Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has told a royal commission he never considered the legality of robodebt and that he trusted Alan Tudge knew what he was doing in regards to the scheme.
Turnbull took the witness stand via video link on Monday morning and shared a number of printed-out WhatsApp messages from 2017 where he and Tudge — then human services minister — discussed negative media coverage of robodebt.
The messages included one sent by Turnbull on January 7 2017 to Tudge alerting him to a Sydney Morning Herald article that suggested the debt recovery scheme could be unlawful.
Tudge wrote back to defend the scheme, saying “it is not correct that we simply take the average of the income declared to ATO and apply that average across 26 fortnights”.
Turnbull said that while he failed to recall many details from the time, he remembered accepting what Tudge said because he was the “responsible minister”.
He said he saw Tudge as a “technocrat” who understood the system.
“I didn’t regard him as being a negligent or incompetent or careless minister,” Turnbull said.
Turnbull also said he never considered whether robodebt was legal or not.
“Look, I did not turn my mind to the legality of the program. It never occurred to us that it was unauthorised,” he told the commission.
“Because we assumed that it was as it had been represented.”
The commission has heard the robodebt system did indeed use the income averaging system described in Tudge’s message, often incorrectly presuming a recipient’s income would be the same in each two-week period.
The onus was then put on welfare recipients to prove to the government they didn’t owe money.
A Federal Court judge found in 2019 that income averaging was unlawful, echoing previous advice to the government.
Tudge has previously told the commission he didn’t understand the scheme was unlawful, and that in any case, he would have had no power to change it because he was a junior minister.
“They were the cabinet decisions, which I didn’t have the authority to overturn,” he said last month.
Tudge has since quit Parliament, sparking a byelection in his Victorian seat of Aston scheduled for April 1.
“Trusting Alan Tudge” is right up there with “Believing Stuart Robert” in the 10 impossible things to do list.
Turnbull said he accepted what Tudge told him but he never uttered the words “I trusted Alan Tudge.” I listened closely to his answer when the Commissioner put the question, he cleverly dodged it while giving the illusion of an answer. Always the lawyer.
As did Tudge’s wife, Turnbull trusted Tudge.
I don’t buy it. Not for one moment. If I, as an ordinary member of the community, can see the outrageous injustice of the Robodebt scheme, surely the PM can. The illegality of it is almost beside the point. How could such a scheme possibly be legal when the assessment criteria for eligibility for payment in the first place is supposed to make sure that the person is entitled to the money they receive. This whole scheme was nothing more than a terror tactic to make people think twice before engaging with the Government support services in any way. I am so ashamed of our Government. Yes still ashamed, because our government is still torturing those who need help through welfare support. They deliberately make the system so stressful and complicated they wear people down. People whose circumstances push them to the limit of their ability to endure even before social services makes them beg on their knees for a tiny scrap from the table.
“I don’t buy it. Not for one moment. If I, as an ordinary member of the community, can see the outrageous injustice of the Robodebt scheme, surely the PM can.”
You can probably also do primary school maths which apparently no-one in the government could manage. Not the engineers, economists, bankers, maths teacher, etc.
This is what happens when the APS is so politicised that negative voices are not only unheard, but their owners punished, while sycophantic know-alls are actively encouraged. I would not mind betting that many in the Centrelink debt recovery area well knew that Robodebt was illegal, and even more knew that it was immoral. But any ‘naysayers’ would have been soundly walloped, demoted or sacked, while the architect/s basked in that Government’s applause. I worked for many years in means-testing policy areas of FaCS and DVA and can state with certainty that if I had still been in either agency at the time, I would have insisted on briefing the relevant Minister/s on the stupidity of the scheme. My blunt speaking did, of course, make me somewhat unpopular in certain quarters…
You do not have to speculate about the fate of those at DSS, DHS etc. who spoke out against, and the rewards of those who devised Robodebt and defended it to the bitter end by fair means and foul. Some of them gave evidence at the inquiry which finishes this week about how they were treated, and it is as bad as you say. The Saturday Paper has been excellent covering each day of the inquiry.
According to the RC testimony from the Centrelink people, that’s exactly what happened.
I suspect that there was another sneaky scheme implemented by DHS which was less obviously illegal.
The payment of Medicare rebates became “ratty” at the same time as RoboDebt commenced and concurrently, with the amalgamation of Centerlink offices with the Tax Department and Medicare.
Most people have no idea whether they are entitled to a rebate or not and this was the basis for systematically underpaying or not paying Medicare rebates.
