The Australian psyche is replete with chilling contradictions. Its selective historic memory, its fraying veneer of justice, landscapes quenched by the broken bargain of a fair go and the triumph of avarice.
There are many others, not least the haunting parallel etched in the dirge of despair experienced by many robodebt victims and the tale of the starving swagman camped by the billabong we so admire in our unofficial Australian anthem “Waltzing Matilda”.
Both in their own way paint a decidedly bleak portrait of people who, for want of a better phrase, were down on their luck, their needs inseparable from the circumstances in which they find themselves. Individuals who, when confronted with the full might of the state on the one hand and the powerlessness of their condition on the other, were overcome with terminal anguish.
And yet in Banjo Paterson’s swagman we ultimately assign not hopelessness but the sentimental dignity of the underdog, hearing in his cri de cœur — “You’ll never catch me alive” — the irreverential spirit of egalitarianism to which our national narrative identifies.
In the typical robodebt victim, by contrast, we see and hear nothing of the kind, preferring to confine most of our frustrations with the scandal to its bureaucratic failures, not its inhumanity. Rather than being something which speaks to the shattered myth of Australian egalitarianism, the scheme’s calculated assault on the disadvantaged is, from this vantage point, instead reduced to yet another embarrassing aberration of the Coalition era.
“Why is [robodebt] not a bigger scandal, even now?” wrote columnist and academic Waleed Aly in The Sydney Morning Herald last week: “Robodebt is less scandalous than it should be, because its underlying logic is not alien to us. It offends in degree more than essence.”
Any long gaze in the mirror, in other words, reflects a nation that is predisposed to despise most welfare recipients, preferring to see their condition in life as somehow born of choice rather than unfairness, misfortune or the lottery of birth. It’s for this reason it’s neither the “welfare crackdown” itself nor its targets which now inspires some to retrospectively stare at their shoes; it’s purely the unlawful manner in which it was executed.
All of which suggests a thorny question: how did we, as a nation, arrive at a juncture where the underlying failure of robodebt is considered more official — in the sense of bureaucratic incompetence, lies and malfeasance — rather than morally reprehensible?
One view, given expression by former deputy secretary of the Social Services Department Serena Wilson, is that it’s something which owes entirely to the smallness of politics exemplified by the former Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.
“[The former government] had a strong view of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor,” she said in a supplementary written submission to the royal commission a few weeks ago.
“At times, social security was regarded as a drag on the budget and the economy. Other than for age pensioners and carers, it was rarely accepted as an entitlement for people who could not otherwise support themselves and needed assistance to address challenges and barriers to employment.”
There are, however, at least two problems with using Wilson’s perspective as an explanation, the first being that it overlooks the reality that it has long been — and remains — a matter of bipartisan consensus to force the unemployed to subsist below the poverty line in a life devoid of dignity. Far from being the measured minimum required to buy plausible deniability of government indifference, the JobSeeker payment — at just $50 a day for a single person — is bipartisan indifference.
The other point is it pays no heed to the ingrained inequities fostered by our distorted tax system, which, much like the tax system that prevails in America, is one unarguably predicated on welfare for the rich.
In recent decades, governments have deliberately tied their electoral success to tax policies that discriminate in favour of high-income earners through a raft of property, superannuation and housing concessions. From franking credits, which cost taxpayers $17 billion a year, to negative gearing and capital gains discounts, forecast to exceed $157 billion over the next decade, complex tax rules for trusts and superannuation perks, the latter of which drains the public purse by some $51 billion a year, the weight of welfare for the rich is immense.
Indeed, it’s a tax system that perversely allows an executive earning $100,000 to pay no tax or just a fraction of the tax rate of a gardener moving from JobSeeker to a $31,000 job and, among other things, one that sees a person with $1.6 million in their super account validly receive an average tax break of $60,000 — nearly three times the value of a single pension. Such inequities are in turn compounded by the destruction of our progressive income tax system, as foreshadowed by the legislated stage three tax cuts, which also favours high-income earners to a tune of more than $250 billion over 10 years.
