Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—On behalf of the member for Bradfield, I move:

That this House:

(1) notes:

(a) the release of Services Australia's 2022-23 annual report, which confirmed that customer satisfaction and other key performance measures went backwards;

(b) that Services Australia has become a basket case under the current Government, with    .sky-rocketing call and claims processing wait times; and

(c) that the under performing Minister for Government Services reduced Services Australia's average staffing levels in the 2023-24 budget and decreased funding for technology and transformation;

(2) acknowledges the work of the former Government in ensuring service delivery was seamless, simple and safe, with a strong emphasis on digital uplift; and

(3) calls on the Government to help get Services Australia back on track by launching a root and branch review into the embattled agency.

This is an important motion. It concerns Services Australia, which is often the most critical government department and is the interface between many Australians and the federal government. It delivered over $200 billion in payments and services to Australia. Therefore, its performance, and the performance of the minister who is overseeing this department, after 18 months is critical.

Firstly, I want to note that the release of Services Australia's 2022-23 annual report has unfortunately confirmed that customer satisfaction and other key performance measures to do with this agency have in fact gone backwards. Secondly, Services Australia has become a basket case under the current government, with skyrocketing wait times for calls and claims processing. Thirdly, it's been shown that, after 18 months, the Minister for Government Services has in fact reduced Services Australia's average staffing levels in the 2023-24 budget and decreased funding for technology and transformation.

When we go through the agency's 2022-23 annual report, it does not make for good reading. First of all, the agency has failed to meet key performance targets, particularly around customer satisfaction—that is, where customers are served within 15 minutes. Work processes within timeliness standards and call wait times—all of these measures have gone backwards. Call wait times are a particularly acute area of failure. In 2021-22, over half of the customers who called social security and welfare were answered in 15 minutes. In 2022-23, under the Labor government—under Minister Shorten—only 36 per cent were answered within 15 minutes, and new data obtained by the opposition in Senate estimates now reveals that the wait time has blown out to 53 minutes and 26 seconds on average. That's almost an hour of being on hold for Australians trying to deal with Services Australia. This is simply not good enough.

This is not Services Australia; this is 'dis-Services Australia' or 'no-Services Australia'. Call wait times, particularly, are getting worse because of this government's ideological crusade against outsourced labour, and, in that regard, we learnt midyear that a major call centre contract with Serco had been axed, with 600 jobs for people answering phones cut.

Claim-processing time is another key performance measure that has also skyrocketed under Labor. My electorate office continues to receive calls and emails for help from worried constituents trying to deal with Services Australia. We know from data disclosed by Minister Bill Shorten that claims-processing times have been lost. From July last year to August this year, it took on average 98 days for a childcare subsidy related payment to be processed, 61 days for the age pension to be processed and 80 days for the disability support pension to be processed. This is simply not good enough—absolutely not good enough.

Particularly, we saw that the minister did call for a review of myGov.

It's a plain fact that most Australians prefer to interact with Services Australia via digital means. For every face-to-face transaction in 2022-23, there were 110 online transactions. MyGov is Australia's single largest authenticated digital platform. At the moment, though, it's a cumbersome and difficult platform. The minister did have an audit of myGov and got the results in January, and it wasn't until November that the minister announced that he will make some changes—and I do applaud him for this. He's engaged former New South Wales Liberal minister the Hon. Victor Dominello, who will be taking up the reins at myGov and hopefully transforming myGov in the way that he did in New South Wales. I do commend the minister for pulling across a New South Wales Liberal to assist with this transformation, but digital transformation at Services Australia must be a major priority.

In the longer term, improving digital engagement saves taxpayers money, saves their time and improves overall agency efficiency. But the minister must now have a full review of Services Australia to increase these efficiencies, and I call for that today.

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

Is the motion seconded?

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

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are a few things I want to say in response to not just the motion but the comments that were just made in the Federation Chamber. The first is around outsourcing and around the contract with Serco. If you deep dive into the experiences of both those who worked for Serco and the people who were directly employed within Centrelink, it is quite alarming. Quite often the people working for Serco received very little training before they were put onto the phones. We have a service centre in my electorate. Our local Centrelink and combined services office, where they do a lot of processing—what we used to call a smart centre—had to work closely with Serco. We also had some Serco workers. They received two days of training on our very complex social security law. How can you possibly support people when they ring Centrelink if you've only had two days of training?

