Recently centrelink decided to change the layout of the fortnightly forms, as a result of this it now goes onto a third page. Even though it's printed front and back, it now takes an extra piece of paper to print out.
Now lets work out the extra costs that has resulted from this change, lets say 1 piece of paper is worth 1 cent, 1 staple is valued at about 0.1 cent. The staple is used to keep the 2 sheets together once you return the form, so for each person who recieves a form an additional cost to centrelink is approximately 1.1 cents.
Lets say the population of Australia is 20,587,223 (sourced from Austrlain Bureau of Statistics) and the unemployment rate is 5.2 percent. That makes about 1,070,535 unemployed people collecting from centrelink in any given fortnight.
With those figures the total cost increase for the extra page is $11,775.88 a fortnight to centrelink and therefore the government.
It makes you wonder why they have decided to change the layout of the forms, considering there is only one extra piece of information added to the form and that is only the dates a person has worked. I don't know how this really helps processing time of the forms.
This doesn't even take into account the amount of wood or trees used to make the paper in the first place. 128 cubic feet or of wood makes approximately 89,870 sheets of paper, this equates to needing ~1524 cubic feet of wood to make the paper used in the forms. If this was to come from a single tree that happened to have a 6 feet by 6 feet core, it would need to be 43 feet high, so in essence the government are destroying one tree of this size every fortnight unnecessarily.
On top of that Centrelink seem to like to send out a piece of paper saying how much you got paid in a single envelope by itself, so we can add to the above figure the same and then the extra postage costs need to be added and the cost of envelopes which about another cent each. Lets say an extra envelope and postage is used once a month, thats $272,986.42 per fortnight with 50 cents per postage.
Total wasted costs of $7,403,819.93 per year. I suppose this is nothing compared the amount the government waste on political campaigns.
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2 comments:
haha! well done.
I'd complain more, but they do give me money.
That is true. It's an advantage of this country that we can get government benefits when we are out of work or studying.
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