Orange woman Claudia Harris waits in line at Sydney passport office for 12 hours

The business owner from Orange in NSW applied for the travel document six weeks ago, and with only a month left until she was due to fly to Europe, she decided to take matters into her own hands and went down to the passport office in Sydney.

"They say at the post office that it will take six weeks, but people have been waiting since the first week of March," she said.

"I thought that if they're taking this long, there's no way I'll get mine by the time I leave, especially with the regional post which is another week."

Having waited in line and heard some of the stories from other people, Ms Harris counted herself lucky as having "only" waited six weeks.

"There was a lady there on Monday who was flying out on Wednesday whose passport had been at the office since the first week of March," she said.

"There was another lady whose honeymoon was delayed three times due to COVID and she was flying out that Monday night, so she had no passport the day she was leaving. She got it after six hours in line and you just saw her sprint out of the passport office to the airport."

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade advised new passports may take "up to six weeks to process" as the reopening of borders increases demand.

But reports have been coming in from across the state that passports are consistently taking longer than that.

When Ms Harris first applied for her passport, she understood there might be an added wait time to what one might normally encounter, but she said the lack of communication was big issue throughout the six weeks of waiting.

"You can't ring anyone," she said.

"I rang 72 times while I was in line and that's no exaggeration. You just keep tapping because it says 'user busy' and they hang straight up on you."

A call to the Australian Passport Office found that people were being told that hold times were on average 90 minutes long and that the process to get a passport would take "at minimum" six weeks, different from the "up to six weeks" people were being told as recently as early June.

"Surely the government could have seen this coming," Ms Harris added.

"To think that NSW has one passport office in the whole entire state is just crazy. At one stage the line didn't move for 2.5 hours, we just sat in the same spot."

At the end of Ms Harris' 12 hour wait, she had a conversation "not even three minutes long" and was told her passport would soon be in her possession.

And while she has been advised that her passport is now on its way, she will only be able to relax "once it's in my hand."

In the second week of June, the Australian Passport Office announced it would recruit more than 250 extra staff in an effort to address delays after a backlog of travellers submitted a record number of applications.