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

It's good to be out of 15 days of quarantine to attend the parliament to talk on this legislation, the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. This bill sets out the proposed framework, or structure, for the newly established executive agency Services Australia, which replaces the now abolished Department of Human Services. There are a number of changes that aim to both update terminology and streamline the reporting lines associated with transitioning DHS to Services Australia. Labor, as a principle, supports modifications to governance structures across the public sector that lead to improved outcomes for the Australian people and for the employees who deliver the services that Australians rely upon, but there is a problem while there is a cap on the number of permanent employees, as the member for Makin so eloquently just said. My colleagues, including the member for Dobell in the last sitting of parliament, have elaborated on the negative effect that the Morrison government's staffing cap has on both services and staff, so I will not dwell unduly on this particular aspect, but for present purposes let it be said that the stifling effect of the cap on the number of permanent employees is a reason for Labor's second reading amendment in the form presented.

I want to talk about the rebrand that this legislation represents. When I look at the mass rebrand of the Department of Human Services to Services Australia I think of one of the most notorious tales from the mad men era of Madison Avenue advertising executives in New York in the swinging sixties. The story is half confected and half based on a real tagline proposed by advertising guru Jerry Della Famina. It features a grizzled adman, a returned veteran from the Second World War still carrying wartime prejudices against the Japanese. The adman is tasked with coming up with a tagline for a new Japanese electronics client, Panasonic. The grizzled adman and former veteran pauses for a while. He thinks contemplatively. He looks at the line of whiz-bang electrical products. And then he proposes: 'From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor'. Well, when I look at this seven-year-old government putting Stuart Robert at the helm, promising a digital 'revolution' in the way that the old DHS services are provided, part of me hopes that his promise may come true. But another part of me can't help but think it's a pledge somewhere along the lines of, 'From the wonderful folks who brought you robodebt'.

So let's talk about robodebt—because, goodness knows, the government won't. Robodebt—or, as its proud Liberal parents prefer to call it, 'the online compliance intervention scheme'—slouched into lamented existence about five years ago. It was introduced as part of the 2015-16 budget measure 'Strengthening the integrity of welfare payments' and the December 2015 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook announcement. Scott Morrison was Treasurer, Christian Porter was social services minister, and Ms Kathryn Campbell was human services secretary. In 2016-17, as more and more disquiet about robodebt's legality emerged, Alan Tudge was human services minister. Robodebt was the holy grail for these digital fetishists. No more pesky staffing costs! No more annoying human intervention! No more troublesome procedural justice or, indeed, that annoying presumption of innocence for Australian citizens—just a magic algorithm, just an averaging tool, that worked out that someone had been overpaid by Centrelink, maybe a decade ago, followed by a very official demand for payment on Australian government letterhead.

Now, the averaging tool was fundamentally flawed. It did not account for changes in people's circumstances. It tried to compare a fortnight of a Department of Social Services payment with a year's annual income across the ATO. It took no account of lumpy income, of the vagaries of economic life in Australia. Many, scared by the official nature of the demand from the Australian government, just handed over the money that they didn't actually owe. But there was an immediate backlash from others, who knew for a fact that they didn't owe the money—people who stood up and said no to the standover racket authorised by the government.

But what was the response from robodebt's architects to the voices of everyday Australians being persecuted by these claims? Well, it was bringing in so much money that it was helping carry the load for the ultimately fictional campaign to get the budget back in black. They were addicted to it in the government. They couldn't stop it. They ramped it up. They needed more of it.

Veteran Centrelink and Services Australia staff proved too conscientious, and they were reticent to engage in this standover scheme on the Australian people. So the Libs did what they love to do: they went out and outsourced it to private companies. Boiler-room offices of casual recruits were set up, and their job was to pressure and compel Australians to settle their robodebts, or else. People who have worked in these boiler rooms have told us that they were forced to work on quotas; they had to basically threaten little old ladies and gents to pay the money, or the boiler-room staff wouldn't get paid. But these workers also had consciences. They recognised what the government had failed to: this process was fundamentally unfair, fundamentally wrong, fundamentally unsound and fundamentally cruel. Many of them quit.

So far, the government must have had the following groups voicing, to some degree, their concerns about robodebt. There were the innocent Australians who didn't want to be hit up for fake debts, the public servants who were told to chase the innocent Australians for fake debts and the private contractors in the boiler rooms quitting because the work was so distasteful to their innate sense of fairness. And there were regular decisions by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal declaring individual robodebts not valid. There have been at least 82 cases in the AAT where decisions were clearly made: 'This was not valid.'

But this government didn't want to hear. They didn't care how the money was got. They did not care how they raised the money, even if it was illegal. This is the worst undermining of the integrity of public service by a pack of rent-seeking, neoright, neoliberal vandals that we are likely to see in our lifetime. I certainly hope that we never see it again. Even last year, advice was leaked that revealed an early plan to expand the scourge of robodebt to groups including the homeless, the elderly and people in the regions. The last 16 months have been a very revealing journey when it comes to robodebt. As we in Labor have been sounding the alarm, the Morrison government's desperately been trying to hold onto its deformed cash cow and keep robodebt alive in some fashion. At every step, the Morrison government has moved the goalposts. They've trimmed their sails and they've performed some spectacular circus backflips.

But they've only ever told us as much truth about the scheme as they've had to. In November of last year, the Victorian legal aid commission was finally successful in its case of Deanna Amato. The federal court said, 'This is unlawful.' The government services minister maintained that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with robodebt even after that court decision. This was despite the Commonwealth not even being able to come up with a defence to Ms Amato's claims. They consented to the judge's order in favour of Mr Amarto. Around the same time, behind the scenes, the Department of Human Services sent an email to all staff, saying that averaging alone would no longer be used to raise the debts. More humans would be brought back in to attempt to tame the malfunctioning robodebt process.

