The raw numbers are in: Centrelink's service stinks
The mass breakdown of Centrelink's service is jeopardising people's lives. After 500 days in office, Minister Shorten has had more than enough time to fix it.
Centrelink's Employment Services line is answering just 12% of calls. The Disabilities, Sickness & Carers line can only manage to answer 10%. Overall, in the first 2 months of this financial year, there were 1 million more congestion messages than answered calls. This is a disaster the Department can no longer hide from.
It’s an old cliche that true natures are revealed under pressure. After years of under-resourcing, service centre closures, call wait time blowouts, outsourcing, and cuts to staff, the pressure has steadily ratcheted up on Services Australia—and this week, as the system was revealed to have all but collapsed, its true priorities and intentions have spilled out in the process.
The first signs of Centrelink’s imminent failure were picked up on social media. There were reports of excessively long wait times and recorded messages, sometimes repeated over multiple days in a row, saying the system was too busy to even place customers on hold before abruptly hanging up on them. As these reports became more frequent and desperate, the AUWU developed CentreStink, a dashboard where people could report how long they had spent on hold and how many attempts they had made to get through to one of Centrelink’s numbers.
The stats we found were appalling. In the first few weeks of operation, CentreStink recorded only 16% of calls being answered and average daily wait times of 108 minutes for those lucky few who eventually managed to get through (often after multiple attempts). Some people who had made multiple attempts and failed to get through to Centrelink were saying they had been told by Services Australia to email the General Manager, Hank Jongen, directly to have their issues resolved.
The data collected by the AUWU was rejected as unrepresentative and unreliable with Services Australia touting their own much rosier figures, assuring the public that, while some people may have had to wait a little longer than expected, the system was hunky dory and largely meeting its targets.
These claims by Services Australia were presented in its Annual Report, where the agency rewarded itself with a grade of ‘Substantially Achieved’ for customer satisfaction, ‘Achieved’ for customer trust, ‘Partially Achieved’ for its target of customers served within 15 minutes, and ‘Partially Achieved’ for work processed within timeliness standards.
These performance outcomes, arrived at through a mixture of hidden exclusions, hazy definitions, misleading averaging, and dodgy formulas, were acknowledged by Services Australia as worse than last year but were nowhere near as bad as our CentreStink data or the individual experiences being shared on social media.
It wasn’t until Senate estimates that the raw call data, yet to be fudged by Services Australia, was finally revealed and shown to be much closer to the AUWU’s data than Services Australia’s spin.
Of the total nearly 8 million calls received by Centrelink in July and August this year, just 1.8 million, or 22%, were answered. Customers were 1.5 times more likely to get a congestion message (an engaged signal) than have their call answered—with 2.8 million congestion messages delivered, over a million more than total answered calls. However, as if these headline figures weren't bad enough, looking into how these figures break down among the most vulnerable groups reveals the brutal truth about Centrelink’s priorities and failures.
Among those calling the Employment Services line, most of who receive below the poverty line Jobseeker payments, only 12% of calls were answered. Callers were a whopping 5.6 times more likely to receive a congestion message than have their call answered.
For people calling the Disabilities, Sickness, and Carers line it was even worse, only 10% of their calls were answered. Every time they called, desperately trying to reach someone to talk to, they were 6.3 times more likely to receive a congestion message than an answer.
It is evident from Centrelink’s own call data that the phone service is, for all intents and purposes, non-functional, and the more disadvantaged you are the more broken it becomes. Services Australia and the minister responsible for overseeing the agency, Bill Shorten, can no longer deny the problems and the fact that people who are the most impoverished and marginalised are the ones bearing the brunt of it. Bill Shorten can no longer rely on public and political apathy for Centrelink recipients to avoid responsibility for fixing a system he has now been in charge of for over 500 days.
People receiving Centrelink payments are no longer the easy target successive governments have treated them as. The findings of the Robodebt Royal Commission, whose recommendations are still yet to be adopted by this government, clearly condemned the pervasive attitude among politicians and wider society that it is acceptable to treat welfare recipients as burdens and subject them to onerous requirements just to access help. We will not stay quiet just because you think you can get away with ignoring us.
Pick up the phone Centrelink, we need your help.
Media contact: Catherine Caine
0431 869 469 / catherine@auwu.org.au