Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

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 forced to contract out. They spend huge amounts on consultants and they engage labour hire firms. They do that to make up for a lack of internal resources. There is way more value to the taxpayer from employing people permanently. In the time we are in, that's what we need. We need people with the confidence that they have a job and that that job will continue. (Time expired)

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to follow the member for Macquarie, who would have, through the lived experience of a constituent, known very much the value particularly of Centrelink from the way that communities in the member for Macquarie's area were affected so badly by the bushfires earlier in the year. I know through the course of the pandemic in my own community how much of a part Centrelink, under the umbrella of Human Services now as part of this move in the legislation we are debating at the moment, has played in helping out constituents from Mount Druitt to Blacktown. I want to put on the record my enormous gratitude for their dedication and commitment.

These are very difficult times, and not everyone who approaches Centrelink for assistance necessarily will love 100 per cent the assistance they get, because the decisions that they are expecting won't necessarily get made in the way they would prefer or want—but that's life, unfortunately, in many instances. The hands of the people at Centrelink are very much tied by legislation, rules and regulations, and they do the best they can. They were really put under testing circumstances. As the member for Macquarie noted in her contribution, there were a lot of people who approached Centrelink for the very first time in their lives to get assistance at the start of the pandemic. They were required to get some sort of income support that they had never anticipated or thought in their wildest dreams they would be required to do, and at that point when they needed that help the system did not deliver. Again, it's completely understandable in many respects, with that huge overload, that that happened. I guess the Australian public would prefer that the minister just be upfront, direct and acknowledge that the system was overwhelmed. We got the excuse that it was hackers—the chief hack being the services minister himself, who had claimed there had been some sort of misdeed and that something cyber was happening that was affecting it. In the end, again as the member for Macquarie noted, he used the two-word apology of sorts of 'My bad,' which for a minister of the Crown was extraordinary. He should have just been upfront. He probably would have got a lot more credit for it.

We are now seeing in this legislation a migration—or a change or a rebranding as it were—of Human Services into Services Australia. At its very heart though, in terms of making this change, there is one critical element that holds up Services Australia, and that is the fact that it's got to live by an arbitrary staffing cap. With demand for the help of Services Australia going through the roof this year, notably through Centrelink, it would surprise a lot of people that the government say they will not put on enough people; they have capped the number of people available to do the work. It doesn't matter if the work goes through the roof, the government won't put people on. They say they'll put them on through other call centres and other providers. So they're not putting people on within the public sector; they're putting them on through contractors. Those contractors do have a role from time to time but it is better, I argue, to have those people in house—trained, dedicated and committed to long-term service to the people of Australia through Centrelink and other arms. When jobs are under so much pressure, we could bring in many people who have capabilities that are easily transferable to the public sector or—and this is radical—we could actually train up our young people! We could bring them in and lead by example and give them a long-term future.

In another debate here earlier, we talked about wage subsidies. Having looked at this space for some time, I can tell you there's a difference between a wage subsidy for someone you know, JobKeeper, and a wage subsidy for someone you don't, which is largely what is being pushed through this parliament. A lot of businesses want someone who they know has skill and capability already. The harsh reality is that they don't care about the wage subsidy. A lot of businesses say: 'I'm not interested. What I want more than anything else is a person who can come in on day one and do the job.' For young people, imagine having a structured career path through the Australian Public Service where you are trained up, you build a range of skills, and at some point you may go out into the broader job market and apply those skills there. You could do that within the Public Service. That's actually not a bad thing to do. It is an anathema.

Ms Bird interjecting—

It used to happen, as the member for Cunningham rightly points out, but it's an anathema to those opposite. They do not want more public servants. But the public wants service and understandably demands it at this point in time. It would give someone employment. In particular, it would give young people employment. Outside of Defence, Services Australia has one of the biggest IT requirements in the Australian Public Service. Imagine providing digital apprenticeships where you train up young people with the skills that will hold them in good stead in the longer term. Services Australia, through its IT budget, with its procurement and from what it does internally, has the potential for a huge beneficial impact not only in terms of internal employment, but outside employment as well.

My comments tonight will be limited because of time, but I will return to this issue tomorrow. What is happening under one agency in particular, the Digital Transformation Agency, which comes under the minister's responsibilities, is an absolute tragedy. It's promise was to have a positive and meaningful impact on the way services are delivered to the general public. The transformation of the way those services are done—using a digital platform, in many instances, to do it—is a tragedy. This is something that definitely has to be followed up. But, having said that, within Services Australia in particular, at a time when joblessness is going through the roof and when we could give people the ability to get a traineeship, it is an absolute tragedy that the government have not thought laterally and provided digital traineeships to a greater extent, because they do it already, through the DTA or Services Australia, and train young people up, giving them hope for the longer term, for the future.

Debate interrupted.