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

I seek leave to speak again on the report.

Leave granted.

This report warrants a little airtime. It is a damning report by a government-controlled committee and, indeed, one of the parliament's oldest and most powerful committees. We have the ability to initiate our own inquiries with a strong tradition, in fact, of bipartisanship for over 110 years. Quite simply, this report slams the government's administration of the disability support pension. It is highly embarrassing for Minister Tudge and Minister Porter, as it again demonstrates their complete inability to manage their portfolios with fairness and integrity, and raises new questions about their futures.

However, the politics of this does not really matter, and is not the point. This report contains a serious and thoughtful series of recommendations which I hope the government will pick up; I really do. If the government swallows its pride, reads the report and agrees to these sensible changes, then it will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who are on, or will apply for, the disability support pension—DSP—in coming years. The DSP provides support to permanently disabled Australians who are unable to work or are unable to work many hours and, on behalf of the committee, I thank everyone who took the time to submit. We do not usually get many submissions for this committee—it is an insider committee between senior bureaucrats and the Audit Office, if you like—but this time we were blown away because we got dozens and dozens of submissions from individuals as well as advocacy groups from around the country.

I will touch on the headline recommendations. No. 1 is a full end-to-end review. In light of numerous concerns raised throughout the inquiry which remain unaddressed, the committee has recommended that DHS and DSS conduct 'a complete end-to-end review of the administration of the entire DSP program'. There have simply been too many problems and concerns identified to tolerate the government's piecemeal, shambolic approach—the stuff-ups we have heard of, the bits and pieces, the band-aiding other bits in the process and this ad hoc approach to evaluating the impact of major policy and program changes, which is responsible for the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in public funding. Government MPs and senators signed up to this recommendation for a full and transparent review.

There was a range of findings and, indeed, I think perhaps the strongest focus of the public hearings and submissions was around the targeting of the notorious DSP reviews that this government is conducting. The inquiry heard from many people who had been targeted—picked on—by the government's cruel, scattergun DSP reviews. We heard numerous reports from individuals and from agencies trying their best to represent these vulnerable people—Australians with severe and permanent intellectual, physical and psychological disabilities, with no capacity whatsoever to work. The case of Andrew Johnson in my electorate gained national media, which started much of this. Andrew is a profoundly disabled man who, I think, is in his early 30s and is living full-time in state residential care—he has lived in full-time care since he was a teenager. He is fed through a tube and is non-verbal, yet is being asked by Centrelink and the minister to prove his eligibility for the DSP with numerous medical appointments. So there is a clear recommendation in the report to improve the data sharing between federal governments and state and territory governments so that manifestly eligible and other severely disabled recipients like Andrew are excluded from the review.

I asked DHS in the hearing, why can they not just rule out people like this—walk around, for example—in state care? They waffle, waffle, waffle—it is all so hard with the data. There was a clear failure to cross check basic data within Centrelink and with state and territory governments which would stop these pointless reviews, save public money on wasteful reviews and wasted Medicare bills. The Commonwealth government in Victoria pays rent assistance for these people. They could get that data off the system. They could send someone to walk around and tick them off a list and say, 'Well you are not going to get better, are you? Let's not send you for a DSP review.' But it was all too hard.

It is not just bad administration though. The committee also found this is driven by government policy. Tens of thousands of these reviews are continuing in the budget just handed down by this government. The committee considers that better targeting of these reviews is a must by DHS. Of course if people do not meet the requirements for the DSP, they should not be paid. No-one disagrees with that. But DHS failed to provide adequate detail to the committee about its basis for targeting.

The committee more shockingly heard recent evidence of recent data which shows only 1.6 per cent of recipients subject to the scattergun 2016-17 reviews have been moved off the DSP. The government was anticipating 10 per cent of people would be kicked off the DSP to achieve its budget saving. So this raises the real possibility that these poorly targeted, costly reviews are actually costing the taxpayer more than they save. These reviews pick on vulnerable Australians and run up the Medicare bill to prove the bleeding obvious so we recommended—government senators and MPs signed up to this—that DHS publicly report the results, costs and benefits of an evaluation of the government's DSP reviews. The question I ask is: will the minister commit to this with no waffle, no equivocation, just fess up and agree to it?

