Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It would be difficult to pick the worst moment in parliament this week. People could well choose the opposition's gutter politics on Constitutional recognition and a Voice for Indigenous Australians, and the misinformation and disinformation they're spreading not just in the media but here in this House. They want to divide and not unite the country for their own political reasons instead of making a practical difference to people's lives. The Opposition Leader and his deputy are too scared to go to the Garma Festival and face people this weekend. People could well pick—and I may—the audit report I tabled on the Liberal government's grants rorts. This was industrial-scale rorting of billions of dollars of funds, treating taxpayer money as if it were Liberal Party money.

But even among all that, surely, this week the former prime minister Morrison's response to the robodebt royal commission tops the list. The response was weak and pathetic. He dismissed the royal commission as a quasilegal process. The royal commission was established by law—46 days of public hearings, with more than 100 Australians giving evidence. Commissioner Holmes is a former chief justice of the Queensland Supreme Court, and she forensically examined how the former Liberal governments designed and perpetrated this illegal scheme for years. More than 400,000 vulnerable Australians were the victims. She found:

Mr Morrison allowed Cabinet to be misled … He failed to meet his ministerial responsibility …

Former welfare minister Alan Tudge famously said he would 'find welfare cheats and hunt them down'. He had a crack, didn't he, as the commission found when he leaked the personal details to the media on some kind of revenge mission on someone who spoke up. Former minister Stuart Robert invented a new doctrine of cabinet—solidarity—in claiming it was okay to say things which were demonstrably not true.

But the worst aspect was that instead of taking responsibility himself, the former prime minister cast himself as the victim-in-chief. This guy was the most powerful person in our country. He is still privileged to serve in this parliament and has power in that way. He is not the victim. The real victims were Australians sent fake debt notices for money they did not owe. The real victims were those who had the onus of proof reversed when they got a letter with the power of the Commonwealth logo and had no way of getting records from employers who went out of business years before. The real victims were those Australians who committed suicide, and those who loved them. That's permanent. That's forever. Nothing can really make up for that, but at the very least these people are owed, surely, acceptance of responsibility and genuine remorse.

I represent Bruce, one of the most disadvantaged electorates in the country. Do those opposite really know what it's like to sit down week after week with vulnerable poor people sent fake debt notices for $20,000 or more for money they didn't owe? How many years does it take to repay a debt like that at $10 a week? It's more than 38 years. But it's not even the financial pain or the trauma—it's the sense of injustice and fairness, and the further loss of dignity. Why is it important to learn these lessons of robodebt? Why must our nation not forget robodebt and just move on, as those opposite tell us we should do? Because Australia needs to understand what happened and make changes so this cannot happen again. Because the Liberal Party needs to accept that their values and culture are rotten. Yes, they should cut the former prime minister loose, but the Leader of the Opposition sat around the cabinet table for years and advocated this policy. He is culpable. All of them are culpable except those one or two who have apologised.

There's something that all politicians need to take responsibility for and listen to. To quote the royal commissioner's words:

Politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments.

The evidence before the commission was that fraud in the welfare system is miniscule, but that is not the impression one would get from what ministers responsible for social security payments have said over the years. Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism and useful for campaign purposes. It is not recent; nor is it confined to one side of politics as some of the quoted material in the report demonstrates. It may be the evidence in this royal commission has gone some way towards changing public perceptions. Largely, these attitudes are set by politicians, who need to abandon for good, in every sense, the narrative of taxpayer versus welfare recipient—words we should all reflect on.