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Voice referendum coverage

Read my articles

AEC head Tom Rogers steps back after a decade (December 17, 2024)

Voter beliefs about the role of contemporary government must change so public service can deliver to expectation (September 11, 2024)

PM’s vow to Close the Gap by shared decision-making with First Nations people (August 5, 2024)

Linda Burney praised for ‘tireless and courageous’ leadership (July 26, 2024)

Feedback sought on proposed First Nations truth-telling commission (July 9, 2024)

Davis: ‘No’ referendum vote must not interfere with Closing the Gap impetus (May 28, 2024)

After the referendum, Megan Davis is thinking about how to rally the 6 million friends of ‘Yes’ (May 27, 2024)

The Voice will hold bureaucracy to account, legal expert says (March 23, 2023)

National interest? Voice truths forced to wrestle with puerile partisan intent (October 13, 2023)

To Australia, with love: Pat Dodson’s appeal to goodwill and substance (October 12, 2023)

Will the Voice unleash a bureaucratic bogeyman? Noel Pearson doesn’t think so (September 29, 2023)

Referendum contest for hearts and minds strays into territory of thoughtless fear-mongering, contradiction (September 27, 2023)

Lawyers pour cold water on furphy the Voice is legally risky (September 26, 2023)

Voice a chance to strengthen Indigenous agency, cut through Australia’s ‘bureaucratic haze’ (September 13, 2023)

Vote ‘Yes’ to change the country for the better, PM says (September 4, 2023)

Confronting Lidia Thorpe’s complaints about modern Australia amid the Voice debate (August 22, 2023)

Discourse that matters for proposed Voice is not equivalent to debating every issue, says Dreyfus (August 21, 2023)

IPAA Victoria says ‘Yes’ for healing and honour, weighs in on referendum question (August 13, 2023)

Dreaming of a brighter future, Voice advocates call for Australia’s healing (May 31, 2023)

Public to receive education on constitution and referendum ahead of Voice vote (April 13, 2023)

APSC’s tips for public servants about political discourse on the Voice referendum (April 5, 2023)

‘We need your help’ with the Voice: Dodson calls time on tyranny for First Nations Australians (March 24, 2023)

The Voice will hold bureaucracy to account, legal expert says (March 23, 2023)

Has Australia heard the First Nations’ call for a Voice? (July 12, 2023)

Tune in for more insights

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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READ MORE:

Public scrutiny a ‘call to action’ against corruption, says Elliott

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

--A feature profile for the The Mandarin and a silent clip of an integrity video produced for the NSW Public Service Commission | 

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.”

Government’s ‘anti-welfare’ robodebt scheme rooted in wicked issues over frank advice

-- News analysis for the The Mandarin | Government’s ‘anti-welfare’ robodebt scheme rooted in wicked issues over frank advice

Robodebt, the illegal Australian government welfare scheme that “made people feel like criminals”, has been described by the final royal commission report as a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal.

It was a dark day for everyone in Canberra on Friday with the delivery of the 900-page robodebt royal commission report to the governor-general, and subsequent tabling of the document.

The three-volume final report, with its 57 recommendations, was released to the public just after 11 am and a press conference with prime minister Anthony Albanese and government services minister Bill Shorten followed 45 minutes later.

The PM apologised to victims for the robodebt scheme – a “gross betrayal and human tragedy” that pursued erroneous debts against thousands of people, many of whom did not owe a dime.

“We have arrived at the truth because of the courage of some of the most vulnerable Australians — people who have shown bravery in the face of injustice, hardship and sometimes terrible grief,” Albanese said.

“The courage stands in stark contrast to those who sought to shift the blame, bury the truth and carry on justifying this shocking harm.”

The PM was referring to a long list of ministers and senior bureaucrats who the royal commission said were “startlingly” responsible for myriad of events that “failed the public interest”.

The report found actors had shown little interest in ensuring the legality of the debt-raising scheme and gave little thought to how this would affect Australian welfare recipients.

An especially pointed observation came in commissioner Catherine Holmes’s preface message, expressing her dismay over revelations of “dishonesty and collusion” to cover up robodebt’s shaky legal foundations from becoming known.

The failure of institutional checks and balances, which theoretically should have filtered all the bad aspects of the scheme from ever being approved — least of all implemented — was also disheartening, the commissioner said, lashing agencies including the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office, the Office of Legal Services Coordination, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, who should have stopped robodebt in its tracks.

