Lessons from the trenches: Humble public servants made to walk a trust tightrope

-- Conference coverage for the The Mandarin | Lessons from the trenches: Humble public servants made to walk a trust tightrope

Dr Todd Fernando says pragmatic public service means knowing that not all battles can be won at once and that some “trade-offs” are inevitable when trying to reach the best possible outcomes.

Speaking at The Mandarin‘s trust and integrity conference in Melbourne, Fernando observed that deft public servants knew how to navigate system failures and stay mindful of the political climate.

When the neo-Nazis showed up on the steps of Parliament in Victoria in 2021, Fernando said, the government had been briefed by police about the likelihood of the clash six weeks before it happened and there was a conundrum about what pre-emptive posture should be taken.

“In the moment where we had to make a decision as to whether we go out and start to minimise the impact of anti-equality demonstrations [Editor’s Note: the event was a Let Women Speak rally]. Do we start to kind of [warn] trans communities and LGBT communities, to kind of not give it airtime and not give fuel to the fire, or do we kind of let it play out and see what happens?” said the former Victorian commissioner for LBGTQIA+ communities.

“Obviously, we let it play out. Things happened. There was a clash that that came to bear. Harm was done to communities, both visceral and physical because of those interactions and those altercations.”

Ultimately, while the decision not to do anything before the protests caused harm, the political climate of the day allowed officials to provide $2 million in surge capacity funding for community organisations and supported marginalised interest groups who were the target of the attacks.

“If we didn’t let it happen, that community organisation, which was struggling to run off the smell of an oily rag, wouldn’t have gotten that injection of funding. These are the kind of trade-offs that you make as people within the public service — are we going to cause harm to a small group of people for the greater good, or not? And that’s a really tough integrity and trust conversation,” he said.

Fernando went on to say that public servants who understood what it took to “deliver at the speed of trust” had some sense of the nuance of underpromising and over-delivering.

This was especially the case where external factors out of the government’s control risked derailing plans and put bureaucrats in a position where they had to revise their commitments and explain to stakeholders why timelines needed to change, he said.

“It’s easy for us to go into communities and say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do this, and absolutely we’re going to do that’,” Fernando said.

“But then we get back and we open up the spreadsheet and realise we don’t actually have enough money for [all of those promises] for this quarter. Or we can’t do that until eight months’ time — and then all of a sudden, a pandemic or something hits, and that speed of trust slows incredibly.”

If done poorly, Fernando explained that the conversations that followed a revision of commitments or back-pedalling could negatively impact public trust in government.

In Victoria, where the fiscal constraints on government were acute, articulating why programs were being slowed was challenging when consultation may have gone so well and expectations had been set high.

“It’s a tough conversation to have with community members, after going in and saying ‘Thanks for your trauma story, and now we’re going to do something, but actually it’s going to be three years [to deliver]’,” Fernando said.

“What we’re seeing now with the Victorian government is that where the coffers of slowly being turned off where we are, we’re experiencing a slow period of kind of change, but that’s hard to translate to communities who have such high expectations about the work that we do.”

Pointing to Victoria’s scuppered 2026 Commonwealth Games proposal, which the state government backed- out of, citing estimated cost blow-outs from $2.6 billion to beyond $6 billion, Fernando said it was a shame that also took away a platform to celebrate things like the mooted mascot, Pally, the non-binary platypus.

“Pally … would have been great, but obviously it didn’t transpire,” he said.

Other recent examples of the government failing Australian community groups, which in turn threatened attitudes about trust, included the engagement after October’s failed referendum for a Voice to Parliament.

Fernando said failing to address big national questions about social cohesion and vulnerable groups in society of the ‘What next?’ kind, when decades of research and advocacy show the situation is urgent and dire was a form of damage by omission.

“When things like that at that national level, or even at state levels fail, communities are left in the wings, waiting to do something,” Fernando said.

“What we’re seeing transpire when things don’t go to plan, particularly on the Voice, is something that I think is deeply felt — that sentiment around ‘What does it mean for me to be able to contribute to my community or to the spaces in which I’m operating in?’

“Without strategy, without leadership, without kind of commitments, it’s hard to know where to go. That comes back to this notion of trust and integrity, but also the work that we’re all doing together to try and move spaces forward or sideways, or whichever way that we want to take it.”

