Financial criminals are exploiting Australia’s worsening climate disasters and extreme weather events,including fires,floods and cyclones.
Services Australia is grappling with 1.1 million unprocessed health and welfare claims. Its new boss David Hazlehurst wants to halve that by the middle of this year.
The first time mother loved being home with baby Bernadette. But the months-long wait for parental leave payments became a financial problem.
The public service and Services Australia will be bolstered as the federal government vows to deliver “robo-justice” to welfare recipients affected by the Coalition’s unlawful debt recovery scheme.
A parliamentary inquiry has heard a senior public servant met the owners of Synergy 360 at the home of a co-owner while the firm was advising clients on Services Australia contracts.
The welfare agency is asking police to trawl through people’s metadata and in some cases crack their passwords to find out if they’re in a relationship.
Trish Price and her children are living in poverty while being owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support.
The revelations about the conflict of interest issues surrounding Services Australia’s dealings with Synergy 360 come after the release of a review calling for an investigation into contracts worth $374 million.
Federal officials spent $374 million on contracts tainted by concerns over conflicts of interest and inadequate records,according to an internal review.
A former Centrelink social worker told the royal commission her concerns about the way debts were being calculated and the distress it was causing customers were dismissed by senior executives.
It is now clear that Stuart Robert was in touch with his friends’ consulting firm while he was a cabinet minister and had inside knowledge about contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.