Reinforcing the capability of oversight agencies was one of the major recommendations to emerge, including strengthening the APS more broadly, and improving the processes at the Department of Social Services and Services Australia.

“Whether a public service can be developed with sufficient robustness to ensure that something of the like of the robodebt scheme could not occur again will depend on the will of the government of the day, because culture is set from the top down,” Holmes said.

“Politicians [also] need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments … Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism, useful for campaign purposes … largely, those attitudes are set by politicians, who need to abandon for good (in every sense) the narrative of taxpayer versus welfare recipient,” she said.

Never again can a ‘mean-spirited’ government program have such a human toll, PM says

Nothing like robodebt should have ever happened, Albanese said, outlining how the illegal scheme caused stress, anxiety, financial destitution and an extreme human toll.

He admonished the former Coalition government for furthering the harm by ignoring multiple concerns raised by vocal victims, public servants, community organisations and legal experts who advocated for years to have the illegal program dismantled.

“The report goes on to say, ‘What is certain is that the scheme was responsible for heartbreak and harm to family members of those who took their own lives because of the despair the scheme caused them. It extends from those recipients who felt that their only option was to take their own life, to their family members who must live without them’. [It’s] an extraordinary finding from this royal commission,” Albanese said.

Quoting again from the report, the PM said: “‘As to whether the Australian government sought to prevent scrutiny of the robodebt scheme, there is no doubt that there was a constant misrepresentation that the scheme involved no change in the way income was assessed or debts were calculated’.

“When I read that, I recalled the multiple times where we asked questions in the parliament and then prime minister Morrison responded by saying that there were no changes that occurred, [and] that this somehow went back to the period prior to the change of government that occurred in 2013. It makes it very clear that that isn’t the case,” he said.

The robodebt saga was equivalent to four-and-a-half years of the previous government and senior public servants gaslighting its citizens, Shorten said, adding the injury of the fiasco to democracy and trust in institutions was serious because Australians were not helped — they were hurt.

“Today my thoughts are with the victims, the 433,000 vulnerable Australians who were identified in the Federal Court, and tens of thousands of others,” Shorten said.

“They were literally shaken down by their own government; by a government who didn’t have the power to raise debt notices against them, and in fact, [broke] the law. [Robodebt victims] had the onus of proof reversed, they were treated as guilty until proven innocent.

“And for those who had the temerity to complain they were subject to vile political tactics — today is about these victims,” he said.

Consequences for bad faith actors caught in the crosshairs and priming bureaucrats for frank advice

Sanctions and consequences for those most responsible were by far and away the common theme among questions put by the media. It is widely understood that a range of criminal and civil legal options are on the table, including the possibility of prosecution and sackings.

Neither Albanese nor Shorten would be drawn on whether 20 individuals had been named in the sealed component of the report.

Journalists were hungry to know about a sealed dossier, which even Albanese himself has not seen but has been given to PM&C head Professor Glyn Davis, listing those facing adverse findings and referrals. Several questions were put asking what this section meant for those elected officials who had been named and shamed.

To some extent, the PM and Shorten shared this frustration – the moment of reckoning today’s report tabling was meant to represent has been undercut by the strong desire for due process to follow.

The government services minister reminded people that for proper accountability to land, proper processes needed to be played out. This meant not rushing to fire some of those named in Holmes’ sealed chapter.

“When I first read commissioner Holmes’ letter [referencing the sealed section], I had conflicting emotions,” Shorten said.

“I know lots of people out there who feel ‘Will anyone ever get punished?’ but … to the people worried about that, there are adverse findings, there are bodies who have now been asked with a brief of evidence to look at these matters. There will be accountability,” he said.

The sealed section may not remain out of bounds forever, but the government has not taken advice from the Attorney-General’s Department on this issue.

Avoiding prejudice was an important aspect of the next steps, Albanese said, and proper processes and procedures must be followed.

“We need to make sure as well that you don’t prejudice action, and I think people want action as a result of this,” the PM said.

“We will take the appropriate legal advice there as well; agency heads have received that element of the report [and] they are empowered, of course, to take action, including the potential suspension as an act to ensure proper processes.”