On the same day as The Mandarin Live panel, a rapid review report was handed to the government after three months of exploring targeted, evidence-based approaches to strengthen prevention measures for violence against women [VAW] and children. Fernando was one of six experts to contribute to the work. He shared that understanding system failures fundamentally meant understanding the different ways people were unable to navigate them.

Fernando said that in order to make institutional systems more accessible and responsive to the needs of its users, bureaucrats needed to think about the many ways people accessed support services.

“We often think of systems as just this one big, gigantic thing, but when we actually break it down, the entry into the system is so difficult for so many different people,” Fernando said.

“For any system, the door into it doesn’t look the same for everybody so that means that we’ve got to look at the approaches of what that means for when you’re entering and once you’re inside the actual room.

“Because there are little doorways, and there’s a little slide that somebody can easily come down, and there’s a fire pole over there — there’s so many different approaches to accessing the system.”

Across government agencies and departments, this meant leveraging the knowledge of people at all levels and openly asking for advice and expertise about what needed to change to make things better.

Building a network of what Fernando called “peer navigators” to work through the system was also key, he said.

“When we ask these questions in consultations and in surveys, and in different ways, a prime minister is going to hear things differently to what it is that an average Australian who’s accessed that system, or who’s been through that situation is going to do,” he added.

“If you ask people questions about their lives, they’re going to tell you, and once they tell you, where do you take them from there? It’s what we do as peer navigators to help people navigate that system.”

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Colleen Taylor: Robodebt truth-teller says no accolade can take away grief caused by scheme

--A feature profile for the The Mandarin | Colleen Taylor: Robodebt truth-teller says no accolade can take away grief caused by scheme

Colleen Taylor has been awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the General Division for her service to public administration.

Robodebt hounded this public service exemplar into early retirement, and the notorious government scheme came to consume her proud 32-year career in ways she would rather forget. But former Department of Human Services (DHS) compliance officer Colleen Taylor vows the illegal scheme and ways the system failed the people it should have protected will never be swept under the rug so long as she can help it.

Taylor has been described in many ways — from “difficult to manage” to “a trouble-maker”. This week, Government Services Minister Bill Shorten called her a “true hero”.

If you ask the former public servant, who now lives a quiet life in regional Queensland, she was always just doing her job.

She only wishes it was enough to stop the punitive automated debt-collecting scheme before it was able to hurt so many people.

“You feel for the robodebt victims because their pain continues on,” Taylor told The Mandarin.

“They were all labelled criminals, and it was actually [the public service] sinning against them.

“To this day, I go through what I should have said: ‘Maybe I should have explained that more clearly?’ ‘Why didn’t I pick up on that?’ ‘Why did I say it that way?'”

It has been a big six years since Taylor retired earlier than planned from her job as a Centrelink compliance officer in July 2017.

Two years ago, she appeared before a royal commission that laid bare all the details of her worst suspicions about robodebt.

The guilt that there was something more she could have done to prevent the scale and devastation of robodebt still torments Taylor. She is hardwired to care, and has always been this way.

This week she was recognised in this year’s King’s Honours list and awarded with an OAM for her service to public administration.

“I will take [the award] if it keeps robodebt in people’s minds, if it vindicates the public servants who tried to do the right thing, and it sends a message to those who did the wrong thing,” Taylor said.

“Had it been a Public Service Medal (PSM), I don’t know whether I would want to accept it to be quite honest, given that it’s from an organisation that presumably has still got people who have that same attitude and prosecuted this scheme so dreadfully.”

In a statement on Monday, Minister Shorten congratulated Taylor for her “decency, ethics and compassion” as a witness before the royal commission in late 2022.

By this time, the former public servant had left Centrelink because the mental stress was taking its toll. She continued to worry that speaking openly with stakeholders outside of the APS would come with penalties.

“Ms Taylor, a compassionate, humble, and model public servant, put her job on the line because it was the right thing to do,” Shorten said.

“[She] fully deserves the recognition of a King’s Birthday honour in acknowledgement of her integrity and bravery.”

