The decision to close the Braddon Centrelink shopfront in December and merge it with the Gungahlin bureau was made five months before October’s official announcement, it was revealed in Senate Estimates hearings last week.

Services Australia said they decided not to renew the lease – which runs out in February – because customer numbers had declined significantly, and the agency was modernising its shopfronts.

Under questioning from ACT Labor Senator Katy Gallagher on Thursday, Senator Linda Reynolds, Minister for Government Services, said she received a noting brief from Services Australia in May about the decision.

“I think it makes perfect sense, particularly as in Gungahlin and Belconnen, the service centres are being upgraded,” Senator Reynolds said.

The old Centrelink buildings from the 1970s through the 1990s – “quite confronting and old-style” – were progressively going, the Minister said. The modernised shopfronts would be “really pleasant to walk in”, with concierges and online facilities: “A very different service offering from the past.”

“This is all part of that process,” Senator Reynolds said. “Having seen a number of these centres, I absolutely agreed with the CEO and the organisation’s decision.”

But Canberra MP Alicia Payne, an outspoken opponent of the government’s plan to close the shopfront, pointed out this meant the Minister was informed almost half a year before the government publicly confirmed the shopfront would be axed, on October 15, two and a half weeks ago.

The decision had already been made when Senator Reynolds wrote to Ms Payne in June; then, the MP said, the Minister’s letter read: “The agency is currently considering its face-to-face service offer for North Canberra.”

“This decision and the secretive way it has been made is so disappointing,” Ms Payne said. “It is disappointing the department did not even bother conducting community consultation around this, or consider what the closure means for the thousands of people who use the Braddon shopfront.

“I’m pretty sure the 27,000 people who use it every year aren’t worried about architectural aesthetics – they just want a person to help them with their payments.”

The current lease will end on 28 February. Grant Tidswell, Deputy CEO of Services Australia, said the landlord no longer wanted government tenancy, and that the agency would have expected lease costs to increase.

The number of ‘customer contacts’ declined 40 per cent between 2016 and 2020; 58,175 customers used the shopfront in 2015/16: only 27,250 in 2019/20. (That last figure includes three months of COVID lockdown.)

“It is certainly evidence of a significant drop in the customer traffic … in the Braddon location,” said Sandy Mamo, Deputy CEO and General Manager, Face to Face Services.

Services Australia attributed the decline in customer numbers to changing demographics; once a public housing area, Braddon was now a retail and restaurant area. Moreover, poor parking made the shopfront difficult to reach, argued Services Australia CEO Rebecca Skinner, whereas the Gungahlin shopfront was close to light rail.

“The accessibility of Braddon is not in the favour of people who we need to support,” Ms Skinner said.

But, Senator Gallagher said: “Central Canberra is the heart of the city, and now there isn’t a Centrelink office there.”

Many people who use the Braddon shopfront come from elsewhere, Services Australia argued. Many, in fact, come from Belconnen, Mr Tidswell said. Ms Skinner expected some would readily go to the Gungahlin centre, while others would likely go to Woden.

“Typical workers in the city may use that service, but they’re often people that potentially live in a place like Gungahlin or Belconnen,” Ms Mamo said. “They swing between utilisation of either one of those centres.”

In moving out of the city centre, Mr Tidswell said Services Australia would follow a similar pattern to the ACT Government. It was moving its Territory services out of Civic to the town centres, creating one-stop shops, Mr Tidswell noted; Access Canberra, for instance, was no longer in Civic.

Services Australia was repurposing and reimagining its face-to-face network, Mr Tidswell said, to make it more contemporary, and provide better customer service. The new service centres had been ‘contemporised’ to make them digitally accessible, and customers could now make appointments, Senator Reynolds said. Online appointments and a virtual service centre would help customers with specific needs access specialist staff across the country.

Over the next two years (up to the end of 2023), the agency would look at all its service centres to see if they met need. The government had no target for closing service centres down, Mr Tidswell said, and apparently shutting more Canberra shopfronts is not on the cards.

“We have no more plans in Canberra,” Mr Tidswell said. “We are progressively going through the service centres in Canberra, and we’ll be modernising them and making them more fit for purpose in this current age.”

Services Australia did not want people wasting their time queuing up, Ms Skinner said; they could make an appointment, and expect to be served when they arrived at the centre, particularly if they had more complex needs. The 30,000 customer contacts, Ms Skinner noted, included straightforward “express” purposes (printing certificates, or dropping off paperwork).

Even once the Braddon Centrelink closed, Ms Skinner said, Canberra would have more access to shopfronts than most Australian metropolitan centres; 96 per cent of ACT residents would remain within 7 km of a service centre, compared to a national average of 89 per cent.

Senator Reynolds, asked by Senator Gallagher whether she would guarantee that people currently using the Braddon shopfront would not be dislocated, replied that Senator Gallagher could not assume that customers would be disadvantaged.

“It’s not an either/or,” Senator Reynolds said. “There are still people who like to come in personally for a whole variety of reasons, but there are many ways that Australians who need help from Services Australia can get it.”

The number of people using the shopfront had significantly reduced during COVID restrictions, Ms Skinner said, but that did not inhibit Services Australia’s ability to service those customers.

Ms Payne, however, believes closing the shopfront will make life harder for vulnerable Canberrans, job seekers, pensioners, carers, people with disability and students.

“Some of Centrelink’s own conditions require customers to come into a face-to-face shop front so it can’t be replaced entirely by online services,” she said.

“There are people who are homeless who don’t have a computer or a smartphone, let alone an address, or women fleeing domestic violence, who need to just go and speak to someone who might not want to be at home on a computer looking into these things.

“‘Digitally accessible’ just sounds like the government taking the human out of human services to me.”

Earlier this year, The Guardian reported, Services Australia publicly apologised after Ms Mamo sent an email asking staff to “minimise” “vulnerable customers’ … need to contact the agency, thereby reducing potential customer aggression”. The Community and Public Sector Union said Services Australia seemed “more concerned with removing access for complex clients”.

Ms Payne urged Canberrans to sign the petition on her website to keep the Braddon shopfront open, and to write to Senator Reynolds and to ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja to express their disappointment at the decision.

Senator Seselja had contacted Senator Reynolds about the service closure, she stated.