Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

Labor will support the bill because it's an attempt to try and make data collection more accurate and to make sure that Australians get the safety net entitlements that they deserve. But we've got to recognise that our vote for this is more a triumph of hope over experience. This is the government who, when it introduced new technology, gave us the My Health Record. That was a flop. We had the 2019 myGov outage, with technical difficulties that brought down the entire online government service portal for a day. There was, of course, Michael McCormack's one job, the census of 2016. That didn't end so well. But the king of all digi-disasters has been robodebt. So, whilst we support the recording of more accurate information through this legislation, our expectations of this incompetent, bungling government to execute it, I think, are an attempt at hope over our long-lived experience.

But robodebt is what has prompted this legislation. We are surprised and disappointed that, in the Senate, the government voted against just relying on the averaging of ATO data over a year to determine whether or not a particular fortnight's benefit to a Centrelink recipient is valid. That is the cause of the robodebt problem, and this stubborn government still can't admit its fault. But, for the education and edification of government members, the robodebt issue is a real issue: 600,000-plus notices were sent out by the government on the basis that it had the power to do so when, in fact, it didn't. How on earth did we get to a state of affairs in this nation where the government sends a letter of demand to hundreds of thousands of Australians but it doesn't have the legal authority to do so? How on earth did we get to a set of circumstances where no-one is responsible for this mistake? This is not a mistake which is victim-free. Thousands of Australians—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—feel the stigma, the humiliation and the desperation to try and find money that the government asserts it overpaid them when, in fact, the government didn't even have the right to ask for the overpayment—or, indeed, refund—which, in many cases, wasn't valid.

This is a government who conducted hundreds of thousands of transactions with its own citizens when they didn't have the legal power to do it. Wake up, government members! Are you so arrogant and so hubristic with the rorts that you committed before the last election that you can't even own making a mistake? Once upon a time, ministers would have resigned if their departments had acted illegally against hundreds of thousands of their citizens to unjustly enrich themselves. And if the government members who haven't bothered to acquaint themselves with the robodebt scandal think that words like 'unjust enrichment' are an exaggeration, they're not. The government's lawyers concede there was enrichment. But what is truly remarkable is—having broken the law, having put hundreds of thousands of citizens through a process that they were never meant to be subjected to, was unfair and caused harm—the defence that the government lawyers are using to justify the illegal actions and to justify not repaying the money—that is, that they don't owe a duty of care to Centrelink recipients. This is a morally bankrupt government. It's a government that lied and cheated at the last election, in terms of the rorts we're hearing about. And now they don't even care about their duty of care to their own citizens. Shame on the lot of you!

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