Australia

3582 readers

174 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
Politics, post it to Australian Politics
World News/Events, post it to World News
A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Dealing with a government welfare system for the first time in a while. (hachyderm.io)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Dealing with a government welfare system for the first time in a while.

Last time there were still people you’d talk to who’d smooth over the process.

Now it’s all online and automated.

And holy fucking hellscape Batman.

They’ve just shipped the whole bureaucracy along with their own software bugs.

And as the welfare seeker you have to navigate all of the details and jargon (and bugs/broken links) without any assurance that anything is ok, hoping the money comes.

#welfare

@australia

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] pmarksen 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/25/centrelink-issues-28m-busy-messages-to-callers-in-only-two-months-as-wait-times-blow-out

I had an issue getting through on the phone and the app wouldn’t let me get past a certain point so I went into the local office…who after giving me a series of wrong and misleading information which I repeatedly pointed out was wrong and showed them their own website to prove it…then told me I HAD to call because they weren’t trained enough to deal with it.

The worker told me that the trick to get through, start dialling the minute before they open and finish dialling at exactly opening time. Well that kind of worked because it reduced my time on hold to….1hr 25mins. But I did speak to someone. Who couldn’t help me either. Or tell me what was wrong. Or how to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

@pmarksen

So so sorry to hear.

Otherwise, yea this doesn't sound surprising. From my recent limited experience it seems like a system held together with duck tape.

Which is funny, because if the fear from govt is to prevent people from becoming professional "dole-bludgers", making the system so hard to use that it requires special skills and experience is the wrong thing to do.

I'm sure there are all sorts of silly loop holes and bugs that plenty of people have learnt to exploit.