I am pleased to be speaking on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. For many people 2020 was the first time that they'd had to interact with Services Australia, and it wasn't because they had a baby or because they became a retiree but because they had lost their job. It was Centrelink that they needed, and they needed it urgently. They needed to access support to help them through a time when their sudden job loss meant they had absolutely no income completely unexpectedly and brutally. I hope we never see the lines outside Centrelink like we did in those weeks, but clearly the agency was not given the resources to scale up fast enough and to meet the need that was there right in front of them. It is operating on, in business, what we call 'no spare capacity', but its heavy dependence on labour hire means it's probably more accurate to say it operates with far too few permanent staff all the time, let alone when a surge in demand happens. I think this reflects how little the coalition government believes in this fundamentally important government department, which every single person in Australia relies on at some stage in their life, whether it is for Medicare claims, for sorting paid parental leave, for NDIS participation, for accessing the pension and—as those in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury know—for accessing emergency payments at a time of natural disaster. These are usually times of great stress. What we used to call Human Services and what we now call Services Australia needs to be appropriately staffed to meet those needs.
I've spoken to many of the amazing workers in Services Australia across the NDIS, Centrelink and Medicare, and the message they tell me is they do feel under pressure. They are trying their best to deliver a first-rate service to the people who come in. They know the stressors that lead people to reaching out for help. I'm sure every member knows what happens when Services Australia and the different rules that are in place don't fit the needs of the people who've sought help there. They turn up at our offices.
We are their place of last resort, which is why we've had so many people, in the years that I've been a member of parliament, come and seek help. They say to me: 'I've never before contacted a member of parliament, but I just don't know where else to turn on this.' And what they've met is a blockage in Centrelink. The blockage might be that they've been given different pieces of information based on different conversations with somebody within Services Australia. It might be that they just don't quite know how to provide the information that's needed. It might be that there's a delay in their pension application being processed—haven't we seen those? Or it might be that they've received a robodebt for a debt they don't believe they owe or, as so many members have said in this place, that they've started paying only to then find out it wasn't really their debt to pay. In this place we see the situations where things go wrong in Services Australia. We've seen a lot of those in the years I've been in this place.
The frontline workers in these centres have had, in recent times, some of the most difficult conversations you can imagine. When I do speak with the public servants who work there, they absolutely demonstrate to me that they feel they are serving the public, and they want to do it to their very best. I invariably walk away reminded of their skill, the depth or the breadth of their knowledge and their desire to help people who can be extremely vulnerable, whether it's by providing financial relief to those unable to work, by helping people access counselling and social work services or by helping jobseekers to find meaningful occupations or prepare them to re-enter the workplace. But I also see that they have frustrations about the constraints under which they operate and their inability to be able to demonstrate compassion and to be able to find a solution that fits with the individual needs of every one of those clients that come to see them. That really goes to the core
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As I was saying, those really go to the core issue that the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020 fails to address, and that is that there's an arbitrary staffing cap imposed across the public sector that's led to an over-reliance on labour hire to keep up with the demand rather than allowing people to become permanent workers who build up their knowledge over time so they can not only be efficient but also effective. I thank the CPSU for its ongoing work to support the workers at what we now call Services Australia. I'm very grateful for having been able to hear the experiences of some of those members of the CPSU.
Like many of my colleagues, I do have concerns about the ongoing existence of Services Australia offices in my electorate and I've written to the minister to seek assurances that those in my electorate will not be consolidated or closed. We have three service centres: one in Windsor, one in Springwood and one in Katoomba. These towns are all at least 30 to 40 minutes by car from each other and much longer by public transport. In fact, you can't get from Springwood down to the Windsor office in anything less than half a day because of the different train lines.
They all service a different need, a different group of people in their own geographic area, and the staff at those centres do their best with the resources that they have to provide advice on Centrelink, Medicare, NDIS, paid parental leave—every question you can imagine. That means that there are pensioners, carers, veterans, people with a disability, students, families and jobseekers in my area who absolutely depend on being able to talk to someone face to face, and I really don't think it's too much to ask that someone can have a face-to-face conversation with someone at a time that can often be one of the worst times that they're going through.
