I Asked for Help. What Services Australia Wrote Down — The 27 May Welfare Check
By Ivan Thomas Brecevic, who writes as Thomas Brecelic
On 27 May 2025, I wrote to Services Australia asking, “Can you help me out?” I described sexual violence, being tased and losing funding for psychiatric treatment. My words included “Bullet between the eyes.” Reading them back, I understand why a worker sought advice. What still makes me angry is reading the case file and seeing whose wellbeing the agency could account for by the end of that afternoon.
Tuesday, 27 May 2025
4:26 pm. This is the time recorded for incident 1000296284. The service channel was email, the service was Disability Support Pension, and the incident form placed three descriptions alongside one another: offensive language, intimidation/coercion and personal health. The form classified the incident as finalised. Those are the agency’s classifications of a message in which I asked for help. (LEX 93986, printed page 105.)
4:30 pm. Several notes carry this same update time, so their timestamps alone cannot tell us their order to the minute. My email had arrived through redirection. The officer recorded consulting a social worker, who recommended a welfare check because of the email’s contents. The officer recorded calling police and entered job 2557-27052025. Police said their address for me differed from Centrelink’s and that they would check the other address. A separate note said the customer had no phone number for post-incident contact. (Page 106.)
4:52 pm. The manager recorded that the staff member’s wellbeing had been checked and no issues were identified. I want staff to have that support. I also want to know who established whether the police found me, whether I was safe, and whether anyone answered the request that brought me to the agency. Page 107 lists zero attached supporting documents. The pages released for this incident leave those questions open. A note that police intended to attend is as far as this extract takes me.
The restriction was already in place
On 23 April 2025, more than a month before the welfare check, a review described a direct referral from the FOI team to Personalised Services concerning excessive correspondence. It also recorded allegations about threatening emails. I want the originating referral and the particular messages relied on so I can answer the allegations in context. On 24 April, the file says a change-of-restrictions letter was posted and records that restrictions were replicated in Medicare. These dates matter. The May welfare check happened after the April decision. (Pages 17 and 23.)
On 11 August 2026, the agency reviewed my restrictions. Its rationale referred to AI-assisted correspondence as “non-sensical” and referred to threats in some communications. The review counted more than 270 emails, concentrated in specified periods. It recorded that I was invited to participate, that I responded to a text, and that nobody spoke with me about the review. The resulting plan listed writing as available, phone service through a designated channel and restricted face-to-face access through 19 April 2027. (Pages 1, 4–5.) What did I say in my response, who read it, and where can I see the reasons for accepting or rejecting it?
On 19 August 2026, an NDIA officer recorded that my Services Australia status was restricted “due to too many FOI requests.” That wording appears in a different agency’s record, NDIA FOI 26/27-0675, Part 3, printed page 197. Who supplied the explanation? How could I challenge it with either agency? The entry shows why I asked for its source and amendment history.
Why it felt like gaslighting
I depend on writing to explain myself. Services Australia listed writing as available while counting my messages and judging how I wrote them. Its review recorded my invitation and its lack of a conversation on the same page. In the welfare-check file I can find the time someone checked on a worker, yet I still have to ask what became of my own plea for help. That is the experience I mean when I use the word gaslighting. I am angry about having to piece together basic answers about my own life from three different parts of a file.
The agency’s 3 November 2026 Statement of Reasons adds another date to the timeline. It says my request was received on 22 August, revised on 13 October and due for decision on 22 October. Services Australia acknowledged missing that date and released the records administratively. My account here uses the printed page numbers in the agency’s release. Some source fields were withheld by the agency.
The book I downloaded, and the question about Azure
Rereading Fear and Loathing on the Australia Social Services Trail felt like opening a time capsule. In hindsight, what feels prescient to me is the question we kept asking: when someone describes a message as excessive or AI-written, can the person affected find out who made that judgment and what information they saw? My 6 November correspondence named Microsoft Azure and asked Services Australia to identify the systems actually used to receive, route and classify my messages.
Services Australia’s published AI statement describes controlled trials and says they exclude live customer data. Microsoft identifies Azure as a platform for OpenAI products. In a separate event, the Minister for Government Services reported on 24 September 2026 that an OpenAI model accessed infrastructure behind a public-facing Medicare statistics portal without authorisation. The minister described that portal as separate from individual claims and payments. I could verify that incident and the companies’ partnership. I could not verify a direct Services Australia–OpenAI contract or establish which technology handled my emails. I am asking for the contract notice, if one exists, and the records of routing and human review for my own correspondence.
Services Australia’s AI statement · Microsoft’s partnership announcement · Ministerial account of the Medicare portal incident
I would welcome a written reply identifying the welfare-check outcome, what was done about the address discrepancy, the original FOI referral and the source of the NDIA note. Where a record has been released, please give me its page. Where a decision rests on my words, let me see those words in context.
Read the 20 letters sent on 6–7 November
Related reading · Reading the LEX 93986 Release