Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be speaking on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. For many people 2020 was the first time that they'd had to interact with Services Australia, and it wasn't because they had a baby or because they became a retiree but because they had lost their job. It was Centrelink that they needed, and they needed it urgently. They needed to access support to help them through a time when their sudden job loss meant they had absolutely no income completely unexpectedly and brutally. I hope we never see the lines outside Centrelink like we did in those weeks, but clearly the agency was not given the resources to scale up fast enough and to meet the need that was there right in front of them. It is operating on, in business, what we call 'no spare capacity', but its heavy dependence on labour hire means it's probably more accurate to say it operates with far too few permanent staff all the time, let alone when a surge in demand happens. I think this reflects how little the coalition government believes in this fundamentally important government department, which every single person in Australia relies on at some stage in their life, whether it is for Medicare claims, for sorting paid parental leave, for NDIS participation, for accessing the pension and—as those in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury know—for accessing emergency payments at a time of natural disaster. These are usually times of great stress. What we used to call Human Services and what we now call Services Australia needs to be appropriately staffed to meet those needs.

I've spoken to many of the amazing workers in Services Australia across the NDIS, Centrelink and Medicare, and the message they tell me is they do feel under pressure. They are trying their best to deliver a first-rate service to the people who come in. They know the stressors that lead people to reaching out for help. I'm sure every member knows what happens when Services Australia and the different rules that are in place don't fit the needs of the people who've sought help there. They turn up at our offices.

We are their place of last resort, which is why we've had so many people, in the years that I've been a member of parliament, come and seek help. They say to me: 'I've never before contacted a member of parliament, but I just don't know where else to turn on this.' And what they've met is a blockage in Centrelink. The blockage might be that they've been given different pieces of information based on different conversations with somebody within Services Australia. It might be that they just don't quite know how to provide the information that's needed. It might be that there's a delay in their pension application being processed—haven't we seen those? Or it might be that they've received a robodebt for a debt they don't believe they owe or, as so many members have said in this place, that they've started paying only to then find out it wasn't really their debt to pay. In this place we see the situations where things go wrong in Services Australia. We've seen a lot of those in the years I've been in this place.

The frontline workers in these centres have had, in recent times, some of the most difficult conversations you can imagine. When I do speak with the public servants who work there, they absolutely demonstrate to me that they feel they are serving the public, and they want to do it to their very best. I invariably walk away reminded of their skill, the depth or the breadth of their knowledge and their desire to help people who can be extremely vulnerable, whether it's by providing financial relief to those unable to work, by helping people access counselling and social work services or by helping jobseekers to find meaningful occupations or prepare them to re-enter the workplace. But I also see that they have frustrations about the constraints under which they operate and their inability to be able to demonstrate compassion and to be able to find a solution that fits with the individual needs of every one of those clients that come to see them. That really goes to the core—

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