Good on them, I assume it was years of LNP attrition that it had gotten this bad ? But happy to be corrected if my assumption was incorrect ?

From the article:

The government said its “landmark investment” in 3,000 extra staff was delivering major improvements for all Aussies.

But also I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the senior public servants appointed by the Coalition pushed them to slow down processing. Because, as we saw with Robodebt, the Coalition want to punish poor people as much as possible.