We also asked if the government had considered the Medicare costs in devising these measures because they have to be included. Literally it costs hundreds of dollars to get specialist appointments to prove this stuff—'will not get better'. Have they done a cost-benefit assessment? The department admitted, well, yes there was a regulatory impact statement but then later the committee was told in supplementary answers that it was confidential and we cannot have it. The true cost to the government of undertaking the DSP reviews including the waste in Medicare to gather medical evidence remains a secret, and I call on the government to release the impact statement. What has the minister got to hide?

The committee also received dozens of submissions and heard evidence of the fear and anxiety caused by letters arriving in the post giving people 21 days to submit evidence or lose their DSP. There is clear evidence that 21 days is very often an insufficient time line to get medical specialist reports. Who can get a medical specialist appointment within 21 days for complex neural and psychological disorders and satisfy Centrelink, particularly as the committee found, if you live in a regional and remote area where there are no specialists? So what does this mean? It takes longer to get a letter; it takes longer to get a specialist appointment. The department said, well, anyone can ask for an extension and they will get it. But this seems stupid. We had 42 million unanswered calls in the last year to Centrelink and tens of thousands of those are from people on the DSP, freaked out by these letters ringing the department to say, 'Please give me more time.' It seems a pretty simple way to cut the volumes of calls so the recommendation is that the government must consider increasing the time given for clients to provide documentation as 21 days is totally inadequate in thousands of cases.

The most bizarre moment, if I could pick a most bizarre moment of the hearing, was when I asked what I thought was a clear, up-front let's-just-start-easy moment to a senior DHS official, a deputy secretary. I asked would the deputy secretary agree that Down Syndrome is not going to be cured? I thought this was an easy one. She said 'no'. No, she could not give me that assurance. I said, 'But surely you would agree it is not going to be cured?' She said, 'I would not be so arrogant; I am not a medical practitioner.' She was a bureaucrat so she could not say that Down Syndrome would not be cured. Everyone knows it is a genetic disorder, and we heard numerous reports of letters being sent—stupid letters—asking people to go to a medical doctor and prove that their Down Syndrome had not been cured. And so the committee made a recommendation to review the list of conditions which provide eligibility for the so-called 'manifest automatic grants of the DSP', particularly chromosomal disorders such as Down Syndrome, which obviously will not be cured. Down Syndrome Australia has strongly advocated for this, welcomed the report and agreed with the need for more targeting. Obviously a small percentage of people with Down Syndrome work and want to work and are supported to do so, but I have been told there is not one person with Down Syndrome in Australia working full-time in the open employment market through a competitive process. There must be a more efficient way to do this.

The final point I want to make is about—there is a lot more, but time does not permit—significant concern regarding the government's latest changes to assessment processes for new applicants. People with some familiarity over the years with the system would remember the 'treating doctor's report'. It was very clear what you needed to provide: a very long complex report gave the right information. The government has changed that; now you just provide your raw medical evidence, and someone—who is not a medical practitioner but a bureaucrat or an allied health professional—will have a look at it and say yes or no. And it is only if you get recommended for the DSP that your case will then go to a medical doctor to try and knock a few more off. We heard of a range of problems that arose from this.

To be fair, the system is only about 18 months old, verging on two years old, but we have made a clear recommendation—given the concerns we have heard about, including the wasted costs of pointless appeals, which just run up bureaucrats' time and lawyers' time, and traumatise people who then get the DSP—to just undertake a transparent review, with input from independent experts and stakeholders, of these changes. If it is working, then have the evidence out there and listen to the experts. If it is not, make some changes.

We heard about poor communication, poor performance, deteriorating performance and increasing time lines. In closing, I would say that so much of the stress is because of the sustained and ongoing cuts to Centrelink and DHS by this government. The staff are doing the best they can, yet in this budget we saw the start of the privatisation of Centrelink, with 250 jobs going to an unnamed call centre and another 1,200 jobs—

Government members interjecting—

Read your budget papers. This must be stopped.

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