A number of ministers embroiled in the robodebt scandal, including Alan Tudge, Stuart Robert and Scott Morrison, released statements of their own throughout the day.

A partner at embattled firm PwC was also announced among the first to face professional consequences in the wake of the report landing. The Mandarin confirmed the news on Friday.

In terms of curing the toxic elements of the APS exposed by robodebt, including cultural transformation, the PM said there had been a marked change to how the government dealt with the public service since Labor took office last May. He reiterated previous statements about the mission to put “humans back into human services” and service delivery.

“I lead a government that has proper orderly processes; that has cabinet meetings where you have co-ord comments from departments, where ministers go and visit the departments and talk, not just to their departmental secretaries, but right throughout their departments as well,” Albanese said.

“It is a different approach that this government has towards all of these issues,” he said.

In answer to a question about the overuse of cabinet-in-confidence processes, Albanese challenged the view, arguing it was an essential part of receiving frank advice from public servants.

Better government policies and their outcomes could only be achieved if there was a safe environment for bureaucrats to deliver robust advice to their political masters, he said, and robodebt was a “wake-up call” to better facilitate this.

“You want public servants to have the confidence of giving clear advice to government. If it is all out there, you will end up having more verbal advice.

“You will undermine the capacity of the public service to give frank and fearless advice,” Albanese said.

Questions about compensation for 526,000 robodebt victims remain

Responding to questions about how adequate existing compensation arrangements were for robodebt victims, Shorten said commissioner Holmes had also addressed the question. He noted that the royal commission reached the view that a general compensation scheme for victims was not feasible.

“What she identifies is that there were different people who suffered different harms,” Shorten said.

“[The commissioner] does raise the question of whether or not there is a tort of public malfeasance and I think that is something that we’ll no doubt look at further.”

Peter Gordon, a senior partner of the law firm that initiated the federal court class action against the commonwealth, and which reached settlement in 2021 for about $1.8 billion, also issued a statement. He said the royal commission report vindicated an already long-held view that robodebt was a “shameful chapter” for the Coalition government led by Morrison.

“Today’s findings have been a long time coming,” Gordon said.

“Hundreds of thousands of everyday Australians’ lives were stuck by this unlawful scheme. They should hopefully feel a sense of justice.

“[Our firm] was proud to achieve a strong outcome in the class action. But that was just the first step.”

Gordon thanked all the robodebt victims, whose strength and self-advocacy paved the way for a royal commission to be held to examine the complex web of public maladministration.

The lawyer also flagged that the firm would consider whether there was scope to pursue other legal remedies on the basis of Holmes’ findings.

“This royal commission was vital in understanding how something so atrocious could occur and, ultimately, who was responsible,” Gordon said.

“We are grateful to all those who contributed to bringing this unlawful system down, including minister Shorten and the lead applicants in the class action, Kathy, Felicity, Elyane, Shannon and Stephen.”

“We will review this thoughtful and detailed report with the time and consideration it deserves, including whether further claims or actions can be brought on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of victims.”

Praise for victims and those who raised the alarm 

A separate joint statement from Albanese, Shorten, public service minister Katy Gallagher, social services minister Amanda Rishworth and attorney-general Mark Dreyfus simply quoted slabs of the report’s scathing assessment of the illegal scheme.

The senior ministers highlighted this choice excerpt from page 29 of the chapter “Overview of robodebt”.

“Robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals.

“In essence, people were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money. It was a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms.”

Establishing the royal commission to unravel how the punitive robodebt misery came to be, why it was permitted to become operational, and which political and public service decision-makers were to blame, was an election commitment Labor made in 2022.

This complemented another key election pledge to establish a federal National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC). The watchdog has been operational for a week.

“Upon receipt of the royal commission’s final report, the government has decided to release it to the public immediately.

“The government will now consider the recommendations presented in the final report carefully and provide a full response in due course,” the statement said.

As an indication of the speed with which the PM wanted to see the report disseminated publicly, he ran his press conference making reference to freshly tabbed notes on Holmes’ key findings.

Albanese extensively quoted verbatim from the report, and said this was in part with a view to give the media time to digest the mammoth three-volume tome but also generally in the name of transparency.

Labor has badged the robodebt fiasco as a Coalition problem, cooked up as a Budget savings measure and implemented in 2015.

