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

Prior to the debate being interrupted I made the point that when the government announced that the Centrelink office at Abbotsford would be closed, thanks to strong community pressure, the government backflipped on the decision to close the office. The government had announced the closure during the pandemic, at a time when people were very reliant on Centrelink for JobSeeker payments et cetera. This would have been a dangerous move for the community, who would have had to travel an additional seven kilometres to the next office. Another planned closure, at Mornington, was recently postponed until March next year. We think that the government has its priorities wrong. Why would the government close Centrelink offices at a time when the number of people needing income support has skyrocketed?

At the start of this month The Guardian reported that Australians visiting Centrelink offices waited 30 per cent longer, on average, in the past financial year compared to 2015-16. The analysis also revealed that people living in major cities waited about five minutes longer, on average, than in 2015-16, while those in regional centres waited about four minutes longer when seeking help. Wouldn't shutting Centrelink offices and call centres result in even longer wait times? We also need to recognise that not everybody can access services online. Face-to-face services are vital to helping people to get the services they need in our communities, including older people and people with low literacy and digital skills.

The danger of Centrelink staff being mostly casuals on contracts became very clear recently. Last month, Serco, a contractor for Centrelink call centres, announced that it would be cutting 420 Centrelink call centre staff from centres in Dandenong and Mill Park. These positions should not have been outsourced or casualised in the first place. These job losses clearly demonstrate the dangers of contracting for-profit providers to deliver essential government services.

Another problem identified by stakeholders, including Economic Justice Australia, is the limited number of Centrelink social workers. People often report they have to wait two or three days to access support from Centrelink social workers, which can be very critical timing for people who are desperately in need. There is a genuine need for Centrelink offices to have a social worker unit that is staffed at appropriate levels. We have also seen recent criticism of Services Australia in the way the agency has been implementing some new IT systems, as detailed in the recently released ANAO report. I will continue to follow up implementation of the commitments that Centrelink made in response to that report.

I hope that, as an executive agency, Services Australia can now learn from its mistakes and in future deliver strong social services to Australians who interact with our social safety net. Particularly as we move forward, addressing and coming out of the pandemic, people are going to need, and do need, a strong social safety net and a strong agency that is there for them—an agency that is not there to punish and demonise, or implement an agenda that demonises people on our income support system. We need an agency that is there for the people who need it and delivers the services and supports that are needed.

Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] Services Australia was established as an executive agency in February this year. The agency was previously the Department of Human Services and the transition from department to executive agency requires the legislative changes in the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. The bill also amends multiple references in legislation to the former department and its secretary. This bill also amends several acts to specify that the CEO of Services Australia is the chief executive of Centrelink, the chief executive of Medicare and the Child Support Registrar. Given Services Australia's broad service delivery functions and the overall responsibility of the CEO for the operations of the agency, the government no longer considers it necessary for these offices to have different occupants.

Labor supports sensible changes which improve Public Service governance arrangements and, in turn, lead to better service delivery for the millions of Australia's who rely on these services. But, when it comes to the issues facing Services Australia in delivering timely and quality services, this government is merely scratching the surface. The fact is that this government has been chipping away at the agency's capacity to support Australians ever since its savage cuts in the 2014 budget. This is an agency which deals with some of Australia's most vulnerable people, often in their time of greatest need. If Services Australia isn't receiving the funding it needs to properly support its customers then it is the most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of our society who will suffer.

Erosions in services for students, families, older Australians, jobseekers, people with disability and their carers, and a range of other Australians is what we have come to expect from Liberal governments, which simply see these people as a burden. The vulnerable Australians who rely on the government for income support are those who former Treasurer Joe Hockey referred to as 'leaners' or, to coin a phrase from our current Prime Minister, they are the ones not having a go and therefore not getting a go. These philosophical pronouncements outline the Liberal world view that every individual is responsible for their own success or failure in life regardless of their background or circumstances, that helping those less fortunate is a role for charity and not the responsibility of the state. That's why the Liberals are the party that promote cuts to pension, have cut the NDIS and continue to engage in rhetoric about cracking down on what they see as dole bludgers.

This is the kind of attitude that last year led to that selective leaking of JobSeeker compliance data to News Limited papers a day before it was published on the department's website. Whoever leaked the data must have known that the Murdoch media would use headlines that would help feed the perception of jobseekers as lazy freeloaders. The Murdoch papers delivered in spades with headlines like 'Doling out the excuses', 'It's a hard day's shirk' and 'New stats reveal the extent of bludging'. The articles quoted statistics about the number of missed interviews and suspended payments. But if the so-called journalists who wrote the articles were doing their jobs they might have looked in more depth at the reasons behind those statistics. Did they stop to consider that for many jobseekers, particularly those experiencing multiple forms of disadvantage, there might be a more complex picture at play? Did they bother to ask for a comment from the welfare sector instead of simply providing a platform for the government's jobseeker-bashing rhetoric? It was a brazen attempt to demonise jobseekers, no doubt perpetuated by those opposite. It is a sad reflection on the professionalism and integrity of some in the media that journalists and editors allowed themselves to be complicit in this outrageous smear.

I placed a series of questions on notice in the following round of Senate estimates to get to the bottom of whether the minister for employment had authorised the leak or investigated the leak and why data was given exclusively to Murdoch papers ahead of its official publication. In answer to a long series of detailed questions I got a single sentence in reply, stating, 'The data has been tabled and is available on the APH employment, skills, small and family business website.' Call me old-fashioned, but when someone deliberately avoids answering a question I think it usually means they have something to hide. If the minister leaked the data or authorised the leak, I challenge her to come clean. We all recognise it wouldn't be the first politically motivated leak to come from a minister's office and, if she didn't authorise it, I challenge her to have the leak investigated. Unlike those opposite, Labor believe every Australian has the right to a social safety net. If you don't believe in that right, like those opposite, then you will not—

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bilyk, I must interrupt. Your contribution will be in continuation.