Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Families and Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

As I said, we need to be very careful and very sensitive because any death by suicide is a tragedy—I say that upfront. Senator McCarthy, I reject the premise of your question, because I believe it is incorrect for you to interpret Centrelink customer death statistics as suicides. These are all individual cases and all these individual people deserve respect and not to be spoken about as just a statistic. We know that there are a number of deceased customers of Centrelink whose estates are entitled to a refund under the Income Compliance program. Those estates will receive those refunds, as will everybody in the Income Compliance program.