Senate debates

Tuesday, 11 February 2020

Committees

Community Affairs References Committee; Report

5:49 pm

Photo of Deborah O'NeillDeborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to this important tabling of a very significant report. It's only short, but it goes to the very heart of what's really wrong with this government. The debate is about two things. It's about robodebt and the reports about that, because that's a substantive issue. It's about a government that is absolutely dedicated to covering its dodgy tracks.

With respect to Senator Askew, who is a hard worker for the people of Tasmania, she's been sent in here to put out a claim that governments don't release legal information. Australian people, all 900,000 of them who got letters, have a public interest in what's going on here. The government, when they make a public interest immunity claim, are saying that it's not in the public interest that this should come out. It matters to 900,000 Australians who got a letter, many of whom just paid without question because they were confident that no government of any integrity would do the sort of thing we have seen this government do. It's now being considered by the legal fraternity to be an illegal action without basis. The averaging that this government has undertaken is obscene, and the consequences are devastating.

Let's be clear: Minister Robert refuses to release this legal advice so he can continue his disgraceful scheme. He says—and Senator Askew is trying to argue—that Australian governments have no precedent in releasing legal advice. That's plain wrong. It's utterly, utterly wrong. In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard released the Solicitor-General's advice on offshore processing. In 2007, immigration minister Kevin Andrews released advice in relation to Dr Haneef's visa cancellation. The current Attorney-General, Christian Porter, released advice on the eligibility of Mr Dutton in 2018. So it does not pass the pub test. This is a cover-up of a gross failure of governance by the Liberal-National government. And they're now trying to protect their own skin.

We know that these robodebt notices have led to people suffering all kinds of trauma and ignominy. They have been barred from travelling. People have been hounded outside by debt collectors. People have had their tax returns garnished. People have had their loan applications rejected. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. I recall reading the heartbreaking tragedy of a Melbourne musician and florist by the name of Rhys Cauzzo, who said the aggressive debt collection of $18,000 by Centrelink—a letter arriving from the government saying, 'You owe us $18,000'—nearly pushed him over the edge. That's what he said. Sadly, Rhys did take that fatal step: he suicided in 2016. What an appalling and utterly preventable loss of life—by a heavy-handed, hard-hearted government that, even in the light of that kind of evidence, continues to want to hide the truth from the Australian people whom it has so cruelly attacked.

Government should be about the empowerment of the citizen—support and enablement—not taking every opportunity you can to shove people down. Government should be about ensuring the dignity of ordinary Australians, not robbing them of their innocence, not hounding them with fake and false debts which you had no authority to establish in the first place. It's very important that the legal advice that this government got is actually made known to the public so that this matter can be resolved and this government can be called to account.

At the end of last year, when Senator Siewert and I asked questions, to give a sense of the scale of this problem, I asked: 'What's happening in the department about finding out about these debts? What's going on with robodebts?' And after they had received the advice, after the court case had come down and they had to concede that something might be going wrong, the department, which consists of 1,500 hardworking Australian people, was carved apart; and half of that workforce that should be out looking after Australians—750 people—was allocated the task of trying to clean up the government's robodebt mess. No wonder they want to hide the documents. No wonder they want to use any trick they can to try and pull the wool over Australians eyes. Well, 900,000 Australians have seen what this government's like and 900,000 Australians deserve to see the evidence of the legal advice that they receive. This government needs to be held to account for a shameful episode of exploitation of Australian people.

Question agreed to.

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