Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to once again condemn the Morrison government for the robodebt scheme. The robodebt scheme is an outrageous abuse of power from a callous and arrogant government. In many ways, this rotten and likely unlawful scheme encapsulates all that the Morrison government stands for. The more we learn about this scheme the more we learn how it has hurt and continues to hurt vulnerable people across our nation. Let me be clear: robodebt is little more than an extortion racket. In many ways, robodebt is a kind of scam developed by the Morrison government to prey on the vulnerable. Under robodebt, hundreds of thousands of menacing letters have been sent to vulnerable Australians demanding that they pay money to the government. Astonishingly, rather than providing detailed proof of the alleged overpayments for the recipient of the demand to review, under this scheme the Morrison government turns the onus on the recipient of the letter to disprove the debt the government claims. This outrageous reversal of the onus of proof is essentially a presumption of guilt on the part of any Australian this government wants to hit up for money. It forces anyone wanting to dispute their alleged debt to provide documentary proof of the payments they've received from multiple sources, bank account details and records of correspondence with Centrelink, often stretching back over many years.

But the obscenity of the Liberal government's robodebt scheme doesn't stop there. The crowning abuse of this Liberal Party extortion racket is that this lose-with-the-truth government knows that, in many cases, on its own admission, as many as one in five of the letters of demand that it is sending out is incorrect. Knowing this, it sends the letters anyway. That's the government's own estimate of how many are false. The actual percentage of false demands is likely to be much higher. If a bank or other financial institution demanded money from their customers in such a reckless way, they'd be in court.

Through robodebt, this government has set out to use fear to try to prop up its budget, demanding money from those who can least afford to pay it, whether they owe it or not. The government has caused terrible harm in that process. As journalist Alex McKinnon wrote in The Saturday Paper in March this year:

Revelations that more than 2000 people died after receiving a Centrelink robo-debt notice highlight the failings of an already flawed system that continues to target the vulnerable.

As I outlined to the parliament last week, earlier this year a single mother of two contacted my office desperate for help because she had received a computer generated robodebt notice of demand. Two years ago, she tragically lost her partner to suicide. After this heartbreaking loss, she returned to full-time work to keep a roof over her children's heads. She relied on support from Centrelink and let Centrelink know when her hours and pay increased. At the end of the 2017-18 financial year, Centrelink applied its robodebt algorithm to average her increased earnings across the whole year. This fraudulent and discredited process claimed she owed a debt of $6,000, which is an extraordinary amount of money for anyone, particularly for a single parent trying to make ends meet to support her family. She spent months appealing the debt, but the government still forced her to pay it back in instalments, even though the appeal was not resolved.

A key priority of any decent government must be to protect its citizens, including by putting in place laws to prevent and punish attempts by scammers to extort money from the vulnerable, but, through robodebt, this desperate, third-term, failing Liberal government has done the opposite. This government is the scammer. I condemn the Morrison government for the despicable robodebt scheme which has caused suffering to thousands of Australians. The robodebt scheme is a brutal, unethical and almost certainly unlawful grab for cash. What an extraordinary thing that the government of Australia is making false demands, knowing that it is making false demands, of hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Australians in our community, who have received government benefits. The Prime Minister should be apologising to the nation for this atrocious failure of policy and of decency.