Three in four Australians who take a complaint to the Commonwealth Ombudsman aren't getting a timely response, as the government watchdog blames a COVID-19 backlog for badly missing internal targets.
The body's annual report found 24 per cent of complaints met their service standards, falling well short of the 90 per cent target.
It continues the Ombudsman's steady service slump, falling from 78 per cent to 24 per cent across the last two reporting periods.
And those who contact the office are increasingly fed up, with 38 per cent describing themselves as "satisfied" in complainant surveys.
That compares with an internal target of 65 per cent.
The independent body set up to deal with decisions made by government agencies to see if they're just and lawful admitted in its report it has a lot of work to do.
"We need to improve in a range of areas, particularly the time it takes to make a decision on complaints and our communication with complainants during the complaint process," the report stated.
"Over the course of the pandemic and the associated restrictions, we accumulated a backlog of complaints … although we were actively resolving complaints, when we did so we had already exceeded the timeframes we aim to achieve for complaints."
The Ombudsman met eight of 13 key performance indicators, including delivering reports on time, maintaining the confidence of parliament and seeing its recommendations implemented by agencies.
It received a 28 per cent rise in complaints from overseas students about private education providers, although the number of investigations opened dipped by a quarter.
Nearly 1200 reports of serious abuse in the Australian Defence Force were lodged, with the 558 reports made in June the most ever received in a single month.
