Showing My Appreciation for Centrelink

I'm a huge supporter of the work that the team at Centrelink do. I visited Centrelink Morley in January of this year. Centrelink Morley is one of the largest Centrelink's in Western Australia. I said hello to Cheryl, Helen and their team, and I say a huge thank you to the team at Centrelink Morley for all the work they did. At that point in time I was there to thank them because a number of their staff had actually come over to the Eastern States in response to the bushfires to help with local service delivery in response to the bushfires.

Less than two months later, they were finding themselves in another crisis on the frontline helping people in their darkest hour. And so again in May of this year I went to say thank you to keep their spirits up. They had worked incredibly hard, lots of overtime dealing with people in incredibly distressful situations. Data shows that in March, 5854 people access services at Morley Centrelink. 4331 in April, 4386 in May.

Despite the fact that this Centrelink is relied on by thousands of Western Australians every month, when I wrote to the minister and said, can you guarantee that it will stay open, he said, “we've got a lot of online services.” All I wanted to know is that my local Centrelink would stay open during this crisis and the response I got was, "go online." It is unbelievable that we can't even get a guarantee from this government about Morley Centrelink, one of the busiest Centrelink's in Western Australia