Raising JobSeeker to $88 a day in line with the Henderson poverty line, by contrast, carries an estimated price tag of about $12 billion per year, with that cost falling annually as recipients gain employment.
Yet anyone with the temerity to say as much or point out the need for reform quickly stands accused of fomenting class war or the politics of class envy — as the unedifying hysteria around the very modest changes flagged to superannuation and franking credits in recent weeks bears out.
In truth, it’s impossible to deny that handouts to the wealthy — even in the best of times — are economically wasteful and ethically dubious. This is especially so in circumstances when the 3 million and counting Australians living below the poverty line are told to tighten their belts because, so the government claims, there’s nothing left to support them.
It’s in this way that the government’s decision to maintain the status quo is tantamount to the path of least resistance — the coward’s way — without even a veneer of morality left.
The ideas and imagery of Australia, in other words, face existential challenges. We’re a country where an unshakeable sense of entitlement pervades the rich, where seemingly every manifestation of fairness is under assault, and where the yawning chasm between the wealthy and the poor is shrugged off as the natural order of things.
None of this denies the force carried by “Waltzing Matilda” in modern Australia. It merely shows the allegiance of most Australians, and the government, lies not with the broke swagman but, unapologetically, with the wealthy squatter instead.
The great irony being, of course, that the class war needs no fomenting, the conflict is fully enaged now, although it’s very one-sided. Class war was quiet for some time in the industrilaised nations after the middle of the last century but it really took off in the 1980s. Warren Buffet at least was honest enough to acknowledge it, but most of those on his side prefer to deny what they are doing, much as Putin says his war is only a special military operation. For them of course this is not the politics of envy, it is the politics of greed, which is just fine. To those that have shall be given, as the gospel says.
Why is Robodebt not a bigger scandal? Perhaps it is just so ghastly that few can stomach the totality. Decades ago when Law Lord Dennison was presented with overwhelming evidence that the Birmingham Six were convicted on falsified evidence manufactured by the police he refused to let their civil claim against the police proceed. He said:
He also commented that
Robodebt also opens up an ‘appalling vista’. In The Conversation there is a good article that nevertheless says, “Hundreds of thousands would effectively cop an averaged and inaccurate debt.” Sloppy writing this like this obscures how bad Robodebt was. There were no “averaged and inaccurate debts”. If somebody really owes a debt, it is a debt, but anything not owed is not a debt. The averaging that took place referred to their earnings. The calculation done with averaged earnings did not calculate a debt. The result of the calculation was just an arbitrary number which was used by the government to extort money from the most vulnerable people in Australia with menaces, including illegal and fraudulent assertions about a debt. This is class war.
Nothing that happened was an aberration. It was the modern public service doing what modern ministers required. Senior public servants devised the scheme, knew it was illegal and worked like demons for years to prevent anyone exposing and stopping it. Legal advice exposing the scheme’s illegality was buried, ignored or fudged. Ministers were delighted with the money it brought in and when there was criticism their only concern was to silence those voices and keep the scheme running. The ombudsman who could have acted was easily bamboozled with false statements and was all too willing to give up and move on. A member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal who made findings that threatened to halt the scheme found his contract terminated. The public servants ignored their legal duty to either take account of adverse AAT findings or else appeal the findings in court for a binding legal ruling; instead they just carried on as though nothing had happened. The few public servants who tried to raise concerns were crushed by their bosses. Public servants as far as possible only told ministers what they wanted to hear, but if there was no way to avoid giving bad news, the public servants would always do it verbally without taking notes so it was all deniable. It’s an appalling vista; better to just move on.
Bloody hell! I realised early on that things are crook in Tallarook but reading your reflections is making my hair (whats left of it)stand on end!
Well said, Rat. Class warfare is where the poor complain about the behavior of wealth, not where wealth and its allies actively gouge and abuse the poor.
