Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I continue my remarks in respect to this legislation. In my introductory comments on this legislation, I was making the point that the Morrison government's staffing cuts have forced many government departments to rely on temporary staff and subcontractors who don't always have the experience or training to deal with the complex social issues that Centrelink staff and other departments are confronted with on a daily basis.

Adelaide's InDaily media recently reported on the mental health impacts on employees of those contracted staff, and, in particular, on employees of outsourced Centrelink call centres. One of those call centres is in my electorate of Makin, and it is a Datacom call centre. According to the InDaily report, Datacom Connect is 'one of a number of external labour hire companies awarded Centrelink contracts totalling more than $1 billion since 2016. one of a number of external labour hire companies awarded Centrelink contracts totalling more than $1 billion since 2016'. Firstly, it begs the question: if $1 billion has been awarded to contractors to do work that would otherwise have been done by government employees, public servants, then what have been the real savings for the government in having done that? Secondly, it goes to the heart of what this In Daily story is all about. It talks about not only the impact that the work has had on clients of government departments—and, in particular, Centrelink—but also the health impacts it is having on those Datacom employees and, very likely, other call-centre employees who have been contracted out to do government work. And I'm going to quote excerpts from the InDaily story directly, as they appear:

A Datacom worker told InDaily that staff were paid lower rates than their public sector counterparts.

"We’re on the contract call centre award and it’s just base award rates but … if we were in the public service system, it’s another probably $20,000 a year …

That point is also critical in this debate. These employees are doing government work but being paid at call-centre award rates. That's a back-door method of cutting people's income. The worker goes on to say:

There's no ongoing support.

When we first start, we have half a day with a Services Australia social worker. So, you go through something like self-harm and suicide and then a couple of hours on domestic violence and things to look out for and things to handle in a call.

…`…   …

To have hundreds of people, who are fairly poorly paid and trained, taking calls from hundreds of people can lead to problems.

The InDaily report goes on, with respect to comments made by another worker who was interviewed. This particular worker quit her job after only five weeks. The article states the worker said:

"There's absolutely no incentive to learn the job, because learning the job takes time, and if you choose to learn the job then you'll be running behind and then you won't meet your quotas.

"So you might be tasked with 30 tasks for the day and when you start not meeting that, you've got quality assurance coming down on you really hard. So there's no incentive to learn.

…   …   …

"I did not have a day when I wasn't screamed at by a client, I didn't have a day when I didn't hear from a suicidal caller. I was broken after five weeks. I'd lost about six kilos.

"I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping. It was just existential dread. I was a wreck."

There is more in the InDaily story that I would like to quote, but time won't allow me to do that. Those quotes highlight the two sides of this problem: (1) Centrelink clients are not getting the support and services that they require, because the staff are not adequately trained to deal with their queries and (2) it's having a real impact on the very people who are employed to deal with the Centrelink problems which, as I said earlier in my remarks, can sometimes be incredibly complex and incredibly traumatic, given the impact that they have on the individuals that are calling Centrelink. It also begs the question: how much is it costing society more broadly to deal with the employees of these call centres and these subcontracted staff who are put under incredible stress as a result of the work that they are doing for which they are not either properly compensated for or properly trained for?

This issue and this legislation comes at a time when we have seen greater demands on government services than ever before. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to that, but there have been other contributing factors. We now have around one million people unemployed. We have somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.5 million people underemployed. There's going to be more unemployed by Christmas—perhaps 160,000 or thereabouts, according to the government's own figures. We have an ageing society and, along with that, we have issues, such as fires, floods and droughts, which continuously add to the demands on Centrelink staff. We then have new programs brought in like JobKeeper, JobSeeker and now JobMaker, not to mention the issues that we just debated only a moment ago with student enrolments and the like.

These programs, and what is happening in society, come at a time when the government has put a cap on public service employees and cut staff within those government departments. We should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn't simply be bringing in outsourced staff. We should be adding to the team of people who are dealing with these complex situations. The government has announced an additional 5,000 staff. They announced that in March of this year. My question to the minister is: how many of those 5,000 have been employed and were they employed on a full-time, casual or permanent basis? I've never seen statistics to tell us exactly what the situation is but, quite frankly, I would doubt that we have added those additional 5,000 staff. Indeed, are they the people who have been subcontracted out to private call centre operators and the like? We simply don't know.

The additional demands for those programs that I alluded to just a moment ago will mean that we will have very complex situations where people are trying to navigate through what their entitlements are and what support there is available for them at a time when they are dealing with some of the most difficult situations in their life, particularly because of COVID-19 and the likely loss of work. We know that over 600,000 people have already cleaned out their superannuation accounts. That probably means that they have nothing left in their savings accounts either, which means that the next step, in the months ahead, will see even more people become financially vulnerable and, in turn, look to government departments for assistance. Yet those government departments are not properly equipped to deal with them and provide them they support that they need, and that will, in turn manifest, itself in more psychological problems, mental health issues and the like. All of that costs taxpayers money and hurts people in the community, but, quite frankly, it causes additional burdens and costs on government as well. The health department of this country will actually find itself paying out more and more for health issues that arise because of them. So where are the real savings in all of this?

I can't conclude my remarks without speaking briefly about the robodebt debacle. I note that the member for Maribyrnong is in the chamber, and I'm sure that he will have more to say about this. That over $700 million has to be repaid as a result of the robodebt bungle just highlights the incompetence of this government. I had people coming into my office who were improperly billed as a result of robodebt. They were people who were not only reliant on the welfare system but struggling in the first instance, and for them to then get bills saying they owed money to the government—bills that were incorrect—only added to their stress and the difficult situations they were in, so much so that we have heard stories of some of them taking their own lives.

Nothing highlights not just the incompetence of this government but the callousness of this government like running the robodebt program when they knew what it was doing to people out there. I'm sure, Mr Deputy Speaker Georganas, you would have had people in your electorate coming to you, and every other member in this House would have heard the same as I did, that in many cases those debts were causing additional grievance and stress to families. Yet this government pursued them, knowing that it was doing that and knowing that the whole process was not only flawed but, frankly, illegal. It's a condemnation of this government and something that this government will never be able to walk away from, certainly in respect of those families that were left worse off as a result of robodebt, because of the trauma, because of the stress and because of the deaths this government should hang its head in shame.

The public service of this country serves this country well. The government should appreciate what the public sector does, and instead of making cuts to it, which ultimately flow on to the rest of society, given the support people need, it should reinstate those people whose jobs it has taken.

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