It appears Qantas has drawn the line of "valuable customers" at P1 and CL. Everyone else is expandable.
I am one of the first to criticise Qantas but will admit I've been impressed by how quickly they've been able to improve WP service lately.
Since the string of bad publicity in early-mid April hold times have dropped very significantly. I've had to call on 8-10 occasions in the past month and the average hold time has been about 3 minutes, with the longest being about 20 minutes. I usually get the HBA call centre unless there is a major issue in the network, e.g. weather IRROPS, when those agents are presumably tied up with an influx of calls on the 1300 priority number.
My biggest gripe now is the incompetence of Fiji & Cape Town staff on the occasion that I get routed to them. For anything other than a simple change, they are useless.
As an example, I recently had two PNRs with identical JL SYD-HND-ITM awards which I needed to change to SYD-HND-NGO. The HND-NGO leg had space available. I called to request the change and got a very helpful HBA agent who informed me the SYD-HND-ITM itinerary was married but proactively offered to lodge a request with the oneworld service desk for JL to divorce the segments. They also added the HND-NGO segment to the booking to hold the seats, but left it unticketed until JL divorced the segments.
JL responded in a matter of hours, and the same rep called me back, but unfortunately JL only divorced the segments on one of the PNRs - they missed the part about the 2nd PNR. Another QF HBA agent lodged a follow up request via oneworld and suggested I call back in a couple of days.
I finally find the time yesterday afternoon to call up, but SYD was a bit of a mess due to weather so I kept getting the Fiji call centre. The first rep tells me JL had divorced the segments but award space on HND-NGO didn't exist, even though I could see it on the QF engine and the seats were already in the PNR. HUACA. The next two reps (still Fiji) tell me the segments hadn't been divorced. 2 x HUACA. The next rep sounded so unsure when I explained the issue that I asked if I should try call again to get HBA and she said yes - lol. 5th time lucky, got Anne Marie from HBA who confirmed the segments were divorced, the seats had already been confirmed, she made the changes and ticketed the booking while I was on the phone.
So while things have improved a lot for WPs, the offshore call centre situation is certainly dire with inconsistent skill levels causing blatantly misleading information to customers. I genuinely feel for those who don't have status and have no choice but to deal with these centres.