I went down to our local Centrelink office the other day, the second such visit in a few months. It is a three-hour round trip but we had been instructed that it was better to go there in person. My wife and I are in our seventies and my wife, God bless her, works part-time as an interpreter and translator. Herein lies the problem. And it is a problem.

But first a good news story. My original experience regarding this organisation was in the early 1970s. I had stopped university studies and was driving a taxi in Melbourne and decided to go to the local dole office, as it was known in these days to sign up. The nearest office was in St Kilda and I fronted up to the main desk and noticed a familiar-looking lass who soon came over to help me. Turned out she was a good friend who had had a haircut so I hadn’t recognised her immediately. This lass in her twenties had just joined the Communist Party of Australia and in keeping with the philosophy of spreading wealth she asked me if I wanted two or three payments. She was quite confident that she could organise this for me but I was a young man of some principal without any socialist leanings and declined the offer. The system back then was obviously well open to abuse.

But it was a generous system and it ‘encouraged’ changes in Australian society, some good and some bad. History tends to focus on and record major events only such as wars, revolutions, or famine. Social history involves much slower patterns over time which are less well documented.

Dole payments to many younger folk in the mid-70s allowed a youthful migration into rural Australia. The so-called ‘hippy generation’ had morphed into the ‘Back to the Earth’ movement where thousands of young Australians began moving from cities to the countryside, bringing with them maturing skills of organic horticulture, weaving, spinning, glass making, leather crafts and other important artisan skills which had become less common in industrial cultures.

This pattern in time led to an explosion of markets now common in rural Australia as outlets for these new rural ‘industries’.

This historical pattern is little recognised but in effect these dole payments in the 1970s led to a change of culture in what had been a quite conservative rural landscape.

But back to the present. When I turned 65 I expected, like many novice pensioners, to automatically get the pension. Alas, this was not the case and because my wife worked part-time, it took over six months to get onto the system and the same thing happened to my wife when she reached pension age.

We were eventually ‘granted’ a small fortnightly sum and repeated phone calls to complain achieved no result whatsoever other than I managed to read Encyclopedia Britannica, volumes one and two, while waiting on the phone to speak to Centrelink operators over the months.

Finally, after about eight months, my wife got hold of a polite fellow who said that he would check our application again and lo and behold he found that some bureaucratic type had ticked an incorrect box. Problem solved.

But the problems continued…

In other countries, for example in New Zealand, you receive a full pension when you reach the requisite age. If you choose to work you are taxed like any other worker but your pension is not affected.

Not so in Australia. On our visits to Centrelink they tell us that my wife’s earnings are being ‘annualised’ and that our pension payment is based on our ‘income’ from the previous year, or the previous six-month period, or the previous nine-month period…

Part of the problem here is simply that part-time work can vary in the number of hours worked per week. So aside from visits to Centrelink, my wife has to ‘report in’ every two weeks to say what she has earned over the past fortnightly period and through all of these ‘deliberations’ our fortnightly payment is calculated.

On our last visit I left my good wife in the waiting area. I had sat with her for a while and then decided to go for a walk in the local town. When I got back she was still waiting.

On our visit some months back I noticed three burly security guards on duty and this was again the case. Obviously quite a number of unhappy and somewhat disgruntled Centrelink customers turn up regularly, hence the need for security guards.

I was disgruntled on our visit of some months ago and when we were finally granted an audience I firmly explained to the Centrelink fellow talking to us that their organization was highly inefficient.

He agreed with every point I made.

Looking around me in the very large space accommodating the Centrelink personnel I saw that we were the only people being ‘looked after’. There were probably around 20 folks seated in the ‘waiting area’, while around a similar number of Centrelink staff were seated at their desks occupied in some manner but not actually serving their customers. A few of the staff were at other desks chatting to other personnel and one lass was eating her sandwiches.

And so it was on our visit of a few days ago. A large number of people seated in the waiting area and a large number of Centrelink workers at their desks. But when my wife was finally granted an audience, she was the only one being attended to while the rest of the staff sat at their desks and their ‘customers’ waited.

A couple of the security people wanted to stop me going to join my wife after I came back from my walk but I made it into the ‘sacred’ area and sat down with my now visibly troubled partner.

After we left she told me that the person she had been talking with had been officious and unhelpful and that our pension had been reduced again even though my wife was sure she was earning less.

But the ‘annualisation’ process dictated a reduction to our fortnightly payment. She also told me that she had not understood the process at all. She felt sick after the whole experience. I felt a bit sick as well.

Apparently this feeling is not uncommon when your main source of income is changed for the worse and you do not understand the process behind the change.

Staff turnover rate in this organisation is high. New Centrelink workers are hired, given an induction, and in a few weeks they too are on the front line. High staff turnovers seem to contribute to inefficient systems.

It would be interesting to know the national Centrelink bill for security guards.

And certainly there would seem to be many pensioners unhappy with their treatment at Centrelink. Whether it is fear of being penalised through different asset assessments; partners working, random payment reductions, mistakes made in determining payments, and general bureaucratic malaise on a very large scale.

Centrelink has a large customer base and these customers depend on payments to survive in an economic climate where the cost of living including rent, power, fuel, and groceries have all gone through the roof and where many folk are seriously struggling to make ends meet.

Certainly Australia is a wonderful country, civilised, peaceful, a fine culture, but surely it is time to look at a better streamlined version of Centrelink if only for the mental health of their customer base?

Or should we remain with what is in effect a top-heavy, badly managed, bureaucracy, which is so inefficient and obviously aggravates so many people that security guards are needed to protect Centrelink staff.

It is time for Centrelink to be streamlined, simplified and made more customer-friendly. Then and only then, perhaps, they can dispense with burly security guards.

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