Makes a mockery of the biblical “The meek shall inherit the earth” Doesn’t it?
That’s well said SSR.
I’ll never forget the way Clyde Cameron, Whitlam’s minister for labour, so frequently used the term Dole Bludger!
That was in the days when the neoliberal disaster was still in its infancy. Since then ALP governments federally have firmly grasped that ideology. They have conned the working man with the myths of trickle-down and efficient markets and continue with that claptrap despite the evidence everywhere of market failure, and the increasing wealth of the already wealthy.
Since the coming of Albo and Chalmers we’ve been frequently reminded of the trillion-dollar debt and the need to rein in public spending, yet today, with a straight face, the government has no problem announcing that the nuclear submarines will only set us back one hundred billion dollars. It’s amazing that governments always know where Australian dollars come from when they need to fund the latest war, or toys for the boys. Never for health, education, or welfare.
The role of the Whitlam government in this shameful con is not widely known. Cameron and that government decided that full employment – which was the governing principal in the post war period to date – had to go. They needed a pool of unemployed to keep wages down. Now they didn’t want to get up in parliament and say that, so they created the dole bludger story: Unemployment was all the fault of the unemployed. No it wasn’t, it was government policy.
Yes that is a different perspective that one usually hears about the Whitlam administration. Remembering a few things. Clyde Cameron was unpopular among the Right and the business sector. As Minister for Labour he raised wages unilaterally by 27% in 1 year at a time when inflation rose by 17%. Unemployment rose from 3 to 6% before falling below that level in 1975. To be sure, unemployment reared its ugly head from 1974-75 after an absence of 40 or so years. That was not Clyde’s fault. I don’t believe it was his fault necessarily and I remember it was Fraser and the press that were using the dole bludger myth. I don’t think it was Clyde’s policy per se to reduce wages. It was from memory that Clyde didn’t get on with Whitlam, that Whitlam who was from the Labor Right (I know that it hard for some to comprehend – he’s the best Labor Right winger I have seen ever!!), didn’t like Cameron’s policy in his portfolio and thought he gave wage rises too much. Also most importantly remember that Whitlam was in for only 3 years. He simply couldn’t do everything.
Gareth Hutchens
Posted Sun 30 May 2021 at 7:22am
Sunday 30 May 2021 at 7:22am –
, updated Mon 31 May 2021 at 9:45am –
“In the early 1970s, when the old model began to disintegrate, systemic problems in the global economy caused unemployment rates to shoot up in multiple countries, including in Australia….
.Australia’s unemployment rate jumped sharply higher in the early 1970s as major developed economies suffered “stagflation”; rising inflation and rising unemployment.(Source: Reserve Bank of Australia, “The Evolution of Employment and Unemployment in Australia,” Jerome Fahrer and Alexandra Heath, Research Discussion Paper 9215, December 1992.)
Long-term unemployment became a serious problem too…….
But, as the level and length of unemployment increased dramatically in the 1970s, the rhetoric from politicians changed with it.
From the early 1970s, Australian voters began to hear of “dole bludgers”.
The first person to use the phrase was Liberal MP Bert Kelly, who was a pioneer of bringing “New Right” political ideas to Australia.
But it was Clyde Cameron, the minister for labour in Gough Whitlam’s Labor government (1972-1975), who really promoted it.
According to historian Verity Archer, the phrase “dole bludger” served a crucial ideological purpose.
By recasting welfare recipients as parasites upon “ordinary Australian” taxpayers, it reset the parameters of economic debate in Australia along neoliberal lines, she said.”
So it seems that both TC4451 and Archibald have little regard for the truths they don’t want to hear, though granted they were right about Clyde Cameron, but not about the motives.
Also they seem to have selective memories to not have remembered the existing worldwide financial conditions that lead to the well-known (except for those who choose to ignore it ) stagflation.
Well said – but it was Lord Denning, I think.
