Royal commission into robodebt lifts the lid on the bastards who run Australia
The royal commission into robodebt, which handed down its final report in early July, has confirmed that our country is run by ghouls—politicians, senior bureaucrats and high-paid lawyers characterised, in the words of Commissioner Catherine Holmes, by “venality, incompetence and cowardice”.
For more than four years, from 2015 until 2019, when the immoral and unjust scheme was halted, its architects and enforcers terrorised some of the country’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged people just because they could. Although not all, some have now been referred to the Australian Federal Police, the new National Anti-Corruption Commission and professional conduct bodies for public servants and practising lawyers. The chief offenders in this disgraceful episode must be thrown in jail.
The Robodebt scheme was an automated program that looked for discrepancies between Centrelink recipients’ reported income and Australian Tax Office yearly income data. The program, which was illegal and flawed, calculated “overpayments” ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars.
The estimated 443,000 Centrelink recipients identified by this process as having been paid more than they were entitled to were then subjected to a campaign of harassment via letters, emails and automated calls, including by private debt collectors on behalf of Centrelink.
Debt notifications ballooned from 20,000 per year to 900,000 at the scheme’s height, between July 2016 and October 2018.
Any presumption of innocence was abandoned; those targeted were required to prove that they had not been overpaid. If they did not pay or respond, possibly because Centrelink addresses were out of date, they faced having their tax returns or bank accounts illegally garnisheed in pursuit of what were overwhelmingly fake debts.
The government’s depravity knew no bounds. Then Human Services Minister Alan Tudge appeared on Channel 9’s A Current Affair in late 2016 to warn victims: “We’ll find you, we’ll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison”. When victims of the scheme went public, Tudge’s media adviser Rachelle Miller passed on confidential information to friendly media outlets to smear them. Unsurprisingly, this had the desired effect of intimidating others from coming forward.
At least three victims committed suicide after being relentlessly pursued over debts they could not pay. Many thousands more were subjected to intense stress and panic and endured months, if not years, of anxiety.
Cabinet ministers responsible knew from the outset that it was illegal. Scott Morrison championed the program as social services minister, declaring himself the “strong welfare cop on the beat”. He was the first to “disappear” damning legal advice, but others were implicated. Stuart Robert, government services minister from 2019 to 2021, continued to parrot the government’s lines in 2019, even after it was forced to settle a Federal Court test case.
Kathryn Campbell, secretary of the Department of Human Services from 2011 to 2017, publicly defended the scheme for its entire existence and did all she could to prevent its illegal nature from coming to the Ombudsman’s attention.
Robodebt was eventually scrapped. Not because those involved suffered an attack of conscience. Nor did the system’s other supposed safeguards step in. Not the Ombudsman, who was convinced by the Coalition’s deception, nor the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which had been so corrupted by blatant political appointments that it was incapable of doing other than backing the government.
It was only undone because the scheme’s victims stood up and objected and got some media attention. Several brave Centrelink staff also blew the whistle. In 2019, under legal pressure media investigations, the government pulled back and rescinded the debt notices. Only in November 2019, however, did it finally bury the scheme. Some small justice was done in 2021 when the government settled a class action brought by victims of the scheme, paying $112 million in compensation to 400,000 class group members—an average of just $280 each. This was not nearly enough.
The scheme was shelved because it was illegal and the government knew it could not stand up in court. But as Colleen Taylor, one of the Centrelink whistleblowers, asked, “Why wasn’t it stopped long before because of all the other reasons: immoral, unjust, unfair, cruel?”
The Royal Commission was damning in its findings, stating that “the dishonesty and collusion to prevent the scheme’s lack of legal foundation coming to light” was “truly dismaying”. The commissioner said, “People were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money” and “the scheme was launched in circumstances where little to no regard was had to the individuals and vulnerable cohorts that it would affect. The ill effects of the scheme were varied, extensive, devastating and continuing”.
The commission found that Scott Morrison—who, as social services minister, treasurer and then prime minister, was involved in Robodebt at every step of the way—“allowed Cabinet to be misled” about the legality of the scheme. It “rejected as untrue” his defence. It found that Social Services Minister Christian Porter “could not rationally have been satisfied of the legality of the scheme”. Tudge’s smear campaign against the scheme’s victims represented a “reprehensible” “abuse of power”. Stuart Robert “was making statements of fact ... citing statistics which he knew could not be right”.
The commission’s findings were all couched in the measured language those in the ruling class use when publicly judging their peers. But those without such class prejudices can speak plainly: these fuckers made life hell for hundreds of thousands of people for years and should pay for their crimes.
It’s not just their cold-hearted cruelty, which enabled them to press ahead with Robodebt even as the toll of human misery piled higher, that makes the blood boil. It’s their bloody hypocrisy. They dare to claim they were protecting the public purse from welfare fraud, but these entitled scumbags live off the public purse in luxury. The politicians, senior public servants and lawyers responsible were all drawing salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Several politicians have quit parliament since the scheme closed, but you can be sure they’ll be looked after.
The nine-year record of the Coalition government was one of ministers serving their business mates first and foremost. But they also used millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on pork-barrelling in marginal electorates to save their political careers. Even now they are tapping the public purse, with eight former ministers racking up a taxpayer-funded legal bill of $2.5 million for their appearances at the Royal Commission.
Will justice be served? Government Services Minister Bill Shorten, who set up the Royal Commission, says those responsible “had gaslighted the nation and its citizens for four-and-a-half years”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says that Robodebt was a “gross betrayal and a human tragedy” and must never happen again.
We shall see. Kathryn Campbell was appointed by the Albanese government last year to the specially created position of AUKUS pact adviser in the Department of Defence on a salary of $890,000. Given such treatment of key offenders, can we seriously expect a thoroughgoing purge of those responsible?
As for “never happening again”, the Labor government continues its predecessor’s persecution of the nation’s poorest. Ministers may not talk about “leaners and lifters”, as Liberal Treasurer Joe Hockey did in pushing austerity in 2014, but they continue to target supposed “welfare fraud”, even though the Royal Commission stated that such fraud was grossly exaggerated and served only to legitimise programs like Robodebt. In just six months, the government’s new employment services system has suspended welfare payments to hundreds of thousands of claimants, including Indigenous people, the homeless and people with a mental or physical disability.
It was ALP Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin who, in 2012, condemned tens of thousands of disabled people to even greater poverty when she introduced changes to eligibility for the disability support pension. As Rick Morton, one of the journalists who pursued the Robodebt story for years, writes in the Monthly, “It is no small irony that the party most effective at kicking disabled people off the pension and onto the lower-rate dole, despite having permanent or partial incapacities for work, was the Australian Labor Party”.
And it was the Gillard government that, in the same year, also dumped nearly 200,000 sole parents onto Newstart instead of the more generous single-parent allowance, cutting their incomes by between $60 and $100 a week—a step the Albanese government has only partially reversed.
Robodebt may be gone, but justice won’t be served until the entire system is completely overhauled and made fit for those in need. In the meantime, those who made others suffer so grievously should now suffer themselves.
