Emma McBride (Dobell, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Hansard source

The Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020 sets out the proposed framework or structure for the newly established executive agency, Services Australia, to replace the now abolished Department of Human Services. It proposes a number of changes that aim to both update terminology and streamline the reporting lines associated with transitioning DHS to Services Australia.

Labor supports modifications to governance structures across the public sector that lead to improved outcomes for employees and the Australians that rely on them. But there is a problem while there is a cap. Leaving aside for the moment the renegade scheme of robodebt, the bill fails to address the biggest issue at the centre of Services Australia—the arbitrary staffing cap imposed across the public sector which has led to an overreliance on labour hire agencies to keep up with demand, as well as exorbitant overspend on outsourcing and consultants.

Staff at Services Australia have been faced with a remarkable workload in recent times, from dealing with the bushfire response in January to managing the surge in new applications for JobSeeker allowance that arose throughout March and April. The staffing cap was placed across the public sector in 2013 without weighing up the capabilities or requirements of each agency or department, either at the time that it was introduced or looking into the future. Doing away with the arbitrary quota would allow the newly established executive agency to recruit the appropriate number of staff to provide the COVID-19 pandemic response without needing to rely so heavily on labour hire and external consultants. The reality is the average staffing level is a staffing cap. It is not only a reduction in the real staffing numbers as the population grows but also a privatisation policy by stealth. It has the inevitable result that agencies trying to do their work and trying discharge their public duties are forced to outsource and rely on contracting out. Lacking in-house resources, they instead spend exorbitant amounts on consultants and engage labour hire contractors to staff to departments.

Does a rigid staff cap save money? No, of course it doesn't. All it does is hollow out the expertise and experience of the public sector by getting rid of salaried employees and replacing them with labour hire casuals through third-party corporations. A staffing cap is by nature inflexible. It relies on nothing changing. What happens when in an emergency like a viral pandemic, for example, you need to hire more people? Does the government save money then? No. They just hire more people as labour hire casuals instead of retaining existing employees.

We saw this with the government's announcement on 22 March to engage 6,500 additional workers to help with the surge in demand on Services Australia. It did not escape our attention that this is a similar number—a very similar number—to what the government had cut from the front line over the past seven years. This is not responsible planning. This is not a responsible government. Are these 6,500 personnel who've been brought on given a career path? Are they given job security? No. Like all the others snuck in through the back door of labour hire or through 'service delivery partners'—that dreaded Tory euphemism—these workers are brought in and, just when they start to get a good handle on the job, to develop a bit of expertise and to be able to help the Australians they're there to support, they're booted out. What have the extra 6,500 workers done during this pandemic response? Well, approximately 1.3 million new claims were processed for JobSeeker in 55 days. That's the same number of applications that would normally be processed across a 2½ year period. At the peak, more than 53,000 claims were completed in a single day—in one day. Just think about that.

Imagine if the government, in a time of dangerously low employment, gave these 6,500 people secure employment. Imagine what might happen to the level of customer service that people experience when they contact Services Australia. There'd be no more phones ringing out, no more frustrating automation and no more robotic programs, just real problem-solving human beings helping out the public. I will return to the issue of the staff cap, but, for the moment, let me say that we need to revive the Public Service. The Public Service needs to be properly funded, and we need to provide some security so it can work in the interests of all Australians.

What the Australian public needs is a substantial change—that is, material change, not rebrands or marketing pictures. Will this bill be able to change the dominant culture of Services Australia—that is, the culture that allowed robodebt to happen? Without Labor's work, without the work of the member for Maribyrnong in particular, the government would still be issuing innocent Australians with robodebt notices, with the tragic consequences we've all seen in our communities. Since taking on the shadow government services portfolio, the member for Maribyrnong has spoken much in the last 14 months, inside and outside the House, about robodebt. He has spoken of his concerns about its cruelty, inaccuracy and unreliability and his belief that it was an illegal scheme. Given the growing number of victims the government was ignoring, the member for Maribyrnong believed the only way they could get justice and have their voices properly heard was through a class action. This government and the department and agencies involved had to be dragged to any admission that there was anything wrong with robodebt or that the victims of robodebt, those countless people across Australia, required anything like fair treatment or a sympathetic ear.

