Mr KELVIN THOMSON —I want to express the fear that the tax office is in the process of abandoning face-to-face public contact and is going the way of the banks, Australia Post and other large corporations in making themselves less accessible and less personal. In our dealings with the bureaucracy, MPs often lead privileged lives because, in many cases, we have access to relatively secret direct phone numbers or have staff to deal with phone queues and the like. We do not understand much about the evils of call centres: what it is like to be held in a queue or not knowing which option to press. I do not think we appreciate how difficult it can be for an ordinary person trying to deal with the bureaucracy.

The tax office intends to close all its cashier facilities by January next year and to cut back public contact opportunities. These things are being described euphemistically as ATO `access' sites. This is a piece of Orwellian newspeak where black is white and white is black. The access sites look very much like `no-access' sites. We have already seen cashier facilities closed in Brisbane, Geelong and Canberra, and concern has been expressed to me about proposals for Newcastle, Townsville, Perth and Cannington by Kim Wilkie, the member for Swan, and Jann McFarlane, the member for Stirling.

There are substantial implications of getting rid of the cashier and client service facilities. For example, there will be no place where a person can make a voluntary HECS payment or a voluntary tax payment in advance or purchase tax vouchers. There are limits on the amount of cash and cheques that Australia Post, the alternative, can accept. I am told, for example, that Alcoa tried to pay a tax office bill in excess of $51 million by cheque and were refused. We can see that this is throwing up very substantial problems. There are difficulties involved in achieving same day banking, and this could mean a loss of interest revenue to the tax office. It would also appear that the closure of cashier facilities is in direct breach of the taxpayers charter. The explanatory booklet No. 15 of the charter—and this is being distributed to the public—specifically states with respect to paying your taxes:

If paying in person at a Tax Office, you can pay by cash, cheque or postal money order . . . from 8.30am to 4.45pm Monday to Friday.

That is no longer the case. Concern has also been expressed at the Newcastle office about the implications of this change. You have a situation where the public is being encouraged to use phone inquiries, even to the point of being asked to ring the call centre whilst on ATO premises. It has been pointed out that this is a very valuable service for small business. I call on the tax office to review it. I think that failure to do so would generate suspicion that the tax office is running away and hiding in the face of the GST implementation debacle. (Time expired)