Mr RUDD (10:49 PM) —There was a delightful irony in some of the remarks just made by my colleague opposite, the member for Robertson, who spoke before me. When we listened to Senator Alston on television on Sunday talking about the great benefits to be delivered by Telstra under its current management and ownership, we seemed to have a government claiming fully the benefits of being able to dragoon Telstra into undertaking a new charging regime. Yet the government seems to think that, once Telstra is fully privatised, according to its plans as they have been currently put to the Australian people, the government will be in a position to continue to dragoon Telstra into doing anything. It is quite a remarkable twist in the logic. But enough of that for this evening.

On most Saturday mornings in my electorate, I conduct a mobile office session. Last Saturday was no exception. I was at Stones Corner, which is in suburban Brisbane. You often find out some very interesting things when people come to talk to you about their experiences of government, either as a consumer of government services or as a government employee. Last Saturday was no exception. I had a woman come up to me to talk to me about what it was like being an employee in the Centrelink call centre in downtown Brisbane, just next to the customs house. There has been a lot of debate in the parliament about the changes which have occurred to various payments and to various categories of persons under this government. We have had the bogus $1,000 bonus for age pensioners, 40 per cent of whom never got it and 20 per cent of whom got something in the vicinity of $1 to $50. We now have the debate about the $300 bonus, and those who are now not eligible for that. We have also had the debate about the two per cent clawback on pensions, the hike in pharmaceutical co-payments, the axing of free dental care, the axing of hearing aids for retirees and a range of changes to pension benefits.

What this woman came to talk to me about on Saturday morning was the impact of this raft of changes on her workplace and the ability of the staff working in the call centre for Centrelink in Brisbane to manage the sheer breadth and pace of change. She spoke to me at length about the stress which staff are under; she spoke to me at length about the unhappiness of customers that staff at this call centre had to deal with, and she spoke about being confronted with absurd findings from surveys conducted by management which in one case indicated that 78 per cent of Centrelink customers were `happy to be breached'. She informed me that, in her experience of people who were being breached in terms of their payments, happiness was the emotion least in their minds as they expressed their response to those who were trying to service them through the call centre.

She also spoke to me about the impact on staff morale of the error factor which understaffing at the call centres was causing. Of course, we have had the report from the Auditor-General which indicates that there has only been something like a 46 per cent accuracy rate in the payment and processing of pension claims. The same report says that 5.9 per cent of pensions were rejected when they should not have been, 13.5 per cent of claims were just plain wrong in the amount which was paid and, in terms of the $1,000 savings bonus which was offered last year, we had a total of some 31,430 corrections which needed to be made to it once the errors were discovered in the initial calculations. Staffing levels are proving to be inadequate and, in the case of this particular call centre, management has now decreed that there will be something called a `getting it right strategy', which is leading to much hilarity around the staffroom at the call centre in downtown Brisbane.

However, the thing which really struck me about the story that I was told concerned the way in which people at that call centre are being treated. To use the term which the woman who came to speak to me used, people are being treated like `battery hens'. She told me that every call in which these workers at the call centre were involved was monitored, that every amount of time they spent on the computer processing the results of an individual call was monitored and that every minute they spent away from their desks on toilet breaks or whatever was monitored. She said to me, `You don't need to watch Channel 10 to see Big Brother. What you need to do is simply come down to the call centre in the middle of Brisbane and see Big Brother at work.' She said, `This is having an enormous impact on the morale of workers at the centre and it is very difficult for those workers to sustain anything like the productivity levels necessary to deliver the outcomes which government expects of them.' Yet in the midst of all this we have a government which is spending $4 million on advertising Centrelink services. Government should instead be spending this money on staff. (Time expired)