Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. This bill makes a number of consequential amendments to update legislation to reflect that Services Australia was established as an executive agency on 1 February 2020. Services Australia has now replaced the former Department of Human Services. The second part of the bill makes governance changes to executive staff at Services Australia—namely, the CEO of Services Australia will now perform the existing statutory roles of the chief executive of Centrelink, the chief executive of Medicare and the Child Support Registrar.

I understand this bill seeks to make service delivery more efficient and effective. I would like to say that the government has a lot of work to do to ensure that Services Australia is trusted by the people it serves. To many, the agency is known as Centrelink. Although it undertakes other services, the interface most people have had problems with, I have to say, is Centrelink. There's a lot of work to do to make sure that Services Australia delivers services and serves Australians. Trust in Services Australia—called 'Centrelink' by a lot of people, as I said—has been severely eroding for quite a long time but particularly since the robodebt debacle. Some people who settled their robodebts are still having difficulty having their debts reviewed. I've heard from people who have faced significant difficulties getting answers about their debts, including those debts that were raised before 2015. The government says it's now easier to have debts from before 2015 reviewed, but I've had a lot of feedback that that is still extremely difficult and that people aren't getting adequate responses to their questions. People across Australia are doing it incredibly tough, with millions of people experiencing unemployment and underemployment. Despite this, the government has decided that this is the right time to resume chasing people for debts. I'm worried that this will result in many new debts being raised, given the huge increase in the number of people on income support payments.

I also have little faith in Centrelink's ability to resolve these debts fairly and clearly explain the process. One of the major reasons Centrelink fails Australians is to do with staffing levels and investment. We saw a huge mobilisation of new staff at Services Australia at the beginning of the COVID period, which was to support the massive influx of people accessing our social safety net. We acknowledged at the time, and continue to acknowledge, that the huge increase in the number of staff helped tremendously in making sure that people could access the social safety net in a fast and efficient manner. An additional 500 staff were brought on to deal with the increase in demand. But it shouldn't take a pandemic and a recession to ensure that the Centrelink call centres and offices are adequately staffed. Centrelink should have adequate staff all year around. These staff should be properly paid and employed in ongoing positions, instead of contract positions. The government has started winding back the number of surge staff who were brought in, but we need to ensure that Centrelink has sufficient permanent staff so that Centrelink can meet the need. Recently we heard about Centrelink offices being closed down and staff being laid off. Thanks to strong community pressure, the government backflipped, at least on one decision, earlier this year, which was to close—

Debate interrupted.