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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is item 48, the government's response to the Community Affairs References Committee report on the 'design, scope, cost-benefit analysis, contracts awarded and implementation associated with the Better Management'—and that's a joke—'of the Social Welfare System initiative'. The government's response is dated September 2017.

What an insult this response is to the thousands of people affected by this debacle commonly known as robo-debt and particularly to the hundreds of submissions that the committee received and the dozens of people that we heard give the Senate inquiry their personal accounts when we held the hearings around Australia. They were very clear that this system had a profound impact on Australians on income support. The government's response is lacklustre, perfunctory, quite obviously didn't pay any attention to the evidence that we received and claims that there is a lack of evidence to justify the committee's recommendations. I will come to that evidence shortly. It says:

There is no evidence to support the recommendation to put on hold the online system.

I'll come back to that in a minute.

It says:

The Government agrees with the conclusions and recommendations in the Dissenting Report.

Oh, my goodness! I'm shocked that the government supports the dissenting report written by its own senators! Of course it would support that dissenting report. But it also says:

On this basis, the Government rejects the central conclusions and recommendations of the Chair's Report, especially the conclusion that the online system lacked procedural fairness.

That is simply ridiculous if you read the committee's extensive report and particularly our conclusions around procedural fairness, where we outlined the complete lack of procedural fairness from go to whoa in the way the government implemented this process.

The government also seeks in its response to imply that the recommendations were superfluous because of the Ombudsman's report, but, if you look at the Ombudsman's report—which of course we covered in our inquiry—it is quite obvious that the Ombudsman's report considered a lot of things other than what our inquiry investigated. The recommendations from the Ombudsman were limited to purported debt raised by the OCI and specifically did not comment on the policy rationale behind the OCI system, the government's broader debt raising, the recovery program or the use of external debt-collection agencies, all of which we considered.

Look at what organisations commented on when they were commenting to the committee inquiry. They were supportive of the Ombudsman's reports. In fact, so was our inquiry report. But they clearly pointed out that the scope of their inquiry was limited to a few implementation matters and did not go far enough to address the fundamental flaws of the OCI system. But of course the government don't want to look at the fundamental flaws in the OCI system, because there are so many. They do not want to stop their revenue raising. They would rather try raising money from the most vulnerable members of our community than from the wealthier members of our community. They'd rather give tax breaks to the rich than actually be fair and have a fair social security system.

There are many points, and I'm sure I'm going to run out of time—in fact, I'm just about to. If you look at the perfunctory way that the government deal with the recommendations from the committee, it's a complete slap in the face to those people that have had significant trauma and, in fact, have had significant mental health issues because of the way the government handled this. Some people have been mentally unwell because of the way the government has tried to raise debts from the most vulnerable. (Time expired)

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Siewert, are you seeking leave to continue your remarks?

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

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.