West Australians facing lengthy delay to renew or apply for passports

There were long queues at Perth’s passport office on Thursday as West Australians became frustrated with lengthy delays waiting to renew or apply for passports.

Perth mum Simone Healy was one of those people in line, waiting to check on her nine-month-old baby’s passport application before they get set for a family holiday to Canada in September.

Australia’s passport service is experiencing “unprecedented high demand”, as a 30 per cent increase in applications has caused a month-long backlog, a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said.

Ms Healy arrived at Perth’s passport office on William Street about 2pm on Thursday where she waited for around 30 minutes before she was forced to leave after her daughter, Lilley, needed a nappy change.

The mother decided to make a trip to the office after hearing no correspondence from the Australian Passport Office since lodging an application for Lilley eight weeks ago.

“I haven’t heard anything,” she said.

“I’ve tried calling several times at several different times of the day and once I go through the ‘press this for this, press this for this’, and get through to the call centre, it’s ‘we are too busy, try again’, and the call has disconnected.”

Ms Healy also tried sending an email but it bounced back with a message saying “the inbox is full”.

“It would be OK if someone could just tell me, ‘Yes we have your application, sorry there’s a bit of a delay in waiting time’,” she said.

“Just some communication would be great.”

DFAT said it was “experiencing unprecedented high demand” and currently receiving 10,000 to 12,000 applications a day, up from the usual 7000 to 9000 a day.

“We currently have around four weeks of work in the processing queue.,” a spokesperson said.

“This is resulting in longer-than-usual call centre wait times, as well as an increased numbers of customers queuing at our passport offices.

“We apologise to those customers who have been directly impacted by these delays.”

DFAT said new applications could take longer than passport renewals, and advised people to start their application online and ensure they submitted all the required documentation in full.

Ms Healy said there were “lots of people” also in the queue on Thursday afternoon, however many became annoyed with how long it was taking and left.

She will now wait another week before tackling the long delays again.