Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will come to the cashless debit card trials second, but let me just first address a couple of the points from the member for Barton. I gave the opportunity and set the challenge to the member for Barton to say one positive thing about the work from the 35,000 dedicated Department of Human Services staff, and in all the five minutes not one positive thing could she say, despite the fact that they ensure that every fortnight five million people get their payments on time, accurately, to support them to pay the rent, to buy food and to pay for all of the essentials. Not once would she admit that they do some good work and by and large do a very good job.

She asked me: what are the plans to improve service standards? I outlined some of those things, but I will just recap on some of those. One, we are now investing a billion dollars a year in upgrading our information technology services—a billion dollars a year. This is not something which the Labor Party invested in; they just kicked the can down the road. But we are investing in the technology to improve services. We have improved the myGov site, and so now we have almost 11 million Australians—

Ms Burney interjecting—

who log onto myGov and have a record on myGov—hundreds of thousands of people, each and every week. We are making process improvements right now. Already, for example, we have brought the youth allowance processing time down from nine weeks to about 4½ to five weeks. We are also looking at other processes and improving the processes before these large IT processes kick in. And in the budget we are putting funding towards 250 additional people answering telephones. The member for Barton has not been around for very long, but she is constantly saying that we have been cutting staff and that that has been contributing to the so-called problems which she alludes to. I would like to ask the member for Barton—right here in this chamber—to look at the record, because the record will show that, when the Labor Party were in office, they cut 3½ thousand staff out of the Department of Human Services. And in that time what happened to call wait times? Call wait times went from three minutes up to 12 minutes in that time—because Labor ripped 3½ thousand staff out of the Department of Human Services. Look at the record, Member for Barton! She is in here every day saying that we are cutting staff, and in fact they are the ones that ripped 3½ thousand staff out of the Department of Human Services—they closed 110 Medicare and Centrelink offices. If you look at what we have done, Madam Deputy Speaker—

Ms Burney interjecting—

the staff levels have basically been constant since we have been in office and, as I have just alluded to, 250 more people will be answering telephones in the near future.

Let me get to the cashless debit card, which the member for O'Connor raised. That has been going as well as we could have possibly hoped in the two trial sites. I know that there are many members of the O'Connor electorate, community leaders, who would like the cashless debit card trial to be rolled out into the Kalgoorlie, Laverton and Leonora area. I have now been there several times with the member for O'Connor. I have spoken with many of the community leaders: some have been very impassioned about the desire for the card and the associated services to come to those locations because they are, quite frequently, in desperate situations. I recall a meeting which the member for O'Connor and I attended with some senior female elders who were pleading with us to introduce this card because of the state of the community, where they see desperate situations, with children roaming around at night in the streets because, as one of the elders said—and I will not mention her name—it is safer for them to be roaming in the streets than, often, it is to be in their homes. And she said that, unless we get on top of the alcohol, we are not going to address many of the other problems. So we are having a look at the Kalgoorlie, Laverton and Leonora area to see whether or not it is an appropriate location for a trial. As the member for O'Connor said, we will roll this card out into places where the community leadership would like it to be introduced. That is the basis for it. To date, we have had good support, but there is still more work to do. It is pleasing to hear that some of those leaders will be going across to Ceduna to find out firsthand on the ground there how people think it is going. This is not a panacea, but it can make a real difference on the ground to some troubled communities.

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