Recovering from robodebt’s moral shame and political blame will be a long road

--A news wrap for the The Mandarin | Recovering from robodebt’s moral shame and political blame will be a long road

Time for the Australian Public Service to buckle up and get set on the journey to ‘continuous improvement’, but with a clear eye fixed in the rear-view mirror.

It was the government program that spawned the biggest class action in Australian legal history, exposed some uncomfortable truths about broken agency culture in the social welfare portfolio, and tipped fuel on an already roaring bin-fire of community cynicism about a system that couldn’t care less for society’s most vulnerable.

Robodebt has become the modern-day moniker for government policy failure and maladministration. It hangs around any mention of the Department of Human Services (DHS) — which later became Services Australia, the Department of Social Services and Centrelink like a foul stench.

The scheme undermined the very objectives of public service.

It made ordinary people needlessly suffer. More than 850,000 citizens were affected.

Unfair, illegal suffering caused by an experimental and poorly designed system that used incomplete data to reach a false conclusion that some individuals owed money to the government. Then the system, aided by commercial debt collectors, hounded them to recoup erroneous sums and added hefty penalties if it thought these people were actively avoiding engaging with Centrelink.

In the year robodebt was introduced, the number of potential debts the government could raise increased by more than 50-fold to 20,000 letters every week.

During the time the scheme was operational, at least two young men — Jarrad Madgwick, 22, and Rhys Cauzzo, 28 — robodebt attempted to extract money from died by suicide. A senate inquiry into the scheme said it was unclear how many other deaths may be linked to the program.

“The committee passes its deepest condolences to the families of those two young men and acknowledges that the acute and enduring impacts of this program on the mental health of many Australians remain undocumented and unacknowledged by the government,” the inquiry report read.

The years-long saga to unravel the disastrous, unlegislated scheme and pin some accountability on the right parties, culminated in a breathtaking royal commission over 2022-23.

The inquiry pulled back the curtain on a circus lineup of anticipatory political boot-licking, finger-pointing turned wilful ignorance, outright bullying, and lame departmental escalation processes.

The royal commission hearings shone sunlight on some tightly held documents marked cabinet-in-confidence.

It also queried why steps to wind up the debt collecting were not made by Services Australia for months — even after the federal government made a decision to end the practice of recovering money based on income-averaged debts.

Similarly, it highlighted examples of DHS and Centrelink skirting oversight rules with investigators of commonwealth ombud after a throng of complaints about robodebt hit the desk of the watchdog.

The Community and Public Sector Union has long been vocal about how the systemic issues caused by robodebt were a sign of an under-resourced workforce.

Within six months of being voted to power, the new Labor government announced the royal commission. Former Queensland Supreme Court chief justice Catherine Holmes was picked to lead the work, and prime minister Anthony Albanese promised Australia that it wanted to put the “human” back into “Human Services”.

The hearings were a banquet feast for voyeuristic vultures and parliamentary opponents of those responsible for the establishment of the scheme — former ministers and prime ministers left their fingerprints all over the program — but for public servants, this was the stage for political masters to step aside and throw a number of mandarins under the bus.

“The idea that I would have assumed that they [senior public servants] had advice and weren’t giving it to me, is inconceivable in my knowledge of those individuals, and surprising,” former PM Scott Morrison told the commission last December.

“I relied on the department. I had great faith in the department,” he added, describing the concept that advice was not shared with him about the scheme’s legality as “distressing”.

The royal commission heard admissions key decision makers were more concerned about the optics of the scheme and public relations of the government agencies than the legal integrity of the program itself.

And later, a number of senior department officials painted a tangled picture of the pressure they faced to gloss over or downplay genuine concerns for critical aspects of the robodebt scheme.

The frustrating opacity throughout the hearings stuck with where and by whom the decision was made to ignore advice to legislate the changes. Did it happen at the department or cabinet level?

It is hard to believe that at least some people — mid and high-level public servants among them — will be able to avoid the barb of an adverse finding. All eyes are on what the final report will say about that.

Former DHS secretary Kathryn Campbell adopted a clearly technical position in all her responses to the royal commission with respect to her departmental responsibilities. But she maintained, in her testimony, that she did not know who decided robodebt did not require law reform so that a debt could be raised on the basis of a different burden of proof: requiring welfare recipients to disprove they owed a debt.

Counsel assisting the royal commission Justin Greggery KC flagged on the final day of the royal commission hearings that a proposed timetable had been drafted. It outlined the timeline by which he expected notices of proposed adverse findings would be issued to the lawyers of the parties in question, as well as the time their responses were due.

Robodebt’s legacy is one already marred with shame and moral turpitude. We didn’t need a royal commission to confirm this — it had already been objectively determined by:

• A commonwealth ombud report in 2017 triggered by an own-motion investigation following an influx of public complaints, that warned transparent and open decision-making processes were essential for good public administration.
  “This principle continues to apply when decision-making is automated. Our investigation revealed DHS’ initial messaging to customers through its letters and in the system itself, was unclear and did not include crucial information such as a contact phone number for the DHS compliance team. Many complainants did not realise their income would be averaged across the employment period if they did not enter their income against each fortnight,” the report said.
  The report also slammed the department for poor service delivery and communication and went on to suggest that many of the robodebt problems could have been mitigated with sound project planning and risk management from the outset. “A key lesson for agencies and policymakers when proposing to roll out large scale measures which require people to engage in a new way with new digital channels is for agencies to engage with stakeholders and provide resources for adequate manual support during transition periods,” the report said.
• Federal Court orders made by consent in the 2019 test case brought by Victorian Legal Aid on behalf of Deanna Amato, which noted there was no material capable of supporting the conclusion a debt had arisen under the relevant act — during this time, then-government services minister Stuart Robert spun the case outcome as a mere “refinement” of the robodebt process and refused to apologise or admit there had been any mistake on the part of authorities.
• The 2020 robodebt class action on behalf of 443,000 individuals, led by Gordon Legal, which saw the commonwealth settle for a more than $1.7 billion price tag ($751 million in refunds and $268 million in compensation for invalid debts) before the case proceeded to trial. The government made no admission of liability in settling the matter.
• An ombud report in 2021 that described the department’s failure to take the next steps as to whether it would revisit and potentially re-raise debts that were refunded as not being “sufficiently transparent with individuals” concerning possibilities on the table for robodebt payments. DHS accepted seven of the ombud’s nine recommendations.
• A 2021 Federal Court judgement that found the case had “exposed a shameful chapter in the administration of the commonwealth social security system and a massive failure of public administration.”
• A senate community affairs reference committee, which in a 2022 report, characterised the robodebt income compliance program (ICP) as the cause of “devastating emotional and psychological harm” that “undermined many people’s financial security as well as their willingness to engage with and trust government services”. In the view of the senate committee, robodebt was a “massive failure of public administration”, ruining people’s lives and causing them breakdowns, anxiety, depression requiring medication, sleeplessness, stress causing physical illness, and fear.
• A submission by the commonwealth ombud to strengthen the investigation powers of his statutory office in light of the fact that DHS withheld crucial information from his team, and amid claims department officials “did not act in good faith” with the watchdog.

The scheme was immoral. It was wrong. It produced a long dossier listing all the things not to do in public administration.

On Friday, some sense of the robodebt reckoning will be clearer when the royal commission’s final report is handed to government, and the loose ends of this terrible chapter can start being tied.

The reform journey to heal the damage of this fiasco is only getting started. First, some accountability.