Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, Mr Speaker. Imagine this, Mr Speaker: you're at home; it's 23 April and your partner has been stood down. You can't go to work. You've got the kids homeschooling and you're trying to keep your tears from your kids. You sit at the kitchen table trying to figure out how you're going to feed your family and pay the bills. You see the postie fill your letterbox. You go out and there are three—not one, but three—letters from Centrelink. Opening them up one by one you find debts letters for $21,000, $15,000 and $21,000 from Centrelink. That is $57,000 of debt that has come out of the blue—$57,000 of debt that does not exist. Imagine the stress and the fear that that puts into you when you're doing it tough and in a hard place. That's exactly what happened to one of our local families.

This family is another victim of the continuing scandal that is robo-debt, the failed scheme the Morrison government claimed would be halted. The three Centrelink arrears notices, which arrived together, demanded payment by the family by 22 May. You seriously couldn't make this up.

The government's total debacle that is robodebt continues to hound and hurt innocent Australian families, despite the empty promise from the hapless minister to back off. On 3 April this year, Minister Robert promised that Services Australia would pause debt raising and recovery activity to help ease the pressure on people's budgets during the COVID-19 pandemic—empty words from this government. Minister Robert's relentless pursuit of families is continuing despite admissions that there is no lawful basis for this scheme. Federal Labor has been pleading with the government to stop this, but they continue. As I said, Labor has been pleading for this to be stopped after raising countless examples of bungles and unfairness which have wrongly harmed thousands of Australians. Every call has fallen on deaf ears. The total lack of competence of the Minister for Government Services, Stuart Robert, continues to hurt innocent, vulnerable families already experiencing severe hardship due to this pandemic. This hapless minister needs to come in here and issue a personal apology to these families and provide assurances that action will be taken to stop these errors from continuing into the future.

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