QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr KEOGH (Burt—Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Minister for Defence Personnel) (14:57): I thank the member for his question, and I really look forward to him and members of the opposition, the veteran community, the allied health professional community and ex-service organisations engaging in the consultation around how we can ensure better access to allied health care.

At the moment, we have a situation where people accessing allied health care have to continually go back for further referrals, and we want to make sure that we make that easier for our veterans. We also want to make sure that there continue to be practitioners across the allied health environment who will service our veterans, because we've continually had the complaint that the fees that we are paying to them have not been sufficient for them to keep servicing our veteran community.

So we've been looking to address that as part of our measure. Mr Thompson: Speaker— The SPEAKER: The minister is being directly relevant to the question. He was talking about the issue that he was directly asked about.

It's going to be difficult to raise a point of order when he's explaining his position on the question he was asked about. Member for Herbert? Mr Thompson: Speaker, it is a point of order on relevance because he was talking about times to see allied health, not about a cap.

The cap's the problem. It's not the same— The SPEAKER: Resume your seat. As I said, I can compel the minister to be directly relevant.

He was asked about a range of things before you got to the question about meeting veterans and the allied healthcare arrangements. So there was quite a bit in this question that he's entitled to be directly relevant to. He is being directly relevant.

Mr KEOGH: The government announced changes to allied health care in an effort to improve access to allied health care by ensuring that we are attracting more allied health professionals into providing those services to support our veterans. That means changing from a system of continual, regular referrals and GP visits to a $5,000 threshold. There'll be an alternative process for approval for all those veterans that have a clinical need that may be above that, recognising that the overwhelming majority of our veteran community go nowhere near that amount of use of allied health care.

It also allows us to make sure that we're improving the nature of treatment and care for our veteran community. We've been clear about the way in which that process will operate for the smaller number of veterans who may use over that because they may have complex needs. We recognise that and we're engaging with them.

We will be releasing a discussion paper shortly to fulfil that consultation process, engaging directly with veterans. I look forward to the shadow minister's feedback as well as that of veterans, our ESOs and our practitioners.