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Showing posts from January, 2017

Contacting Centrelink

Various news outlets reported on the 11/1/17 that the human services minister, Alan Tudge, said “…I know that the call wait time for Centrelink can be long, the average call wait time at present is about 12 minutes…” and “People can also go to a Centrelink office and typically they’ll be able to see a person, in person, within 10 minutes.” Now this is a significantly different to that reported by Centrelink staff and that which has been presented at Senate enquiries. The Australian National Audit Office reported that in 2013-14 13.7 million callers hung up after waiting for as much as 1 hour. From all reports the current situation is now far worse; especially since the average age pension claim processing times have gone from an average 6 weeks to 4-5 months! Now let’s test those ‘access’ times. It’s unlikely to be statistically significant, but it may give an idea of how a ‘typical’ Centerlink recipient needs to handle the situation. We are going to work with an age pensione