Department says surge in use of private contractors is temporary but union says government is ‘privatising our safety net’

Centrelink to use 1,000 labour-hire staff to help recover welfare debts

Centrelink will enlist up to 1,000 staff from labour-hire firms to help it recover debts and enforce the compliance of welfare recipients.

The move has prompted a furious response from the main public sector union, which labelled it yet another example of the government “privatising our safety net”.

But a spokesman for the Department of Human Services (DHS), Hank Jongen, has described it as simply a “temporary surge” in the use of private contractors, a practice that was neither new or unusual.

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The large-scale outsourcing exercise comes a month after the government announced 250 staff from multinational outsourcing giant Serco would be used in Centrelink’s call centre, which has struggled to reduce excessive waiting times.

The department is yet to select the labour hire firms but Guardian Australia understands the new staff will begin work in early 2018 within Centrelink’s compliance area.



That area came under immense scrutiny earlier this year, after the “robo-debt” crisis caused the issuing of inaccurate debts to vulnerable and disadvantaged Australians.



The labour-hire staff are designed to supplement DHS’s existing workforce of more than 34,000. It is understood they will be dispersed to offices across the country, and used to free up existing public servants for more complex cases.

The labour-hire staff are also expected to have access to Centrelink systems.

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) national secretary, Nadine Flood, described the outsourcing as “new and scandalous”.

Flood said it would place labour-hire staff in sensitive roles that “should be done by well-trained public servants”.

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“Robo-debt was an absolute disaster for both DHS staff and the community – the Turnbull government is trying to abdicate their responsibility for this debacle by outsourcing the mop-up to a private company,” Flood told Guardian Australia.

“Labour hire has no place in public services – the Turnbull government needs to lift its arbitrary cap on public sector employment so that the community can have the services it needs,” she said.

The outsourcing is designed to help achieve recent Coalition budget measures, which sought to crack down on welfare fraud and non-compliance.



Jongen said the government had committed extra resources to help strengthen “the integrity of the welfare system”.



“To meet this commitment, the Department of Human Services has engaged additional workers on a contract basis to support the temporary surge in workload as these measures are implemented,” Jongen said.



“This is not new, the department has engaged contractors over many years for specialist services and to support day-to-day operations to help fill short-term requirements for finite periods.”

The robo-debt scandal, which emerged publicly in early December last year, caused a further deterioration of morale within Centrelink.

Flood warned moves to privatise the compliance area would only cause morale to plummet further.

“DHS staff have an important job that they take pride in and that the whole community relies on,” she said.

“These privatisation moves make these jobs precarious and unnecessarily stressful. Staff are saying that morale has reached rock-bottom and this has real implications for staff and the community.”