I first entered the job market as a teenager in rural Australia at a time when local youth unemployment was over 50% and I couldn't get work despite applying for everything available. So my first experience of 'work' was the stigma and poverty of long term unemployment, which was depressing, demoralising and bad for my motivation and self worth. Even though you know it's not your fault your home town is economically depressed and there's no job for you, you are given the message by the media, people around you, and by Centrelink, that it is your fault, and you can't help be partly affected by that. Centrelink no longer have a culture of service delivery but of compliance and punishment, and you are made to feel like a criminal underclass. You are constantly being threatened with being starved or made homeless by having your meager subsistence payments cut, it they deem you to have not met your obligations to the letter. You feel powerless to challenge Centrelink, you just put your head down and go along with every stupid resume writing course they put you in, and try not to argue so that you can still have a roof over your head. They have the power of destroying your life, actually and literally.
You become hyper aware of their reporting rules for casual and part time income because if you get it wrong you can be left with not enough to pay rent again. In the period they are alleging I was overpaid I had work from 5 different casual employers, and hours varied from week to week. You have to report the income earnt in a Centrelink fortnightly reporting cycle, but your employer's paysilps work on a different cycle and you usually don't get the documentation, or the payment, until later. So sometimes you have to guess. Your pay can change on different shifts, and it can be difficult to work out before you get a paysilp. I am sure I would have calculated my earnings wrong in some fortnights, although I did it to the best of my knowledge with the information at hand it was complicated and I'm not a payroll accountant. So I do think it's possible I was overpaid and/or underpaid on some occasions. But I also know Centrelink have calculated overpayments incorrectly and come up with a wrong figure to issue their debt notice. They have taken earnings from two separate employers at times when I was not receiving a payment from them, and averaged them out over 26 fortnights of a financial year, to count them as earnings in time periods when I was receiving Centrelink payments. This is just factually wrong, and it seems to be a denial of natural justice to claim a debt based on a miscalculation. If it's not illegal it should be.
The first letter I got from Centrelink asked me to confirm employment income in their online system within roughly two weeks from receipt of the letter. I didn't have payslips from 2011-2013 as I was not required to keep them for tax or any other purpose, and I knew I wouldn't be able to get them in that short a time period. I tried on three separate days to login to the Centrelink system, one day it was down, the other time my login was refused repeatedly, and the third time I was locked out. It had been three years since I had any dealings with Centrelink so I figured I had no account anymore and tried to get on to the MyGov site. That was also down, then finally when I got through I couldn't link to Centrelink either. So I gave up and waited for the debt notice knowing I'd have to challenge it and seek a review.
The debt notice came on the thursday before christmas alleging I owed over two thousand dollars, including a $150 'recovery fee' and I had to pay by January 13th. I'd seen the minister on TV that week threatening jail for anyone who didn't pay, and I was already hearing about other people being harassed by debt collectors. My stress levels went through the roof, I work part time casual and have no savings, and I knew the alleged debt had to be wrong, but I had no indication of how they worked it out and arrived at that decision - and I also knew it was possible I had got some overpayments due to the difficulty of correctly self reporting income before it's documented. I couldn't connect to Centrelink by phone on the friday before christmas at all, or on any day between christmas and New Year. So it was hanging over my head the whole time, I had a depressing christmas and was scared to spend any money. I had until January 13th to challenge the fake debt, but they were closed for more than a week of that time, and I know from past experience it can take days to get through on the phone anyway when they're open.
In the week after Christmas I couldn't log on to the Centrelink site. It took me several calls and nearly two hours on the phone on the Tuesday after New Years to finally get through to them and ask for a review. The person I spoke to sounded stressed and agreed that the alleged debt was incorrectly calculated, he actually mentioned the media coverage and confirmed that their system had wrongly averaged out earnings in one period over the whole year. There was nothing he could do about it on the phone except put my case in for review. He got me access to the Centrelink online system and I was able to see their debt calculation, which was completely wrong - so wrong I couldn't work it out. I was told I would have to agree to a payment plan while I was waiting for review, or they would refer me to debt collectors. They wanted a minimum payment of $350 a month, which I can't afford on my part time wage. So I was able to negotiate it down to $240 a month, which will be financially stressful and make it difficult to pay bills and rent. I can't sustain that for long and I'm concerned I'll have to start selling household and personal posessions to get by if it lasts too long. The person I spoke to couldn't tell me how long a review will take as they are getting a lot of people contacting them now and are understaffed. He claimed I would be reimbursed any money I paid them if I was found to owe nothing. I know from bitter experience how hard it is to deal with Centrelink and I'm concerned that getting money back off them will be a similarly long, frustrating, soul sucking, Kafka-esque nightmare with no guarantee of success.
Obviously the staff member I spoke to understood the problem, and was able to acknowledge that the system was spitting out wrong debt calculations, but they couldn't do much to help me. So now I wait an unspecified amount of time to see what they decide. I feel like I can't fix my car, pay off my credit card, put money aside for bills as I normally would because I have to pay them - whether I owe anything or not. This just brings back all those feelings of being an unwanted underclass, being treated like a criminal when you've done nothing wrong. Part of me thinks screw them I'll just go to jail, or I'll go bankrupt and by the time it's dissolved this government will be out and the mess sorted out. But part of me thinks I might legitimately owe a few hundred bucks, I really don't know. I wish they'd had a better system of income reporting or checking with employers at the time so this had never happened.
I feel like the Government is attacking me, frankly. When I work, and shop, I pay tax, and I pay tax to contribute to a welfare safety net that a rich country like ours can afford to have in place for any citizen when they need income support. There's no shame in getting a payment from Centrelink when you are entitled to it and need it to survive. Millions of Australians benefit from Centrelink payments of one kind or another at some time in their life. I feel like since John Howard's government politicians have adopted the tabloid press ideology of welfare bashing quite openly, and I've been treated like a kind of criminal by Centrelink, with suspicion and distrust. They have reversed the onus of proof enshrined in our legal system to guilty until proven innocent. Speaking plainly it freaks me out, because the Minister has threatened me with jail, and the Social Services Minister denies there is anything wrong with their system, they're even denying that the letters sent are debt notices, it's insulting, it's threatening and it's depressing as hell. It's class war. I utterly oppose them and wish I could vote them out, but I never voted them in to start with. If this was France we'd be burning their luxury Gold Coast Apartments by now, not that it would solve anything.