The Department of Human Services' embarrassment at criticism of its public telephone services by the Australian National Audit Office this week appears to have been acute. In the immediate wake of the Auditor-General's report, which found that 26 million of the 43 million calls made to Centrelink in 2013-14 had gone unanswered, and that that those unlucky callers had waited a combined 143 years before hanging up in frustration, DHS ordered customer support staff around Australia to cancel whatever they were doing and man the telephones. "There is currently significant media attention surrounding our wait times," the DHS line manager emailed staff. "As a result a number of strategies are being put into place to assist with maximising customer access the next two days. If you are scheduled for any off-phone activities, please remain in open time and serve customers."
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The department might also have apologised for the massive inconvenience caused to welfare recipients – perhaps even asked for the forgiveness of call centre staff forced to bear the brunt of people's understandable irritation at being forced to wait in ever-lengthening phone queues. But for an organisation whose regard for, and attention to, the notion of public accountability (most recently in 2014 when DHS secretary Kathryn Campbell suggested problems with Centrelink highlighted by the Commonwealth Ombudsman had been overstated), this may have been expecting too much.
According to the Auditor-General, wait times for Centrelink customers jumped from an average of about three minutes in 2010-11 to an average of almost 17 minutes in 2013-14, despite an investment of $338 million on the creation (in conjunction with Telstra) of a network of 29 networked "smart centres". While acknowledging the challenge of managing significant call volumes, the ANAO report highlighted what it said were call targets that were "very much at the upper end of the range of organisations and benchmarks examined". By comparison, the Australian Taxation Office ("another large customer services organisation") was identified as having a commitment to answering 80 per cent of calls to its general inquiry line within five minutes.
Were that finding not troubling enough, the ANAO report observes that "the department's overall target for all customer telephone services — an average speed of answer within 16 minutes — has been agreed with government". For those Centrelink callers who may have suspected that long wait times were a deliberate strategy to get them to migrate online, the ANAO report explicitly states the department "is pursuing a transformation program for service delivery, with a focus on realising efficiencies by transitioning customers to self-service where possible, and reserving telephone services for more complex cases and those customers most in need".
The annual funding reductions that have been a feature of the Commonwealth budgetary landscape in varying degrees ever since 1987 have required all government departments to explore efficiency gains. No one could fault DHS for seeking to capitalise on the spread of home and mobile computing by shepherding more and more of its Centrelink and Medicare customers online, thus allowing it to reduce staff numbers. But in its rush to embrace the outsourcing of call centres (and cynically gaming the operation of those call centres to frustrate customers and drive them online) the DHS has fundamentally failed its duty of obligation to vulnerable welfare recipients.
Why, for instance, was no thought given to the possibility that many callers might be attempting to alert Centrelink about their changed circumstances so that they would not receive payments to which they were not entitled? And why condemn elderly or infirm Australians fretting about pension changes in this month's federal budget, and perhaps unfamiliar with the Internet, into having to talk to poorly trained call centre operators – assuming they were patient enough to last the time needed to get to the head of the queue?
If this debacle was cause for embarrassment within the DHS, the Minister responsible, Marise Payne, appeared to be having none of it. Insisting it would cost more than $100 million annually to ensure calls were answered in timely fashion, Senator Payne said that "spending hundreds of millions of dollars to address the symptoms and not the cause of Centrelink telephone wait times is not a responsible use of taxpayer money". Senator Payne's shamelessness and disdainful attitude does her and her party little credit.
