They invariably appealed to the Speaker to rule out of order any question about robo-debt. The Coalition wanted to suppress any discussion of the scheme. Now we know exactly why.
Illustration by John ShakespeareJohn Shakespeare
The into the Coalition’s robo-debt policy is a thunderclap of accountability. It has concluded that it was “a crude and cruel mechanism,neither fair nor legal,and it made many people feel like criminals”.
The commission confirms the bald fact that the entire scheme was illegal. “It’s pretty staggering,” says ANU’s Professor Peter Whiteford,an authority on the social welfare system.
“The government and the public service decided to do something unlawful. The government we trust to make and administer the law,broke the law.”
Even more staggering is that it was not a slip-up,quickly corrected,but a travesty of lawbreaking and deceit covered up for four years.
Coalition ministers are rejecting the findings of a scathing report into the robodebt scheme.
The centre-right Dutch government of Mark Rutte apologised,resigned and went to an election in 2021 when it was found to have falsely accused families of fraudulently receiving welfare payments. Prime Minister Rutte himself had no direct involvement.
The centre-right Australian Coalition government,by contrast,persisted with its scam and lied about it all the way into the royal commission’s witness box. And in the Australian case,the former prime minister,Scott Morrison,was not only the creator of the policy but among the prime liars defending it,the commission found.
Morrison created the scheme when he was minister for social security,continued to support it when he was promoted to treasurer and then prime minister,and,when called to testify to the royal commission,gave evidence which “the Commission rejects as untrue”,it reported on Friday.
Specifically,Morrison claimed under oath that he’d been told that the method he’d chosen to “calculate” supposed debts was well established,“a foundational way” in which his department had worked in the past. Untrue,said the commission.
Of all the ministers who had been responsible for running robo-debt from inception in 2016 to abandonment in 2020,Morrison is the only one still in parliament. And the one to whom the royal commission apportions original sin for robo-debt:“Mr Morrison allowed cabinet to be misled” from the outset in first proposing the policy,writes the royal commissioner,Catherine Holmes,a former chief justice of the Queensland Supreme Court.
“He failed to meet his ministerial responsibility to ensure that cabinet was properly informed about what the proposal actually entailed and to ensure that it was lawful.”
How to prevent such a debasement of the Australian government happening again? Among the commission’s 57 recommendations is one that requires a kind of certification that any new federal budget policy proposal is lawful.
It seems absurd that this needs to be spelt out,but the recklessness of robo-debt has made it so:the federal government’s budget rules should be changed so that “all new policy proposals contain a statement as to whether the proposal requires legislative change in order to be lawfully implemented”,Holmes advises.
Scott Morrison,was not only the creator of the policy but among the prime liars defending it,the commission found.
The Liberals never accepted the name robo-debt,but the name stuck because it allowed government computers to conjure up debts that welfare recipients supposedly owed to the Treasury. And conjuring was required because – in the cases of more than 430,000 people – there never was any debt. It was a fiction.
It never could have worked. Because it was based on a flawed assumption – that even if your income was uneven as your circumstances changed during the course of a year,the government would assume that it flowed steadily and uniformly through the year.
This was called “averaging” or “smoothing” the facts,as opposed to recognising reality. In many cases,this created an artificial impression that a welfare recipient was earning so much money that they weren’t eligible for welfare. Therefore,they were assumed to be cheating and in debt to the government.
Worse,the government didn’t explain how it conjured the supposed debt,but reversed the onus of proof. The recipients had to prove that they had not earned too much.
Peter Whiteford,in a report written for the royal commission,showed that,in reality,very few benefit recipients who received income did so at a “smooth” rate:“More than 93 per cent of those with earnings while on youth payments did so unevenly,as did 95 per cent of those receiving income while on Newstart or Austudy,and 90 per cent of those receiving income while getting parenting payments.”
So an assumption that might have applied to 10 per cent of people at most was deemed to apply to all.
“In essence,” writes Commissioner Holmes,“people were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money. It was a costly failure of public administration,in both human and economic terms.”
Worse yet,the government sooled private debt-collection agencies onto people. In the month before his suicide,,for example,received at least 40 forms of communication from debt collectors for his supposed debt of $18,000. He was 28.
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten has addressed the findings of the robodebt royal commission report.
It was so cruel,so unfair that the royal commissioner identified at least three people who’d been driven to kill themselves at least partly because of the way they’d been treated by the federal government.
It was impossible to know how many more people had been driven to suicide,she noted,but:“At the least,I am confident that the commission has served the purpose of bringing into the open an extraordinary saga,illustrating a myriad of ways that things can go wrong through venality,incompetence and cowardice.”
Venality. Incompetence. Cowardice. Is it possible to write a more damning epitaph for any government?
The robo-debt outrage didn’t persist for four years because it was somehow overlooked. “Truly dismaying,” writes Holmes,“was the revelation of dishonesty and collusion to prevent the scheme’s lack of legal foundation coming to light”.
The red flags,apart from the known and publicised suicides,included warnings from the staff administering the program in Centrelink,warnings from the Australian Council of Social Services,warnings from the Commonwealth Public Sector Union,Senate inquiries and hundreds of Labor questions in parliament. Not to mention 4339 appeals to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and tens of thousands of media reports on problems with the scheme.
Within the system,staff concerns “fell on deaf ears,” reports the commission. The commission was told that “managers did not care,did not want to hear about it,didn’t want to know about it”.
“Equally disheartening,” reports Holmes,“was the ineffectiveness of what one might consider institutional checks and balances – the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office,the Office of Legal Services Co-ordination,the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal – in presenting any hindrance to the Scheme’s continuance.”
If the prime minister and the ministers were determined to persist with an illegal and failed program,they proved to be unstoppable,regardless of cost. Holmes’ report gives us an unsettling glimpse of how an autocratic government works.
What brought it to an end? The then opposition,in the form of Bill Shorten,who led the political and legal campaign against robo-debt from opposition and today is the Albanese government’s minister for government services,proposed to Gordon Legal that it bring a class action lawsuit against Centrelink.
And when the case ended with the government paying a settlement of $1.8 billion to the wronged recipients and a Federal Court judge,Bernard Murphy,calling the scheme a “shameful chapter in the administration of the Commonwealth”,the game was up.
And while all attention now will focus on the unnamed individuals whom Holmes has referred for possible for civil or criminal prosecution,this dismal saga is not just a Coalition atrocity. It’s an object lesson for all governments.
Robo-debt was an example of overpoliticisation,where a minister wanted to use performative cruelty against welfare recipients to burnish his political credentials and cared not about the rights of citizens.
It was an example of extended abuse of power to cover up a political failure. It was an example of possible consequences of automated systems,unchecked by human intervention,operating against citizens. It’s a case study in how checks and balances can fail – even in a democracy – in a system with weak civil service officials and unscrupulous ministers.
“We have to remember the ends don’t justify the means,” summarises Shorten. “And that’s a lesson for all governments.”
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
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