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

Australians listening to parliament should be aware that this government and its predecessor coalition government have since 2015 been running an unlawful compliance campaign against hundreds of thousands of Australians on Centrelink. The reason why this unlawful scheme is worth the attention not just of the victims of robodebt but of all Australians is that this scheme and the conduct of the current coalition government go to the heart of what drives them. This is a scheme which can be best described as 'the ends justify the means'. The scheme was introduced with much fanfare by the government in 2015 and then again in the 2016 federal election. It was this very Prime Minister who, as Minister for Social Services, said in May 2015: 'We're going to track down people who are not doing the right thing, who are owing money to the government and therefore the taxpayers, and we are going to finally get the money back off them.

In 2016, during the federal election, the government announced:

A re-elected Coalition Government will:

They said:

Some welfare recipients make genuine mistakes—

but—

No one who genuinely needs social welfare … and who is honestly disclosing their employment income … will be worse off under our commitment.

Never have words never been so true.

Fast forward to 2019. This robodebt scheme has been around for four years. Labor MPs, probably even coalition MPs, community groups, advocates and individuals received notices of debts raised by the Commonwealth, many of them unfair; they simply weren't owed by the recipients to the Commonwealth. But this didn't stop the Commonwealth extrapolating their wages information and saying, 'Because the tax office says that over a year you theoretically earned X dollars, therefore you weren't eligible for Y dollars in a given fortnight.' This is at the core of what was wrong about the scheme. There is currently no Commonwealth law on the statute books which authorises the government to rely upon a single data point and then issue a letter of demand against its citizens. That law does not exist. It is unlawful.

This government tried to do what it normally does when it gets caught out: say, 'Well, Labor did it first.' This is not true. There's no doubt that income-tracking data can help raise a red flag to say, 'Is there an issue here?' But what you would then do normally, and what respectable conservative and Labor governments did up to 2015, is say, 'If there's a red flag, if the data shows an anomaly, we will get a trained professional in Centrelink to go and check the data.' But this government saw the human part of the human services component as irrelevant. They were so greedy to chase and prop up false budget surpluses that they saw vulnerable Australians and said, 'Righto, we think we can get away with picking on the poorest and most vulnerable in Australia, and no-one will notice.' Unfortunately for this government, a senior member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Terry Carney, made a decision on 8 March 2017 that the government couldn't rely on just extrapolating a single data point. He didn't make that decision only on 8 March 2017; he made it again in another matter on 20 April 2017, and again on 25 August 2017, and in two cases on 7 September 2017. The independent review tribunal for the Social Security Act said that this scheme was unlawful.

Today I listened to the Prime Minister cry what I have to say were crocodile tears, saying: 'Well, I'm sorry. Of course we only ever want to do what's lawful.' But this government has known for over three years, through a decision of the independent review tribunal, that this scheme was unlawful. Maybe the government doesn't agree with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, but it has options. It can either accept what the AAT says and change its practices, which it didn't do, or it can say, 'We don't agree with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal's finding that it's unlawful, and we will appeal it,' which it didn't do either.

This is a government for whom the end justifies the means. They calculated: 'We will take a proportion, and just settle up matters. If people have the capacity to complain, get to lawyers, get to advocates, get to MPs and complain, we will settle them up. But we are going to keep doing the measure which is unlawful.' So for three years they continued doing something that they knew wasn't lawful. This is really where the government's culpability needs to be explored.

On the Social Security Act, the government says there's no duty of care to social security recipients. What it has to do, if it says there's no duty of care, is say: 'The review process can be relied upon. That's why they don't need a duty of care.' But this government ignored the review process and also failed to deliver a duty of care to the people upon whom this government relies to actually do the right thing.

This is the heart of the robodebt scandal. It caused countless grief. We MPs, advocates and individuals saw the trauma. When the government of Australia issues you a legal demand saying, 'You owe us money', that is confronting. Some people just paid up—as you would. But other people are vulnerable. There were students who, with a debt, couldn't get a job. There were people who wanted to go overseas but could not fly overseas because the Commonwealth said, 'You can't go until you pay your debt.' There are people who are vulnerable. I agree with the minister on people with mental illness: there are lots of things that can trigger it, and it is a complex matter. But I can't agree with the minister that he can conclude, therefore, that because mental illness is a complex matter this robodebt didn't have a triggering effect on vulnerable people. There was psychological trauma.

The government says, 'Please tell us if there are problems.' They were told for years. They were told on A Current Affair last night. We have spoken to families who believe that the robodebt letter of demand and the process triggered self-harm and worse. These are real matters caused from a government's unlawful actions. We have seen the gradual retreat back. The government said in November of last year, 'Hmm, we will make a refinement to robodebt.' It's not a refinement, Minister. When you are doing something unlawful and then you choose to be lawful, that is more than a refinement; that's not a simple jump to the left or hop to the right. You've decided to obey the law which you were tasked with managing in the first place.

In this government there's been a parade of human services ministers over the time and social security ministers—too many to remember, but we will. The point about it is: if they knew that it was unlawful, why didn't they act? Why didn't they take a step? If it was unlawful, why didn't they check in the first place? Why didn't they ask the basic questions: is this lawful? Can we do this? The AAT, the only protection at law for Centrelink and social security recipients said, 'Stop. You must look at this.' The AAT is the only mechanism which people have had up to the class action, up to the Victorian Legal Aid Commission running its groundbreaking case in 2019. That was the only protection people had.

The government are so cynical, so sure that they could just settle up matters quietly. They are so cynical that they just ignored their own watchdog. The watchdog had no teeth. They just ignored it. If there were some people who had the wherewithal to complain and were lucky enough to have the resources, they just paid them off. This was a very mercenary calculus. This was a very arbitrary exercise in crude and thuggish stand-over fundraising by the government on the most vulnerable Australians. This government knew what they were doing was wrong. Even now they still seek to justify and delay and prevaricate. They knew in March 2017. The minister was finally dragged, kicking and screaming, his fingernail marks on the marble of the Federal Court, saying, 'In 2019, we're going to pause.'

Since 19 November last year to 29 May this year, the government have held on to $721 million of unjustly and rich money. They're still collecting the interest on the money, money they haven't been entitled to for 4½ years. Why did it take them from November to May of this year to decide to refund? The plot thickens. We know from leaks which were given to The Guardianexcellent sources, The Guardian had in this case—that the government was considering what to do in February. This government has unjustly enriched itself at the expense of the poorest people. What we need to recognise here is this is a scandal. The greatest shame of all is we don't know how much it will cost taxpayers and we can't even find out who's responsible but, be sure, we will. (Time expired)

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