and men of the ADF, their professionalism, their commitment and their black humour. There is a lot of black humour but also a degree of sophistication, wisdom and knowledge of the world and a sense of history that many perhaps would not immediately associate with them, given a lack of experience or exposure. But also it is interesting to try to understand the values which underpin different institutions. The values of the military around the mission, achieving the mission, safety and accuracy are first and foremost, looking after people, not always efficiency. I do not mean that just in the expenditure realm but also in the important motto of 'hurry up and wait', because things seem to take a while.

In my community we have three RSLs, Noble Park, Dandenong and Glen Waverley, and they all, of course, have very different flavours and cultures, reflecting their communities and members and the characters who put the time in to run them. In Noble Park we have the wonderful John Meehan, the president, who is renowned across Melbourne for his welfare work. They run an incredible welfare service. He is returning to Vietnam himself, I think this month, for the first time since his service there. That will be an emotional trip for him, which he has been preparing for, and I certainly wish him well. In Dandenong we have John Wells, who is a touch scary, an ex-school principal and a fierce advocate for his members, and in Waverley there is the president, George Cooney, and Dennis Everitt, who I know well, who coordinates the great welfare work. I have spent time listening and learning and trying to understand the current concerns of veterans, mental health and mateship. But there are also more recent veterans who do not always connect as well with the RSLs upon their return, so new models of outreach are an area of interest.

With that as the context, this bill has three parts. I will confine my comments to schedules 1 and 2, given that schedule 3 is really technical amendments. Schedule 1 is to support automated decision-making. It is hard not to support the objective to make decision-making more efficient. I have heard that from my local RSLs, and, broadly, people are supportive of engaging more online, subject to ensuring proper training, fair access to the IT systems and support, of course, for those who cannot engage online, particularly perhaps older people. More-automated decision-making, of course, has been a trend for many years under successive governments. It can help to provide rules and policies to decision-makers, assemble evidence for an applicant, ensure logical step-by-step decisions and, importantly, record evidence and rationales associated with every decision, which is important for accountability and for reviews and so on.

Concerns arise, though, where it is not to aid decision-makers but to automate decisions in a mindless fashion, such as we have seen with the government's flawed robo-debt policy in Centrelink, which, to understate it, takes the human out of human services. Minister Tehan said in the second reading speech that the aim of this is to 'improve services for veterans and their families', to 'reduce claims processing times' and 'streamline existing processes'. On the face of it, that is fine. That is something that we would all sign up to and support.

I just wish to record two major concerns though: firstly, predictably, if the robo-debt debacle were rolled out to DVA. It is bad enough that the government—not this minister but his colleague ministers—are picking on pensioners, disabled people, the unemployed and single parents, but imagine if they were to then start on veterans. Fortunately it seems, for now at least, that there is some decency left in the government with this minister, and I note and put on the record the assurances provided by the department to the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee that the computerised system would not be used for debt recovery related purposes. The legislation permits that, but we have been assured that that is not how it will be, and there may still be humans left in this service. We need to record that, and we will see how long it lasts. Goodness help the veterans if the Minister for Social Services or the Minister for Human Services ever got this portfolio—you can just imagine them in charge of DVA—or indeed if Centrelink got control of DVA. Goodness gracious me: 'empathy bypass' does not begin to cover it. Minister Tehan, the member for Wannon, is a decent chap—he is in the chair, and I see him talking; I am probably distracting him from his reading—so we will trust his word and hope that DVA does not get Portered or Tudged up.

The second area of concern, as has been well covered by previous speakers, regards the government's record on IT rollouts. It does not exactly fill you with confidence. I hope the ministers responsible for the census, the NDIS, the ATO and Centrelink's 40 per cent error rate will be kept well away from the IT upgrade. The final thing I will record is that if indeed this does achieve efficiencies in the department it is a great thing. As a former public servant, I know that the more you can automate things and free up resources the more you can do other things you would wish to do with those resources. I do hope that, given the pressing needs in relation to mental health and other things in this portfolio, the minister is able to keep the savings in the portfolio and reinvest them in important initiatives. So we on this side are right behind you, Minister Tehan, in your battles at ERC with the cabinet.

