E&OE TRANSCRIPT
SUBJECTS: 3000 new Services Australia staff announced
GARY ADSHEAD, HOST: This morning, the federal government's Government Services Minister, Bill Shorten, has unveiled a $228 million plan of action, and he joins me now. Thanks very much for your time, Minister.
BILL SHORTEN, MINISTER FOR THE NDIS AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES: No worries, Gary.
ADSHEAD: Well, I mean, you're reacting to clearly what is becoming a major problem, have you reacted too late?
SHORTEN: Well, the problem started in 2015 when our predecessors started cutting back numbers. The reality is that during Covid, there was a boost in staff numbers. But as Covid stopped, it went back to the downward reduction. So, since becoming Minister, I've become increasingly aware that, you know, it's not a popular thing to say, but we need more public servants. We cut to the bone too much. The other thing, which has exacerbated it since July, is that the Labor government has introduced better childcare rebates, better parental leave rebates. So, demand is right up. So, what we have is that twin jaws of a snake, so to speak. On one hand, historic low levels of public servants to process payments and answer the phones, and historic high levels of demand outside of a pandemic. But the good news is I've been working on a package, we're able to announce that today, 3000 extra people to help hit the backlog of payments and calls. We've already, I think the bureaucratic term, the jargon term is, onboarded 800 of them, and now we're training them in the welfare system to understand what they're dealing with. There’ll be about 3000 new people by hopefully the beginning of the end of this year, beginning of next year.
ADSHEAD: Geez! Where do you get them from?
SHORTEN: Well, you know, this is the thing about Australia right now, demand is up. People, do you know it's not 23% calls answered, it's higher than that but it's still an unacceptably low rate, but they're answering a million calls a week. 10 million people visit Centrelink and Medicare offices. That's fair enough. And there are 1.1 billion transactions online. Like, Australians want more from their government than ever before. That's their right. So, where do we get the people from is, the good news is these jobs aren't going to go to - and I'm not disparaging labour hire working in a call centre, but these are ongoing public service jobs where young people, people seeking a new career, people looking to enter the workforce, and not just young people, could get an ongoing engagement with the Commonwealth Public Service. So that's good. You know, the jobs, they don't pay like princes. You know, it's not a king's ransom, but it's a foot in the door to permanent work and regular work, and that's good for the workforce. The people currently working on the front line of service Australia do a great job, but they've had to go through the whole of the Robodebt scandals and put up with a lot of grief. So, I know that all around service centres around Australia, there's just a sense of relief that finally something's being done.
ADSHEAD: Now, I did note that the plan is to have these in, quote, smart centres, unquote, and I've seen plenty of Utopia episodes. What's a smart centre, Minister? What's that?
SHORTEN: Well, I inherited that jargon from my predecessors. To be honest, if the last government could win a war by management consultants, we'd have the Chinese and the Americans outnumbered 2 to 1. Anyway, the smart centre is a back of house operations where they - and the good news about South Australia is it's quite decentralised. So, for example, I don't think this number's been out before yet, Gary, so 200 of these jobs will be in the West.
ADSHEAD: Right. Excellent.
SHORTEN: So, what I hope is that people will take an interest in the work because it's ongoing work. It's not, you know, casual work. But also, we'd love more people to go online. But I respect the fact that some people have a generation where they can't they don't want to go online. Sometimes people just got really complex issues and need to talk to someone. So, we're trying to put the human back into human services.
ADSHEAD: Can you come up with a sort of a target on how, like how much you'd like to bring down those waiting times if you've got all these new people on deck?
SHORTEN: It's a bit chicken and the egg. The two things driving waiting times, one is the length of time you're waiting for your payment and the other waiting time is length of time you're waiting on the call, or you get a congested answer. I think we've got to start with the payments, because 20% of the calls are about payments. If we can get some of that traffic off the phones because people know they're going to get their payments in a reasonable time, so I'm hoping to halve the waiting time for payments.
