Pension wait has just got better

This time last year, we brought you a story about older Australians applying for the Age Pension were increasingly out of pocket as the time it took Centrelink to process their applications and payments were blowing out month on month. 

By last February, Centrelink had a backlog of nearly 34,000 claims and the waiting time had blown out to an average 84 days. 

Phone waiting time had also blown out to 30 minutes, sparking the comment from then Government Services Minister, Bill Shorten: “We’ve got a backlog of over a million payments,” he told the ABC. “I really want to get waiting times on phone calls down. 

“But let’s give it the next six months. I don’t expect new staff to produce miracles.” 

According to Centrelink, reasons for delays in claim processing include applicants not supplying all the necessary information or having complex financial affairs that need to be appropriately assessed through third parties. 

The “new staff” Mr Shorten referred to were, at that time, a proposal to recruit 3,000 additional staff to bring the logjam under control. 

It’s taken longer than six months, but it appears the extra public servants have got their feet under the desk and have contributed to chipping away at the wait-time figures.

The average time to process an Age Pension has been declining:

In other good news, Commonwealth Seniors Health Card average processing time has also dropped - from 50 days to 22 days. Processing times for the Home Equity Access Scheme have gone from 76 days to 56 days. 

Those of you planning to apply for the pension will note that there is still a waiting time of more than a month, and you should factor that into your application for the pension. 

Whether this improvement can be sustained is uncertain given the hullabaloo around how to pay for the $8.5 billion dollar Medicare bulk-billing funding promise by the government and opposition.  

The status of the public servants employed to address wait times could be uncertain.  

The opposition says it will find the money, by slashing public service spending, including culling public servants, but not front-line staff.  

Labor has not yet revealed how it plans to pay for it. 

NSA believes that simplifying the pension system, e.g., by Letting Pensioners Work or by creating a Universal Pension, would help to reduce onerous administration costs associated with seniors’ interactions with Services Australia and Centrelink.