It's debatable whether any particular agency or department within the Commonwealth bureaucracy can lay claim to be unhappier or more discontented than any other. But were departments to be rated on a scale of one to 10 – one being flushed with gladness and 10 being marooned in the pits of the world – the Department of Human Services might appear at the upper end. Last week, DHS was stung by revelations from the Australian National Audit Office that callers to its Centrelink agency routinely wait 17 minutes before speaking to an operator. And this week, it has emerged that staff taking legally protected industrial action have been identified on internal DHS rosters with unflattering rat and toilet paper icons.
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Following the audit report's public release, DHS staff were ordered to stop what they were doing and to help clear the phone backlog. However, DHS general manager Hank Jongen later played down the email's significance, suggesting Centrelink's new call centres were in fact meeting key performance indicators and that the directive was just an ordinary response to a surge in phone inquiries.
More management claims of "nothing to see here, move right along" followed the icon incidents, with officials insisting they were not pictures or a rat or a lavatory roll but rather a mouse and what was supposed to be an ordinary sheet of paper. The response of staff, not surprisingly was that while one blooper was understandable, two suggested malicious intent. Both icons have seen been removed.
DHS employees have been locked in a pay dispute with the federal government since mid-2014, with many of the department's 34,000 employees unhappy about the 3.25 per cent pay offer, and on it being tied to cuts in terms and entitlements. The DHS offer is similar to those that have been made to other large departments. However, the distress of lower-ranking employees (SES officers have negotiated their own pay deal, one somewhat more generous than the one on offer to clerks) has been exacerbated by a belief that workloads have increased after successive job losses at Centrelink, Medicare and the Child Support Agency. Hence the industrial action. There's also resentment that SES staff have been spared the cuts visited on other DHS staff, and that they are no more answerable for their mistakes and misjudgments than they ever were.
Were staff morale within the DHS to be higher than it is, this week's weird icon incidents might have been dismissed as inconsequential and accepted as just poor judgment from someone acting on their own. Instead, some staff are livid and the attempt to play down the episode has reinforced the belief among staff, right or wrong, that anyone working against the Abbott government's pay offer is regarded by senior staff as treacherous and disloyal, even though such actions might be entirely lawful.
It's hard to see how the DHS trust deficit can be rectified. But with welfare recipients increasingly being marginalised by budget cuts, DHS managers need to pay more attention on how outcomes might be improved and less on intimidation and blame-shifting.