I work for a specialist and started doing the claims on behalf of patients. Anything involving surgery took 2 attempts (after a series of escalations) by our local sitting member (Trevor Evans Brisbane LP) for me to get 1/4 of what was legally due.
Even I got tired.
Most people would have given up on the first/ second try and then blamed their “Overcharging Specialist” for the discrepancy.
And so, I think this was another wedge driven into Medicare, with the intent of breaking our health system.
If Medicare declines to pay for an item, the private insurance does also.
Couple this with Tony Abbott’s government allowing the state public system to access the private insurance of public patients ($800 per day for a public bed and the private health insurance premiums rose by over 50%). Talk about cost shifting onto the Private health Insurances.
US style health system only a few steps away.
The ATO were also instructed to start issuing debts on people around the same time. ATO staff saw it as a cash grab and said so.
Which is why exATO official Richard Boyle, having followed ALL the procedures demanded by Dreyfus’ useless PID Act (2013), put a target on his back by pointing out abusive & illegal ATO debt collection tactics.
The ATO did not admit that he was correct when they ceased those actions but, for his troubling ethics, Boyle has nontheless been facing W/B charges for the last 3 year.
I rather fancy it was Bernard Collaery whose case was dropped, and that Boyle is STILL facing charges………………
As I stated above”…Boyle has nonetheless been facing W/B charges for the last 3 years“.
That is outrageous given that the ATO, in ceasing the unlawful actions to which he drew attention, then charged him.
In the cases of WitnessK&Collaery, Dreyfus is continuing the previous government’s iniquitous behaviour in seeking to have the documents already submitted to court sealed and/or redacted.
This is a basic failure to understand the concept of ‘open justice’ and in no conceivable way can the Crown be said “an ideal litigant’ – which is a basic requirement.
Reading through the messages between PM Turnbull, Tudge and Porter I am reminded that the big problem with Turnbull as PM, was the reason he never lived up to the expectation of so many: he could never bring himself to stand up to the far right of his party. He provided cover for the crazies and he did it for years. Only when he was booted out by Morrison did he then decide to speak up. Too little too late. If not for him we would have avoided most of the horror of the last decade of incompetence and corruption.
He was broken by losing the leadership to Abbott in 2009. After that he was scared of his own shadow and spent the rest of his days in the Liberals grovelling to everyone in sight. He’d have done better for his own reputation if he had left parliament after 2009 rather than carry on in that state. If he had he’d probably be remembered rather like Kim Beazley, as a “great PM we never had”, instead of the floundering, pathetic, spineless, inert apology for a real PM that he became in due course.
Kim Beasley gave us two terms of Howard..it wasn’t ticker it was acumen..
Just another ‘miserable ghost’ moaning from the feather-duster cabinet.
Who, apparently, either :-
a) ‘Didn’t read the papers that were reporting Robodebt malfeasance : confining himself to the ‘friendly media’ version of news? And didn’t watch the TV, or listen to radio news, that was conveying reports of such ‘anomalies’ – to what he liked being told’?
b) Not possessed of any curiosity beyond what he was being told, in the face of such ‘contradictions’; or
c) ‘Couldn’t be arsed’?
Remember his nickname was ‘fizzer’.
Turnbull was told what he had to not do before he was returned to the leadership. I do not know one person who has said they would take the position under those circumstances.
Ah yes! Mal the smooth operator.
Eighteen versions of “I can’t recall”.
Four instances of “Not turning his mind” All this in 50 minutes. A strike rate of twenty two denials – one every 2.3 minutes.
No wonder he fancied himself a prime minister! He fit right in!
Yes, an extraordinary performance by the brilliant ‘spycatcher’ lawyer.
And please, it’s ‘he fitted right in’.
And yet seems like a good bloke when compared with Liberal Prime Ministers from Howard to present. There’s the story.
“The Curious Case of the Incurious Malcolm Turnbull”
It’s a good thing, for his infallible credibility, that he apparently ‘never read the papers beyond Rupert’s’ (busy selling Robodebt’s ‘efficacy’ – against all contrarian comers) and ‘never watched’ those TV news programs that raised concerns too?
For 3 years, during that ‘media storm’ waged around it.
That’s the ‘3 years’ he was PM.
he apparently ‘never read the papers beyond Rupert’s’ Which is utterly incredible.
This is the man who claimed credit for his part in the arrival of The Guardian Australia.
the spivs interest is only piqued when his wallets involved..