Category Archives: Centrelink

‘You are deceased’: Services Australia bungle results in woman losing bank accounts and pension – twice

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A 74-year-old carer was mistakenly declared dead by Centrelink two times in a case advocates describe as illustrating the ‘devastating consequences of automation’

The Centrelink officer on the end of the phone to Eve* was telling her she was dead. Eve, 74, who receives a carer payment, had called after she noticed an extra $3,000 from Centrelink in her 81-year-old husband’s account in May this year, and she was concerned they had been overpaid.

After calling multiple times, she reached someone from Services Australia who looked up her account history.

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Two people remain in jail for welfare debts that Centrelink may have been calculated unlawfully

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The cases are probably wrongful convictions and prosecutors should facilitate appeals, a legal expert says

Two people are in jail after Centrelink used unlawful calculations to accuse them of overclaiming welfare benefits, a watchdog has revealed.

On Monday the ombudsman released its second report on the income apportionment method, calling on Services Australia to waive 100,000 debts that may have been incorrectly calculated and revealing the “traumatic” impact on those convicted of offences related to welfare debt.

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Centrelink to get 3,000 new staff in bid to deal with helpline and payment delays

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Funding boost of $228m aims to return workers to frontline roles after millions of calls went unanswered

Centrelink call centres will get an additional 3,000 staff as part of an immediate $228m funding boost to speed up claim payments after complaints of blown-out call wait times.

More than 800 workers have already been recruited, with the remaining 2,200 to be employed in centres across capital cities and regional New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, the government services minister, Bill Shorten, announced on Sunday night.

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Services Australia forced to pause Centrelink debt repayments for 86,000 people amid legality concerns

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Debt pause comes after watchdog found historical ‘income apportionment’ method breached social security law

Services Australia has been forced to pause Centrelink repayments for 86,000 people over concerns the welfare debts may be unlawful, while warning income support recipients it’s too early to say if those debts will be waived.

In August the commonwealth ombudsman revealed that up to 100,000 debts or potential debts were incorrectly calculated over two decades by “unlawfully apportioning” welfare recipients’ income.

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Services Australia backtracks after ‘unfair’ approach to botched child support assessments

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Commonwealth ombudsman says agency initially planned not to inform people affected by 15,803 potentially ‘inaccurate child support assessments’

Services Australia proposed not to contact past customers affected by 15,803 potentially “inaccurate child support assessments” but backtracked after the commonwealth ombudsman warned this could leave parents out of pocket.

In a statement on Monday the ombudsman revealed that poor IT systems had resulted in errors in up to 47,488 assessments, but Services Australia had wanted to avoid notifying about a third of the caseload, a plan the ombudsman labelled “unfair”.

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Australia news live: grocery prices should ease, Gallagher says; eye-infection causing microbe found at NSW swimming spots

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Comments follow Coles and Woolworths announcing annual profits of more than $1bn even after a spike in cost-of-living pressures on households. Follow today’s live news updates

A Gold Coast city councillor has been charged with murder, AAP reports.

A 58-year-old man was found deceased inside an Arundel property by emergency services, after police were called to the residence around 3pm yesterday.

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Hours on hold, repeated calls, months of delay: Maryanne’s struggle to get urgent jobseeker payments

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Even as a former staff member, Maryanne Watts was shocked at how long it took to get urgent assistance. Experts says she is not alone

When Maryanne Watts applied for jobseeker earlier this year, she knew it wouldn’t be a smooth process. She had been a Centrelink worker in the 1990s and had received income support in recent years.

But even she was shocked at how difficult it was to get her application processed – even when she was about to run out of money.

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Australian jobseekers told to use ChatGPT to apply for jobs and shown irrelevant videos

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Exclusive: A taxpayer-funded online employability course that included videos on body language contained ‘not curriculum-endorsed materials’

A taxpayer-funded employability course is under fire after jobseekers complained that much of the compulsory training involved being shown irrelevant, inappropriate and, at-times, bizarre YouTube videos.

Under contracts signed by the Coalition last year, the federal government will pay private providers about $300m over five years to run Employability Skills Training (EST) courses as part of the commonwealth’s $7bn Workforce Australia program.

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Australians who lost welfare under 1990s student loan scheme have cause for class action, expert says

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Andrew Grech says action could be pursued if implications of SFSS loans were misrepresented to people when they signed up

Recipients of a dumped welfare scheme that enticed low-income students to trade away their right to welfare have cause to mount a class action, a senior legal expert says.

The Australian government is still chasing $2bn of debt from more than 140,000 former students who signed up to the student financial supplement scheme (SFSS).

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Welfare advocates welcome Centrelink rule change to help domestic violence victims

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Officers will have to consider whether domestic violence is a factor when determining if welfare recipient is part of a couple

Australian welfare rights advocates have welcomed changes aimed at preventing family violence victim-survivors from being punished under Centrelink rules.

Under social security rules, people must declare to Centrelink whether they are single or in a relationship. Those deemed to be in a “couple” receive a lower rate of income support than singles.

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Coalition’s $50 jobseeker rise more generous than Labor’s proposal, Pocock says

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Albanese government risks being unfavourably compared to the Morrison government if it does not raise the payment for all, the key independent says

The Morrison government’s post-Covid decision to lift jobseeker payments by $50 a fortnight helped more people than the Albanese government’s mooted 55-plus budget proposal, the key crossbench senator David Pocock says.

