The volume of complaints to the Australian agency that handles welfare payments has spiked from 14,000 to well over 25,000 in just three years.
Officials representing Services Australia faced a range of questions from senators during a parliamentary inquiry into the aged pension.
Five representatives were unable to tell the committee how many complaints it received in a year, the nature of those complaints, or even how many people were working on it.
While officials from the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), who testified later, supplied data from previous audits showing complaints had almost doubled from just over 14,000 in 2021-22 to well over 25,000 in 2023-24.
“In terms of the primary complaints, it was [about] the the process, the claim application, or assessment process, or the decision on the process. And then the second largest complaint was the wait time,” Auditor-General Caralee McLiesh told the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit.
What did eventually emerge from the hearing was that the ANAO considered the administration of the age pension to be “partly effective.”
“Participants were required to answer a lot of questions with no clear guidance about information that was needed. Some of the claims questions were ambiguous and difficult to understand. The claims question had been developed under the assumption that applicants have a high degree of financial literacy, and the forms were difficult to navigate,” McLiesh said.
The age pension is a significant component of Australian government expenditure. It accounted for 8.4 percent of the federal budget spending in 2024–25 and 42.5 percent of all social security payments.
Services Australia Faces Tough Questions on Complaints
Amid questions on handling complaints, Robyn Shannon, deputy chief executive of Service Australia’s programme and design group, said staff were mapping out the process and looking for ways to improve.
When Committee Chair Josh Burns asked how many people were in that unit, Shannon said she did not know and could not give a rough estimate.
Committee Deputy Chair Scott Buchholz also struggled to obtain basic staffing numbers.
“That’s not a hard one,” he said. “How many staff do you have? Nearest 10,000.”
Officials eventually answered “about 30,000,” but could not say how many were providing frontline services to people on the age pension.
Further questions proved similarly difficult to answer, prompting Buchholz to throw up his hands.
“I flew down today to genuinely try and participate in this in good faith,” he said.
“And I am just gobsmacked by the amount of simple lines of questioning that I’ve asked, that you’ve had absolutely no idea to the point that you cannot tell me how many staff are employed. I am frustrated.”
When questioning returned to Burns, he referred to a 2018 review of the pension application procedure.
“I don’t really get the thinking here. You pay someone to do this external review in 2018 [yet] nothing has happened. It’s the main topic of all of the complaints of Services Australia, and at the moment, even after an audit by the National Audit Office, the best answer you can give me today is that you’re looking for areas for opportunity to improve the form. Why not just fix the form?”
“We’ve already moved to adopt most of what’s been recommended,” Shannon said.
