The Coalition is staking more of its reputation than it realises on the success or failure of its solution to ballooning call waiting times for Centrelink clients. By announcing on Wednesday it would outsource call centre work to multinational services company Serco, the government has invited a private company into Department of Human Services tasks that are at the core of its public mission.
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If it's a decision that was taken lightly, it shouldn't have been. Human Services Minister Alan Tudge heralded the three-year contract with Serco, costing the government $51.7 million, as a remedy for phone waits that averaged almost 27 minutes at the height of the "robo-debt" maelstrom and resulted in tens of millions of calls to Centrelink reaching engaged signals.
There's reason to suspect it won't be the fix Mr Tudge hopes for. How 250 staff working for a private contractor will have the grasp of Human Services policy needed to resolve the serious queries of Centrelink's welfare recipients is unclear.
Managing the needs, concerns and problems of the agency's clients involves a lot more than answering the phone, following a script and forwarding a query as needed. The public might want to know how Serco staff will do any more than this. In the absence of an explanation from the department, it can only hope they can.
Whether this is a genuine attempt to resolve an unacceptable slip in service standards by the government, or a cynical strategy to dress the numbers and cut call waiting averages using a private contract will become apparent when Centrelink's clients make it known whether their experiences with the agency have improved.
The Coalition should be warned that any claim it has lifted standards may well be drowned out by the stories of those who have to spend their time navigating what is an unnecessarily arduous client service system, one that would see customers walk out in droves in the private sector. The public, which has listened in disbelief to the stories of welfare recipients negotiating the "robo-debt" system, will heed any further complaints just as carefully.
At the core of this decision is a persistent attitude towards welfare recipients and public service that steered the government disastrously towards the "robo-debt" saga. Its refusal to suspend data matching on Tuesday showed the Coalition won't reconsider how the department should relate to the people who use it. The Serco contract, announced the following day, confirms this. People in difficult personal circumstances will remain subject to data-matching, and now will have their calls answered by private contractors whose credentials for the task are uncertain.
Should the experiment go awry, the government decision to axe nearly 1200 jobs from Human Services in the same 2017-18 budget that funded the Serco contract will deserve some more attention. The government will not only have to account for its failure to improve Centrelink's service standards. It will have to explain why its own staff could not do work it entrusted to staff of a UK-based multinational.