With less than a week to go until the budget is handed down, advocates and MPs are becoming increasingly concerned the Albanese government’s second budget will not do enough to help those living below the poverty line, or help women re-enter the workforce.

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Labor MPs condemn ‘discriminatory’ plan to increase jobseeker only for those over 55 in budget

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Concerns growing that any changes to rental assistance will also fall along generational divides

Labor MPs who have advocated for an increase in the jobseeker base rate were mostly unimpressed by the prospect of their government limiting the raise to those aged over 55 in the upcoming federal budget.

Concerns are also growing that any changes to commonwealth rental assistance will also fall along generational divides and be lower than what is needed to meet the rising cost of housing, with a 25% increase firming as the likely figure, when advocates had called for 50%.

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Majority of Australians on jobseeker and parenting payments live in poverty, study finds

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Report on 3 million people living below the breadline shows welfare payments are ‘totally inadequate’ and action is needed in May budget, Acoss says

The majority of people on the jobseeker and parenting payments are living in poverty while about a third of single parents are also below the breadline, according to a new study.

A report from the University of New South Wales and the Australian Council of Social Service, to be released on Wednesday, provides further insight into the demographics of 3 million people, including 761,000 children, previously identified as living in poverty in the 2019-20 financial year.

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Australia’s welfare system puts disadvantaged at risk, inquiry told

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Mutual obligation system subjects some participants to ‘punitive conditions’, commonwealth ombudsman says

Australia’s mutual obligation system for welfare risks “subjecting disadvantaged participants to unreasonably onerous and punitive conditions”, the commonwealth ombudsman has warned.

The ombudsman made the submission to a Senate inquiry, which has already recommended a major overhaul of the controversial ParentsNext program, and revealed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants were fined at almost double their rate of participation.

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Queensland mother whose son took his life calls for change at robodebt royal commission – As it happened

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Inquiry into the unlawful scheme, which ran from 2015 to 2019, is ongoing. This blog is now closed

Final robodebt hearing shines light on people affected

A Centrelink employee and a customer impacted by the illegal robodebt scheme will be the final two witnesses appearing at the royal commission’s public hearings, AAP reports.

The international standard now in the OECD area is beyond 52 weeks. It’s great we’re moving to 26 but we are not going fast enough, doing what other countries are doing. We have slipped down the international rankings on paid parental leave.

It’s very important that we give the support to parents when a new baby arrives so they can share the leave, they can begin life with a new child, give that child the best shot and alongside that, of course, we need quality, early childhood education and care which we in the Greens think should be free, just like primary school.

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‘They bleed you dry’: the recruitment scammers preying on Australian job seekers

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As cybercriminals increasingly target the job market, antipoverty advocates say punitive welfare rules leave job seekers particularly vulnerable

“I can’t stop kicking myself,” Rose* says.

The 51-year-old has just lost $10,000 to scammers – a life-changing amount for the mother of three.

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Linda Reynolds sends formal defamation complaint to Brittany Higgins’s partner – as it happened

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This blog is now closed

Ukrainian loss would embolden leaders in Pacific region, ambassador says

The ambassador of Ukraine to Australia and New Zealand, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, stresses that the reason Australia’s assistance needs to continue is because it’s in Australia’s interests to support the Ukraine:

The reason why we need to keep up and step up that assistance because this war in Ukraine is disrupting everything. It’s really undermined security, regionally, globally.

It’s having a major impact on your partners here in the region. Look at Indonesia. I mean, they are really suffering from the lack of food that can get on their market. They have 275 million people to feed and they really rely on grain from Ukraine, which now they have a hard time getting hold of as the prices have surged. We’ve seen the impact on the energy markets on the volatility of the commodity markets.

What’s important is that Australia continues to support Ukraine. We are truly thankful for what Australia has done so far, especially the last package which was announced in October where another 30 Bushmasters were allocated and the troops which are now in Britain have already been able to train Ukrainian soldiers. It’s really a big help.

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‘Morally questionable’: compliance element should be scrapped from controversial ParentsNext scheme, MPs told

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Human Rights Commission says aspects of ParentsNext program have the ‘effect of penalising parents, overwhelmingly mothers’

Job agencies running the contentious ParentsNext program have called on the Albanese government to scrap compliance from the scheme, with one suggesting the current system is “morally questionable”.

In submissions to a parliamentary inquiry looking at the employment services system, the Human Rights Commission has also argued stopping social security payments under the program was “contrary to Australia’s human rights obligations”.

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Robodebt royal commission told ‘misrepresentation may have made its way into the cabinet’

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Bureaucrats from March 2015 insisted in documents that scheme would ‘not change’ how welfare overpayments were calculated, inquiry hears

Bureaucrats misrepresented the robodebt scheme in cabinet documents prepared for the 2015 budget, apparently paving the way for the unlawful program to be set up, a royal commission has heard.

The inquiry is investigating why and how the unlawful Centrelink debt recovery scheme was established in 2015 and ran until November 2019, ending in a $1.8bn settlement with hundreds of thousands of victims.

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Labor drops plan to reduce access to disability pension for drug and alcohol-related conditions

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Albanese government backs away from controversial change as part of once-in-a-decade review of disability pension eligibility criteria

The Albanese government has backed down from a controversial proposal that would have made it harder for people with drug and alcohol-related conditions to get access to the disability support pension.

But it is still facing calls to do more to address longstanding problems with the design of the disability pension, amid record levels of people on jobseeker living with a disability.

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