What’s slowly emerging from the robodebt royal commission is one of the worst episodes of maladministration in the history of the Australian Public Service.
Once again, Scott Morrison is at the centre of it, but the true scandal pertains to the behaviour of senior bureaucrats in the Human Services and Social Services departments.
To the extent that it wasn’t clear before, we now know senior officials understood that income averaging was unlawful, but were so attached to achieving a set savings target from welfare payments that they ignored that advice and made sure it was watered down so that Morrison, then Social Services minister, could be assured what would become robodebt would work.
The evidence of DSS managers Andrew Whitecross and Murray Kimber yesterday spells out the process that went on in DSS in late 2014 and 2015 when the Human Services department proposed automated income averaging. Whitecross specifically cited legal advice that using income averaging in the way proposed was likely to be found unlawful, requiring legislative change.
Senior managers expressed frustration with his advice and suggested his observations on the DHS proposal be watered down. In the minute that ultimately went to Morrison, what were originally cited as “fundamental impacts on social security policy and legislation” were softened to “significant implications”.
That change was made by a more senior DSS executive, Catherine Halbert, who says she can’t remember directing anyone to water down the critical language toward income averaging, and says dumping “fundamental impacts” was a mere stylistic change.
Kimber recalled seeing DHS’ draft New Policy Proposal in 2015, which stated that legislation would not be required. He pointed out to DHS that legislation would be required given the unlawful nature of the proposed use of income averaging. There was, of course, no legislative change to make robodebt legal.
Other than outright corruption, it’s hard to think of a more serious case of maladministration than senior executives overlooking the likely unlawfulness of a policy change, with the goal of securing an identified level of savings, via a mechanism that inflicted massive trauma on welfare recipients and led a number to take their own lives.
The apparent desire of DHS officials to pander to a minister’s “reform” agenda, and the apparent willingness of DSS officials to fail to accurately convey the unlawful nature of what was being proposed, led to appalling outcomes.
This is where “responsiveness”, that KPI of the quality public servant for the last three decades, has led a once-respected bureaucracy: being so willing to be “responsive” to a minister’s desires that illegality is overlooked, downplayed, ignored, fudged in the quest to anticipate and meet ministerial demands.
It starts with lineball cases where legal advice is sufficiently vague to permit proposals to go forward despite awareness of the potential for a court to rule against the Commonwealth. But there was nothing lineball about the unlawfulness of robodebt, as senior officials were repeatedly told.
This was as plain a failure of public sector leadership as it’s possible to have. Senior executives and secretaries are supposed to act as a check and a filter on more junior managers; they’re supposed to have the authority to push back against ministers and staffers when necessary, to offer the fabled “frank and fearless advice”. Instead, it seems, they dismissed accurate warnings in favour of pandering to a minister.
People died as a result. Thousands of families, perhaps tens of thousands, suffered profound stress. This should be a “never again” moment for the APS, and those responsible should become living examples how not to lead.
A government determined to rebuild a discredited public service would ensure that this happens. But politicians of good will can only do so much. The APS’ current leadership should be doing some deep soul-searching.
There is something being missed here. The robodebt scheme was illegal without required legislative change. But it is impossible for any legislative change to alter the plain fact that when an income varies during the year, with different amounts in different fortnights, it is impossible to know the income for any fortnight from looking at the average income over the whole year. The average does not tell you what you need to know. It cannot. The lack of necessary evidence provided by average income data is a fundamental and unalterable property of reality, no matter what legislation is or is not passed. Legislation to make Robodebt legal would not change the nature of the extortion conducted by the DHS, it would only have the effect of giving legal cover for the extortion.
Yep, extortion it would remain. If a mafia boss and his henchmen extorted $1.2 billion they’d be locked up for ten years. Why won’t these bastards?
In politics, when expedient, the Left hand will sometimes cover the Right.
Exactly. Best comment so far.
Of course you are claiming that the author of the article misses the point since all he says in fact is that some legislative amendment should have been proposed and then everything would have been all right.
Well put Sinking Ship Rat. And if the scheme did in fact have a legislation to support it, the legislation would be saying “you are eligible for unemployment benefits while unemployed over a number of fortnightly periods in a given year, but if, in that same year, you get a job, and earn $X, you’re going to have to pay the benefits back”. Or something like that. Unemployment benefits become HECS. Which may be the intent so perhaps it’s best not to say it out loud.
When you support an initiative you have good reason to believe is unlawful, you share culpability for the injury it causes. The further up the decision-making hierarchy you go, the greater your culpability. It seems to me that by their unlawful behaviour, the senior public service managers involved have voided their immunity and should be made personally accountable.
And yet, one of the most senior of those involved is now to be appointed to head the body overseeing AUKUS (another ill-conceived idea in my view – is there some sort of weird consistency in this appointment?); while Labor has said there will be no public service sackings. Surely someone ought to get the boot, at least, over this latest example of the way the public interest has been damaged by politicising the Public Service. Sinking Ship Rat has it right ….
The former Sectetary of DSS, known in the APS as a control freak , and as an army reservist for taking orders from above, was pushed sideways by the new govt, but seems still to be on full pay and now appointed to a “real” job, even if its dealing with the fable of AUKUS.
She was a disaster and loathed when Morose Pain rewarded her with DFAT, where her ignorance was embarrassing. Morale plummeted as DFAT realised it had been dudded yet again. The upside was she stayed out of policy matters and focused on corporate affairs – probably the reason she made such a “significant failure of public administration” at DHS/DSS.
My first thought about that AUKUS posting was, well – That’s one way to get rid of AUKUS.
Second thought was – Well that’ll get rid of Dutton.
Then again if these callus people are still in the APS, it makes me wonder… I dunno… too may paths I could type down.
Like one – boot out entitlement and sly yes men and laziness as status quo and then actively, conciously shift to decency and human rights.
I dunno, dont thing any one much in power is up for it.
I really like some of those historic BBC tv shows of Crofters. If we want apprentices and trainees and people sticking around in the public service, and, well, in jobs – ONE way to replace the APS old-guards so to speak -may be to stop blindly idolising “productivity gains” and “profit”.
I mean, who would want to enter or re-enter APS (or politics) employment if your sole purpose is to be a conduit for uncaring cruelty.
Our employment systems/ options feel to me, an equivalent of worn out factory line workers, serfs, slaves maybe, certainly prisons and disabled people are already feeling to me like working houses never went away.
Talking today about how prevelant Autism seems, and, I’ve been thinking for a while – when handmade crafting got replaced for productivity, industialisation, and profits, we still existed. Doing things quietly, with our hands, paying attention on little details. Maybe on our own or barely talking for hours.
I think there is hope for the trades, and the APS, and employment in Aust.
Employment just need to fundamentally slow down, boot entitlement out, and pay attention to employees.
There again, what hope is there for anything but blips of human decency.
Hmmm… too off topic?
Not at all, Karletta – these are all symptoms of the Randite reconstruction of our society, wherein one hand soils the other rather than washing it. Aussie Mateship has been replaced by “Bugger You, Jack, I’m alright – pull up the ladder, I’m Inboard!
It’ll be a long, arduous haul back to re-establishing the “Fair Go” society we used to enjoy.
Agree 100%.
One of the current problems in this sort of situation, there is no motivation to become a whistle blower.
As David McBride and Richard Boyle can attest. Incredible that Albanese is making a fuss about Assange (and rightly so) but Dreyfus is doing nothing about McBride and Boyle.
Their alacrity to take to such a low board to dive into such depths of amoral complicity – to please their similarly ‘ideologically disposed(?)’ political masters – to screw “the public”, is breathtaking.
And at whose behest did they “water down” what they passed on to Morrison?
Takes me back to “Children Overboard” and Reith-Howard’s “firewall” – erected to keep Reith, Howard, Downer, Hill et al from ’embarrassing facts’ that would detract from their politicising that situation.
…. Was ‘Jane Halton Inc;’ in this too? Or was this “APS best-established practice” : to preempt a situation, to protect the minister, so that they could go on misleading the public, ‘because they weren’t informed’ – deliberately, by the a specious, politicised PS?
… Then there was Shredderjiklian’s encapsulation of the m.o. “I don’t need to know about that bit”?
… Throw in a goodly measure of duplicitous (PS) as well.
It is also the result of a process of transformation carried out over decades (it was explicit as far back as the 1990s) to change the public service from a body dedicated to, well, public service, into one concerned only with how to do anything a minister demands or suggests, without question or challenge; and where possible, to anticipate and deliver before the minister has even indicated what might be required. This change has been carried out with great thoroughness to purge the entire service of any belief that serving the nation or the public has any validity if it collides in any way with serving the minister. Under the current doctrine the minister embodies both the state and public, always. When the minister is a beacon of decency and wholly rational the public servants do all they can to help, and that’s ok. When the minister is a dangerously deluded, incompetent and sadistic clown, the modern public servants are equally enthusiastic to help and enable, and see every whim and cruelty enacted. If such a minister struggles to come up with suitably vile schemes, the modern public servant should invent them for the minister.
…. a process of transformation carried out over decades (it was explicit as far back as the 1990s) to change the public service from a body dedicated to, well, public service, into one concerned only with how to do anything a minister demands or suggests, without question or challenge;…
Excellent encapsulation of the problem.
Morrison told us this out loud, do as I tell you or…
Seems from a collection of their actions that the AFP acted in the same way.
Thank you John Howard.
. . . is breathtaking. Nah! It’s corruption.
Under what KPIs were these people operating? Who was doing their performance appraisals? Had I or my staff stuffed up so badly when I was working in the APS in Canberra, there would have been counselling and a warning that any repeat in the next six months would cause liability for dismissal.
…. Yet this mob get promoted to witless protection?
Bernard, “frank and fearless advice” died with the loss of tenure in the public service. Want your 3-5yr contract renewed? As gossiped, a DG telling an underling “when I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you”. It’s all about pleasing the minister, bugger the actualities of the situation.
Alongside these spineless functionaries, Sir Humphrey Appleby emerges as a Plaster Saint; he and his Good Mate Arnold from Treasury could teach this lot much about housetrading Ministers. We need to re-establish our own version of Whitehall.
1 fact is there is a finite pot of support for people in need of social support; single parents, ill, disabled…out of work despite a high level of Skills!..However The important number 2 but infact central fact over all of this is if middle men i.e: parasitic ineffective and profit oriented middle men and women ( off shore operatives with third party agendas) get hold of the money
Penultimate fact is our money, people and futures are being placed second to greed… fossils and neoliberal lurking in all parties do the math
It seems there is a finite “pot” of support for vulnerable people, but an infinite barrel of support for expensive new useless and already obsolete military toys shows us where our priorities lie.
Keeping 5% of the population in desperate poverty is a political choice, decided by the owners of our politicians so as to keep wages low and conditions poor. It’s a stick to threaten any worker who has the temerity to demand better wages and conditions. “Sit down, shut your effing mouth or you’ll end up like them. There’s a line up of people around the block waiting for your job”.