After the bitter stoush today over where Services Australia staff were (and were not) deployed into flood zones, Labor MPs in Brisbane have welcomed news they’ll get more help for people in their electorates.
Opposition MPs including Jim Chalmers, Terri Butler, Murray Watt and Graham Perrett had complained that Services Australia staff weren’t in their local areas to help flood victims apply for Centrelink payments.
The government services minister Linda Reynolds denied the placement of staff was politically-motivated, blasting Labor for “playing cheap politics” with the disaster.
Reynolds’s office said Services Australia workers were being deployed mostly into evacuation centres, but said there were no such centres in the Labor-held electorates of Rankin, Griffith, Oxley and Moreton.
Applications for help are also able to be made online, on the phone or in-person at Centrelink offices. But Butler complained that people in her electorate had no power and therefore couldn’t use their phones, and it was difficult to travel physically to Centrelink offices due to flooded roads.
Perrett called the situation “the lowest dog act ever”.
Butler suggested to authorities that Services Australia staff could be deployed to other locations besides evacuation centres, like community centres, to help out.
She told Guardian Australia she’d been informed that a community centre in the West End area of her electorate would be visited by Services Australia staff on Friday morning. Perrett’s office said they’d also suggested suitable locations to federal authorities.
We’ve contacted Services Australia for comment. Butler said she was relieved, but frustrated at the delay.
“It shouldn’t have taken days of pushing from us … it shouldn’t have taken me cracking the shits at a flood briefing. It’s now Thursday in the middle of the day,” she said.
“I had no intention of trying to be partisan in this disaster and I’m still seeking to avoid it where I can. But where things are obviously not being done and there’s an obvious disproportionate response between government and non-government electorates, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t calling that out.”