The minister further lauded Taylor’s repeated display of courage and dedication to truth while in the job in 2016 about the debt calculating inaccuracies of the scheme, notifying her superiors about the adverse impact it would have on vulnerable people.

Shorten said Taylor’s perseverance of justice for Centrelink customers, in the face of risking job security and promotion opportunities, was further demonstrated when she continued to flag concerns with senior executives in the belief they were being misled.

The royal commission examining robodebt also underscored Taylor’s example as one becoming of the greatest public service integrity.

Commissioner Catherine Holmes noted in her final report that people like Taylor restored faith in an otherwise despairing lineup of APS witnesses who testified before the royal commission.

“The shame is that people of [Colleen Taylor’s] calibre were not listened to,” Holmes said.

Taylor said that while she was grateful for the recognition, she was still slowly coming to terms with being proud of the role she played in standing her ground to do everything she could to prompt those in power to stop the scheme.

In some ways, she observed, because her King’s Birthday award celebrated the fact a public servant told the truth was an embarrassing indictment on the bureaucracy.

“I won’t say it’s every day, but I have many, many sleepless nights and I have a lot of trouble sleeping thinking about robodebt,” Taylor said.

“Even now, when the news recently came up about the NACC [choosing not to investigate] some of the public servants involved — I was just in tears, and angry.”

Last week, the newly established federal corruption watchdog announced its decision not to probe six government officials the royal commission referred to the NACC.

The prospect of no fresh evidence likely to be unearthed and the potential oppressive effects of subjecting individuals to repeated investigations were cited as reasons the NACC said it would not look into the matter further.

Critics argue the reasons given by the watchdog are entirely predictable and as time passes, so too does any credible prospect of finding new or additional evidence.

In Taylor’s view, justice demands the chief mandarins responsible for permitting robodebt to occur should be named and shamed.

It was not okay, she said, that the good work of the royal commission be glossed over as though a little bit of performative reckoning in the public area was enough.

“It’s a true indication of how obscene robodebt was that someone would get a [public administration] award for telling the truth. Truth was such a rare commodity that it’s come to this,” Taylor said.

“I suppose I’m called a whistleblower but, to my shame, I never went outside of the public service.”

When Taylor twigged something was not right with the automated debt notices being issued to people, she explicitly queried if sending a debt notice based on income averaging was equivalent to Centrelink stealing from welfare recipients.

The former compliance officer told the royal commission that it would have been “very rare” to use income averaging over the period of a PAYG summary to calculate how much debt (due to overpayment) was owed to government as robodebt did, because doing so would result in an inaccurate calculation.

Many recipients who Taylor spoke to explained that while their PAYG summary was for an entire period, they often had not worked for the entire financial year and most welfare recipients did not earn even amounts of income over a fortnight.

When DHS made a decision in 2016 to do away with human compliance checks of its automated debt notices and the calculations the system used to raise them, Taylor let her bosses know her concerns.

The concerns raised with the department’s so-called ‘compliance help desk’ were batted away with a response that suggested people had an opportunity to explain why their debt notice was wrong. Should a customer fail to do this, they knew match data would be relied on instead, DHS said.

“I thought: ‘The people who are making these decisions don’t realise how this works in reality, and here’s someone who can tell them this is what’s happening, and this is why it’s so wrong’,” Taylor said.

“And you naively think: ‘If I could just explain it to them, then they’ll put a hold on it’.”

Taylor then escalated her issues with the debt notices to her director and assistant director, further flagging that most recipients of debt notices could not challenge them because the letters were being sent to addresses where people no longer lived.

“We are being asked to ignore evidence that no debt exists and to ‘collude’ in raising a debt where none should exist,” Taylor wrote in an email.

“That is, we are being asked to commit a fraudulent act.”

Even today, Taylor can recite why the whole debt calculation process was so flawed. It was obvious to anyone in her line of work, and with her experience. She explained that the three components of PAYG — gross income, dates, and employer details — by their nature required a human to parse and verify the conclusions being reached.

“What we could see clearly was — you should never use the PAYG raw data to raise the debt. That’s where the problem is, before you even get to averaging,” she said.

“You cannot possibly work out what someone earns in any individual fortnight, and if you average it across you robbed people of their income bank credits, and you created a false debt.”

