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

I rise—somewhat out of breath—to contribute to this debate, which is, of course, about the need for Mr Morrison to apologise for his role overseeing every aspect of the illegal robodebt scheme—as the social services minister who designed it, the Treasurer who implemented it and the Prime Minister who settled the claims of victims for $1.2 billion—and to establish a royal commission, because that is the only forum with the coercive powers and the broad jurisdiction necessary to properly investigate this fiasco.

And I agree. We absolutely need a royal commission. This government settled the robodebt—and I will always call it 'robodebt', despite what the government says, because it was robodebt. And it was illegal. There's this fiddling around with language to say it is 'legally insufficient'. It was illegal. And the government has settled this case because they didn't want public servants who knew what went on and ministers who knew what went on to be hauled into court to actually establish when they knew this was illegal. And they must have known, because we established it in estimates, just a couple of weeks ago, when we went through the process of the AAT. Perhaps they weren't reading the reports of the AAT—and, quite clearly at estimates, we were told people had been reading them. We were told the process that you go through in an AAT process and a decision is made. There have been a large number of cases that must have clearly pointed out that these debts were not legally based.

The government don't want people in court being asked questions that may be slightly inconvenient, so, of course, they settled the class action. Of course they settled it. That's why we need a royal commission to forensically analyse what went on, who knew what, and when and where that information was held. We need to also go back before 2015, because this process isn't going back before 2015. We can't get access—when I say 'we', that is the Community Affairs References Committee that is inquiring into the Centrelink compliance program, which has asked for various bits of information. The government won't provide that under the claims of public interest immunity—including executive minutes, including their decision-making process and why they were looking at debts prior to 2015. In my opinion, it is in the public interest to release that information, but will this government release it? No, they won't. They hide behind public interest immunity.

It's not quite settled yet, because I know it still has to go through the final approval process, but they have effectively agreed to settle. They think that people will stop asking questions about when they knew it was illegal and who knew it was illegal. The Prime Minister was the Minister for Social Services when this new accelerated process of income averaging—turbo charged through robodebt—was introduced. The Prime Minister knew then. Then he became the Treasurer. Now he's the Prime Minister. What did he know? What did he know about it? What did all the other ministers we've had know? Let me remember. We've had Christian Porter; he's the Attorney-General. We've had Dan Tehan. We've had Alan Tudge. We've had Stuart Robert a couple of times as the Minister for Human Services and now the minister for Services Australia. We have the current minister for social services, Minister Ruston. Did they not ask: 'Is this legal? What's the legal basis for this?' Of course they must've asked those questions.

We also need to discuss the issue around the apology. Would this count as an apology?

I would apologise for any hurt or harm in the way that the Government has dealt with that issue and to anyone else who has found themselves in those situations… Of course I would deeply regret any hardship that has been caused to people in the conduct of that activity.

This is the Prime Minister's so-called apology. What? He doesn't know that people were hurt by this? Hundreds of thousands of people were subjected to their illegal robodebt fiasco. People were articulating very clearly their hurt and distress. If he hadn't listened to any of the radio stories about it, watched any of the TV stories about it or read any of the media articles about it, you would have thought that one of the ministers, particularly the Prime Minister, would have looked at the Senate inquiry and the Hansard transcripts, which clearly articulated people's deep, deep distress and anxiety. He says: 'any hurt or harm'. Of course there's hurt and harm. We know there's the worst possible harm. We know because we've had evidence from families about the impact on people's mental ill-health, and distress and anxiety to the point where some people, as a result of robodebt, did take their lives. It was the most distressing, awful thing for the people who took their life, and for their families. We've had evidence to the Senate inquiry, and I've had evidence personally from families, about the impact that robodebt had. Everybody in this country knows that it caused hurt, harm and distress.

So that was not an apology. It was not a heartfelt apology that acknowledged the hurt, harm, anxiety and stress that robodebt caused hundreds of thousands of people because the government were once again picking on and demonising people on income support. They thought they could save money—in fact 'recoup money', so called—on the most vulnerable members of our community. It started, in fact, with the Howard government demonising people on income support. They accused people with disability of rorting the system and subjected them to Welfare to Work. It continued through the Howard governments and into the Abbott government, when Mr Abbott, as Prime Minister, accused people on the dole of sitting on the couch. He accused people of rorting the income support system. That was the mindset that was used to dream up robodebt while the Prime Minister was the Minister for Social Services—in other words, the person entrusted to look after and support those Australians who are the most vulnerable and most in need.

What did the Prime Minister, as the social services minister, oversee? He oversaw the initiation of the robodebt scheme to make money off the back of the very people he, as minister, should have been working for. He should have ensured they got the support they needed, not letters saying, 'You could owe thousands of dollars.' When you get such a letter, or when the debt collector turns up at your door—which is what happened to people—and says, 'You owe thousands,' it has the most significant impact on you. This has caused deep hurt and trauma and it needs a full apology and a royal commission.