Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor support the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. We will always support modifications to public sector governance structures that lead to good outcomes for employees and the Australians that rely on those services. This bill, however, does nothing about the biggest driver of bad outcomes for Public Service workers and the provision of services to Australians that Australians should be relying upon—that is, the government's entirely arbitrary staffing cap that leads to the under-resourcing of the public sector and an over-reliance on labour hire to keep up with demand as well as an exorbitant overspend on outsourcing and consultants.

From dealing with the Black Summer bushfire response in January to managing the surge in new applicants for JobSeeker as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, staff at Services Australia are managing a growing workload. Over 20 times the normal number of claims are being processed. In six weeks Services Australia received a million claims for JobSeeker related payments—more claims than it would usually process in a year. That workload will no doubt only increase as Australia's recession deepens.

Labor welcomes the government's long-overdue decision back in March to bring in an additional 5,000 workers at Services Australia to deal with the workload. But we should be under no illusion as to why this has been done and the significance of how these additional workers were hired. Bringing in an additional 5,000 staff was only putting back what the Liberals and Nationals had cut from the front line over the past six years. That has undermined the services that they are supposed to be providing. I will speak more about that a little bit later.

How did the government find 5,000 new staff in March? The answer is labour hire and outsourcing. After wielding the axe on almost 5,000 permanent full-time secure APS jobs over six years they replaced those positions with workers in insecure work arrangements working for labour hire companies and companies like Serco. So 3,125 employees came through labour hire and 2,103 employees came through outsourced so-called service delivery partners such as Serco, a multinational tax dodger—who else would you employ to employ people in such an important service for the country?

In their ideological war on Public Service workers in secure work, the government saw fit to take 5,000 secure APS, Australian community jobs over six years from this critical agency. Then, overnight, when the crisis hit, they replaced them but without the conditions and security that used to come with these positions. Surely everyone can agree that having secure work makes a difference—particularly in the face of significant economic downturn, when Australians are relying on these vital public services more than ever. Yet the coalition has cut the size of the Australian Public Service to figures around 2006-07 staffing levels. Regardless of how much work needs to be done, agencies like Services Australia are forced to arbitrarily limit their staff. The cap on hiring permanent staff forces them to outsource jobs and hire through labour hire agreements, at exorbitant costs to the Australian taxpayer. It is privatisation by stealth, with more than $400 million spent on privatising Services Australia call centres in 2019.

I have spoken in this place before about the many issues with insecure work. Its impact on workers and their families and the broader community is well-known. Across this country only 60 per cent of workers are in full-time or part-time ongoing employment. The rest, around four million workers, are engaged as casuals, on short-term contracts in labour hire or as independent contractors without rights. The result is an emerging class of workers without jobs they can count on. They have no sick leave, no holidays, no job security, of course little bargaining power and a severely reduced capacity to get home loans. Those issues are only exasperated during a health and economic crisis.

Staff working under labour hire arrangements in the Public Service, including at Services Australia across most of the country, did not have access to paid pandemic leave, and still don't now. This means that they face severe financial hardship if required to isolate now or into the future. On principle, no worker should be faced with a choice between following public health guidance or being able to put food on the table. Forcing workers to make such a choice undermines our solidarity and our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our community response is undermined.

The government, as the largest employer in the country, should be leading by example and providing pandemic leave to all workers. Instead, these positions are managed by Serco. In July about 450 staff at the Serco-run Centrelink call centre in north-east Melbourne were stood down and sent into isolation without pay due to an outbreak connected with the centre. Serco have been repeatedly warned since March about the unsafe work environment and a lack of physical distancing and other COVID-safe protocols. An anonymous worker said that many workers didn't have time to clean their desk because they were only paid for the time they were clocked on via a computer system. One went on to say: 'At every stage they resisted doing things like proper distancing at training sessions, where there were 30 people in a room every day. We've been providing a valuable service to people calling Centrelink during the recession, but our own lives have been put at risk.' That an Australian worker providing vital services would be treated in this way is an absolute disgrace.

The insecure work at Services Australia also clearly affects the quality of the services provided. The ramping up of insecure work because of the staff cap means an increasing reliance on these outsourced call centres run by Serco. These companies do not deliver for the Australian taxpayer or those doing it tough. We know that outsourcing and understaffing has seen as many as 55 million calls to Services Australia going unanswered every year—55 million calls mean a lot of frustrated Australians, Australians who could be facing some pretty trying times, like having their homes and livelihoods destroyed by fire or losing their income because they've lost their job.

Greg, who is an ex-staff member at Services Australia, including a stint at the Coffs Harbour call centre, points out that a Centrelink recipient may be able to get through to Serco-managed call centres in 16 minutes, but then they speak to someone at Serco who cannot actually answer their question so they get put on the line and they wait an hour-and-a-half or two hours so they can speak to a government employee. This is an incredibly cyclical way of extracting profit from an essential public service and it fools people into thinking that someone is adequately addressing important issues in a time-sensitive way when all Serco provides is a statistical fig leaf for the government. Quite simply, there is more value to the Australian taxpayer through employing staff directly to Services Australia without spending on unnecessary or expensive labour hire that doesn't provide staff with the training. It's completely unfair and unnecessary to have two workers doing identical work but receiving different pay, conditions and training because one is lucky enough to have direct APS employment while the other is contracted by a labour hire agency. Outsourcing to companies like Serco is privatisation by stealth, and it must end.

The government should listen to unions like the Community and Public Sector Union. A recent CPSU survey of Services Australia staff reveals that, while most of them feel valued by the community, nearly three in four felt the government did not properly recognise or value their role. If your work was being outsourced to a company like Serco, you would probably feel the same way. As fellow servants of the public, as senators, we should stand up better for the Public Service. The government's arbitrary staffing cap undermines the quality of services provided for Australians and devalues the essential work of our Public Service.