By Lilia Guan
Minister for Health Services, Senator Kim Carr spoke at technology vendor IBM’s third annual Smart Government conference about the use of technology to provide services for every fabric of society.
Senator Carr said the Department of Health Services (DHS) is the government’s service delivery arm and bridge between the commonwealth and every Australian – from mum and dads to students and retirees.
"Human Services will be presented to you as the Commonwealth’s payments agency – or, if you watch Today Tonight, its crack-down squad," he said.
“Its true mission, as I see it, is the daily maintenance and repair of Australia’s social fabric.
"It is the fashion to speak of people as customers when they front up to the Centrelink or Medicare counter – as if they could shop around for a better service. The fact is, they can’t. And they rarely have the luxury to turn that service down."
Senator Carr said technologies are used to improve services and make sure service providers get more than just a passing grade.
“I am not just speaking of the demand for instant access, home-delivered services – the sort of service we expect any bank to be offering."
"In the last financial year, the Department received some 55 million calls. Centrelink alone saw a four million increase on the previous year. The figure will be even higher when this year is out.
That is the human face of the economic uncertainty of the times, said Senator Carr.
However the Department will never replace the experience and judgment of the professional officer on the end of the line – but give them the tools to do a better job.
"That’s why we spend about a billion dollars a year on the DHS technology network," he said.
It has enabled the officers to open entirely new channels for service, including a new initiative, Senator Carr launched at the Forum yesterday.
"This is the Department’s first app – to be called ExpressPlus," he said.
"With this new tool, students will be able to conduct routine business such as reporting their income or requesting advances.
"Those transactions make up some 80 per cent of their dealings with Human Services."
It will begin with a small pilot in June, followed by a broader roll-out in July.
Senator Carr said this isn't the Department’s first foray into the 'brave new world', with more than one million reports are made online every month by jobseekers reporting their income.
"Almost a million citizens are registered to receive online letters and close to 80 per cent of Medicare services are now claimed electronically," he said.
"When the floods hit this year, it was technology that allowed the Department to achieve the fastest turnaround of disaster payments in Commonwealth history.
"When staff fly into remote communities, it is technology that keeps them in touch. So machines can do a lot for human beings."
It would be easy for a Minister to be carried away.
Senator Carr said the Department could cut out all the letters and speak by SMS; itcould close all the centres and replace them with a website.
We could sack all the staff and make decisions by machine; it could do all that; and call it duty done.
"Just as the perfect hospitals in Yes Minister were those without patients, and the perfect football clubs have no players or fans, our perfect Human Services Department would have no human beings," he said.
"But we have to live in the real world – because there is nothing more real than the daily experience in a Centrelink office."
"This is the real world where machines don’t fix themselves. The Department recorded 33 IT outages in March this year – some of them internal, and some of them stemming from external providers. That was an improvement on the 50 it recorded in the month before. Only 10 of those directly affected the citizen, but all of them affected the operation."
Senator Carr asked what would this 'brave new world' mean, but more exclusion and denial?
"This is the reality of the digital divide – a reality the IMF holds responsible for three-quarters of the global rise in inequality since the 1980s," he said.
"That doesn’t mean technology has nothing to offer to these people – on the contrary, it is the most vulnerable who need these tools the most.
"We can be smart about our technology, if we’re smart about our citizens first and none of this should be construed as a reflection on the staff of the Department of Human Services."
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