In terms of calls, I want to reduce the waiting time, but I've got to see how I go reducing the backlog of payments that's the source of a lot of the problems. People just want to find out. They put in for their aged care or their Commonwealth senior’s card. Also, the other thing we've got to do, and I know this just will drive people into sitting on the line to distraction, but I've got to make sure the payments are accurate. The worst thing we can do is send out an incorrect payment. Then there's a debate about overpayment or underpayment. Anyway, I don't pretend that life's going to be any better tomorrow than it was today for people trying to deal with Centrelink, although there's 21,000 very good people there working frontline, but another 3000 people will come on board. There'll be interpreters for those whose language isn't so good. You know, it is a genuine commitment. You know, sometimes the politics here, you get to announce, you know, something at a fete or something. And that's all good local politics. This is real. This is real people, real jobs. And they're not being put on to, I don't know, measure the size of the curtains in an office. They are here to handle people's payments, Medicare payments, childcare support payments, their unemployment benefits, the aged pension.
ADSHEAD: It's tough work because you're going to have situations where people have waited or not been able to get through for days and keep trying, keep trying. Then they finally get that human voice at the end of it, and their frustrations are taken out on them. It's not easy.
SHORTEN: No, it's not. One thing which I have announced as well about three weeks ago is a number of frontline staff get assaulted on a weekly basis in our offices. So, it's only a very, very small minority of people who do it. And it's these people generally have other problems in their life, it's not the waiting time. But we've got more laws and more protections for the frontline staff. So, they know I've got their back there. But I do get I really get that the delay in getting paid, it's a cost-of-living measure. I mean, I have a very simple view about government services. Some people think it's a backwater portfolio. It's not very important, yada yada yada. The main games and you know, the environment or defence or the big-ticket sort of nightly news issues. The reality is citizens deserve to be treated with dignity, and the system, people, it a bit like our roads and our hospitals, our government services is national infrastructure, just like a road or a bridge. And it hasn't kept up pace. You know, we've sort of been using a two-lane road to deal with a four-lane human needs and service requirements, if you can follow my metaphor.
ADSHEAD: Yes, I can. Can I just ask you before you go, you probably, you know, this is in relation to Newspoll, are you concerned about the PM's, you know, obviously off the back of the voice and how badly that went, his approval ratings slipping to 42%?
SHORTEN: Well, I've been polled within an inch of my life when I was a leader. I've learned you pay attention close to elections, but the rest of the time, I think a lot of this reflects genuine cost of living anxiety. No, I don't think it's Albo. I think the truth of the matter is I think people are doing it hard at the moment, and they want as much as they can get from their pollies. That's fair enough. But we're doing it. And so, I think politics is not a particular day in the year. It's consistent application to the problems which affect real people. You know, I've got this motto, just get stuff done. This announcement today is getting stuff done. I think you'll see quite a bit of that from the Albanese government.
ADSHEAD: All right. But you're not spending much time looking at the pattern, because once that consistency of a fall in approval rating starts to stick, it could spell danger towards 2025.
SHORTEN: Well, I think in 2025 people will say, did you do what you said you were going to do? And if you haven't done it, did you try as hard as you could have? Are you a government who's on our side? Do you understand what's going on around my kitchen table? And you know my dreams and hopes for kids. You know, your kids and your job and your quality of life. And I think that from what we're endeavouring to do to upgrade our energy grid, to sorting out GST with the West, I think there's more to come in hospital funding, what I'm trying to do with the National Disability Insurance Scheme and make that a more human experience, stop the rorts, and even just something as modest as making sure people's payment waiting time diminishes. That's all real. I think that's what matters.
ADSHEAD: Well, it certainly matters. Whenever we raise it on this program, we get plenty of calls with people's frustrations. So, let's hope that that can be curtailed in coming months.
SHORTEN: We'll see it. Believe me, I'll be watching the lists as carefully as anyone else.
ADSHEAD: All right. Good stuff. Thanks very much for that, Minister.
SHORTEN: Yeah. Good to have a chat. Thank you.
ADSHEAD: That's the Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten.