Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the minister's response to recommendations 1, 2 and 3 of the Senate Community Affairs References Committee's third interim report. This scheme has devastated hundreds of thousands of Australians, and the government won't even answer questions that relate not to what the legal advice is but to whether they actually asked for legal advice. I have the original questions that we asked when the original public interest immunity claim was made. That was again subject to the third interim report, because we did not get a response to our follow-up correspondence.

I will just touch on that very briefly. In our third interim report, we commented on the fact that the minister had not responded to the committee's communication in April this year when we rejected the claims of public interest immunity and wrote back to the minister. That email with that letter, I understand, went missing. I will just let the chamber know that I've checked with the committee, and the correspondence was sent in the usual manner, the manner in which we've been corresponding with ministers for some time. However, I personally accept that admin mistakes happen. But we subsequently referred to that correspondence quite a bit. Was there no thought in government that perhaps they needed to find out where this letter was, what—I was about to say a slightly naughty word!—was going on and why the committee was carrying on? I was very concerned that we hadn't heard back from the minister.

Having said that, I want to go back to what is fundamentally the problem here, and that is that apparently no-one in government thought to check whether trying to claw hundreds of millions of dollars back from people who had low incomes and were on income support was actually based on a legal premise or not—whether it was actually legal. Of course, it turns out it wasn't. There was no legal foundation for them to be claiming back these hundreds of millions of dollars, affecting hundreds of thousands of Australians and causing them a great deal of distress.

The sorts of questions that were asked included: is the department satisfied that its net-to-gross calculations provide a legal basis for raising a debt? Well, we would have thought that was okay. A series of questions were asked about how many times the department asked for or obtained legal advice from a range of government agencies, including the Solicitor-General and the Australian Government Solicitor—there are a number of them. We can't even ask how many times the department—or the minister, for that matter—asked for that legal advice. Does that mean they didn't actually ask for it at all, or does it mean that they asked for it and didn't get the answers that they wanted—they ignored the advice—or that they just didn't care about the impact this program would have because they were so desperate to balance the bottom line on the backs of people trying to exist on a payment that is, let's remember in this place, below the poverty line?

The minister, in her response just then, talked about how, when the government were made aware that using the ATO information for income averaging was unlawful, they never thought that they needed to go and seek legal advice.

The Community Affairs References Committee rejected the concept that it was not in the public interest to release this information. We rejected the claim for public interest immunity because we don't agree that it's not in the public interest for the community to know this information. We have sat for hours and hours and hours hearing about the impact of this scheme on Australians who have been impacted by this scheme. Those of us on the committee have sat—I think I've now been through three inquiries dealing with this matter—and I've sat, and heard people's accounts of the impact on their lives. People have been in tears. People's mental health has been badly affected. And I've heard from people's families who believe that robodebt led very directly to those people taking their own lives.

I'm trying to be very careful when I talk about this, because I'm aware of triggering. To people who read this or who are listening: please, if you are impacted by this or need some help, reach out to Lifeline. The fact is that this had a detrimental impact on people's lives. People have lost loved ones; people have had their mental health permanently affected. People talked of shame, of how they felt demonised and of how they thought that people thought they were cheating—all based on a lie, because this was not lawful. This process was not lawful.

And the government say that the community has no right to know whether they knew whether it was legal or not. And it wasn't sufficiently lawful; it was insufficiently lawful. It was unlawful—it was against the law! And yet the government tries to hide behind public interest immunity, saying that's not in the interest of the community. Well, it's very strongly in the interest of the community. And then they try to hide behind a minute having gone to cabinet. Trotting it through cabinet means that they can't give it to us.

Senator Patrick interjecting—

They sprinkle the cabinet dust—yes, Senator Patrick, they sprinkle the cabinet dust around it! They did not directly tell us that it did impact on the deliberations in cabinet, and giving us the minute would not release the deliberations of cabinet or tell us what those deliberations were.

It is very important to this inquiry that we actually have a look at that minute and see what was in that minute. We all know that, while the government have finally paid back most of the people who were owed money from this illegal scheme, they've only paid that back going back to 2015. They're not going back before 2015. That's why this committee which is inquiring into Centrelink's compliance program needs to see that information, so that we can actually get a true look at this. The government isn't releasing that information, which is why we and many other people are calling for a royal commission into this debacle. It is only that forensic review that will identify what went wrong here. (Time expired)