The human services minister, Alan Tudge, says he is unaware of any Centrelink recipient who is “completely convinced” they have been given a debt notice they do not owe.
Tudge spoke on the Centrelink debacle for the first time since his return from summer holidays on Wednesday morning, saying he was committed to maintaining the government’s controversial automated debt-recovery system.
He told ABC’s radio national that he did not believe the process was flawed, despite a flood of complaints to media outlets, unions, politicians, lawyers and support agencies of vulnerable Australians struggling to deal with inaccurate welfare debts, sometimes in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“I’m not aware of individuals who are completely convinced that they don’t owe money but have been given a debt notice,” Tudge said.
“I have read all of the media reporting of this but as I said, people are given the opportunity to update their records when a discrepancy is found to be present,” he said.
The comments are likely to rankle the many welfare recipients who have shown that they have been given inaccurate notices of welfare debts, only to have them dramatically reduced when challenged.
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Tudge expressed surprise at reports that some people were having to call Centrelink up to 350 times before getting through.
“I’m very surprised by that figure. I know that the call wait time for Centrelink can be long, the average call wait time at present is about 12 minutes,” he said.
“People can also go to a Centrelink office and typically they’ll be able to see a person, in person, within 10 minutes.”His comments are at odds with the reports of welfare recipients, who are told to go online or use the agency’s phone service when they attend a physical office.
It also belies the significant problems faced by users of Centrelink’s phone system, which in 2013-14, blocked 13.7m of 56.8m calls and saw 30% of users hang up before reaching call staff, according to the Australian National Audit Office.
Tudge also said he had been taken out of context when he threatened to jail welfare recipients.