Campbell considers herself very lucky. “Honestly, I don’t know how my application was expedited so quickly,” he said. “I said, ‘This is crazy.’ Everyone I spoke to said his passport had been around for more than eight weeks.”
The next morning, he made a call to Airtasker with a budget of $ 90. “I need someone to line up at the Haymarket Passport Office while I’m at work,” he wrote. “You can [call] when I am at the head of the line and I come to see you. “
After Airtasker chose to queue for several hours, Campbell returned to the line 10 minutes before the closing time of the passport office and took Airasker’s place.
In a few minutes, he had his passport in his hand and he does not regret having paid more for a substitute in the queue. “It wasn’t even the line itself, I knew it would take a long time. But the stress of the people around me [me] – Honestly, it seemed to me like we were trying to cross a border because it was so frantic and horrible. “
Melbourne Monday: Long queues at the Australian Passport Office, Collins Square, go outside to the trail and around the block. Credit: Eddie Jim
On Thursday, Deputy Foreign Minister Tim Watts said passport office hours were being extended and staff were “choosing” customers so that lines could move faster.
Passport call centers will also gain 70 more employees during this and next week and another 250 will be employed to help clear up the delay in passport processing, he added. But it will take six weeks for the newly hired staff to be fully trained.
“Processing times are unacceptable right now,” Watts told 3AW, noting that the Morrison government did not allocate adequate resources to the passport office department.
“There’s no silver bullet. There’s no quick fix. But hopefully the problems will start to change gradually this week and next week, especially as people go to call centers.”
Airasker chief Tim Fung said the first passport queue task was listed in the middle of last week. About 15 more have appeared since then.
Airtasker CEO Tim Fung. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
“Because of the way Airtasker is really a community platform, when someone sees someone posting these kinds of tasks, other people say, ‘My God, that’s a great idea. I will, too, “he told The Herald.
It’s also a far cry from the first of its kind of concerts the platform has seen: people have issued calls for help getting Air Jordan sneakers or tickets to the London theater, for example.
And when the American burger chain In-N-Out first appeared in Sydney in early 2016, people posted jobs in the queue for it.
“That really set the trend for people who are increasingly doing this kind of work on the platform.”