Everyone loves a baby… including the government so it would seem. The government in all its myriad forms; Federal, State and Local, they all want in on the act, they’re all here to help…
An inundation of glossy brochures and photocopied fact sheets, two DVDs, registering with local health care, state records, national medical insurance.
This morning the regional maternal health nurse came to visit, to record, to instruct and book us in for further visits at our “local” maternal health centre. Except it isn’t our local centre, the local one is easy to get to and about four minutes walk — we’ve been allocated to one that’s three times as far away, and on the far side of a six-lane main road. At least we managed to get reallocated, then had to sit and listen to about half an hour of an interesting mix of useful advice, the bleeding obvious, and what I think are personal opinions, all mixed in as one. She handed over a great sheaf of photocopies of local guvment advice, then carefully took her pen and crossed some bits out and made her own annotations. I guess that like all free advice, its worth what we pay for it.
Paperwork step one, register the baby with the Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. You have two months, and if you do not all sorts of dire things will happen. Hating to be caught with an unlicensed baby, we leap at the chance to placate the government.
This one’s not so bad, just four pages of questions that must be filled in, then signatures from both parents, both witnessed. One of the nurses from the hospital had told us we’re allowed to witness each other’s signatures, so we did. On the back of the form we then found a footnote saying that we’re not allowed to witness each other’s signatures. Oh well, we’ll send it off and see what happens. Now on to the next one…
Half-way through filling out the four pager paper form to register the new baby with Medicare we find that you get to a certain point and then have to do part of it either online or via the phone, then transcribe some receipt number onto the paper form in order to continue. Typically convoluted. I started by going to the website, http://familyassist.gov.au/, but of course there is absolutely no indication of what you have to do! Fumbling around found a page that looked promising, but surprise surprise, you can’t go any further without “registering” and creating yet another bloody account on yet another bloody website. I started filling this out, meanwhile Jo simply picked up the phone and started to call. She was in touch with a person and starting the process before I’d even got the rest of the way through creating the account on the website.
Hey, dearest government, if the only websites you can make are this bloody convoluted and hard to use, PLEASE DITCH THE WEBSITES and stop pretending you have an online presence!
Second surprise; despite us having sent any number of Medicare claims in to them in the past nine months, indeed quite a few over the past three years, they claim that there’s no record of us at this address! This is despite them somehow managing to send us refunds TO THIS ADDRESS for the past three years!
Anyway, after giving out a whole lot of details over the phone, we are now in possession of a magic registering number which we can enter on the paper form, together with re-entering half the details already given out over the phone! We can then send off the form where all the details will be transcribed from paper back into someone’s database — hopefully without too many transcription errors.
OK, we now think the paperwork has been dealt with. What’s the next surprise in store?
