Services Australia: A Year On

Today marks a year since the Prime Minister announced the Government’s vision for Services Australia.

On the 26th of May 2019 the Prime Minister said:

“A key focus for all of my team will be on lifting and improving service delivery for all Australians, for services that Australians rely on.

I spoke about it when I brought together the heads of the public service. I want to see congestion-busting not only on our roads and across our major cities; I want to see congestion busting when it comes to bureaucratic bottlenecks and regulatory bottlenecks, so Australian can get access to those services in a more timely and efficient way for them, making better use of technology and better integrating service delivery across portfolios.

The goal is to make it easier to deal with services that Australians rely on… that’s what we want government to be for Australians, we just want it to be much easier.”

He made clear his intent for the establishment of this new Executive Agency: excellence in service delivery for the Australian Government.

A year on it is clear Services Australia is delivering in exceptional circumstances and has proven to be an agency postured to respond to unprecedented times. 

Faced with a Black Summer of bushfires, followed by the global coronavirus, as Minister for Government Services I have seen how Australians have reached out in record numbers and how Services Australia has been there to support them.

Throughout the Black Summer Bushfires Services Australia staff deployed over 20 Mobile Support Teams alongside the Australian Defence Force into dozens of communities in fire grounds from the South Coast, to Kangaroo Island and East Gippsland. This innovative system of small teams enabled by mobile servicing technology worked in tandem with our Mobile Service Centres to get help into hard-to-reach communities across the country.  

Through embracing the New Payments Platform we were able to get disaster payments to thousands of Australians who had lost everything to the bushfires within minutes of their applications. We also successfully trialed facial verification technology to provide support to those who had lost identity documents. To date hundreds of millions of dollars has been paid directly to thousands of Australians in need across the country.

In recent months Services Australia has faced the most significant demand for social supports since the Great Depression. Whether managing the queues at our network of sites across the country or the massive and unprecedented demands on our digital channels, including myGov and our hotlines, Services Australia has been there as people sought assistance and information.

With hard work Services Australia cleared the queues, and made impressive strides in process simplification and digital processing, keeping Australians safe at home and getting them help faster.

This included enabling people to establish their identity online, providing customer reference numbers via myGov and introducing a simplified online claim form, which people can complete in about 20 minutes, as opposed to the previous average of about 55 minutes.

Australians can now obtain a CRN and apply for JobSeeker all online through myGov, something successive governments have been trying to deliver for years. Services Australia has delivered this in just four weeks.

In the face of this unprecedented demand we've surged thousands of extra staff redirecting people from within Services Australia, across the Public Service and from service delivery partners—totalling around 12,000 people.

Within approximately 50 days, we processed as many JobSeeker claims as we normally would in two years and as a result more than 800,000 Australians who have lost their jobs are today receiving financial assistance.

As the payment infrastructure of government, Services Australia has successfully delivered more than $5.1 billion in $750 economic support payments into the bank accounts of 6.8 million eligible Australians.

Thanks to Services Australia all Medicare related claims, changes or inquiries can now be done online or over the phone. This includes newborn enrollments, re-enrollments for people returning to Australia, and linking Medicare cards to myGov.

We've implemented 279 new services to the Medicare Benefits Schedule, some within hours of announcement, to support recent policy changes, and as of 10 May, almost half a billion dollars has been spent on these COVID-specific Medicare services alone, to support 5.4 million Australians—minimising the risk of infection to health professionals and other patients in waiting rooms and helping to keep us all safe.

Services Australia is delivering additional payments worth hundreds of millions of dollars to support the aged-care sector. These payments include a new COVID-19 subsidy are  supporting around 1,800 providers of residential care and home care and their staff, and around 350,000 care recipients.

Services Australia’s digital channels today can support vastly more Australians than at any time in history.

In 2019, about 571,000 people accessed myGov every day—during the working week in April it supported an average of 1.7 million logins. That's a million extra Australians logging in, every day, to myGov.

Our busiest day, 25 March, had almost three million people logging into their myGov account, compared to the previous busiest day of 1.8 million logins in July last year during tax peak time.

For an authenticated online platform, myGov now has the largest capacity in Australia.

Services Australia has been working closely throughout the crisis with the Digital Transformation Agency who with the Department of Health worked to build and manage the world-leading COVIDSafe health app, which has seen over 6 million registrations—a key step on the road to recovery.

And Services Australia continues the BAU efforts through provision of Medicare, the PBS, child support, and aged care support to all Australians, when they need it, at some of the most critical moments of their lives.

In its first year it is clear Services Australia has already demonstrated the capacity to deliver for Australians in great need, living out the Prime Minister's vision for service delivery in the Morrison government.

A year ago we could not have foreseen just how important that objective would be.

A year on—I say thank you to Services Australia staff for their passion and dedication in what you have achieved for Australians so far and for what we will do together into the future.

And a year on it is abundantly clear Services Australia is already living out its purpose.

I gave a speech on the floor of the Parliament reflecting on what Services Australia has achieved over the past year I would encourage you to read it here.