Thanks, you’re right – my mistake, sorry.
Perhaps he was thinking of the expense to Crown purse? All that nonsense about Justice is very costly.
As Lord Privy Seal he was, after all the final arbiter, of demands on the Chancellory.
Perhaps he was, but along with that, was the challenge to the whole British justice system, which the upper-class traitorous mongrel clearly stated.
His behaviour in this was typical of the privileged views exhibited all through British legal history of dismissing proven facts in the interests of their thieving, oppressive class warfare.
Just so. Also, at the time Denning spoke it was generally understood that in a British court you were innocent until proven Irish.
I was very surprised by the evidence given about and by the Acting Ombudsman. I had thought an ombudsman our best bet of unethical and illegal practices but it seems this may not be the case.
I really, really dislike the phrase “class warfare” but I agree with you, this is exactly what Robodebts was.
We are incredibly lucky that a few lower level people told the truth. In many cases, it is their testimony that seems to have taken us passed s/he said / s/he said thanks to what looks to me to be collusion and corruption between senior public servants and politicians perpetrated against ordinary Australians on a significant scale.
We can also be grateful to The Guardian and The Saturday Paper for their reporting on Robodebts. I understand that reporting on RCs can be tricky but it’s hard not to feel that the other media outlets were not somewhat complicit in the scheme (after it was ceased) due to their poor reporting of the RC. I was very glad to see the Commissioner acknowledge both outlets and their key journalists.
My guess is that the government shares your view of the ombudsman being our best bet, and it is no accident a spineless patsy was in charge there who knew better than to ask awkward questions. This is a consistent pattern. The AAT was stacked with Liberal stooges. Senior public servants were promoted for blind unquestioning loyalty, anticipating each minister’s whims with a ‘whatever it takes’ attitude, or else exiled to hard labour in Siberia if they showed symptoms of holding to ethical principles. And so on.
It seems to me the public has been successfully conditioned, mostly by the MSM, to reject, without any thinking, all talk of class war. It’s obvious whose interests this taboo serves. There’s an old story about Trotsky, just after the Russian Revolution, addressing a meeting of workers in the one of the new soviets to talk about the civil war in Russia. One of the workers objected that they were not interested in war. ‘You may not be interested in the war,’ said Trotsky, ‘But the war is interested in you.’
At the conclusion of the public hearings the Commissioner made mention of the sporadic reporting by large sections of the media. She noted the ‘honourable exceptions’. She seemed to me less than impressed by the absence of the MSM and commended the Twitter feeders (can I call them they at?) for their efforts in reporting the progress of the commission.
Yes, her mention of the tweeting was fascinating. I might resurrect my Twitter account for future RCs.
Having the hearing live and recorded and available through YouTube has been fantastic. There is no excuse for the lack of coverage by the media with such top class resources readily available.
I should have added that the closing days of the hearings leave one with the suspicion that DHS withheld relevant information from the Ombudsman. See the evidence of Louise McLeod.
True, but that same testimony revealed that the ombudsman’s staff were alive to what was likely going on and advocated for more action from the ombudsman who, as SSR says, acted irresponsibility at best.
Thankful to The Guardian for reporting it, but not for how they reported it, such weaksauce.
‘Bungled’, they called Robodebt, without any comment section anywhere on the subject for people to set them straight in that score.
What an egregious misframing – there was no mistake; it was plainly deliberate. To say otherwise is to be complicit with those LNP filth.
That’s true. I wish I’d followed on Twitter but didn’t. I think The Saturday Paper did the best job at getting at the reality. I think Rick Morton’s upbringing might help him understand the true depravity of RoboDebts which has helped The Saturday Paper get passed “bungled”.
In the past you would be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Robodebt presumed you were guilty until proven innocent, and if you don’t have the resources to fight the case then you stay guilty. Robodebt is bullying of the worst kind, a malicious action of the politically strong against the weak.
