Robodebt is a dystopian enough word, but the program’s official name — the Online Compliance Intervention — would have conveyed its sinister intent more effectively. Remember that other “intervention”? Perhaps it’s Coalition secret code for punishing the unworthy.
Robodebt was introduced in 2016 with the promise of using artificial intelligence to save the taxpayers $3.7 billion by clawing back undeserved welfare payments. It ended this week with $2.1 billion going the other way.
It was supposed to use automated data-matching between Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office, to identify who was being overpaid. Robodebt would then issue invoices and the money would come back, all without the inefficiency of human intervention.
It worked as well as you’d expect. Somewhere north of 400,000 welfare recipients were the victims of robodebt overpayment notices that had no proper basis in law or fact but might as well have been produced by a random number generator.
Following an investigation by the Ombudsman, two Senate inquiries, multiple successful challenges in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), an AAT ruling that the entire scheme was unlawful, and a class action, the final bill to the Morrison government amounts to $1.2 billion: $720 million in refunds, $400 million in forgone claims, and $112 million in damages to be shared between the victims and their lawyers.
Then there are the lawyers’ and consultants’ fees, IT costs, PR spinning and wasted resources expended by the government over four years defending this dog with fleas. That will add up to hundreds of millions more.
The human cost cannot be calculated. Over 2000 people died after receiving robodebt notices. How many of them took their own lives is disputed, but it’s not zero. What cannot be denied is the trauma inflicted on the most vulnerable part of the population by this “intervention”, as soulless and incapable of empathy or understanding as the Terminator.
Robodebt took Australian society several steps further down the path of what the Coalition likes to call “good economic management” but is really the institutionalisation of cruelty.
By any measure, a clusterfuck of historic proportions. The government’s last-minute capitulation to a record class action settlement on a no-admissions basis, reflects the obviousness of both its incompetent handling of the debacle and the further embarrassments that were otherwise about to be revealed.
Apart from the catastrophic failure of robodebt’s creators to appreciate that what they were doing was illegal, there is the over-arching question of ministerial responsibility. And guess who we find on that conga line? Scott Morrison, Christian Porter, Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert. The wonder boys.
Ah, ministerial responsibility. Remember that quaint notion? Tudge alone has racked up at least five separate offences for which he should be under pressure to leave, but one thing we know for sure these days is that a Coalition minister could strangle his grandmother at the Public Bar in Manuka on a Wednesday night, and the prime minister’s only response would be a demand that the media show some respect for the dead.
What all this adds up to is that Bill Shorten, by happy coincidence, is right: we need a royal commission into robodebt.
I don’t say that lightly; there have been way too many royal commissions in recent years, deployed mostly as an alternative to actual governing. Did we need yet another aged care inquiry when the preceding 19 had been ignored, or a commission to tell us that last summer’s bushfires were the result of climate change?
And lest we forget Tony Abbott’s royal commissions into pink batts and Julia Gillard’s home renovations.
A royal commission, like a federal anti-corruption commission (not Porter’s fake one, a real one), has one purpose: to root out truths that the powerful would rather we didn’t learn.
The case for a royal commission into robodebt is unanswerable. Of course Morrison doesn’t want it to happen, for the same reason that his government paid $70 million in 2017 to the men detained on Manus Island rather than allow their negligence case to be heard in court. There is no amount of our money that this government will not pay to avoid scrutiny, when all of its other standard techniques have failed.
That, of course, is all the more reason to do it. But the government’s innate shadiness need not be taken into account; even the most honest, diligent and caring government would have to submit itself to a full and transparent reckoning if it stuffed something up as badly as robodebt.
Justice for the victims, assurance that this won’t happen again, and accountability for those invested with the power to uplift or destroy lives, all call for the whole sorry saga of robodebt to be brought to light.
Royal commission. Now.
The corruption and rank incompetence of this government has become epic. But, that was known before the last federal election. It is just that the great majority of Australian apparently couldn’t care less and are happier living in distorted fantasies of the distinction between the coalition and Labor. So, either being cognisant of the incompetence and corruption or being wilfully ignorant of it, the electorate largely rejected Shorten on the basis of his public persona and embraced incompetence and corruption. Is there any prospect of hope? It just keeps ebbing away.
