Why is there a minimum hold time of 30 minutes when calling any government service? Always “we’re experiencing a high volume of calls”.

It's particularly bad for Centrelink, where you might not even make it to the hold queue, and just get a busy tone/automatic hang-up.

They're basically never not "experiencing an unusually high volume of calls". At some point, you'd think that the high volume of calls would just become the norm. Your average worker is juggling a whole bunch of different people all at once, and that doesn't seem at all sustainable.

And the hold music is terrible.

Tom Scott did a video on it. It used to be better, but newer computerised systems, where they're both using old files, and it's crushed to death because it's cheaper to store/process that way.

As an aside, I feel like the sound quality has also gone downhill. it used to be either clear, or at least somewhat audible, but now, it's just incomprehensible gibberish at times.