What is more, the DHS / DSS knew it. Their modelling included assumptions about how many of their victims would try to fight back and dispute the claims against them, and they made changes to ensure it was very difficult to dispute their fake numbers. They were well aware the scheme would generate very little income for the government if it was run fairly, so instead they did whatever was required to maximise the revenue generated. The effect on the victims and the lack of proof of real debts was not a consideration for either ministers or for public servants.
If your sense of humour is up to it, you might be amused at many thousands of innocent welfare claimants being falsely accused of making fraudulent claims by a very righteous moralising government that was really making fraudulent claims against those people running to billions of dollars in total.
Re ‘malicious action of the politically strong against the weak’. Yep. For perceived political edge, probably real. Years of gotcha journalism have prepared fertile soil. But as McGregor explores here, this has been a cultural shift, away from support for the underdog and toward a willingness to punch down.
As Clive James noted (back when he had some relevance) the difference between English and Australian class system is that while in the UK eveybody is aware of where they sit on the hierarchy, able to identify stratas above and below them, Aussies can only see the stratas below them. This makes us vulnerable to being manipulated from those above, including wealthy media proprietors.
Combine this with a lustful enthusiasm for financial advancement, a pioneering settler narrative that fueled our unbridled embrace of all things privatised and market-based, a place where economic liberalism trumped social compassion, a neo-liberal fantasy land of limitless affluence for the worthy, a mind-palace in which so many were willing to dwell.
I recall a text-book study from the late 90’s I think, that compared social attitudes toward welfare fraud and tax fraud. $1K of welfare fraud was held to be as bad as $5K of tax fraud. Numbers thereabout. I doubt much equalisation has occurred since; its probably got worse.
Feeding the don’t want-to-know response from so many.
I’m certain the balance between welfare and tax fruad is much worse now. Both in the UK and Australia all governments have nearly abandoned any pretence of caring about tax fraud, except for petty amounts committed by little people. There is almost no attempt at enforcement of the rules, the rules are relaxed at every opportunity, the use of offshore tax havens is standard practice for anyone with real money and for them paying tax is now near enough optional. The government even takes advice from tax-dodging consultancies on how to write the tax laws to benefit the tax-dodgers, and seconds staff from those consultancies to work in the tax office and make sure it all runs smoothly. Meanwhile over in welfare (real welfare for people who need it, not the middle-class welfare) even the smallest mistake by a claimant is pounced on and punished, any excuse is grabbed to stop payments, and every claimant is automatically treated like dirt anyway.
Thank-you Maeve. You have raised such significant issues for our society.
The government’s timidity in selling the modest super change was fascinating to me. Even discovering 60+% of people polled being in favour, it still didn’t seem to be prepared to back itself. It must also have had its own polling suggesting such support or it wouldn’t have considered it in the first place.
It took Dick Smith to say if you’ve got three mill in your super, you can afford to pay that extra 15% and you should for the sake of your children and grandchildren who are going to be left holding the can, and the NAB CEO who said we’ve got a mess on our hands, we ALL need to pitch in to clean it up.
I’m still struggling to believe that the NAB CEO has a better grip on the realities of every day life than a whole lot of every day people. The NAB’s books must be showing some seriously ugly stuff for the long-term no-one is talking about.
The federal election was very similar. Labor not concerned about JobSeeker recipients and their children living well below the poverty line but the “teals” coming out in support of raising JobSeeker.
And, the NSW Libs has just announced another middle class welfare vote buying scheme.
I had been hoping that a broader acceptance of Climate Change might help us see that that there are other critical nation-wide aspects which demand we do more pulling together over the short-termism and me, me, me. But, it’s definitely looking like we Boomers, Gen Xers and Inter-warers still haven’t managed to grow up and we’ll be looking to the young ones to show us the way to a sustainable society and economy (if that’s even possible now that we’ve buggered up the environment to the degree that we have).
