Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Digital Transformation) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very happy to respond. Firstly, in relation to the member for Bruce, if there's some detail that he can provide me, we will certainly look into that. My experience with these things is that if they're raised and if there has been a genuine problem we can deal with it very quickly. But, of course, members opposite need to actually give us the facts. If they're prepared to give us the facts then we will certainly look into it and ensure that people get the best possible service that they can.

This is a very complicated system that we operate here in Australia, and 5.2 million Australians access it on a regular basis. When problems occur, my department actually cares, I actually care, and we do what we can to fix them. We have a record of doing that. So your coming in here and just raising cases without providing me with the detail, without contacting my office and giving us an opportunity to respond, shows me that you're not particularly concerned about the individual, because, if you wanted to get a result, that is exactly what you would do. That's what I would recommend to members opposite if they actually want to get a result for their constituent.

I have very limited time left to speak, but I do want to go through this complete nonsense about ASL reductions in my department. Can I just explain what we inherited when we came into office. The Labor Party had axed 4,800 people from the Department of Human Services—4,800 people. When the Rudd government was elected, call waiting times on Centrelink phone lines were an average of one minute and 29 seconds. This is in the financial year 2006-07—one minute and 29 seconds. When the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government left office, it was almost 13 minutes. This was the legacy of the Labor Party and their astonishing cuts to the Department of Human Services. That is what they had left for us when we came into office. Of course, we will endeavour to fix it, as we always do. What we are doing to fix it is having an extra 1,250 people staffing our telephone lines—1,250 people—and we're already seeing the results. People are getting significantly better service and they're not getting the busy signals that they had before, whilst getting shorter waiting times on our phone lines. Of course, whilst this is happening, we're also transitioning to new and better ways of people getting services through the Department of Human Services.

We will continue to do that. We've made a $1.2 billion investment in the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transition Program. That is our flagship digital transformation program—

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