The experience that got reported to us from people working directly for Centrelink was quite often that the Serco people, because they hadn't received the training, were giving out the wrong information, or they couldn't answer the call, so that person was being put back on hold. Technically, it might have appeared that your call was being answered within 15 minutes, but it wasn't being resolved. You were quite often put on hold or referred on, given the wrong information and having to call back. Outsourcing within Centrelink does not work. We need properly trained, directly employed Australians to answer and help support Australians.

We also have to change the culture within Centrelink, and I applaud the minister for going down that path. The idea that Australians accessing their social security and support services like Centrelink and Medicare are called 'customers'—they're not purchasing things. They're Australians. They could be clients. They are people seeking support and accessing what are their rights. This idea of customer culture that we've focused on is the wrong direction for our Centrelink. I want to acknowledge the efforts that the minister is making to change the culture: direct employment, less casualisation, and giving people the jobs they can rely upon into the future.

Let's also look at the workload that Centrelink have had since we came to office. This is something. It is a knock-on effect of having a progressive Labor government that is reforming our social security to support people. We have had some big changes happen since the last budget, and that has created more work for our Centrelink staff in particular and for our Services Australia staff. More families are now eligible for the family tax benefit, paid parental leave and the childcare subsidy. The agency processed almost 1.1 million claims from January to 16 November 2023. This is the workload that our agency has. The agency has received 7.9 per cent more families claiming in 2023 than it did for the same period last year. This is because our government has moved down a path of supporting more families, so the workload has increased.

The change in eligibility for the parenting payment came into effect on 20 September, resulting in 65,000-plus people transitioning from the JobSeeker payment and youth allowance payment onto the parenting payment. All of this extra, progressive reform, which this parliament supported and which we support, has created extra work. These are just some of the many areas.

What I also want to acknowledge, in the moments I have left, is the great work of our Services Australia staff, who, quite honestly, are hanging on in there. In the last decade, we have lost a lot of good people from Services Australia to the state system because their pay and conditions have not kept up. That's a real shame that we've lost talented, experienced people from Services Australia to our state agencies literally because the pay rates aren't the same. Our government is looking at that parity because we want to have the best people working for the public and supporting some of the most vulnerable people in our community.

I want to give a shout-out to the people working in my electorate and, in particular, the specialists working in areas like aged care that have gone back to face-to-face appointments to help people navigate what is a very complex system. Our Services Australia staff are amazing. They forgo a lot to work to support our community and they deserve our thanks.

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

David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Listening to this debate, you might want to know what happened to the last decade. The 2022-23 Services Australia report revealed an agency left crippled by a decade of coalition cuts and neglect.

I want to begin my response to this motion by recognising the 30,000 or so staff that work at Services Australia. Near my electorate office in Greenway are the headquarters of Services Australia and the Department of Social Services, and many of those staff are my constituents. In Tuggeranong and Woden I have two great Services Australia centres. The staff are professionals with decades of experience. They are passionate Commonwealth employees. They've dedicated their careers to serving Australians most in need.

Ten years ago these workers were sidelined and silenced when those opposite came to power.

They were forced to watch as sensitive and vital face-to-face work was contracted to outside organisations and valuable skill sets and knowledge were ripped from their agency. Those workers continue to live with the consequences of those cuts. The legacy in those agencies is the continued loss of talent and brain drain and the overworked, underpaid and underappreciated frontline staff with growing caseloads.

Over the past decade, the former government decimated Services Australia's front line to make way for malicious, profit-making programs like robodebt. People were an afterthought at both ends of that program. This Labor government says 'no more and never again'. The Albanese government has agreed, in full or in principle, to all 56 recommendations of the royal commission into the coalition robodebt scandal.