On 15 November last year, the class action which I helped organise went forward. Gordon Legal sent a letter to Services Australia confirming the class action would be proceeding. Four days later, Mr Robert—again, with that habit of telling the truth only when you've been caught out not telling the truth—held a press conference and said they would make a refinement to the scheme, but it would only affect a small cohort. What that meant, in more honest language, was that they were finally heeding the legal advice and putting the brakes on the whole sordid scheme. I think you might remember Mr Robert rising in this place and saying, 'I will not apologise for robodebt.' Things have changed a little, but not completely. Continued pressure on behalf of the victims of robodebt has meant the Prime Minister has eventually expressed regret over this rogue scheme.

Robodebt has been a fraud perpetrated by a government against its people. We should not forget that this is the worst scandal in the history of social welfare, and it's gone all the way to the top of the hierarchy of this government. Mr Morrison started robodebt when he was social services minister, he banked it when he was Treasurer and he's done nothing but whitewash it since being Prime Minister. He only says that he has 'deep regrets' now they've been caught red-handed. I suppose that is better than nothing, but true remorse would be accompanied by an action to remedy and rule out a robodebt reboot.

Minister Stuart Robert has suggested that he isn't really responsible, because he's only been a minister for the last 15 months—at least in his current incarnation. He must be forgetting, though, that he was human services minister in 2015-16, overseeing a key stage of robodebt's rollout. This was, of course, before he resigned from Prime Minister Turnbull's frontbench after breaching the ministerial code of conduct. I'm not going to recount in great detail the member for Fadden's many bungles: the China trip, the Rolex watch incident and the home internet bills—what do you spend $40,000 on the internet? But he's back again in this frontbench, living proof that a souffle can rise twice. Now he's in charge of the robodebt cover-up and clean-up. As robodebt minister, Mr Robert has sent threatening letters to innocent Australians, when, in reality, it is the government that has behaved fraudulently. As minister for robodebt, a scheme that unlawfully accused Australians of stealing from the Commonwealth, the reality is that he's presided over a scheme where the Commonwealth was unlawfully stealing from Australians. We've been saying all along robodebt was immoral. Despite its inaccuracy and despite its lack of procedural fairness, the government still let it run amuck and upset the lives of countless Australians. When really bad examples of robodebt's toll have surfaced, Mr Robert has issued qualified apologies.

I think a low point in this sad and sorry saga of robodebt was the experience of Anastasia McCardel being rung at home and drilled over her dead son Bruce's alleged debt. When they stand over a bereaved mum for a debt that, in all likelihood, never existed, that is sickening. We've raised it in parliament so the government couldn't hide from it, but, for the most part, thousands of sad and often tragic experiences of Australians coming a cropper with robodebt have happened quietly and out of the public eye. There was Norm Austwick, a recently widowed 79-year-old who was hounded for $67 from last century, which he never owed. There was 82-year old Canberra woman Wilma Spence who in July was hounded for $61 dating back to 1995. People officially questioned their robodebts, and, while they were under review, while the whole thing should have been paused, the government went and garnished their tax returns. Minister Roberts said they weren't robodebting disaster areas like Townsville after the floods. But guess what? They did.

We've been saying for some time that not only is robodebt harsh, inaccurate and immoral; it is almost certainly illegal. On 29 May this year the Morrison government finally announced that it would scrap robodebt and repay a small cohort—470,000 wrongly issued debts, worth at least $721 million, to be repaid in full. If it weren't for the COVID-19 pandemic, this scandal and the amount of money would leave Australians with the their jaws on the ground—and it still does. In June, the Prime Minister finally found the words to apologise in this place for any 'hurt, harm or hardship' caused by the scheme—his scheme. If he's really sorry, then I guess there are consequences, aren't there.

But there are no consequences for the architects of robodebt; they're all still there. In a pattern of only admitting what they are still denying when they are able still to deny, they no longer claim that robodebt works fine, as they did for a long time; they no longer claim that robodebt is accurate, as they did for a long time; they no longer defend robodebt's fairness or morality, as they did for a long time. They are even a lot quieter about robodebt's legality than they have been for a long time. These are the new battlelines that the government has drawn on robodebt. None of the cronies lose their jobs or get demoted. No-one admits what mourning parents have known for a long time, and will tell you if you're willing to listen, which is that young adults took their lives because of robodebt.

And under no circumstances will the government agree to Labor's royal commission into the origins of robodebt. I said for a long time that resistance against robodebt was inaccurate, immoral and illegal. Today I say there must be responsibility taken for it and the consequences for those involved. The government owes it to grieving parents to admit the truth. The government owes it to the nation to have a royal commission into robodebt and its origins. For the moment, robodebt's architects are still all there. There is a bright new sign painted out the front of Services Australia. But has the culture changed? A lot of the top Liberal-friendly bureaucrats who like nothing more than outsourcing and ripping money out of these departments and agencies have moved onto pretty good jobs. And what is happening in the culture is that, apart from a few isolated cases of apparent whistleblowing, the bureaucracy has been forced to go along with a clearly immoral and illegal scheme. Where were the 'no' people, the people who were saying the algorithm was malfunctioning? We've taken away too many of the safeguards. Innocent people were harassed unjustly, and sometimes even to self-harm. I'm sure there are many outbreaks of this—the existence of this hollow Public Service treatment. Who is more likely to speak up? A casual worker? An outsourced worker? This is why they should lift the caps. (Time expired)

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