David Farley (Farrer, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Veterans' Affairs. The minister was quoted on Tuesday, saying that one in 10 veterans may go over the $5,000 cap for allied health services. One in 10 is circa 30,000 veterans. If the minister knows that 30,000 of our most injured veterans will be subject to the stress of reapplying for more assistance, why not do the right thing now and carve them out of the $5,000 cap immediately?

Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for the question. Clearly, as we've articulated, the purpose of the cap is to replace the current treatment cycle system where veterans are going back time and time again to a GP after every 12 referrals in order to access allied health services. We're replacing that with the $5,000 allocation, which means around nine in 10 won't be going over that allocation and won't have to continue going back to GPs.

What we're trying to do here for the one in 10 is engage properly with those veterans to make sure that they're getting the right level of health care to meet their allied health needs as well as where there are other needs so they can provide them with the best overall wellbeing outcome whilst maintaining integrity in the system. The proposal you're making would make the entire system a nullity, which is not what we want to do. We're actually trying to provide better outcomes for our veterans in overall wellbeing.

Another key part of what we're doing here with these changes is making the biggest increase in fees that are paid to allied health professionals in two decades. We've heard from the veterans and we've heard from the allied health professionals that, if we don't pay them more, they won't be servicing our veterans. We can't allow that to happen. We want to improve our veteran community's access to allied health services, and that's what these policy changes will be delivering.