One of the key recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme outlined that the government should facilitate 'easy and efficient engagement, with options of online, in-person and telephone communication which is sensitive to the particular circumstances of the customer cohort'. This is why the government is making an immediate $228 million funding injection to frontline and service delivery staffing at the agency this financial year. It's only by funding the return of people to government services, to have a people centred approach and get away from the robosystems beloved by the last government, that we can ensure robodebt never happens again. The new staff will be critical to reducing call wait times, speeding up claim payments and giving Australians back some time in their busy lives. Services Australia will be bringing on the staff as quickly as possible, with more than 800 Australians already accepting jobs at the agency. This announcement comes at a time when Services Australia has fewer public servants per capita than at any other time, as a result of the former government gutting staff at the agency.

The previous government didn't keep up to pace in supporting Australians who rely on critical government services. They defunded Services Australia, they reduced its staffing numbers and they negotiated underwhelming industrial agreements. They created the very conditions which they are now criticising. We know that when people are waiting a long time for their claims to be processed they turn to the phones to seek answers. This is unfortunately adding to call centre traffic, meaning more people aren't getting through.

As I discussed earlier, we must facilitate easy and efficient engagement options of all types. That's why we're also strengthening and enhancing online access via myGov. In the 2023 budget, the government committed to investing a total of $134 million to sustain improvements in this area as well. This government understands that Australians in need of support from their government should be able to seek assistance in an easy, timely and human manner.

Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are some motions where you read through and do a bit of a double-take on some elements of them. I must say that in this place we're used to self-congratulatory motions from those opposite on their time in government. There's no time for any self reflection or introspection after the last election loss; it's all motion after motion saying how amazing it was. Times were never better, apparently! But this one takes the cake. Apparently, Services Australia and service delivery were 'seamless, simple and safe' during their decade in power. It just occurred to me: was it seamless, simple and safe when 3,800 frontline staff were being gutted from Services Australia? Was it seamless, simple and safe when people were being subjected to robodebt letters and all the unnecessary stress and illegality of that?

I want to read one paragraph from the robodebt royal commission to see whether they found that, under the previous government, these kinds of operations were seamless, simple and safe. The royal commission found:

Robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals. In essence, people were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money.

But, as we know, so many people who were sent those traumatising letters weren't in a position where they owed money. This is the situation that we saw under the previous government.

It took a royal commission that this government instituted to uncover so much of that, and then those opposite come into this place with a self-congratulatory motion to say how wonderful things were. How absolutely ridiculous! In terms of putting some of the services that this government is providing into context and some of the investments that this government is making into Services Australia, I want to make a few additional observations—in addition to observing how ridiculous the motion is.

Firstly, as previous speakers on this side have indicated, there are many areas where Services Australia's workload has increased substantially, which is a reflection of the fact that there are many people receiving benefits who previously weren't and many areas of the operation of government where people are getting assistance because they're doing it tough in the current environment, where there are cost-of-living pressures being put on the economy through external international pressures. For example, the agency has received over 80,000 more family claims as at 16 November 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. There have also been changes to the eligibility for parenting payment single that came into effect on 20 September, which resulted in over 65,000 customers transitioning from JobSeeker payments and Youth Allowance to parenting payments on 6 October. There are others. For example, from 4 September, a mailout of 1.4 million rent statements occurred advising customers of changed entitlements or action needed following increases to rent assistance—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12:36 to 12:47

As I was indicating, the work of Services Australia has increased substantially as a result of a number of the measures that this government has put in place to support those who are most vulnerable when it comes to those cost-of-living pressures that are being experienced and that have been imposed on our economy by international, external forces. I also want to make the point that this government is putting on significant extra staff, investing in Services Australia and reversing some of the staff cuts that we saw under the previous government.

I want to add that Services Australia has done so much in recent times when it comes to providing support for those experiencing hardship as a result of natural disasters. In 2023-24, this government invested a significant amount—over $230 million—to establish a cost-effective emergency capability. I saw this firsthand in my own electorate in the suburb of Maribyrnong and some surrounding suburbs when people were affected by floods in 2022. I saw that people were able to access the Services Australia portal that was put up by that government department and access emergency payments very, very quickly—within just an hour or two of submitting their application. This showed me how important it is for those people in the absolute most dire need that our IT services and that our staff are there. Services Australia also had staff on deck in that suburb to provide people with face-to-face advice. So Services Australia does an amazing job, and this government is investing in it so that it can do even more after 10 years of being gutted. (Time expired)

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.