Currently, anyone who's walked into a Services Australia knows that right now you are, wherever possible, headed off to a bank of computers, and that's not because the team don't want to help; it's because they are short-staffed and they don't have the time to provide that face-to-face. The offices have been stretched, and COVID has taken a heavy toll on the whole community. People have often ended up in a queue, feeling desperate and alone, to see if there's anything that Centrelink, for instance, can do to help them, and sometimes there is not.
I think the numbers really speak for themselves when we talk about the level of demand there's been. In the fortnight from 23 March there were 6½ million busy signals for people trying to phone Centrelink offices. That's just Centrelink alone. It's not any of the other parts of Services Australia. There were two million congestion messages. There were 1.5 million unanswered calls. There was an average call wait time of over 40 minutes. The delays certainly extended to a whole range of inquiries. Of older people making inquiries, only 37,000 of them got through to speak with someone. Those sorts of delays are the evidence, if anyone needed evidence, of the numbers involved in the demand for the services of Services Australia. Those numbers tell the story.
I think what is the most disappointing thing is the government knew the sorts of consequences its policies and decisions were going to have. Those were that people would be out of work and would need help in a very concentrated and intense period of time. They had plenty of warning of this. We saw what was happening overseas for months, and yet the minister did nothing—nothing—to increase the capacity of those offices to cope with the demand. When you look back at the track record of how the department has been run—I guess it isn't a surprise—you can look at the past IT system under preparedness and see that, back at the 2019-20 tax time, there was the MyGov outage just when people needed to put in their tax returns. And there was the total debacle of the 2016 census. Both of those incidents should have been something they learnt from, but clearly this government did not learn from its mistakes. It's not good at learning from its mistakes, and people then suffer.
One of the most common issues that was raised with me around the recent queues was that people who were trying to get on JobSeeker, people who had never engaged before with Centrelink, needed a customer reference number—the dreaded CRN—and they just couldn't get one. They needed to have a conversation with someone to talk them through that process. That was an absolutely predictable consequence. The other incidents we've seen in the past were around robodebt, which was, again, something the government was far too slow to take the message of and far too slow to learn from.
We know that Services Australia told the government in February that the robodebt program was not viable and they recommended it be scrapped, but it wasn't until months later that the minister finally admitted it. This is the track record. By the way, that had devastating impacts on the people who falsely thought they had robodebt. People will genuinely try and do the right thing, and many did, to their own detriment. They really suffered, until the government recognised and admitted to itself, let alone to the rest of the country, that it had made a serious mistake.
This legislation really only goes part of the way to addressing the issues that are there. I think the whole country can expect more from this government, and certainly more from this minister. They have a track record of such dreadful stuff-ups—that's the only language I can think to describe them as—or maybe errors, mistakes, lack of preparation or things that are overlooked. Don't forget there was the time when, during the early COVID days, the system crashed. The whole site crashed and we were told it was because there were hackers hacking it—that was, until we were told, 'No, it wasn't hackers.' Not long after that we got a very deep apology from the minister. It was concise. It was just two words—'My bad.' That's the sort of thing a teenager tries to get away with when they've really stuffed up. It is not the sort of response that the Australian community deserves from the minister who was there not just to administer the systems but to try and make things better, to protect vulnerable Australians, to protect the people who turned to the government for help at their lowest point. A number of people have come into my office and said: 'I have never had to interact with a government agency like Centrelink before. I've never had to do that.' They've only done it because they've had absolutely no choice.
While we will need to see these changes in this legislation, there are so many other things it fails to address. I would absolutely like to see a much greater effort put into equipping and resourcing this department to do the very best by Australians, to lift or do away with the arbitrary staffing cap that's been placed on Services Australia. In the times that we've just had, that would have allowed the agency to recruit and appropriately train up people to meet the demand that was being asked of them. I think what we are seeing is that, the more you hive away services and the more you refrain from employing people permanently in these government departments, the more you've essentially got privatisation policy by stealth. That's what it is. They are forced to outsource. They are force