“For almost five years, Liberal ministers dismissed or ignored the significant concerns that were raised, over and over again, by victims, public servants, community organisations and legal experts,” the statement read.

“The robodebt scheme only came to an end in 2020 after the Federal Court found that it was unlawful in late 2019.”

But the commissioner’s report also warned that one of the enablers, which saw the public service respond to the policy intent of the government of the day just a bit too well, was the way politicians wielded rhetoric about welfare recipients, demonising them as problems to be dealt with. This was not a feature of any one side of politics, she said.

The senior ministers also thanked the team of public servants who worked to see the gruelling work of the royal commission accomplished, calling out their dedication, professionalism and forensic efforts.

“Throughout the royal commission process we have seen courage, leadership and ethics on display from victims, their advocates and whistleblowers.

“We also acknowledge the individuals, researchers, stakeholder groups, expert witnesses, government and non-government representatives who gave evidence by way of hearings and submissions. This evidence has helped inform the royal commission’s report and recommendations.”

Robodebt has stained the reputation of the public service but its eventual reckoning shows a system capable of countering itself

--An analysis for the The Mandarin | Robodebt has stained the reputation of the public service but its eventual reckoning shows a system capable of countering itself

 The illegal robodebt scheme besmirched the reputation of the APS long before the royal commission began in late 2022, meaning institutional leaders had years’ of notice to transform itself and do better.

While everybody waits for retired Queensland Supreme Court chief justice Catherine Holmes to hand her final report to the government, and the document to pass through the various protocols before it can be made public this morning, it is safe to assume that there will be a lot of rot to dissect in the royal commission’s report.

But it is also worth noting on this sombre day that a report surmising the full, sorry mess of the scheme is delivered, that a team of hard-working public servants at Victoria Legal Aid, along with some internal whistleblowers helped to eventually unravel the wicked scheme.

The lawyers of VLA’s economic and social rights program in Melbourne helped to run early test cases challenging the legality of the federal welfare debt-collecting program. This was instrumental in kicking the can down the road to get to a series of royal commission findings, and ultimately led to a class action settlement worth at least $1.8 billion for debts against 433,000 people and wrongful recovery from 381,000 people.

It cannot be said comprehensive justice has been delivered yet, or that the chips of accountability will fall on the right heads. It would also be very fair to say that whatever the outcome at this point, the consequences are too little, too late.

Given the devastating fact at least two known robodebt victims who were hounded by commercial debt collectors to repay erroneous sums they were told they owed died by suicide, there hardly seems recompense adequate enough to fix the damage that has been caused.

Official data reveals many others also died after receiving illegal debt notices, nearly a third of whom were classified as “vulnerable”.

The scheme also disproportionately impacted people with mental health issues or who spoke English as a second language.

The contrition of current public service heads is already on the record.

According to new APS commissioner Gordon de Brouwer, the only way public servants can learn from when mistakes are made is to be honest about them. He called for accountability to be embraced with searing honesty and empathy, by APS leaders in particular.

The commissioner told the IPAA ACT podcast in April (one month before his appointment to head the APSC) that the position of the secretaries board on the robodebt saga would be apparent once the final report landed.

“It’s talked a lot around the service and it matters to people. People see others who acted with courage [and spoke out] through that process. They also see just how easy it is to be the frog in the boiling pot — if you get a bit of pressure for asking questions, if there’s a bit of discussion or view [around] the nature of hierarchy,” de Brouwer told Work with purpose.

“Is hierarchy a way to enable people to do their job and take responsibility and make decisions? Or is hierarchy a device to control, tell people, and direct them? Those discussions really matter. Setting the tone and having continual conversations [about these issues] is really important,” he said.

The secretaries board is a powerful group of top bureaucrats who have spent months – published documents suggest at least since early 2023 (but presumably much earlier than that) — mulling over the various aspects of the royal commission that will affect the APS.

At around about the same time as de Brouwer’s podcast where he apologised to the community for the robodebt fallout, we know the secretaries board were considering how to handle the complicated, delicate process of procedural fairness and risk to individual reputations.

The commonwealth, via the Attorney-General’s department, had made a submission to the inquiry about how things might be handled in the event the royal commission made some adverse findings against people in the ranks of the public service.

The public pillorying some in the community want, as well as those victims most injured by the illegal scheme, may not materialise in the fashion the mob might prefer.

