Centrelink’s call waiting times have blown out as the agency deals with a labour shortage, with Labor blaming the gutting of the agency’s workforce under the Coalition.
Senate estimates heard on Wednesday that Indue, the company that ran the cashless debit card, has been handed a $12m “limited tender” contract for the new income management card to be used in the Northern Territory.
Appearing at Senate estimates on Wednesday, Services Australia chief executive, Rebecca Skinner, said the current Centrelink call times were “less than … optimal”, noting the agency was dealing with labour shortages that had also affected other large businesses around the country.
Data tabled in estimates showed the average waiting time between July 2022 and 31 January 2023 across all Centrelink phone lines was 18.04 minutes, up from 14.14 minutes in 2021-22 and 4.06 minutes in 2020-21, when agency staff numbers were boosted for the pandemic.
There were 25m calls handled up to 31 January 2023. Of those, 8.3m were answered, 2.1m were terminated by the customer and callers received a “congestion message” on 5.8m occasions. By comparison, there were 5.6m congestion messages across the entire 2021-22 financial year.
Under questioning from Greens senator Janet Rice, Skinner said the agency was currently 500 employees below the average staffing level for the customer service team.
Services Australia is currently on a recruitment drive and has hired several new staff, but Skinner said there was a “lag” due to the need to train new employees.
“We currently find ourselves in our service delivery space several hundred people short of where we could be,” she said.
Don Farrell, representing the government services minister, Bill Shorten, told estimates the Coalition had reduced the average staffing level by 3,515 between 2016-17 and 2019-20 – equivalent to 13% of the workforce. The former government had a heavy focus on the use of labour hire staff, which it said brought down call waiting times.
Farrell also noted demand has been higher than usual in recent times, with the agency taking 2.3m disaster-related calls, and a significant increase in some claims.
He said it was “little surprise” there was “extreme pressure” on the phone lines.
Rice acknowledged the situation inherited by the new government but called on the government to do more to fix the situation, saying the figures showed congestion messages on Centrelink calls have gone from “1.2m in 2020 to a whopping 5.8m this year”.
“I’ve heard from so many of my constituents that they can’t get through to speak to someone at all,” she said.
The pressure on Centrelink comes as Services Australia prepares to roll out the new income management card, which replaces the cashless debit card, the latter controversially run by the banking company Indue.
The Albanese government vowed to scrap the Coalition’s “privatised” cashless debit card – which was trialled in several sites – if it won the 2022 election, a promise it kept in October last year.
However, it also said that while it conducted further consultation it would maintain the income management policies that existed in the Northern Territory, which date back to the federal intervention and were carried out with the so-called basics card.
A tender published on 13 February indicated Services Australia had awarded an $11.89m “confidential” contract to Indue under a “limited tender” due “extreme urgency or events unforeseen”.
Services Australia acting deputy chief executive, Jonathon Thorpe, confirmed no other companies were approached or able to bid for the contract due to the “short time frame for the transition of customers off the cashless debit card to other arrangements”.
Thorpe said the agency also wanted to make sure customers weren’t affected and had a “seamless transition from the cashless debit card to enhanced income management”.
Thorpe said Indue would provide the banking services, such as the bank account, the physical card and the connection into the financial system.
He said the tender was consistent with the procurement rules and the agency had sought advice, including an assessment on “value for money”.
The replacement to the cashless debit card, known as the “smart card”, will be introduced on 6 March for those in the Northern Territory and Cape York, and others who wished to opt-in in Ceduna, East Kimberley, Goldfields, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay regions.
The government has noted Services Australia would support customers directly through a dedicated phone line for day-to-day queries. In the past, cashless debit cardholders were required to contact Indue with queries.
