Table of Contents
Centrelink was established in July 1997 as a statutory agency within the social security portfolio with a simple and quite original task. This was to enter into arrangements with department heads to carry out functions and to be responsible for delivering federal government services and benefits to Australia’s unemployed and social welfare recipients. The Prime Minister, John Howard, called the establishment of the new CSDA ‘probably the biggest administrative reform of recent times’, with its combination of ‘efficiency with sympathetic and responsible service’ (Howard 1997:6).
This chapter examines how this administrative reform has been played out since its creation by providing an overview of the main dimensions—including the challenges and achievements—and serving as a bridge to the more specialised treatment in subsequent chapters. It expands on the ideas behind Centrelink’s creation touched on in the previous chapter—an efficient organisation; a customer-centric one-stop shop separating policy from delivery; a modern public agency with purchaser–provider arrangements; an executive board with multi-portfolio accountability—and tracks how they developed in times of major change. It also examines how Centrelink has sought to integrate successfully staff from two departments, to re-engineer procedures and systems and to develop its own culture and business processes.
Presented as ‘the human face of the Commonwealth government’, Centrelink’s mission was ‘to provide easy and convenient access to high quality government and community services that improve the lives of Australians, their families and communities’ (DFaCS 2003:249). Centrelink was to be the Howard Government’s key administrative innovation of the 1990s. Jocelyn Newman (1997), the Minister for Social Security at the time, saw it as a new model:
Service delivery agencies have been established overseas, notably in the [United Kingdom] and [New Zealand]…but the new agency takes the concept of single-point government service delivery further. Unlike overseas counterparts, the Agency will not operate solely as an administrative entity within a department of state or be limited to single portfolio responsibilities. In many ways the Agency represents a groundbreaking model for government service delivery at a federal level…customers will have a single point of contact—a one-stop shop—for a range of government services.
According to the explanatory memorandum for the bill creating the new organisation, Centrelink would deliver various services that were provided by a variety of departments. The second reading speech of the bill reiterated Centrelink’s role as a cross-department delivery agency, and high expectations of service: ‘The clear principle underlying the concept of the agency is the government’s commitment to put the needs of people for high quality service delivery above the boundaries of Commonwealth departments and agencies’ (Ruddock 1996:7623–4). This chapter considers how Centrelink went about responding to that responsibility in its first eight years.
The new agency immediately took over responsibility for delivering social welfare and employment-related services and income support to some 6.2 million members of the Australian community. The biggest two segments, in terms of customer numbers and payments made, were ‘families and children’ and ‘retirement services’. Its recipients—or customers, to use Centrelink’s preferred term—are set out in their main groups in Table 2.1
|
Customer segment |
No. customers (million) |
|---|---|
|
Families and children |
1.80 |
|
Retirement services |
2.00 |
|
Employment |
1.10 |
|
Disability and carers |
0.70 |
|
Youth and students |
0.50 |
|
Rural and housing |
0.02 |
|
Total |
6.2 |
Source: Centrelink 1999a:2–3.
While the creation of Centrelink was partly about combining employment and welfare services in one organisation, providing employment services was always going to be a small part of the total and, because unemployment fell after Centrelink’s inception, it came to make up just 5 per cent of its business. Nevertheless, the employment segment consumed a higher proportion of staff effort than other segments, primarily because each payment required more processing effort within the office. In colloquial terms, the unemployed were expected to ‘jump through more hoops’ to gain payments and the natural concomitant was a greater administrative effort.
A year after beginning, Centrelink estimated that it had made some 300 million contacts with more than six million customers, answered more than 20 million telephone calls in the year and processed more than 3.4 billion transactions. Information provided to customers was delivered by mail, telephone, the Internet, by personal contact at a Centrelink office and by off-site visits.
It was not just the size of this activity that made Centrelink significant in day-to-day Australian life; it was also the nature of its task. The wellbeing of most recipients of government income support has been dependent on Centrelink successfully continuing its daily operations. Many of its customers are the most vulnerable members of society and any confusion about support payments or failure to pay pensions is immediately a major issue politically and in the media. A major disruption to its services is significant to those dependent on it and an embarrassment to the government of the day. The fact that the payments it delivered amounted to a major portion of the Commonwealth budget reinforced the attention Centrelink attracted from the government.