Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Today I asked the Minister for Human Services, Senator Payne, three very detailed questions in relation to the theft of Medicare clients' personal information, including their bank account details. I asked the minister: when did she become aware of the theft? Not only could the minister not tell me about when the theft took place; she could not tell me how many Medicare clients were involved and she could not tell the Senate the amount of money that has been defrauded from the Commonwealth. Even more concerning, when I asked what steps the minister had taken to deal with this issue we get told it is in the hands of the police. Well, it might be in the hands of the police but the minister has a responsibility to ensure Medicare information is kept confidential and is not used by fraudsters to defraud the Commonwealth. That is what the minister failed to do. This minister knew there was a problem just under a month ago. After a constituent had raised with me that there could be a problem, I wrote to the minister and asked her to advise me about the issues facing DHS in relation to the stealing of Medicare clients' confidential information. I received nothing back from this minister.

The problem is that the minister is too busy trying to rip the wages and conditions off Commonwealth public servants in her department at the behest of Senator Abetz. She is too busy attacking the wages and conditions of hardworking public servants. We know that is a precursor to ripping the wages and conditions off workers in the rest of the country. This was Senator Abetz's little experiment within the public service to see how it could be replicated in the rest of the community.

In the meantime, clients of DHS are having their identity ripped off and the Commonwealth is being defrauded. I think the priority should be to make sure that people using Medicare—people using DHS systems—are not ripped off. But no, the minister was too busy to do that. The minister was too busy attacking workers, wages and conditions to deal with what I think is one of the most outrageous problems we have in the government at the moment, and that is the use of Centrepay by companies like Radio Rentals to rip off some of the poorest people in our community. Radio Rentals today have now had to pay back $1 million to people on welfare benefits. Yet when I raised this issue with the minister, what does she do? She dodges it.. She said, 'There will be an inquiry.' To fix this Centrepay issue simply requires a signature from the minister. Fix it minister! Before you end up going somewhere else in the reshuffle, what you could do is one good thing in your time in this portfolio, and that is to sign off on excluding the rip-off merchants from consumer leases that attack welfare recipients and others in the community.

The industrial chaos takes away from what should be one of the best government departments in the country. The industrial chaos is caused by the ideology and extremism of this government. Call wait times are soaring because this government cannot get its act together. They are too busy attacking working people. They are too busy attacking each other. They are too busy knifing their own Prime Minister.