Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026

Senator McALLISTER (New South Wales—Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) (12:53): As Senator Ruston has indicated, her amendment proposes specifying how a provision subject to automation is to be referred to, and the government won't be supporting this. We consider the amendment as drafted unnecessary, but it is also insufficiently broad to cover provisions that may be located in rules.

I think the purpose of Senator Ruston's amendment is to ensure that provisions under which automated decision-making is taking place are sufficiently specified by the rules, and that requires, under the amendment, a provision to be specified by reference to a section, a subsection, a paragraph or a subparagraph. This is unnecessary, because we would not be able to specify a provision of the Health Insurance Act without reference to the section.

So this amendment doesn't really add anything in relation to transparency. However, it could complicate rules drafting, in particular if the provision being automated sits in a schedule which isn't referred to as a 'section'. I would observe, as I did in my contribution to the second reading debate, that transparency of the provisions being automated is already provided for in a series of ways in addition to specifying them in the rules.

That includes notifying the person who the decision relates to that a decision was taken by a computer program, setting out the provisions that are being automated on Services Australia's website, notifying the person who the decision relates to that a computer-made decision was overridden by a human decision-maker and publishing all of those occurrences as part of the annual report.

I make the other broad observation that the public will be better served by a conversation around the use of computers in government administration that is based on facts rather than on fear. I am concerned that some of the contributions to this debate, either in this chamber or outside of this place, veer towards fear rather than fact. The problem with that is that computers already play an essential role in public administration.

They enable thousands of transactions to take place quickly, efficiently, at a relatively low cost and in ways that are enormously helpful to the Australian public. Demonising those or falsely representing such decisions as dangerous or unsafe doesn't help the debate. Nothing I say obviates the separate point that we should, of course, be cautious and use computing in government decision-making responsibly and sensibly.

Everyone in this place saw what happened with robodebt. I can assure this chamber that our government will not repeat the mistakes that were made by the previous Liberal government. That scheme was illegal.

It was immoral. We will not make those same mistakes. The bill that's before the chamber amongst other things sets out the transparency arrangements that we do consider are necessary when a computer is being used for automated decision-making.

But, I say again, we ought not let fear and fearmongering drive the tone of this kind of debate. The use of computers is already a very important part of public decision-making; it's already a practice that delivers very significant benefit to millions of Australians. We ought to be mature enough to have a sensible conversation about the safeguards that are necessary for the use of computers in government administration.

I think that is an objective—that mature conversation—that members of this Senate could consider signing up to, should consider signing up to. We owe it to the Australian public to deliver the very best Public Service that we can. Often that will mean retaining the role for a human, perhaps for a clinician, in making a key decision.

But at other times it will involve continuing the use of a computer, because that helps us. It helps everybody, and it helps us free up human resources for the tasks that matter. That's true in government, and it's true in other service systems.

Those are broader contributions about the way we might approach this debate, but, as I have laid out in my earlier remarks, we won't be supporting the amendment that is presently before us and that has been moved by Senator Ruston.