Senator CROWLEY (3:13 PM) —One could say that the speech that Senator Payne has just given is the answer we should have heard from the minister before, and it certainly does go some way in defence of Centrelink. Centrelink's ambitions have just been very well described; Centrelink's performance is something else again.

Some of us have had the opportunity, as part of a regional employment inquiry which I chaired, to visit and cover many, many places around Australia this year. Again and again, the complaint from the Job Network providers and from the people who were looking for jobs and assistance through the Job Network was that Centrelink was one of the major breakdowns and failings in that process. Centrelink, for something like eight weeks, failed to provide referrals to Job Network agencies. That is why so many unemployed people were disadvantaged, and why so many Job Network providers went to the wall.

So you might have listened to Senator Payne's excellent description of what Centrelink might be or might even strive to be, but it is not a description of what it is. Certainly it is not. As for the suggestion that it has a new service delivery model that makes everything wonderful for the community out there, anyone who has ever rung a 1300 number trying to get information from the department will know that the time delays are very extensive.

Senator Calvert —Not all the time.

Senator CROWLEY —No, not all the time, but one of the most recent calls I made involved a 20-minute wait. That is no service assistance to the community.

One of the things that really troubled me when listening to Senator Payne's answer on behalf of the minister was the use of the word `customer'. Most of us do not think of people as `customers' of government services. People who go to Centrelink or the department of social security or Medibank offices are not customers. They are citizens—they are people of this country. They are not there to buy a service; they are there to access what the public sector in this country provides for its citizens, for its people. I think the use of the word `customer' conveys a whole mentality that is characteristic of this government, and one of the reasons why so many women—another responsibility of Minister Newman—in the last election voted overwhelmingly to support Labor.

I find the mean spiritedness of Minister Newman interesting. On occasions she has told us of the pride that Mr Howard and the coalition government took in their success in 1996 to have so many women come into office. She has certainly not offered the same congratulations to the Labor Party, with so many women who have been successful in coming into the parliament this time around. I have actually congratulated Liberal women in the past on their successes. I would have thought it was befitting of the Minister for the Status of Women to also acknowledge the success of the Labor Party in getting so many excellent women, along with their male colleagues, into parliament this time around. Many of them, of course, are in safe Labor seats and they are here for the long haul—excellent.

Much of what Centrelink is proposing to do with the amalgamation of the service delivery so as to make it customer friendly—building on what the Labor government had instituted and was in the process of implementing—had already started. It is not the policy or the intention that the opposition and I stand here to criticise today; it is about exactly what is happening. This process is fraught with difficulties and, like the Job Network, the minister fails to acknowledge that.

Senator Newman is saying, `If you want to know about Centrelink, I am the minister with portfolio responsibilities in the book, but don't ask me any questions. Centrelink stands by itself; you'll have to ask them direct.' Where does ministerial responsibility for the insufficiencies of this organisation stop? They stop with Minister Newman, who is actually stopping thousands of citizens getting easy and proper access. It stops with the 5,000 people who are going to lose their jobs from Centrelink over the next fews years, as people are going to be encouraged—the `customers'—to find out what their services are from a touch screen. I hope they have had lessons in how to use it. Thousands of people who would rather talk to somebody in the department or in Centrelink to assist will, I think, be disadvantaged.

Minister Newman, who has responsibility for Centrelink, is failing in her service to the citizens. She has failed to come before the parliament to answer questions that relate to the status of women. There are many things that the Howard government has sneered at that Labor introduced. They have decided to cut the funding, and lots of services for women are no longer in existence. The minister does not support the services to assist women that have continued. (Time expired)