Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I recently found out via a Facebook post advertising office space that the government is looking to close the Braddon Centrelink office in my electorate. There has been no community consultation at all. I wrote to the minister, who confirmed this and extolled the benefits of dealing with Centrelink online. That the government would be considering closing down vital government services in a pandemic is absolutely unthinkable, when fresh in our minds is the vision of people lining up outside Centrelink in their hundreds as the pandemic broke, and when more and more people are relying on this assistance.

We've already seen from this Liberal government the disaster of robodebt and a failure to increase JobSeeker in a meaningful way to address the poverty in this country. Now we're seeing Centrelink offices close down around the country: on the Central Coast and in regional Victoria, and it looks like Canberra is next. This government want to take the human out of human services, and that's part of their broader disdain for the social security system and for their responsibility to deliver this vital safety net. They certainly don't care about vulnerable Australians, and they certainly don't care about my community of Canberra. The Braddon branch is the only Centrelink office in my electorate. When it goes, there will be no Centrelink office in the central business district of Canberra. Over a thousand Canberrans have already signed my petition to save the Braddon Centrelink. They will not accept having no access to Centrelink services in the central area of Canberra, and they will not accept a government that doesn't deliver the services that Australians need.