Adjournment Debate - Services Australia

I rise to call attention to the declining levels of customer service and the declining performance indicators at Services Australia, which, regrettably, is in the custody of the member for Maribyrnong, somebody who has a longstanding indifference and lack of interest in customer service. The fact is that this comes at a very bad time. Australians are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis. It is therefore vital that they receive from Centrelink and from Medicare the payments and the support to which they are entitled in an efficient and timely manner. But I'm sorry to say that precisely the opposite is happening. If you call Centrelink, you will be waiting longer than ever.

Let's take the disability, sickness and carers category as an example. If you call in that category, you will find that call hold times have risen from just over 20 minutes under the coalition to 28½ minutes under the care of the member for Maribyrnong. If you are fortunate enough to get through to somebody at Centrelink and you lodge an application for a payment to which you may be entitled, you will find that the sorry truth is that the processing time to deal with such an application has blown out quite remarkably. The average number of days to process an application for the age pension stood at 33 days under the coalition. It now stands at 61 days under the leadership of the member for Maribyrnong.

The simple fact is that many Australians are desperately looking for other ways to get Centrelink to deal with them in a timely fashion. Remarkably enough, one way that seems to be increasingly used is contacting the agency's official spokesperson, Mr Hank Jongen. During a Senate estimates hearing last year, it was revealed that some customers had successfully had their payment claims expedited and processed faster by expressing their concerns through the media and through popular social media platforms such as Reddit. There were case studies highlighted in which customers who communicated their frustrations with claims processing through social media or through the media would then be contacted by Services Australia and, coincidentally, their claims would be expedited and resolved quickly. This points to a troubled organisational culture at Services Australia and a lack of transparency.

The member for Maribyrnong has taken a number of actions which have made things worse. He dumped the specialised call centre operator Serco, and it is a reasonable inference that the call hold times have blown out dramatically because he has dispensed with experienced staff and this experienced outsource provider. I have no particular brief on this outsource provider or any other, but what I do raise is the member for Maribyrnong's ideological obsession with being opposed to the use of specialist external providers.

He has also fired around a thousand specialist IT staff. What does that mean? It means, unsurprisingly, that work to improve digital service delivery has ground to a halt. The myGov user audit, which examined these issues, made 10 recommendations. He responded a long time after the user audit was provided. In fact, his response was five months overdue and the response he produced was an empty box-ticking exercise, which, again, reminded us that the current government has zero interest in digital transformation.

The Australian Public Service Employee Census of 2023 found that Services Australia is an agency riddled with dysfunction, poor morale and hopeless communication. According to the Services Australia highlights report, this key agency has gone backwards on key performance measures, mirroring a similar decline in standards contained in the agency's annual report of 2022-23. The simple fact is that Services Australia is in disarray under what purports to be the leadership of the member for Maribyrnong. For example, under the question: 'Change is managed well in my agency,' 30 per cent of staff at Services Australia responded negatively. Of course, if the staff are disillusioned and disenchanted, that makes it very difficult for them to provide good service to Australians. Most recently, we've seen that the Health Delivery Modernisation Program, a multiyear fund overhauling Australia's legacy health payment systems, is in disarray. The coalition invested over $100 million in this program but it has been in red status since December 2022, even though it was in green status in July 2022. Services Australia is in a mess under the member for Maribyrnong.