Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I speak today about the matter of public importance that is robodebt and the Prime Minister's failure to accept fault for his actions as minister, Treasurer and Prime Minister. He's completed a trifecta that nobody would want to win on a program that was illegal and atrociously executed. He was the minister who designed robodebt, he was the Treasurer who cashed the money from robodebt and he is the Prime Minister who refused to fix it. We could look at the numbers—and they're large—but what are we dealing with? We're not dealing with numbers; we're dealing with the lives of hundreds of thousands of fellow Australians who have been put through the unnecessary stress and heartache of having to disprove their liability for debts they didn't owe. They were treated so badly that some of them took their own life. They've been put through this heartache because of the callousness and incompetence of Mr Morrison and his government. So those opposite can try to defend their position, deny the undeniable and talk about mental health programs being implemented, but the reality is that the government caused the angst and anxiety felt by participants caught up in the robodebt fiasco—it's all on them.

I'm a member of the community affairs references committee. As Senator Siewert has said, we're undertaking an inquiry into Centrelink's compliance program, as robodebt is formally known. As a member of that committee, I've heard evidence and read submissions from witnesses whose lives were completely devastated by the program. We heard some really distressing evidence. Let me tell you about Ms Kath Madgwick, who believes her son Jarrad's robodebt contributed to him eventually taking his own life. She wrote a letter to the committee, which was read into evidence during a public hearing of the committee. I'll just quote part of it. She said:

My son Jarrad Madgwick was an amazing, caring, intelligent boy. He was a loving + protective son.

…   …   …

If it were not for the Automative Compliance letter & the threat of a debt Jarrad would have been sabotaging my cooking with cayene pepper & giving me his cheeky giggle when he got caught that night & my son would be sitting next to me today. Instead he was extremely distressed & it pushed him to make an impulsive decision.

Jarrad was not planning his death. … He was desperately applying for jobs & he had an interview scheduled with the Army on the 4th of June.

I would like to express my condolences to Ms Madgwick and her family, and my condolences to all the families who have lost a loved one because of this awful program. But what has been truly shocking to me has been the reaction of the government and some of its officials. During the same hearing of the committee, a department official refused to accept that there were suicides caused by this program. This was even after being presented with the testimony of Ms Madgwick that I just quoted. Ms Madgwick is not the only grieving parent who has made this claim, so I really think it's time for the government to take seriously the parents and the loved ones of those who have taken their lives and who are saying that this program pushed them over the edge. Lives were ruined because of this program; lives were lost because of this program.

Yesterday in question time in the Senate, the government warned us about speaking about the lives lost, supposedly out of a sense of respect. But I say this: it's a damn shame it didn't have that same sense of respect when it was harassing people about debts they didn't owe. This government treated 430,000 people as cheats and debtors, and these people paid the government thousands of dollars when they didn't owe it a cent. The government didn't show Australians respect, and, instead of admitting fault, former robodebt minister Stuart Robert denied for months that the standover scheme was unfair, inaccurate or illegal. Instead, the government spent years trying to defend the program, dragged its feet on the class action for months and then finally, just on the cusp of the trial but without admitting any liability, it decided to settle. I agree with Senator Siewert when she says that is because those ministers would not want to have to stand up in a court of law and swear that what they were saying was the truth.

Minister Porter, the Attorney-General and former Minister for Social Services, still doesn't show respect when he continues to call the dodgy scheme 'legally insufficient' rather than downright illegal, which it has been shown to be. I think the government's understanding of respect seriously needs to be reconsidered. It's not showing respect to raise debt through illegal means, often for thousands of dollars, against people who are struggling to get by already. Shamefully, this program seems to have targeted particularly vulnerable people.

I would like to take a few moments just to outline a case that appeared in the media. Mr Christopher Pascoe is a 53-year-old man living with epilepsy and an intellectual disability. In July 2018 he received notice of a debt of over $15,000 from Centrelink. The department alleged there was a mismatch between the income he declared to the department, dating from 2013 to 2016, compared to what he actually earned. Mr Pascoe doesn't declare his income to Centrelink, which is a common arrangement for people who have a disability that limits their ability to handle their own finances. Mr Pascoe's mother has described the situation like this: 'It's really sort of disability bullying to me.' Centrelink subsequently admitted they made a mistake, wiping $5,000 off the debt in February 2019, before offering to waive the debt after his story was aired on the ABC show 7.30.

It shouldn't have to take going to national media to get an incorrectly raised debt wiped. This scheme has caused enormous heartache, but the government refuses to take responsibility. Under persistent questioning by Labor, in and out of the parliament, the former minister, Stuart Robert, said: 'We will not apologise,' and he spoke about the integrity of the welfare system. I'd like to remind the minister that integrity isn't illegally stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Australians. Robodebt victims need and deserve an apology from Minister Robert. We need a proper apology from the Prime Minister, who will only say that he has 'deep regret'. Seriously, that was not an apology. If an apology isn't genuine, it's not worth the breath people use to say it.

More than apologies, you need to determine what went wrong and how. The Australian people have the right to know, and deserve to know, who was actually responsible. You need to determine how it happened—that ministers either knew that the law was being broken and did nothing about it or never bothered to even find out if the law had been broken in the first place. We need to discover how we got into the situation of senior public servants authorising a scheme which was illegal. If we don't know how this disaster occurred, how can we ensure that it won't happen again?

Labor is calling for a royal commission into robodebt, and we will continue to do so, because it is the most appropriate way to investigate this absolutely disastrous policy. Royal commissions have broad powers to hold public hearings, call witnesses under oath and compel evidence. I can see why the government don't want to have one. We've seen the power of royal commissions recently with the disability royal commission and the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. In both of these cases, what we already knew was shocking but what was revealed through the proceedings of the royal commissions was even worse. It begs the question: how bad is what we don't already know about the robodebt debacle? How bad is it?

It's important to remember that robodebt was the brainchild of Mr Morrison when he was the Minister for Social Services. He was the Treasurer who announced it and, finally, he was the Prime Minister who failed to stop the implementation of his own botched policy. Now the government have to pay out $1.2 billion in refunds, debt elimination and compensation. That explains why we can't find out what the government knew and when. I really think there's a fair bit of the PM protecting his own bum going on here.

Only a royal commission can determine what really happened and who is to blame. The fact that it took the biggest class action in Australian history before the government finally started to put things right is extremely disappointing. The government knew years ago that things weren't right. They had made an enormous change to the system without thinking through the practical outcomes or the legalities. While governments have previously matched ATO data with Centrelink data, this government automated it, took out the human oversight element and moved it from 20,000 cases a year to 20,000 cases a week. It was once used as a last resort but under this government it turned into an extortion racket. The government unjustly enriched itself with $720 million that was stolen from vulnerable Australians and it did so at the cost of over $600 million—(Time expired)