Rebuilding trust within the APS about its own capability and purpose, and across the wider community will also take time, de Brouwer told the podcast.

Dr de Brouwer said some of the structural changes which had been made to address this included an overhaul of the performance management of SES-level staff so that both delivery and behaviour measures were given equal weight when it came to career development and promotion opportunities.

“The way you perform with both delivery and the behaviours you exhibit matter to your position in the service, your promotion, and actually whether you stay in the service,” de Brouwer said.

“Most people, if the culture says ‘delivery and behaviour matters’, the vast majority of people will respond very enthusiastically to that. That’s the starting point, but you also need a performance management system that formally assesses it and, frankly, screens people out who can’t engage on that.”

There were many examples of actors in the robodebt saga who emerged during the bloodsport of the royal commission hearings as examples of bad apples – such as the late Department of Human Services deputy secretary Malisa Golightly, who died in late 2021.

The inquiry heard recounts of her shouting at staff, making personal comments and losing her temper. It also heard that she denied “incoming smoothing” was taking place, and if it was as a matter of last resort.

Golightly had the primary carriage of the scheme. It serves nobody, least of all the truth, that her side of the story will never be aired.

But the systemic failures, which saw the scheme snowball to become what Federal Court Justice Bernard Murphy would call a shameful chapter in the administration of the commonwealth social security system and a “massive failure of public administration”, cannot possibly sit on the shoulders of one person (it should be noted Golightly later moved to take a deputy secretary role at the Department of Home Affairs).

Much more powerful decision-makers — ministers and secretaries — wear the shame of the punitive scheme. The extent of that will be made clear in Holmes’ final report.

In conversation with The Mandarin last week, the commissioner shared that many of the expectations about workplace behaviour were fairly garden-variety hallmarks of how to respectfully deal with others and as an adult.

“That’s where the stewardship idea, frankly comes in as a value,” de Brouwer said of the changes made to the Public Service Act in June.

“I can say this actually is an empirical statement because we know from the feedback that this is what most people think in the public service — Most people want to take responsibility for where their workplace is, and they want it to be good and effective now, and they want to leave it better off when they leave.”

To illustrate how the concept was easily applied to a concrete scenario, de Brouwer gave the example of an APS3 public servant working at Services Australia. The aim was to get government employees to understand that they represent something beyond themselves – they represent institutions that people want to be able to trust and rely on, he said.

“If you’re doing data inputting, and then you’re doing that with someone who needs the services; you want to make sure that your records are accurate. That’s part of your contribution to making that system work — your records are accurate, and the person who comes in can easily access and understand what you’re doing,” de Brouwer said.

“Similarly … when a member of the public is dealing with you as a public servant, or Services Australia or ATO employee, they generally don’t see you as a person. They see you as ‘Services Australia’, or ‘the ATO’ or a public servant.

“You’re really representing your workplace, your institution, the public service, the government to the public — stewardship [in this case] is that people trust the service more, people trust the public sector more, and they trust government more from your interaction,” he explained.

Indeed, the submissions from public servants working for the affected agencies released by the royal commission this week, outline a whole cohort of staff who felt disbelief, outrage, and a sense of having been lied to or duped concerning the robustness of the scheme.

Some public servants shared disgust when they realised they were working for an organisation that had such disrespect for natural justice and quit. Others expressed frustration about the feedback they were receiving from victims not being taken seriously by leaders. Some retired earlier than they had intended because they could not cope with the stress of the situation.

Centrelink senior complaints officer Judith Stolz told the royal commission:

“All of us were staff of long-standing and knew how to read the Act and that this new process was illegal,” she said of the robodebt’s rollout.

“However, no discussion could move anyone from their view that robodebt was perfectly legal.”

According to de Brouwer, the only way to sustain public service delivery was to have the right behaviours underpinning them — in this way, being able to meet ministerial wishes but stay within the bounds of the bureaucracy’s values, principles and code of conduct should not be challenging.

“You can do both — it’s actually not that hard,” de Brouwer said.

“They’re not contrary distinctions, they’re not alternatives — they go together.

“When it comes to things like integrity, it’s not a woke concept; it’s actually the law — a basic legal requirement for you doing your job. Understanding means you can do the delivery, all of that, but with integrity,” he said.

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.