Centrelink really wants people to wait less, but argues that the delays are caused by the complexity of the policies it has to deal with.
Call waiting times grew from an average of three minutes to nearly 17 minutes in the three years to 2013-14 for the 43 million people who phoned Centrelink.
And another 13 million callers couldn't even get through to be put on hold.
The department official in charge, Grant Tidswell, says it would be relatively easy to answer calls within three rings and then shunt people off to a "complicated automatic list" or menu.
But that wouldn't help with people's often-complex inquiries.
"Sometimes people ring us in quite a great deal of distress ... there might be multiple payments involved, they might be separating from their partner and sometimes these calls can take a considerable time," Mr Tidswell told a Senate committee examining call waiting times.
"We'd like to do better than that, but it's challenging, given the complexity of the social security and welfare ... policy settings."
He asked parliament to stop coming up with ever-more complex policy changes.
Every change demanded system updates that didn't always have time to get tested, which meant things didn't work as well as they could for the public.
People's confusion made them more likely to ring up, particularly for social security and welfare inquiries.
Another source of increased demand were the computer-generated letters required by law to be sent every time someone walked into a customer centre, made a phone call, sent an application online, or a policy changed that affected them.
"I'd like not to have to send letters, to be truthful, because it drives demand and calls," Mr Tidswell said.
"Sometimes, because the letter might have arrived after you've had that conversation with one of our staff and that staff member might not have known that that letter was on it's way, it can be confusing."
He hoped a new computer system would increase information to clear up some of this confusion, but said it wouldn't necessarily decrease the volume of calls Centrelink received.
However, a new phone system that should boost capacity would likely be in place by the end of the year.
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