Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the member for Maribyrnong for bringing this motion to this chamber today. I think it's incredibly important. In my local community at the moment, a lot of my work is about acknowledging the work of essential workers as we work through the pandemic and finding people to celebrate and announce as Lalor heroes. What the member for Maribyrnong's motion does today is shine a light on those who work in government services. None of us in this chamber will ever forget the queues around our local Centrelink offices when this pandemic and the recession began. How could we ever forget? We saw person upon person, many of whom were standing in a queue in front of a Centrelink for the first time in their lives. I know I went down to our local Centrelink and spoke to people in those lines and spoke to the staff. I spoke to many people as they left after getting support from government services staff. I was astounded at the way they told me that they really appreciated the support that they had been given and the patience that they'd been seen with.

Working for government services during this pandemic has really shone a light on how important that work is and how important that public-facing aspect of this work is and how important it is for people, on potentially the worst day of their lives, to actually have a human being to speak to. Nothing is more important in times of heightened anxiety than person-to-person contact, and nothing is more important than those public-facing government service workers. They are the face of government on that person's worst day. We say that the pandemic is unprecedented, and we've heard it said a thousand times. But, although the queues were long, the feelings were similar to feelings during the bushfire crisis of last summer. I've spoken to local people who work in our Centrelink who volunteered to go and spend time in regional Victoria to support their neighbours and to support other people in Victoria as they sought support in recovery from the bushfires.

I know how tough government service employees find their job. When I think about the days I spent sitting with members of the public from my community when they had received debt notices from the infamous robodebt system, I know how difficult that was for staff in my office and for me personally to sit with people who had been traumatised by a process, who were looking for assistance, looking for guidance and looking for help on what they perceived to be the worst day of their lives. I think about the people who work in government services and the people who work in Centrelink, and I think about the stresses of their day. When we ask people to be the public face of a government, then the least a government can do is make sure that, when people are seeking support, that public face is the face of a government who cares about the population—is the face of a government who is there to support Australians on their worst day.

Unfortunately, that is not how a lot of government services employees feel, and it's not a surprise. Our government services should be crisis ready all the time. That's what we've learnt this year. That's what we learnt in the bushfire crisis. That's what I learnt in my office during the height of robodebt: they need to be in crisis capacity at all times. They always need to have well-trained staff. Those staff need to be permanent and need to be secure in their employment so they can give the best service to people who need support on the ground. It is a fact that this government has not had that front of mind. This government closed the Newport Centrelink this year. They've sacked workers at Services Australia's call centre. They've refused to lift the staffing cap during this pandemic. They come into the House and give us all the numbers of the people who've been supported, but how often do those opposite sit with those workers to find out the toll on them of doing the work and how much better supported they would they feel if, in being the face of this government, they felt supported and were in secure work?

See this speech in context