The robodebt royal commission report has shown for the first time how two Coalition government scandals intersected to create an unrelenting attack on the welfare of Australia’s most vulnerable.
In so doing, it has revealed the true impact of the Coalition’s all-out assault on the independence of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), and its allied moves to nullify the work of a once-powerful independent body that had oversight of the tribunal. The actions destroyed the mechanisms of accountability for government decisions, even as the government enforced an unjust regime of accountability on welfare recipients.
Buried deep in the 1000 pages of the robodebt report delivered by royal commissioner Catherine Holmes last week, we learn the story of how the AAT was rendered impotent as an effective guard on the rights of social welfare recipients. This was due in part to actions tracking back to former prime minister Tony Abbott.
Abbott can be grateful that so far it is one of his successors as prime minister, Scott Morrison, who has taken nearly all the heat from the robodebt scandal.
As the royal commission report chronicles, the Abbott government took an early decision to disband a body called the Administrative Review Council (ARC), which had the function of watching how the administrative law was being applied and advising the attorney-general.
The council, had it not been abolished after the Abbott government’s “efficiency review”, would have been in a position to raise the alarm on robodebt’s illegal use of income averaging to calculate debts. The key flaw in the robodebt scheme was revealed in decisions made at the AAT from 2016 onwards. However, the government systematically ignored those findings and then moved on the AAT members who made them.
What happened to the ARC?
The Administrative Review Council was established under the legislation that created the AAT. It brought together a powerful collection of human rights guardians and accountability experts, eight members in all. They included the Commonwealth ombudsman, the president of the Australian Law Reform Commission and the Australian information commissioner.
Gillian Triggs, then president of the Australian Human Rights Commission — and a constant Abbott government target — was a statutory member of the council. She had previously served as dean of Sydney University’s law school. Triggs told Crikey in 2019 that she had been “very honoured” because the council had “such an important role as a check and balance … on government behaviour”.
Triggs recalled that nothing happened for the first few months after her appointment. When she asked the head of the attorney-general’s department why she hadn’t received any information about meetings, she was told: “Oh, don’t worry, it hasn’t met for a long time. And we don’t have any plans to meet in the future.”
The robodebt royal commission found that the council had been defunded and “effectively discontinued” in the 2015-16 budget, as part of the smaller government initiative of the Abbott government, which Abbott billed as an attack on government red tape. Holmes noted that this was the same budget that brought robodebt into being. The government never repealed the legislation; it simply allowed the council to die quietly in the dark.
The royal commission has recommended that the ARC or a body with similar membership and functions be reinstated, “with consideration given to a particular role in review of Commonwealth administrative decision-making processes”.
The AAT’s heroes
The killing of the ARC is but one part of the story.
A former AAT member, Professor Terry Carney, who made an early finding on robodebt’s flaws in March 2017, was made to pay for his actions. Later that year, Carney found himself out of a job when his contract came up for renewal. Carney is one of Australia’s most highly regarded social security law experts, but that didn’t save him as the federal government moved to install its political friends in key positions throughout the AAT. Carney was never given a reason for his removal.
Carney later wrote: “It surely behoves us all to reflect on why it should be that taxpayers apparently receive a higher quality of justice than do social security clients. For the rule of law supposedly applies equally to all.”
Carney was to become a public face of all that was wrong with robodebt and the AAT. Less well known is that others were also forced out as the government accelerated its push to appoint its friends and ideological fellow-travellers to the AAT division responsible for robodebt.
As Crikey detailed, the body count included Carney’s colleague Dr Andrea Treble, who also concluded in March 2017 that there were flaws in Centrelink’s calculations. By September that year she too was gone.
In 2019 the government moved on the most senior member of all: James Walsh, division head and deputy president of the AAT since 2015. Walsh was a career expert on the ins and outs of social security law and had spent close to 20 years on social security appeal tribunals. Before that he had been a lawyer with Centrelink.
Walsh was ultimately replaced by a former Liberal senator, Karen Synon, who had no comparable experience in social security law. Synon was appointed by then-attorney-general Christian Porter. She was later promoted to a $500,000-a-year role at the AAT.
Synon was later counselled by the AAT for publicly supporting the reelection campaign of former treasurer Josh Frydenberg for the seat of Kooyong in 2019, apparently in contravention of the AAT’s code of conduct, which stipulated political independence. Synon repeated the offence in the 2022 elections by displaying a Frydenberg campaign sign outside her house.
The AAT was intended to be the low-cost, independent umpire to give vulnerable people a voice against government overreach. But as the royal commission report shows, the degradation of the AAT aided and abetted robodebt long after it should have been halted.
The Albanese government put a stop to that particular rot soon after taking office last year by moving to replace the tribunal altogether.
