CENTRELINK is wasting Australia’s time. Monstrous amounts of it. Whole lifetimes are being chewed up by Centrelink’s outrageous slowness.

It takes 43 million calls a year and people wait on the line for hours to get answered. The worst story I found was a woman who waited on hold for 15 hours.

The Minister says the average wait time is 12 minutes and his last annual report says it is 15 minutes. Even if that was true, it isn’t good enough. And don’t forget Centrelink had 29 million unanswered calls, plus 7 million calls where people got tired of waiting so long and hung up.

Why does Centrelink do it? Because they can! They save a bit of money by understaffing — there are no consequences for them when they use up our time to save money.

TEMPORAL ALCHEMY

This trick — turning our time into their money — pops up time and again in Australia. Consider Australia Post. When they drop off a note saying they tried to deliver a parcel they are using up a lot of my time to save a little bit of their money.

It looks great on the bottom line: expenses are slightly lower. Imagine if they had to include our time in their accounts — things would be very different indeed.

Too many organisations will happily trade hours of my time to save seconds of theirs. It is incredibly inefficient, and it happens mostly in a particular kind of large organisation.

For example, I do not get screwed around at my local burger shop. They try to be efficient because they know customers will go somewhere else if they’re not fast. Wasting customers’ time is the signature move of big organisations that don’t have enough competition.

WHERE THE HOURS DRAG BY

We get screwed around by government entities like Centrelink and the local council. By semi-government entities like Australia Post. And by big private businesses like airports, phone companies and banks that don’t have enough competition.

In the early 2000s, banks were a bit like Centrelink is now. They made you queue for hours if you went into a branch. Likewise, there was an era when Telstra was famous for its wait times if you needed help. Around a decade ago, people hesitated to use them because their customer service was famously abysmal.

But Telstra and the banks fixed their issues and these days they have a reputation for being maybe not perfect — but pretty good.

Airports are probably the worst example in the private sector. Australian cities each have only one airport. There’s no competition, so when they tell you to get there very early you comply. You normally spend ages queuing up (because they’re saving money on security, etc). Then you still have a long time to wait. The industry motto is “dwell time is sell time.”

Airports count on you buying a few overpriced items during that dwell time. That comes back to them in the shape of high rents for airport retail. It’s an elaborate system and it all depends on you giving up your time for free.

TICK, TOCK

We need to put a stop to this. Australians time has been disrespected for too long, and organisations need to stop turning a blind eye to it. These organisations know time is valuable: they try to use their own staff’s time at maximum efficiency. But not ours

Government ministers knows the value of time too. That’s why they spend up on a charter flight instead of taking a regular flight later — to make sure not a moment is wasted. If only the same courtesy was extended to the rest of us.