A labour hire workforce may look good on the books...

These are the employees of Services Australia, and right now they are working a squillion hours a day. From a 37.5-hour week filled by the strains and stresses of those with disadvantage, now they are working up to four hours of overtime each day, seven days a week. Where once there was a limit of 56 hours a week and no more than 12 days straight, these limits have now disappeared. The people they are dealing with, Australians shell-shocked by the shift in the economy, are devastated and desperate.

The folks at Centrelink are doing an amazing job under the circumstances, especially considering staff were told around 2 million Australians would have an intent to claim. General manager Hank Jongen said last week: "In the last two weeks, we have answered over one million calls, and processed record numbers of claims."

The folks who work at Centrelink are used to dealing with those in despair, but maybe not 1 million people at once and maybe not hundreds and thousands of people who have never in their lives dealt with welfare payments. As one Centrelink staffer said: "Members of the community who have never engaged with Centrelink are now needing assistance." [Let's hope that after this is over, if it ever is, those people will remember what it was like to need financial aid from the government urgently.]

Those who are staffing the call centres may sound like they know what they are talking about, but insiders say that those contracted to the "service delivery partners", more honestly called labour hire from companies such as Serco, Stellar, Datacomm and Concentrix, just do not have the expertise to deal with all the queries and questions. That results in double handling because the initial contact with the call centre doesn't have the expertise and must then hand the issue over to more experienced staffers. The national secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union, Melissa Donnelly, says labour hire arrangements lead to a high error rate. She says: "They don't have the benefit of sitting next to experienced staff with corporate memory and understanding."

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One Centrelink employee (who can't be named because employees are gagged from speaking out) said: "Some of them are only recently hired with no experience or knowledge of the agency or our work but will do the work whilst staff like myself are not able to do it." That person went on to say: "Even Centrelink staff in some areas that have previously processed claims aren't being utilised to process. The work, money and jobs are going to privatised services with little oversight."

Sounds like hell. But it's the result of years of degradation of Centrelink. The average staffing levels of the Department of Human Services declined by about 20 per cent between June 2011 and June 2019 - and there's been a massive expansion in labour hire. Cheap. Easy to dispense with. And sadly, not ready for the tsunami of need generated by COVID-19.

Michael Di Francesco, a public sector specialist at the ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy, says this reveals the broader policy setting within the public sector around average staffing levels. In other words, it's now understood that the cap on staffing levels, benchmarked by the levels at the end of the Howard era, are way too low.

"They've led to a diminution in the capacity of public sector agencies to deliver," he says. And those staffing levels are fake, anyhow, because the workaround - the hire of huge numbers of contract staff - still costs the nation money.

"Functional expertise and specialisation both need to be reflected in the workforce," Di Francesco says. "A highly trained, motivated full-time workforce that not only knows the programs inside out and the systems inside out but [is], in effect, able to deal with demands such as those we have now. It should have the capacity to respond to shocks, with people who know the systems and programs well enough to meet the demand when it's needed."

That need isn't going anywhere. If Google searches are anything to go by, we are in for a very long era of need. The lovely people at Google Trends tell me search interest for Centrelink has soared to a five-year high. Our worries wake us up, and searches for JobKeeper and JobSeeker start to surge at 5am. Those searches remain high until around 5pm.

The top trending question relating to JobKeeper in the past seven days is "When is job keeper starting?", which has spiked by 2220 per cent. "When will I receive jobseeker payment?" is the top trending question for JobSeeker, up more than 5000 per cent.

The ACT and Victoria are the places with the most searches for "jobkeeper" in the past 30 days, but search interest for "jobseeker" has been slightly higher than "jobkeeper" in all other states.This week, search volumes for "jobkeeper" are double the volumes for "jobseeker". Comparing the two topics by state and territory over the past 30 days shows search interest has been highest for JobKeeper in the ACT, followed by JobSeeker in Queensland.

In our land of sole tradies, it's interesting to note that the top five national trending questions for "jobkeeper" over the past seven days are:

But in the ACT, there's one specific question which stood out: "Are senior leadership team eligible for jobkeeper?"

One way for our senior leadership team to keep its job after the next election is to ensure they leave the public service in a fit state to serve the public. It's during these hard times we need Centrelink to support the community. Those inside are determined to serve, so the government must make it possible for this key agency to sustain a very needy Australian public.