Robodebt was one of the vilest government actions ever wrought on a section of the Australian people – not unexpectedly the work of the worst government this country has had in my lifetime, possibly since Federation. But the stacking of the AAT, with some 80-plus Liberal hacks, cronies and flunkies given high-paying jobs, mostly, as far as I am aware, hearing cases brought against Centrelink seems to have got and is getting far less attention than it deserves. Fine to lambast the biggest nincompoop to ever be elected as PM (McSmirky was, in my estimation, way worse than McMahon), for appointing himself to 5 ministries in secret, but the stacking of the AAT goes to the heart of the justice system. Sure the AAT is a tribunal, not a Court, but for many, the cost of taking action in a Court is impossibly prohibitive, so the AAT is the only means of seeking redress for appalling administrative decisions made by governments, but the actions of successive Coalition governments was a deliberate attempt to put justice beyond the reach of “ordinary Australians” and the actions of Porter(potty), in particular, warrant much more derision. Porter may have been acting under instruction, but as an A-G, his attacks on the basic principles of democracy were worse than shameful.
Some good news in The Conversation today though – a couple of law professors at UTS Sydney reckon there is a very good chance that personal criminal charges of misfeasance in public office could be successful against some of the ringleaders like Morrison, Tudge, Robert and Campbell. Also that individuals or groups could and should successfully sue for compensation.
agree as thats tge law but we should do a funding scheme to push it along with Get up maybe o
well put – wheres the bloody media outrage The Australian should do a name change The Propagandist
“Holmes noted that this was the same budget that brought robodebt into being. The government never repealed the legislation; it simply allowed the council to die quietly in the dark.”
So the bastards did take legislative action. But it was the wrong legislation for the wrong purpose.
Surely there’s a Criminal Penalty for that somewhere on the books?
And my reading of the rest of the article gives me the definite feeling that had the LNP been elected in 2022, Australia would now be (slyly) marching down the road to being an authoritarian State.
It may have taken a few terms but I suspect the next step would have followed the US Republican Party’s work of denying whole demographics the Vote.
Why would there be? All the government did was set the budget for the ARC. That’s a basic function of government, and the budget is then voted on by Parliament, the sovereign body under the Westminster system which has final say on all such matters. So could you specify how exactly you you think a crime (not in any informal sense, but an actual offence, either summary or indictable) was committed, and who by — the minister who put up the proposal, the treasurer who put it in the budget, the cabinet who agreed, the MPs who voted for it, the entire parliament or the voters who put those MPs into parliament?
Ah yes, the obligatory downvote for a comment that tries to bring the discussion back to reality. Does the downvoter actually dispute anything in my comment, or is the downvote just a general moan of despair against this cruel world?
its happening under Labor too with their anti demonstration laws – bad stuff – wheres the outrage in the so called media ? ABC freedom sold off to neo lib sympathist dullards
It really is difficult. Just when I decide #30 was worse than #28 I am reminded how bad #28 was.
My personal grouch against #28 was that in 2013 I was an AusAID volunteer and he closed AusAID within months of being elected (though, fortunately for me, the closure was so unexpected that it took ages to implement and I was outside Australia for all of the time #28 was PM). He also closed the original Australia Network because its programs were coordinated by the ABC as part of the ABC charter and he loathed the ABC.
And when I decide they were, though in different ways, equally bad I recall Howard.
I suppose they’ll be crowing on that “Credbott Fightback” podcast about that Abbott ‘success’?
They have no shame.
…. And who would have been pulling Abbott’s strings to do that defenestration of the ARC, back then?
Most crappy stuff in the govt can be traced to Abbott, if not then Howard.
And also the US, where else, Australia or the LNP does not do original?
Surely not inspired, like Voter ID, by the Koch ‘bill mill’ ALEC (linked to IPA, CIS etc.), in 2013 promoted the ‘Welfare System Integrity Act’ in 2013:
‘This legislation will establish the Income Eligibility Verification System (IEVS), a computerized system designed to find and root out welfare fraud.’
https://alec.org/model-policy/welfare-system-integrity-act/
99% of people simply aren’t capable of comprehending the distilled evil that is ALEC. Absolute scum.
whilst wheres the real rorts frydenburg handing Joyce et al and corporate shareholders billions millions in public assets and money
Howard got in because Keating lied to prevent Hewson becoming prime minister.
Keating is the start of the rot.
The rot started in 1975.
Howard actually got in because of the conga line of incompetent liberal members who queued to prove the Peter Principle during the Hawke / Keating years, he was the one still standing when the election was called. Mickey Mouse could have won that election.
and the IPA established sinister coterie prior to the off shoot liberal party mates