Centrelink farce as woman, 70, is asked to give welfare agency the exact COORDINATES of her house by latitude and longitude to prove her income
- Welfare recipients are outraged by Centrelink making their website hard to use
- A furious woman said her elderly mother struggled with navigating the system
- Aussies are branding the system as ‘deliberately complicated’ and ‘cruel’
Centrelink recipients are outraged after being asked to provide the welfare agency with the latitude and longitude coordinates of their homes while making a claim online.
Inari Saltau, from Brisbane, took to Twitter to call out the ‘unnecessarily complicated’ website, as she tried to help her elderly mother use the website.
‘Our welfare system is f***ed. I was helping my almost 70-year-old mother to report her non existent income to Centrelink and after jumping through 10 security questions we get asked to put in the LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE of her house?!,’ she wrote.
Ms Saltau posted a photo of Centrelink’s website portal, which asks users to manually enter the coordinates of their family home.
‘How is anyone, little alone some of the most vulnerable people in this country, supposed to know the exact coordinates of where we live,’ she added.
Inari Saltau, from Brisbane, took to Twitter to call out the unnecessarily complicated website, after trying to help her elderly mother to report her income
Ms Saltau went on to brand the system ‘broken,’ ‘demoralising’ and ‘purposefully cruel’.
The Tweet prompted hundreds of other welfare recipients to call out the welfare agency for deliberately making their systems hard to navigate while making online claims.
Ms Saltau posted a photo of Centrelink’s website portal, which asks users to manually enter the coordinates of their family home
Other Centrelink recipients echoed Ms Saltau’s anger and branded the system a disgrace, calling it ‘totally demoralising’
‘This is unnecessarily complex and conducive to errors. Anyone else would geo-code off the home address but you make things as difficult and cruel as possible,’ one Twitter user said.
‘I’m a former military cartographer, and I wouldn’t have a clue what the lat and long of my house is. At least I could estimate it from a map, though. Most people don’t have those skills,’ a man wrote.
‘This is cruelty in the extreme. I am 72 and fairly computer literate but there is no way I would be prepared to navigate my way around various websites to find the information they have asked for,’ wrote an elderly man.
Centrelink’s website fails to let customers know why they need access to this information, as recipients call out the welfare agency for making the system deliberately hard
Centrelink’s ‘make a claim’ section of its website asks people to provide the coordinate details for people’s residence.
However the website only explains what latitude and longitude is, and how to measure it.
The website fails to let customers know why they need access to this information.
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Centrelink for comment.