The entire intake of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade graduates has been put to work in the passport office to combat record demand.
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This follows reports of people waiting for hours at passport offices across the country in a last-ditch effort to get paperwork processed before they head overseas.
A DFAT spokesperson confirmed the 2022 graduate intake had been redeployed to help process applications.
"Graduates have been temporarily deployed to the Australian Passport Office to perform key service delivery roles, pending the onboarding of additional processing staff," they said.
"DFAT regularly redeploys staff to meet the department's organisational and service delivery priorities."
When asked how many graduates had been redeployed, and how long it would take to clear the backlog, DFAT did not answer.
The passport office has been receiving anywhere from 13,000 to 17,000 applications per day, up from the usual 7000 to 9000.
The department said the number of Australian passports issued had doubled to 1.3 million so far this financial year.
The department earlier this month advised new passports could take up to six weeks to process as the reopening of borders caused a flood of applications.
Colleen Lawless has been waiting nine weeks. When she called the passport office to check on her application she was met with a message saying they couldn't take her call.
Ms Lawless submitted her application the same time as her husband but while he received a new passport, she was still in limbo.
Luckily, the pair have no imminent plans but wanted to renew their passports in anticipation of an international trip next year.
Ms Lawless has been an Australian citizen for 40 years after her family immigrated from Ireland in 1969. As a result she has to provide additional documentation to renew.
"It's frustrating. We've just gone through two years of a pandemic, where they were able to send you a text message about just about everything that was happening, but they can't send you a message to say they're in receipt of your documentation for your passport, which is a fairly major thing to have. Lots of people need it for identification and all sorts of things," she said.
"If I could have got onto somebody, spoken to someone who said to me, 'Yes, we've checked, yes, it's in progress'. But you can't even talk to anybody.
"We're not in a situation like some people I know. I was just talking to a friend of mine who's got family leaving to go overseas on Friday next week and they can't get their passport. My frustration is a lack of communication."
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He told ABC radio on Tuesday the government had now committed 70 extra staff in call centres, with 320 more to be added next week alongside a further 300 staff members for processing. He promised 1100 more staff by September.
"This is a problem of the previous government failing to plan for something that was entirely predictable," Mr Watts said.