Robodebt has been nothing less than a fraud perpetrated by this government on some of the most vulnerable people of this country. And we should never forget that the worst scandal in the history of social welfare in this country went all the way to the top of the government's political hierarchy. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, started robodebt when he was social services minister. He expanded it when he was the Treasurer and has done nothing but whitewash it as the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, now that they've been caught out red-handed, will only say that he has deep regrets. It is better than nothing, but true remorse would be followed by action to remedy and the ruling out of a robodebt reboot. Minister Stuart Robert has claimed he can't be responsible because he's only been the minister for the last 15 months. Others will remember that he was human services minister in 2015-16, overseeing a key stage of the robodebt rollouts before he resigned from the Turnbull ministry. The bright new sign out the front may say 'Services Australia', but has the dominant culture changed?

I'd like now to share two of the many examples of people in my local community who haven't got the support they deserve from Services Australia. The first is Jennifer from Berkeley Vale. Jennifer is 66 years old. After being injured at work, she was forced to retire earlier than she wanted to. Jennifer had to wait five months to find out whether she would receive the age pension. What was Jennifer expected to live on, as her savings disappeared? The department revealed at Senate estimates that in 2017-18 nearly half of the applications for age pensions were not processed within the target of 49 days. We can argue about whether or not that is a reasonable target, and I don't think it is, but more than half were not processed within that target. And, alarmingly, waiting times were longer for both disability support pensions and carer payments. In the middle of this pandemic—noting that it's National Carers Week next week—we know the number of unpaid carers who have experienced increased demands during COVID, when formal support or paid support has fallen away. They've had to school their children from home, and they've had to pick up the gap in the mismanagement of the NDIS. We know how hard it is for carers at the moment. That they would have to wait more than 49 days for a carer payment to be processed is just not good enough. The department advises people to apply for pensions 13 weeks ahead. But, like Jennifer's, people's circumstances can change quickly, particularly in a global pandemic, leaving them in desperate need of support, especially in a crisis like the one we're living through at the moment.

The government can't genuinely aim to improve Services Australia while the pain and injustice of robodebt persists. Robodebt is a shameful episode in the history of this government. Billions of dollars were unlawfully taken from innocent Australians, while the government used the money to prop up a so-called budget surplus. This has hurt people in my community, people like Veronica. Veronica is a single parent from Killarney Vale in my electorate. In 2015, she was hit with a $5,000 robodebt from Centrelink. Veronica and her children faced eviction from their home. When the government issues you with a legal demand, when the government says, 'You owe us money,' some people are afraid. They're terrified, and they just pay up. Others just can't afford to foot the bill. These are the real human consequences of the government's unlawful actions that are affecting people across Australia.

As I mentioned earlier, it took the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Australians getting their day in court to force this government reluctantly to announce a plan to repay victims of robodebt. With over 60,000 direct applicants and up to 734,000 group members, the robodebt class action is the biggest in Australian legal history. This government has been forced to do the right thing by the Australians they have ripped off, by the Australians they have traumatised. For months the robodebt minister, Stuart Robert, denied the scheme was unfair, inaccurate or illegal. And when he put the emergency brakes on the scheme, he said it was only a refinement—a refinement!—affecting a small cohort. This dodgy scheme is more than what the government now calls legally insufficient. It has cost countless Australians their livelihoods and, tragically, in some cases their lives.

I will return now to the staffing cap. As I mentioned earlier, the staffing cap was placed across the public sector in 2013 without weighing up the capabilities or the requirements of each agency or department at the time it was introduced or looking towards the future. It is turning the Australian Public Service into consultancy land. A recently analysis by the Australian National Audit Office found the four big firms—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC—collectively reap $800 million a year in government contracts. Imagine if that sort of money, nearly $1 billion, was instead invested in keeping know-how, in keeping skills, in keeping that corporate memory within the Public Service instead of gutting it from within and then seeking to patch it up from the outside.

