Clients are being "shooed away" from Centrelink offices and told to take their problems online, with politicians inundated with complaints about the turnaways, a parliamentary committee has heard.
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But the giant Department of Human Services, which runs the welfare agency, has defended its performance, saying it was "greeting" customers as they arrived and helping them to help themselves.
Parliament's joint committee on public accounts met on Thursday morning to grill DHS officials over the performance of their telephone call centres.
The session followed a scathing report by the Auditor-General' published in May that found almost a quarter of the 57 million phone calls made to Centrelink last year went unanswered, and Australians spent 143 years waiting in vain to speak to the agency in 2013-14, before simply hanging up.
About 13.7 million calls did not make it to even the point of being put on hold, after they were blocked or received a "busy signal".
But Centrelink chief executive Grant Tidswell told the committee on Thursday that waiting times for face-to-face conversations had never been better.
"In face-to-face settings, our wait times have never been better," the senior DHS executive told the multi-party committee.
"This July our average wait time for social security, welfare, work and activity was about ten minutes. To receive a Medicare inquiry was about seven minutes and last financial year we handled about 24.5 million contacts in those service centres."
But Labor MP Pat Conroy cut in to say his office had been inundated with complaints from people who had been chased away from Centrelink offices before they could get through the front door.
"With respect, my office and I'm sure every other office, is inundated with complaints about approaching Centrelink offices, they have to fight quite hard to see a customer service agent," Labor's "wastewatch" spokesman told the senior public servant.
"The automatic push-back is 'have you tried online, have you tried a phone call'?
"I get constant complaints from people who say that if you don't know that you can actually request to talk to someone, people get shooed away from the office."
Mr Tidswell suggested that Mr Conroy's electorate on the NSW mid-coast had some "challenging" locations to run a Centrelink office before saying that clients were greeted at the door of service centres before being triaged.
"What we're doing with our customer service centres is we're greeting people when they come in, we're triaging them to the right service," he said.
"We're increasingly sitting them down at computers that we have in the service centres to show them how to use the digital applications.
"We have over 80 per cent of our customers using our online applications, we have extraordinary growth in the mobile app capabilities."
"We're shifting, no doubt about it, we're shifting some of the effort that used to be staff-assisted effort to customers themselves.
"Then customers we hope are able to use it on their own devices or at a school or a library to have the ability to do it at their convenience and in their time."
DHS has been unapologetic for its effort to push clients onto the MyGov portal, which has also been criticised recently, to conduct their Centrelink business.
But Mr Tidswell described MyGov as an outstanding success that was close to unveiling improved capabilities.
"MyGov has been an outstanding success and we're not that far away, all of us who are MyGov customers and there a 7.7 million of us, is the ability to credential up and have a lifetime ticket to government services, how good is that?" he said.
