Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Hughes for moving this motion which calls on the government to get Services Australia back on track, because every day we see evidence that Services Australia is in very bad shape and is not serving Australians, serving customers, as it should.

Just last week, there was a new revelation that there had been a major technology bungle at Services Australia which resulted in around 11,000 vulnerable Australians having their superannuation incorrectly assessed when they reached the age pension age. The opposition had to work very hard to get the details of this. After I lodged a freedom of information request, the Minister for Government Services initially refused it, and the agency is still saying that there are around 7,100 customer records yet to be remediated. This is just one of many, many instances we have seen of a very serious problem at Services Australia. It's a cultural problem which has been driven from the top down by the minister, the member for Maribyrnong, who'd rather spend his time playing political games, blocking transparency and scrutiny, than focusing on improving customer service.

I want to disagree very strongly with the previous Labor speaker, who rejected the idea that Australians, in engaging with Services Australia, should be treated as customers. The coalition disagrees very strongly with that. There needs to be a customer service mentality at Services Australia, and we are seeing the very opposite from this government. There's an ideological crusade against the use of specialist providers, which led to specialist call centre provider Serco being axed in the middle of this year. Now, I've got no particular brief for Serco, but it is absolutely clear that, when you use specialised providers with particular expertise, you get better outcomes on metrics that are used all across the private sector, such as call waiting times. In the period from 1 July to the end of August this year, it has taken almost an hour on average for an Australian to get through to Centrelink's employment services line. Why? Because of those ideologically driven decisions by this Labor government that puts customer service right down the bottom of the list of priorities, as we just heard from the member for Bendigo, and instead puts the union objectives right up the top of the pile. It's no surprise that the current minister, a former union official, has failed to inculcate a strong customer focused culture at Services Australia because this concept is entirely foreign to him.

One other thing that is very foreign to him is the fact that customers of Services Australia and of businesses, large and small, around the country are showing a very clear preference to engage through a digital channel. They find it quicker and more convenient.

For every one face-to-face engagement with Services Australia in 2022-23, there were 110 digital transactions. That compares to 70 to one in 2015. That's a very clear trend, and that mirrors the trends we're seeing in the way that Australians are engaging with private sector providers—for example, the number of ATMs. In August 2021, ATMs were used 24 million times by Australians. That's down from 71 million in July 2012.

Australians expect the same digital services efficiencies from their government as they do from the businesses that they are engaging with. That was something that was a real focus of the previous coalition government. We created myGov ID. We created the corresponding trusted digital identity framework. By contrast, under this government, we've learned through Senate estimates that a federal-state digital credential sharing agreement between the Australian and New South Wales governments has now completely broken down. In February, the minister said that this work would be completed by August or September. It's now late November. It's nowhere to be seen.

This is yet another of the current minister's dismal failures. It illustrates the lack of reform, energy and commitment from this government and from this minister when it comes to digital service delivery. Funding for technology and transformation as a line item in the budget is going backwards over the forward estimates, and that failure to enhance digital service delivery is also a failure of customer service. This minister is ignoring the proven capacity of digital technology to improve customer service.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12:16 to 12:28

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