Schedule 2, disclosure of information, aims to enable the Secretary of DVA to certify in certain cases that it is okay to make public interest disclosures of information about a case or cases. That is kind of bureaucratic gobbledegook, but what it means is the power to disclose externally personal information of any sort about our veterans. That warrants careful consideration by the parliament. On the face of it, it does seem like there are reasonable arguments to permit this. The Bills Digest points out that the capacity to make public interest disclosures which are otherwise restricted by the Privacy Act already exists in social security legislation, and this bill, I think the Bills Digest and the government have noted, is modelled on those provisions. They require the secretary to comply with any guidelines issued by the minister. We will support the bill, including this aspect, subject to the agreed amendments—which I understand the shadow minister has been working on very collaboratively with the minister, which is how this parliament should work—which will provide stronger safeguards to protect the private information of veterans and to review the bill in two years time to check that it is working as intended and that there are no unintended consequences. I trust that our shadow minister will reach sensible agreement with the minister regarding the details of the public interest disclosures.

My concern, having watched the Centrelink robo-debt debacle, is that however these safeguards are written into legislation, regulations or guidelines it may not be enough, because this government feels free to leak personal information to the media when it suits its political interests. We have seen this behaviour shamefully in recent weeks and months from other ministers in the government, and only yesterday the House debated these very matters in the portfolios on which these provisions are apparently modelled. The DHS/DSS legislation provides a range of criteria—things like to lessen threats to life; the enforcement of certain criminal laws; to brief a minister; to assist courts, coronial inquiries, royal commissions; to facilitate other calculations—but it is noticeable what is not there. There is no provision to leak information to feed the media to get a better story up or to obscure the truth about the stuff-ups you are making in your portfolio, but that apparently has not worried ministers in other portfolios, as we have seen them picking on vulnerable people and leaking their details to the media.

Examples of circumstances in which the Department of Veterans' Affairs has said it might be appropriate to disclose information seem sensible and, on the face of it, they are good. They have been recorded and include 'threats to life, health or welfare, enforcement of laws, proceeds of crime orders, research and analysis, investigations', and so on. I do note that mistakes of fact and misinformation in the community are included, and would hope that that does not provide an entree into leaking information about individuals as opposed to classes of people, which of course makes sense. I want to put those concerns on the record.

The reservation from our side is that it does not matter what agreement we reach. What we have seen from this government is that if it is not a decent minister, if it suits the political purposes—if the government disagrees with you—then it will just target you anyway, and you will not really know that it has even happened until the journalists hunt you down and start phoning you, and you find your name in the paper. Only yesterday the Department of Human Services confirmed that at no point did their secretary authorise the release of confidential information. The Minister for Human Services in his pathetic response to the House provided no explanation as to the basis or the head of power under which he had released this information. That matter clearly still has a way to run.

So we can do our best as legislators to pore over the detail and to construct sensible regimes to manage privacy and information appropriately, but executive power in our system rests with ministers, which is something I support. Our job is to hold them to account, to put these issues and concerns on the record, uncomfortable as that may be at times.

I will close with three hopes. Let us hope that the Minister for Veterans' Affairs runs his own race on the IT system changes and that they go better in DVA than elsewhere in the government. I saw that the Minister for Health was here before. He was the world's best minister! It must have been a lovely day for him, wandering into cabinet as the world's best minister. It was a wonderful award, a wonderful achievement. Let us hope that in future world's best minister competitions the Minister for Veterans' Affairs is a clear winner in the IT category. Let us hope that the Minister for Veterans' Affairs is not infected by the disease which seems to permeate the rest of the cabinet and the behaviour of his colleagues, the little germ that says: 'Ooh, it's a good idea to start leaking confidential information and private information! I know, I'll ring The Australian. I'll tell them about what the vets have been up to.' Let us hope that that is not the case about clients of his department. And let us hope, for the sake of our veterans, that DVA does not get Portered or Tudged up, so they unleash their robo-debt stuff on veterans as well. But with the amendments we will support the bill.

See this speech in context