Well,
This is my general feelings and experience with Centrelink. On January 20, 2014 I was retrenched from Traffic Technologies. On February 4th, 2014, I went to the local Centrelink office at Warragul to register for NewStart.
I couldn’t actually register in person, I had to phone the central call centre. The Customer Service Officer (CSO) took me over to the phone, and showed me how to use it. Then after being on hold for 2 hours, I spoke with someone who took my details – then made an appointment for me to see a CSO at the Warragul office for the end of February.
Basically, because I was paying the mortgage for the family home, my redundancy payment went into the mortgage account so the bank wouldn’t get on our case for missing payments. Anyway – Centrelink told me I wouldn’t be eligible to start receiving payments till the end of April because of the redundancy payment, so we needed to live off the credit card – yikes!! Anyway – got to do, what you need to do.
So, now I’m on NewStart, going to the Job Services Agency weekly, and to date, no interviews from the various jobs I’ve applied for. We’ll see how things go.