More than 11 million Centrelink Calls went unanswered in the year to April 2024, nearly double the number in the previous year, according to Services Australia data.
On the other end of the line, sick welfare recipients and those struggling to pay for food and rent are said to be spending hours on the phone, but have yet to experience the impact of the massive surge in Service Australia staff in February.
Congestion messages – automated recordings that tell people waiting on the phone line that staff are too busy – will refer callers to online services before automatically disconnecting.
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There were 11,268,048 of those congestion messages in the year ending March 31, 2024 — up from 6,997,300 the previous year — on the Link Center’s Social Security and Welfare lines alone.
Of those 11 million unanswered calls, nearly 2 million were to the Disability, Illness and Caregiver Line, and people who were able to answer that line waited an average of 47 minutes.
These huge figures do not include missed calls to Medicare and Centrelink elderly care customers, whose phones were switched off more than a million times – a 27,500 per cent increase on the previous year when just 4,067 people received the jam message.
Services Australia told 7NEWS.com.au that the number of unanswered calls has now halved since January, but for those who continue to receive congestion messages the improvement is subtle.
As a single person seeking parental leave payments I tweeted Monday: “It’s really funny that Link Center keeps sending me emails saying… we need to call them. What’s even more funny is that I’ve tried to call them every day for the past week, and the line just goes dead.”
Another person – who was calling about a recurring issue that “cannot be fixed on the Centrelink app or website” – expressed similar frustration after hearing the congestion message taking him back to online services.
“The solution to your problem is to call this number? And what do you do? Keep calling and hanging up again until I go crazy?” I tweeted Earlier this month.
“There is no waiting list, no call back. This puts the onus on me to fix a Centrelink error, and then requires me to spend hours of my time fixing it.”
another person I tweeted Last month: “It seems like Link Center can’t be counted over the phone, but I’m going to lose my payments if I don’t talk to someone. I can’t just take a week off (from work) just to try and hopefully get through it.”
New employees face backlog problem
Services Australia said it had hired thousands of additional staff by February, and by April they were trained to take calls and process claims, following recommendations made during the Debt robot investigation.
But their priority so far has been to overcome a huge backlog of claims – which has been halved in the past three months and is now back to almost normal levels, 7NEWS understands.
“Congestion message usage has halved since January,” Services Australia general manager Hank Jungen told 7NEWS.com.au.
He also noted reduced waiting times.
“Overall, LINK call wait times have dropped from an average of 31 minutes in January to about 25 minutes in June, depending on the day,” he said.
But even if the congestion messages are reduced to just a few million a year, the Australian Council of Social Service’s acting chief executive Edina MacDonald says the situation is still dire for many vulnerable people.
“In some cases, people are calling because their payments have been reduced or cut, preventing them from paying their rent or buying food,” MacDonald told 7NEWS.com.au.
“Long waiting times for calls are a big problem because it means people who need support can’t get the help they need.
“The presence of over 11 million congestion messages, which prevent the caller from connecting, asking him to try again at another time because the lines are too busy, is very worrying.
“We welcomed a $1.8 billion investment to hire 3,000 new employees, and it is good to see waiting times reduced.
“While it is good to see this progress, too many people are still waiting too long. The Government must continue to invest in Australia’s services, including by recruiting and retaining skilled staff, after so many years of cuts to this essential service.”
New data on unanswered calls and waiting times by Services Australia will be released next week, and is set to reveal exactly how much impact the investment in the government agency has had.
