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

The Morrison government's robodebt scheme is a cruel and cowardly extortion racket that intimidated innocent and vulnerable Australians into paying debts they did not owe. It's a scheme designed by the current Prime Minister, which he expanded with the current Attorney-General, to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from everyday Australians. This was money they had no right to take—money taken from people who had no ability to pay it. People across my electorate of Isaacs contacted me, desperate for help, as the Morrison government stole from their bank accounts and tax returns and threatened them with debt collectors and jail terms. People from every suburb across my electorate were illegally held to ransom by this government's grasping robodebt scam, from Mentone to Patterson Lakes, Dandenong South to Aspendale, and Dingley Village to Highett—the list goes on.

Jane was hit with a $6,000 robodebt. After she lost her partner to suicide in 2017 she returned to work full time, but, instead of looking over Jane's case and seeing that her income had increased, Centrelink averaged her salary across the year and sent this single mother of two a bill for $6,000. In 2018 a young hospitality worker, Tyson, came into my office with a robodebt demand for over $4,000, which included a 10 per cent recovery fee because he couldn't source pay slips with only 28 days notice. That year he earned only $21,000. They were asking him to cough up almost a quarter of his salary in a month. And then there's the 62-year-old woman who contacted me about her robodebt demand for $4,000 allegedly owed from 2014. Centrelink is her only income, so they stole the money from her disability support payments to repay the alleged $4,000 debt.

And all the people caught up in Mr Morrison's illegal robodebt money-making scheme were branded guilty until they could prove otherwise, when, in fact, the only people acting like criminals were this government and its most senior people. On four separate occasions in 2017 the Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruled the scheme illegal, and on every occasion the government did not appeal that decision, so for at least three years the government knew its robodebt scheme was illegal. And yet they continued to extort millions of dollars they had no right to claim from people who had no ability to pay and threatened them with jail if they didn't. The cowardice and wickedness shown by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his government towards the people in my electorate of Isaacs, and across this nation, is unforgivable. It's now long past time that this Prime Minister, the Attorney-General, the hapless human services minister and everyone else involved in this scandal took responsibility for this state-run extortion racket.