In the wake of the unlawful robodebt scandal, the agency at its heart is ready to be "really open", its new boss says.
It is a sentiment which will be put to the test in hours of Senate estimates hearings from Monday, focused on Services Australia. Officials, led by new chief executive David Hazlehurst, will try to impress on politicians and the broader public that things are turning around.
Primarily, that will mean proving billions of dollars, and thousands of extra staff poured into the agency, have brought wait times for key Centrelink and Medicare services down.
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten has already declared a bloated claims backlog has been slashed, in April revealing that 3000 additional staff - announced in November 2023 - had processed about 500,000 claims in the span of 10 weeks.
"We're not there yet, but we've turned the corner," Mr Hazlehurst told The Canberra Times on May 21.
"And turning the corner means that, for example, the claims backlog peaked at about 1.35 million ... it's down now.
"It goes up and down but it's down now to 650-660,000, so it's basically halved in that time."
The agency has acknowledged publicly that call wait times have blown out unacceptably, with waits for Centrelink services sitting around 32 minutes in August 2023.
Officials will reveal that has fallen to around 24 to 26 minutes in the most recent telephony data.
"We'd like to get that down to 15 minutes," Mr Hazlehurst said. "So we've still got a way to go on that, but we're also using less congestion messages."
The agency issued more than 7.4 million congestion messages to Centrelink callers who were unable to get through, between July and December 2023.
"The additional investment and the sustainment of that over the next couple of years means we can keep improving," Mr Hazlehurst said.
"We can keep getting that trajectory back to where people expect us to be and, to be frank, where our staff want us to be.
"Because obviously it's a far more satisfying experience for our staff who are really purpose driven."
Some of those new staff include team leader Thomas Bradshaw, and service officer Amarnath Maherwal, both of whom reflect on culture in the troubled agency positively.
They are two of the hundreds of new recruits in Canberra, though staff have been hired all over the country, including nearly 500 in Western Sydney and 500 in South-east Queensland.
Mr Hazlehurst began in the agency on January 8, on the same day as 900 other staff - the largest cohort to commence at Services on a single day.
One of his key responsibilities will be continuing to reckon with the findings of the robodebt royal commission. It was a process begun by former chief executive Rebecca Skinner, who was brought on after the scheme, and apologised to innocent staff for the "heavy burden" they carry.
The agency was "still on the journey" of learning from robodebt, which Commissioner Catherine Holmes last year determined to be "crude and crude, neither legal nor fair".
"One of the big learnings for us, which we're really responding to well now is to be really open about ideas that we've got, things that we might want to do differently or better," Mr Hazlehurst said.
"[We] test those with stakeholders, with the public early, rather than developing up an idea polishing it within an inch of its life, and then revealing it to people."
