A NARRABUNDAH man has waited 3½ months for a letter from ACT Senator Kate Lundy that, when it arrived, contained a botched cut-and-paste job about jobless families.
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Howard Silcock has now received two apologies from Senator Lundy, who has faced claims of office inefficiency in the past.
Mr Silcock wrote to her on October 15 asking whether she supported plans to cut sole parent benefits.
During the long wait that followed, he was told his letter had at one point been lost.
The senator finally responded on February 1, apologising for the 105-day wait but the letter was incorrectly dated 2012, not 2013, and contained confusing mistakes.
In consecutive sentences in her letter, the senator said jobless single parent families totalled both 290,000 and 218,000. Jobless single parent families, she also wrote, made up both 70 per cent and 85 per cent of jobless families. Much of the letter appears to have been cut and pasted from the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations submission to a recent senate inquiry.
When Senator Lundy's attention was drawn to the mistakes, she sent another letter and apologised a second time. This was sent on February 18, four months after Mr Silcock sent his original letter.
''They [Senator Lundy's office] produced only verbal promises that weren't kept,'' he said.
In comparison, Mr Silcock said he received a response from Canberra MP Gai Brodtmann on the same topic within 24 hours of sending questions to her.
In November, The Canberra Times reported that the senator had embarked on a major restructure of the way her office was run.
A spokeswoman for Senator Lundy's office said the senator had built strong relationships with her local community and she continued to work hard for the people of the ACT ''day-in, day-out''.
