Covid-19 Victorian hotline relief callers told to wait 17 hours

‘Your estimated wait time is about 17 hours and five minutes. All of our operators are attending to other calls at the moment. Your call is important to us.’

The Victorian government said the hotline had received 4043 calls to 3pm on Monday – 30 per cent more than the total for the previous Monday.

“Your estimated wait time is about 17 hours and five minutes. All of our operators are attending to other calls at the moment. Your call is important to us.”

That’s the message desperate Victorian small business owners received when they phoned the Andrews government’s Business Victoria hotline on Monday.

The government has attributed the message to a “technical issue” and maintains calls were answered within 10 to 20 minutes.

The phone bungle comes as tens of thousands of business owners are still waiting for payments from last month’s lockdown, with their eligibility for support during the current lockdown dependent on qualifying for support for the previous one.

To qualify for Victoria’s payment, businesses must also be ­eligible to collect GST, meaning those with turnover of less than $75,000 do not qualify for support – a rule that does not apply to affected businesses in NSW.

Victorian Opposition Leader Michael O’Brien said the 17-hour wait time message was “disgraceful”, adding: “Treating small business with this sort of disrespect is what you get from a government, a Labor government, that has never missed a pay cheque themselves this entire pandemic, but doesn’t care about the biggest ­single employing sector in our state,” Mr O’Brien said.

“If these small businesses can’t survive the lockdown, thousands and thousands of Victorians will be out of work.”

Mr O’Brien said he had been contacted by numerous businesses which had been told they didn’t qualify for support, but had not been told why.

“Last Thursday or last Friday there were thousands of businesses that received an email … in relation to fourth lockdown pay­ments, and it said, ‘Oh, we don’t think you’re eligible – it could be one of eight reasons’,” he said.

“They don’t actually tell you which one of the eight reasons they’re relying on, but then if you want to basically argue the toss over this, call the hotline. And guess what happens when you call the hotline?”

In April, Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass found the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions had unreasonably refused some businesses’ applications for support during last year’s 112-day lockdown, refusing to reassess them even after the ­Ombudsman had highlighted the harshness of some decisions.

A spokesman for the Andrews government said: “A technical issue meant that all callers heard a message that related to the estimated call-back time for callers who had elected to take this option. Live calls were answered within 10 to 20 minutes throughout the day.

“Business Victoria is addressing the issue as a matter of urgency and apologises for the inconvenience caused.”

The government said the hotline had received 4043 calls to 3pm on Monday – 30 per cent more than the total for the previous Monday. To accommodate the demand, 30 extra call-takers were added to the roster of 70.

The government said automatic fifth lockdown payments totalling $180.8m were made to 86,069 businesses on Monday. All of these businesses were businesses that qualified for support during last month’s lockdown.