I suspect that the NAB CEO simply pays more attention to the news than people who give a knee-jerk reaction to “They want to take our super!”
I’ve noticed that timidity too Woke Woman. Don’t they have people whose job it is to figure out what the Coalition argument is going to be so they can jump on it beforehand? It’s like they don’t believe in their own position, so it’s no wonder far too many Aussies don’t believe it either. Somebody needs to grow some balls.
Yes, this government is a very, very poor communicator. It’s very lucky the Opposition is so full of people without substance.
Definitely Albanese should’ve taken the bull by the horns but he is too meek. His refusal to support an RC into media diversity. The cave in to the Gas Cartel, allowing tax cuts to the rich to remain, the last minute changes to Federal ICAC.
I sometimes wonder if this government will turn out to be just as corrupt as the last 3 but keep going back to my original summary that their cowardice prevents any meaningful reform.
“Why is [robodebt] not a bigger scandal, even now?” asks Waleed Aly. Could it be the reporting was done by some media but selectively ignored by News Corp which owns the majority of print newspapers?
This weekend I borrowed a copy of The Australian due to curiosity about how the Royal Commission was being reported. Perhaps I didn’t scour the pages sufficiently carefully but I found no mention of the Commissions proceedings for the previous week. Hence the mob of knaves (aka former PMs, ministers, highly paid public servants) was not revealed to be incompetent, irresponsible and irrelevant to the positions they held. Nor was there any mention of testimony given by grieving relatives of tragic victims of Robodebt. Thus a monumental scandal went under the radar of News Corp subscribers.
It raises the question of what coverage – if any – News Corp has given to the Robodebt debacle since the Royal Commission hearings began. One suspects if Robodebt had been a Labor government initiative the details of the incompetence would’ve hit page one of their papers daily eg: Minister has no memory!…Minister was warned scheme illegal!…PM ignored advice! …etc….
Can any Crikey readers provide insight into News Corp’s coverage?
Good and fair coverage in THESATURDAYPAPER. worth a read.
News Corp published one article last week, or maybe the week before, on page four I think. It has conspicuously ignored the whole Commission, despite actually publishing a letter asking where the coverage was. I keep perservering with it, as The West Australian is just Harvey Norman adverts and I refuse to subscribe to that, but it’s really hard going. It’s a good job I can read the Saturday Paper as well.
Not only Newscorpse; also 9 papers.
Where I live, two of us separately scoured the Weekend Australian and could not find a word on Robodebt, not even in the letters to the editor.
I can only assume even News Corpse realises Robodebt was indefensible, and, that the behaviour of both politicians and public servants was unspeakable. So I guess they are channeling Ludwig Wittgenstein i.e. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’.
There was also the active role of Limited News, as Limited News Party press agents, in selling the scheme to the greater public, spinning that ‘everything was above board’, the embellishment that the likes of those single mothers and dole bludgers ‘ripping off the system’ (as per the Curry or Maul) deserved everything they got and more – that probably has a lot to do with that reticence to talk about it….
Hoping it will go away – and take any trace of their partisan complicity, in the disgrace, with it?
Bring on a RC into media ownership and control !
We tried that – remember the Petition to Parliament that garnered more than half a million signatures?
Whatever happened to that?
Oh yeah, it was rejected the ‘Labor’ government.
With the backing of Dutton.
Bugger that. We need an RC into Australia as a nation.
People live with the fantasy that “Murdoch is finished” his power is waining. Nothing is furthur from the truth. He doesn’t hold on to his newsprint assets for sentimental reasons. They are pivotal to his grip on the nations narrative.
Papers get delivered at midnight to talk back radio stations. The headlines become topics for overnight discussions. Those attracting the most comment then move to morning news bulletins, breakfast news, free to air television news and then spread via the internet.
With over 70% of Australian newsprint, Murdoch controls what people are talking about. Very rarely does a storey break free from the narrative he wants to project.
The “fair go” always was, and still is, a piece of marketing bumpf.