45
Centrelink should consider waiving 100,000 debts that may be unlawful, ombudsman report finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
45 points (100.0% liked)
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This whole agency and department needs to be completely overhauled. I'm fairly certain services australia are still breaking many laws in their day to day operations.They need to be put into crisis mode, have business as usual mode suspended, auto-approve payments, hire a fucktone more staff (permanently) and fix shit. I would have thought Shorten would have the political will to do something about this but he's been so disappointing.
I'm not sure if anything needs to be "fixed". They just need more staff. They've laid off tens of thousands of staff in recent years and as far as I know it hasn't even cut costs.
The department has spent a fortune paying the remaining staff penalty/overtime rates to fill in staff shortage gaps and a lack of staff has massively increased the workload of the staff because problems are easier to deal with if you get on top of them early.
For example when my kid was born, someone in the department stuffed up his registration. It took over a year to fix that simple mistake and created a huge amount of work for the department. In the old days, when the department had enough staff, they would've fixed it in five minutes.
Robodebt has been just as big a stuff up as my little story. It cost $600 million to run robodebt, which is almost as much money as they "recovered" and it's looking like most of the money recovered will be paid back to whoever they took it off with over a hundred million in interest on top of that. What a mess.
Why even bother fixing it. Shut it down, move to UBI, plus a new - less cunty - outfit for disability payments etc.