The Minister for Human Services (DHS), Michael Keenan has announced that Centrelink will have access to 1,500 extra personnel to help it improve its customer service.
Mr Keenan said the additional staff were on top of 1,000 personnel announced in April and the 250 call centre operators who were engaged late last year through a pilot program with Serco.
“Those staff have already answered more than two million calls and have helped reduce busy signals on Centrelink phone lines by almost 20 per cent,” Mr Keenan said.
He said DHS had recently signed contracts with four service delivery partners to provide the additional 1,000 staff.
“Under the new contracts, Serco will engage additional staff at their Victorian call centres and Stellar Asia Pacific, Concentrix Services and DataCom Connect will create jobs based in Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide.
“Centrelink answers about one million calls a week and getting through on the phone can sometimes be difficult, especially at periods of high demand.”
The Minister’s announcement was not greeted positively by the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) which said profit-hungry corporations providing low wages and insecure work were not the answer to Centrelink’s problems.
National Secretary of the CPSU, Nadine Flood said the call centres were being set up to generate fat profits for multinational corporations, not to help ordinary Australians struggling with declining Centrelink service standards.
“Centrelink desperately needs more well-trained permanent staff, but is instead being forced to cannibalise its own workforce and resources to pay for this ideological folly,” Ms Flood said.