Public servants, often at the frontline of service delivery, who complained about the flawed process up Centrelink’s chain of command were told that if they did not like it they could simply leave, and over time new staff were hired to try and flush out those who had some idea of what was going on out of the processing teams.

“The worst thing was the duplication of employment names, because the payer name with the Tax office is invariably some sort of business entity name, or a family trust, or company, or it’s something like Coles or Woolies where they’ve got myriad trading names,” Taylor added.

“What was happening was, there was no human being looking … it was just a computer saying ‘It doesn’t match’ and raising it as a debt for an undeclared employer, and hoping that the customer can work it out or pay the debt.”

The proof of the flaw was in the radical jump in numbers of people who had suddenly decided to rort government systems, Taylor said. And nobody at the higher levels of the organisation were interested in hearing the very clear message that something was wrong.

The missed opportunities to hear Taylor’s warnings about errors, fraud, and breaches of duty of care were unheard, ignored, or waved away — again and again.

“You can’t be more plain than saying ‘We are being asked to commit fraud — help us’,” she said.

“I remember my manager and teammates saying, ‘Oh Colleen, you’ve got to cut down the pages [of your warning email to secretary Kathryn Campbell], because there’s just too many, they’ll never read it’. And I thought, ‘No, I’m only gonna get one shot at this’.”

Taylor said she would never forgive the Centrelink middle managers and team leaders who threatened staff that alerted them to the data duplication problems with the robodebt system.

Instead of pausing operations and looking at what was wrong with the system, she said these people defended the scheme and threatened staff with disciplinary action.

“They were actually prosecuting [the scheme] with something like an unholy vigour,” Taylor said.

“We are human beings, and you would hope that if you’re a public servant, you’ve got a certain level of empathy and compassion for people. But obviously not.”

On her retirement from the APS, Taylor received a warning letter from her former employer reminding her that should she disclose any confidential information from her time working for the government, she faced up to two years in prison.

None of Taylor’s peers who also retired at about the same time received a similar letter. There was no message from DHS thanking Taylor for her more than three decades of service.

“It was pointed at me to shut me up, and it worked. It left a sour taste because I couldn’t talk to anyone about it,” Taylor said of the letter.

“I don’t want people to think you get awarded for being a whistleblower. You are in danger of being sent to jail, so vindictive are some of the people that pursue whistleblowers,” she said.

Taylor’s sadness and frustration is palpable. She is often moved and tears up thinking about some of the vulnerable Australians who died by suicide in the aftermath of the punitive debt-collecting scheme which chased them for sums that were, in some cases, fictitious or overblown due to faulty calculations.

To this day, she still cannot believe how much collective effort — from victims who litigated the government, to advocacy groups, lawyers, journalists and academics — was needed to stop robodebt in its tracks and push for some accountability.

The former compliance officer says that the search for robodebt accountability and justice, even after a scathing and comprehensive royal commission, appears to be elusive.

“It’s this thing all over again of, ‘Well, if we can just bury it, and if time goes on people will lose a bit more interest and it won’t be the newsworthy thing that it has been’,” Taylor said.

“[Accountability] needs to be specific. I really want naming and shaming, even if it’s not with a legal charge, because it’s otherwise disrespectful to the royal commission.”

Last November, the government announced it had accepted or accepted in principle 56 of 57 royal commission recommendations. None of the ministers in attendance at the press conference — the Attorney-General or the ministers for the public service, social services or government services — would be drawn on the sanctions process being undertaken by the APSC to deal with public servants embroiled in robodebt wrongdoing.

Since then, none of the individuals being investigated by the APSC has been sacked. It is increasingly looking as though nobody’s head will roll as a consequence of the royal commission.

Reflecting on what has been given the moniker as the “APS’ black chapter”, Taylor said the robodebt episode had also dominated and consumed her thoughts on what has otherwise been a rewarding career.

She enjoyed helping people and thinking creatively about how government processes could improve people’s lives and give them opportunities and better outcomes — all things that were ultimately the antithesis of her final years with DHS.

“I’m proud that I spoke for the truth,” Taylor said.

“But I don’t feel satisfaction because [my efforts to raise concerns about robodebt] went nowhere, except that it highlighted how evil the actions were.”