Centrelink, mutual obligation and individualised service delivery
Cosmo Howard
Australian National University
Contact Email:   Cosmo.Howardanu.edu.au

Recent Australian welfare reforms have been dominated by rhetoric about individualised service delivery. While unemployed income support recipients in Australia are increasingly compelled to undertake activities as a condition of receiving benefits, there is also a growing emphasis on the importance of treating recipients as individuals and incorporating their ‘choice and voice’. The Commonwealth Government claims that participants in its Mutual Obligation Initiative get to exercise choice and to negotiate ‘activity agreements’ that are tailored to their individual needs. They are also supposed to be able to maintain ‘one to one’ relationships with individual staff members from Centrelink, the Australian benefits agency. To date there has been no academic or publicly available research on Centrelink’s implementation of these individualised service delivery agendas. In this paper I report on the findings of a doctoral study into the administration of the Mutual Obligation activity requirements in Centrelink. The qualitative study relies on interviews with customers and frontline staff and observations of the meetings at which activity agreements are formulated and signed. I argue that individualised service is not consistently provided in Centrelink. Customers do not maintain one to one relationships with staff, while staff cannot tailor requirements to individual needs. Customers cannot meaningfully exercise choice or undertake negotiation.

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