Annual Report 2003-04

The Defence Service Charter

Defence's mission is to defend Australia and its national interests. By its nature, Defence provides very few services direct to the Australian public; instead it serves all Australians through, and at the direction of, the Government of the day and the Parliament.

The services that Defence does provide include assistance to the civil community (in times of natural disaster), participating in public events, conducting recruiting activities and managing recruitment offices, and responding to a range of correspondence on many Defence issues.

The Defence Service Charter sets out our standards in service delivery. While the service charter is aimed at ensuring quality service to the public, we also apply the standards in our work with our colleagues and other agencies.

Defence reports annually to the Minister for Defence on the extent to which it has met the performance standards relating to the charter. The following is a full account of the report provided to the Minister for 2003-04.

Performance Standards

Defence commits to the following standards in its service charter:

• act on a request from the public in a professional and courteous manner;
• provide accurate information;
• respect privacy and sensitivities;
• respond to phone calls, faxes or emails within two working days; and
• reply to correspondence within 15 working days.

Performance Monitoring

Defence's Groups have systems in place to track compliments and complaints.

• Consistent with Australian Standard 4269 on Complaints Handling, Defence only reports on complaints/compliments from members of the public rather than internal complaints. Complaints are reported only if they relate to services provided (ie the process), not to decisions made.
• In most cases, written complaints referred to first assistant secretary and military equivalents or above are recorded.
• Where a complaint is resolved at a lower level without recourse to senior levels, no information is recorded for service charter purposes.

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Performance in 2003-04

Awareness of Charter

The Defence Service Charter remains available electronically on the internal and external Defence web sites.

Copies of the service charter are made available to the public through the Defence Community Organisation, Defence Force Recruiting offices, and civilian recruitment areas.

Customer Feedback and Complaints

The Defence Service Charter provides the public with information on how to make a complaint or provide feedback, together with contact details. Members of the public are encouraged to phone or write, in the first instance, to the relevant area of Defence or the supervisor of the area, and then if necessary, the Ministers or the Parliamentary Secretary, or their local Member of Parliament or Senator. There is also a dedicated email address defence.servicecharter@defence.gov.au. In addition, members of the public can contact the Commonwealth Defence Force Ombudsman.

Most complaints were resolved within the stated performance standard of 15 working days. Complaints of a more complex nature were generally resolved within 28 days. Some issues, because of their ongoing nature, remained unresolved. Groups report that the most common complaints related to recruitment processes, honours and awards, and aircraft and ship noise.

The most common compliments Groups received were for the overall level of Defence assistance to the civil community, especially in relation to ADF personnel attendance and displays at public events, and the professional conduct of service men and women on operations.

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Responsiveness to Ministerial Correspondence

The volume of ministerial correspondence remained high in 2003-04. The success rate for satisfying the ten-day response requirement was not sustained. This was due mainly to the increased complexity of the requests including the decreased proportion of correspondence generated by letter writing campaigns down from 40 per cent to approximately 31 per cent of total correspondence. The complexity of responses has required increased coordination between areas of Defence to ensure that whole-of-Defence and Government responses are provided.

Note

1. Prior to 2002-03, the requirement was 15 days.

Payment of Accounts

The timely payment of accounts is a customer service measure and an indicator of the efficiency of Defence's internal business processes. Defence is aiming to achieve a level of performance whereby 95 per cent of all accounts are paid within the nominated trading term, which is generally 30 days from receipt of a correctly rendered invoice and receipt of the goods and services.

Continuing improvement of Defence's business processes during the year has resulted in consistently better payment performance. Management emphasis on the use of purchase orders for larger payements and the Defence Purchasing Card for simple purchases has improved their levels of use throughout the year. Increased use of these methods of payment has improved transaction speed and efficiency. A new card management system was brought on-line during the year and has already made a large improvement in the efficiency of card transaction processing. As a further measure, rollout of the Defence Travel Card commenced during the year. The use of the travel card will simplify the payment of the very large numbers of smaller, travel-related accounts and allow the GST paid on them to be recovered more efficiently. In addition, implementation of imaging technology for invoice processing is scheduled for later in 2004. The adoption of this technology is expected to further improve processing efficiency and speed of account payments.

It is anticipated that these and other related initiatives will continue to improve Defence's performance in the timely payment of its accounts. The improvement achieved over the past three years is shown below.

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