Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion moved by the member for Jagajaga. Over the winter recess, I went to visit one of the busiest Centrelink services on the Mornington Peninsula, located on High Street in Hastings. It was a privilege to meet with the team there, led by Lily Nikora, and to hear firsthand their experience in recent months. They described pensioners and families coming into a Services Australia office for the first time in their lives. These are proud, self-reliant, capable, hardworking people who now face a cost-of-living crisis unparalleled in recent times and now find themselves heading into an office to seek guidance, help, a sympathetic ear, reassurance and compassion. As the Centrelink team explained to me, for many it was their first time seeking any help from government at any level. The team at Services Australia was characterised by their patience, their kindness, their empathy, their humour, their respect for one another and their respect for their clients.

Over the last sitting break, I met with constituents in my electorate of Flinders who had navigated the so-called robodebt scheme. They came in to see me with handfuls—indeed, binders—full of papers: letters of demand; baffling calculations, each time different; bills to be paid; moneys to be extracted from their fortnightly payments; dates to be met; and moneys to be explained and justified. These letters stretched over years. The brave ones raised concerns and sought redress, first with the ATO and then with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and ultimately participated in a class action.

One of my constituents came in and told me her story, her constant struggle to explain what money she had earned and when. She joined the class action, and she succeeded in that class action, and she received 3c after years of stress and endurance. I'm in awe of her determination. She was fearless. It should be no surprise that she had been a member of the Australian Defence Force. Best of all, she kept her sense of humour about it, when most of us, if not all of us, would have long given up.

In conversation with those who serve our community via the Mornington Community Support Centre, I heard of another constituent who had worked hard over summer, as we often do on the Mornington Peninsula, and then gone off to study and who had come back from study to be greeted by a $7,000 debt. He then challenged that debt, only to be given an $11,000 debt in its place. He tried to fix it as best he could. He was studying overseas, and he couldn't access the online portal from Europe.

If ever we needed to learn a lesson that the sharp edges of algorithmic and artificial intelligence computation need a human overlay, this should be it. The integrity of Australia's welfare system is paramount. Our welfare system distributes more than $150 billion in payments every year, and fairness and compliance are critically important components of the system. However, it is now apparent that the expanded compliance system which was rolled out from mid-2016, now known as robodebt, is one of the poorest chapters in Australia's public policy history and one that sits at the feet of the coalition in its time of government. The thousand-odd pages of the full report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme paint a picture of avoidable human suffering, of bureaucratic processes and of an attempt to reconcile the fast paced nature of digital transformation together with real life. The scheme had tangible consequences on people and especially on vulnerable people. It's important that we all, on both sides of this place, take the lessons from these errors and ensure that we do not revisit them.

The party I'm privileged to represent in this place is built on personal responsibility and has a record for high integrity in government. In reading the findings of the royal commission I find it out of sync with the coalition governments I have known and served in during the Howard and Abbott eras. I find it equally vastly out of sync with the Australian Public Service that I have known and worked with over the last three decades. I was perhaps incredibly lucky to grow up professionally in this building, working in partnership with public servants like Peter Shergold, Lisa Paul and Peter Varghese, and in various capacities outside the building with those now leading and improving the Australian and state based public services like Glyn Davis and Peter Coaldrake. It was always a culture of mutual respect, and there was an expectation that the Public Service could and would speak its mind frankly.

The Public Service I know would generate their own policy proposals and improve the policy proposals emanating from the political class. It was a true partnership and collaboration in which the public servants ultimately held the pen, the official record and the accountability that went with it. I commend my colleague and my friend the member for Menzies, Keith Wolahan, when he said in this chamber that we have a duty to have a strong and sustainable safety net. Any one of us may find ourselves in the position where we rely on it. Even if you don't rely on it, I like to know it's there for my fellow Australians when they need it, and the system should be one that is compassionate. In the light of tangible local examples, our responsibility as parliamentarians to learn from these mistakes is clear.

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