Just so. And the same thing is evident elsewhere. In the USA in 2016 it was possible to argue those voting for Trump did not understand what would happen if he won, or they voted for him confident he would lose. In 2020 there could be no doubt about his character and conduct, many of those voting for him confirm they know how rotten he is, and yet his vote increased substantially. In the UK there is PM Johnson, a sort of poor man’s Trump, who still gets extraordinary levels of support relative to his non-stop blundering and utter mendacity.
YES, YES, YES to Been Around. You have finally worked it out. For me the greatest puzzle of the decade is how Morrison and his pile of garbage managed to retain government in 2019. Their value system was there for all to see: do and say whatever it takes to maintain power, I mean even blind Freddy could have seen this
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Remember the fine words of the ‘daggy dad’ (Morrison) when asked to explain what fairness meant to him? Here is a brief refresher course “I believe in a fair go for those who have a go’ – this obviously does not include welfare ‘leaners’, ‘and what that means is part of the promise that we all keep as Australians is that we make a contribution (that is be a lifter) and don’t seek to take one (that is don’t be a leaner)’. To Morrison and Howard before him by definition the ‘lifters’ are the ones who have a go, generate wealth and growth – (and dodge their rightful share of taxation) and therefore deserve a go mainly via tax cuts.
Morrison continued: ‘ …under our policies, if you’re having a go you’ll get a go (notice the deep thinking that has gone into this piece of twaddle) and that involves an obligation on all of us to be able to bring what we have to the table’ Really!!!! It is so simple for you dummies it is almost like black and white.
It makes robodebt totally logical because ‘everyone’ knows about those nasty welfare cheats – that would be the leaners again, that they all cheat on their claims and we have to do everything – including the illegal robodebt, to protect the ‘honest hard-working lifters. Hence the leaners don’t deserve a fair go and so bullying, extortion, intimidation, being set upon by debt collectors are all ‘fair’ options because such people have forfeited any rights they have to just or dare I say it ‘fair’ treatment. And besides what little if anything they bring to the table is not worth much anyway.
The thing is the vast majority of Australians did not experience this form of degrading treatment or simply lacked any sense of empathy for those so poorly treated. You know the old ‘I am alright mate’. This episode brings to mind an old story that may awake Australians from their apathetic slumber. Perhaps they should be more cognisant of the words of Pastor Niemoeller in his warning of the growing Nazi influence to the individual freedom to the people of pre-World War 2 Germany:
‘First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me’.
Good article, Michael. But you mentioned Bill Shorten only in the context of being right about the need for a RC; in fact he did a hell of a lot more to end this monumental, punitive sadism and bring some justice to those affected. Shorten was instrumental in getting the class action going in the first place; he has the right to speak about it above any other MP. Even as election loser and ex-Labor leader, Shorten has far more to his credit in being socially useful than the PM of Australia and most in parliament.
Shorten would have been a very good PM. It is Australia’s loss that so many forces were lined up against him and he tried to do too much too soon.
Yes, he would, DF. The bushfire crisis would have ‘made him’ as it were, because he’d have been there doing all the right things, and by now, after ten months of pandemic, he’d be very short odds for the next election. Sadly, he was never able to project a sense of confident strength rather than insecurity. Perhaps the MSM are to blame?
Clive Palmer helped a lot, plus the lies of the Wilsons with their vested interests re franking credits, etc. and keeping nearly the whole of the lnp in hiding during the electioneering process all sealed his future..
True.
Agree.
True.
How about criminal charges for demanding money with menaces? How about civil litigation for wrongful deaths?
Ran mine off before getting to yours.
“On a no-admissions basis”.
Yep, here’s $1.2B, but I’m not admitting anything.
Agree with the call for a Royal Commission Michael. I’d like to see a lot of these people squirm under cross-examination.
I don’t know how a government can demand money with menaces, while also reversing the burden of proof. Looks like adherence to the rule of law is another victim in this absurd war of the government against the people.
This matter needs to be subjected to a public enquiry, but criminal sanctions should be available for use against each of those politicians who knowingly drove this immoral and illegal process.
Unfortunately, like the United States, we are in the grip of, simultaneously, the most religious and the most mendacious political leadership of all time. For this reason, the matter will be buried with all the other devious acts of the Morrison government and nothing will change.