The Minister for Human Services Joe Hockey has spelt out the Government’s Vision for a Single Health and Social Services Smartcard (pdf).
Some key quotes:
The fact is if you were to invent or create the optimum service delivery model, it would be internet based. However, there are Australians that neither understand the internet nor have access to it.
The Queensland government in particular has formed a working group for the Federal government, as the Queensland government proceeds down the path of rolling out its smart card driver’s licence from the beginning of 2008.
we are working closely with the financial services sector to ensure that we have consistent technology…that allows us to deliver, in my case, one hundred billion dollars a year, potentially through the banking system
one of the key applications of the new health and welfare access card is to enable it to be used for emergency payments, and that it could be used at EFTPOS terminals, and in automatic teller machines, to enable people to access cash immediately.
We are also determined to avoid application creep. It should be noted that this is a replacement card. It is a replacement card for the Medicare card, and in total is a replacement for seventeen cards and vouchers across the Human Services family. And because it is a replacement card, it is far easier to deal with the logistics of the roll out even though we anticipate that from 2008 it will take two years for the entire population that wants to access the card to receive one.
Four percent of our interactions are online. And one of the challenges for us has been, in delivering better services, one of the challenges has been increasing the level of online activity and being able to identify the person claiming to be accessing the online service. Now, there is a compelling argument to having a PIN associated with the smart card. If that is the case, then that solves a lot of our online authentication needs.
It is a replacement of a magnetic strip with a chip….The information in the mandated fields on the chip will contain your basic identity information. Name, address, date of birth, obviously a Medicare number. And the only field which we control, the government controls, will be your concessional status, whether you are a pension concession recipient, or a health care card recipient, and so on. That is the only field the government will control. All other mandated fields are in the control of the individual.