The government has even conceded this point. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has let the cat out of the bag that the APS staff cap effectively forced agencies to use more expensive consultants and contractors. Not surprisingly, this is hurting the quality and capability of the Australian Public Service. A review of the Australian Public Service by a former Telstra chief executive found the use of external contractors and consultants to deliver work previously done in-house was cited as a key in the decline in the capability of the Australian Public Service. It's not good enough. We need to properly invest in the Public Service, we need to provide proper security to the Public Service so that those people working within it can provide the support that Australians need, particularly in a pandemic.

I'd now like to turn to big data or, more accurately, the government's over-reliance on technology, or the misuse of technology. The effect of this over-reliance on technology in what was the Department of Human Services is really to justify cutting permanent staff and contributes to greater economic inequality. This is something that US professor Virginia Eubanks has written about. She said:

Massive investments in data-driven administration of public programs are rationalized by a call for efficiency, doing more with less, and getting help to those who really need it.

She concludes:

Technologies of poverty management are not neutral.

She said that they're in fact shaped by an underlying contempt for the less well-off, for the disadvantaged, for the poor in our communities. Our bold new world of big data does have many exciting possibilities. But to avoid repeats of robodebt, we need a government that treats data with respect. Letting automation loose on data, which has no concern for human beings—it is people who are needed to make the important decisions about how data is collected, how data is monitored, how data is analysed and how data is used. This responsibility needs to be a publicly accountable responsibility. This is a weighty responsibility; it needs to be transparent and it needs to be publicly accountable. It can't just be handed over to the private sector. It's a public responsibility to look at the consequences of big data, mass automation and artificial intelligence, and the decision framework needs to go beyond profit and loss.

Human services should not just become a series of contractual decisions in a free market. If outsourced, privatised and robbed of internal resources, organisations can become imbalanced and may become harmful to the common good. Power over vulnerable people is a fragile contract. It must be respected and it must be properly resourced. This is why the government must abolish its counterproductive ASL offset rule which arbitrarily caps numbers of public servants. Directly employing workers within Services Australia instead would create a stable and experienced workforce with less turnover and greater capacity to serve the needs of all Australians, so that calls to Services Australia don't go unanswered every day and so that Australians don't waste too much time on hold trying to access Centrelink services, causing avoidable distress and anxiety.

From 1 July 2019 to 27 April 2020 there were almost 25 million busy signals and 4.3 million congested signals. If you exclude the quick income management calls, the average speed of answering a call was approximately 21 minutes. That is 21 minutes from someone dialling to be able to speak to somebody within Services Australia. Unanswered calls from the public in times of crisis are what happens when humans are taken out of human services. For all of these reasons, we urge the government to lift the cap and put actual service back at the forefront of Services Australia.

Before I conclude, I'd like to mention the Tuggerah call centre in my electorate. These past few months have been difficult for workers in the Services Australia call centre at Tuggerah. In April, one worker tested positive for COVID-19. As a result, all 208 people working at the centre were required to self-isolate for two weeks while working from home, which, as everyone would recognise, placed an enormous strain on them and their families and households. The anxiety of quarantine was heightened by lack of public information. It took three urgent letters to the Minister for Government Services to get a response. I thank the local health district for sharing relevant and timely information for those directly impacted, for their households and for those in the wider community. But, if appropriate arrangements had been in place to work from home, some 208 employees and their households, their family members, may have avoided quarantine, and the isolation and associated anxiety.

I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) calls on the Government to:

(a) abolish the "ASL offset rule", which has the effect of capping average staffing levels within Services Australia;

(b) stop the excessive use of consultancy firms and contractors to outsource important government services including Centrelink; and

(c) recognise that the staffing cap is a false economy that undermines the quality of government services, especially those delivered by Services Australia".

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