The Federal Government's recent announcement that Serco will be delivering some of the income support system, Centrelink, is another blow to core public services that serve some of the most disadvantaged Australians.
Alan Tudge, the Minister for Human Services, said that this move is to deal with the long waiting times many people are subjected to when trying to get in touch with Centrelink, despite denying they are an issue at all. Myriad inquiries have found that getting through to Centrelink is difficult and that existing problems worsened after the robo-debt debacle.
The Community and Public Sector Union's National Secretary Nadine Flood is, unsurprisingly, not impressed. 'The Turnbull Government has cut and cut and cut at Centrelink, and is now trying to use the appalling service standards it has caused as justification for privatising a critical public service,' she said in a statement.
How adding a private company to human services delivery will solve some of the considerable problems with the current Centrelink system seems hard to understand. Long call waiting times are, in part, caused by a reduction in staff and a reliance on inexperienced, casual staff to fill short term demand. The CPSU says that over 5000 staff have been cut from the Department of Human Services over the last few years, despite an increase in the number of people receiving income support.
People contact Centrelink when something has gone wrong, or when there has been a big change in their lives; they lose their job, get sick or injured, have a baby or end a relationship. Encounters with Centrelink come with big feelings and lots of vulnerability.
Australia's highly targeted income support system means that eligibility is mostly for people at the bottom of the economic pile. Being poor is often hard, terrifying and demoralising. Finding ways to survive, keep a roof over your head and to get medication can be a daily struggle. The social security system is meant to be a safety net; instead payments are so low, and the compliance regime so harsh that it is becoming a barrier for people to get work at all.
The ACOSS Poverty in Australia 2016 report says that 'those doing it the toughest are overwhelmingly people living on the $38 a day Newstart payment, 55 per cent of whom are in poverty. This is followed by families on Parenting Payment (51.5 per cent), the majority of whom are lone parents with children.'
"The social safety net is not some kind of shopping centre, where everyone has the ability and capacity to go and select the right widget for their individual needs. Applying these kinds of market ideologies to a core public service is a laughable absurdity."
Injecting a for-profit company, such as Serco, into this stressed and stressful environment seems a strange move, until the Harper Review is taken into account. The Harper Review, released in 2015, was a review of existing competition policy with the goal of extending competition to what are euphemistically called 'human services' — the ones that deal with people. Some of the recommendations said that 'user choice should be placed at the heart of service delivery' and that 'governments should retain a stewardship function, separating the interests of policy (including funding), regulation and service delivery.'
Introducing competition to human services is supposed to improve efficiency and give people greater choice. How either of those could apply to Centrelink is baffling, given that the agency has a natural monopoly on managing the income support system. Welfare recipients are now 'consumers', just out shopping for their Newstart Allowance, I guess. Who delivers government functions is now irrelevant, as long as users exercise their magic choices.
But the social safety net is not some kind of shopping centre, where everyone has the ability and capacity to go and select the right widget for their individual needs. Applying these kinds of market ideologies to a core public service is a laughable absurdity, if it were not actually happening.
The Harper Review says 'designing markets for government services may be a necessary first step as governments contract out or commission new forms of service delivery, drawing on public funds.' Serco has been awarded $51.7m of public funds to manage part of a service that has no competitors. The Review goes on to say that these kinds of contracts will 'both empower consumers and improve productivity'. Right.

These kinds of ideologically blinkered approaches to marketisation should not be applied to core public services, such as the social safety net. The very accountability mechanisms that have led to such widespread reporting on the robo-debt disaster may end up shrouded in commercial in confidence agreements in the future. Will people have to go the Serco AGM to find out what has happened to the public monies that the company administers? And what kind of choice does this offer people who need Centrelink services, or is it more about making sure that a private company can profit off other people's misfortune?
No one should make a profit out of people being poor.
El Gibbs is a freelance writer specialising in the area of disability and social services and has over 15 years experience in the community and NFP sector, as well as politics. Find her on Twitter @bluntshovels