“Financial counsellors have clients who are at risk of becoming homeless because of lack of income,” Guthrie said. “Parents are struggling to provide for their children and put food on the table three times a day.”
Hazlehurst said Services Australia was prioritising disaster relief,managing to answer most calls for flood assistance in South East Queensland within a minute and processing claims quickly as well.
Hazlehurst said he would put more staff on the telephone lines,but the main focus was speeding up claims processing because when people are waiting they will also ring to follow up,resulting in more calls.
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten announced funding of $228 million in November for an additional 3000 permanent frontline staff at Services Australia,blaming the former government for slashing staff numbers during the robo-debt era.
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The workforce of 30,000 is about 7000 lower than in June 2012,when the Department of Human Services was formed from the merger of Centrelink,Medicare and Child Support. The department became Services Australia in 2019.
Hazlehurst said benchmarking in 2020 identified that the resourcing would not be enough long term,but the agency was provided with emergency resources for increased workload during the COVID-19 pandemic. The backlog grew last year once the extra COVID resources fell away.
Services Australia will not clear the backlog as quickly as it could because the agency has switched off some of its automation processes following the robo-debt debacle,which a royal commission found to be illegal.
“Naturally,we’re very sensitive to getting things right around[the use of technology and automation] with the experience of robo-debt for example,” Hazlehurst said.
“We’re really wanting to make sure that[with] everything we do that uses technology to make us more efficient,people can understand how it’s working,it’s done fairly,and ethical considerations are taken into account.
“We’ve actually turned off some of what was able to be done in an automated way,so that we’re making sure that we’re getting absolutely everything right.”
Hazlehurst said more automation would be added in the future,but it would be done openly,not “in some sort of black box mysterious kind of arrangement”.
Hazlehurst is a veteran public servant who most recently worked on the reviews of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and myGov,and was a former deputy secretary for the Department of Agriculture.
He started his job at the helm of Services Australia amid a hiring spree at the agency. More than 800 people started on the same day as he did in mid-January.
Overall,he said the agency had hired about 4000 new starters since November,including the newly funded positions and natural turnover,which was a big recruitment,training and integration effort considering it was more than 10 per cent of the workforce.
The staff across Australia are already working the phones as the agency experiments with combining on-the-job practice with formal training. The new joiners in Parramatta have physical red flags under their desks that they can wave in the air whenever they need extra help with a call.
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