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

I rise tonight to speak again on robodebt. This is an issue I have been pursuing since the debacle started in 2016 when people started getting those awful notices just before Christmas. So we're going on for four years now.

We have known and heard from people who have been hurt tremendously by this process and who are feeling traumatised, demonised and victimised. The system was flawed from the start. And we know that because we now have the finding that the income-averaging process is illegal. The income-averaging process has been an issue since the start of the program. That's because they take what you've earned and make the assumption that it's over the whole of the year and that you must have been telling them lies! It's fundamentally flawed—but not just flawed; it's illegal.

What we have here is the fact that the government doesn't want the public to know exactly what is going on. Last week, the Senate inquiry that I'm chairing released, as I said a bit earlier in this place, an email trail from the ATO that talked about the garnisheeing debt—the debts that have been garnisheed. We need to know how many people who have already had their tax returns garnisheed actually had that decision made based on income averaging. They can't tell us. They don't know! We still don't know how many of the robodebts are illegal and, quite frankly, when we had the hearing on 16 December, just before Christmas, the government was essentially making up the process as it went along—or it was obvious that the government has been making up the process as it goes along, because we weren't able to learn what happens after the first stage of the review of the debts. And we don't know how many of these debts do in fact involve income averaging. As I asked at the hearing on the day, there are also debts which are partly based on income averaging. So we can't just look at the debt and say, 'Oh, it was income averaged,' it's much more complex than that.

There are so many fundamental questions that we still need to get to the bottom of, and I know a number of us are going to keep pursuing this. For example, when did the government know it was illegal? Who knew, and for how long? When did they receive the illegal advice? And when will we be able to see it? 'We' is the Senate, but also the public. Why didn't they check the legality before unleashing this program onto Australians?

Time and time again this government refuses to be accountable, and not just on robodebt. We've been talking for days in here about 'sprorts'—note that it's now been given the name 'sprorts'. That's sports rorts mach 1 and mach 2. This place is riven with decisions that have been made in secret and which the government is not being accountable for here. Robodebt is an absolutely classic example. People are still contacting our offices and asking us about what is going on because they can't get the answers from Centrelink. They're very worried that they have debts. They've been told all along that they have debts which they say they don't owe, and now this finding of the illegal parts of this program quite clearly show that they didn't owe them. They don't know if they're going to get compensated. They don't know if they're going to get their money back if not compensated. I'd argue that they need to be compensated for all the deep harassment and trauma they've suffered. And, believe me, there is a lot of trauma out there. Our offices—senator's and members of the House's offices—are getting phone calls from people who articulate the issues and the impact those are having on their mental health. And, unfortunately, there are people who have taken their lives as a result of this deeply flawed and damaging program. It's time it ended. (Time expired)