Life on the West Island - Robodisgrace

The West Island Royal Commission into the Robodebt scandal held its final public hearings last week, having heard evidence from an impressive range of senior politicians and bureaucrats about how an illegal scheme could have been allowed to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens while they all collectively looked the other way. Perhaps even worse, the evidence showed that the scheme was deliberately designed to punish the “undeserving poor,” because as one senior adviser to a minister put it “it was playing well in the marginal seats.”

Confronted by this, at the close of the public hearings Commissioner Catherine Holmes had only two words: “I’m appalled”. She rebuked the program as “amateurish, rushed and disastrous.”

The Morrison government had so undermined the independence of the public service and hobbled freedom of information that without the Commission, the standard rules on transparency would have applied. As Norfolk Island’s indefatigable campaigner for transparency Brett Sanderson has found – at great expense - the public would never have known any of it.

Darren O’Donovan of Latrobe University examined all of the transcripts of evidence and concluded that the Royal Commission had exposed Robodebt as an ethically indefensible policy targeting vulnerable people.

He concluded that Robodebt was about so much more than just the absence of law. After years of semantics and political rhetoric, the hearings confirmed Robodebt as baseless. The core concept at its heart was the tactical imposition of administrative burden on vulnerable people. Instead of the previous system, where evidence would be gathered direct from employers, the onus of proof was reversed. The hearings revealed the department’s own budget assumed most people would give up. Hundreds of thousands would effectively cop an averaged and inaccurate debt.

Robodebt should never again be framed as a technological glitch or a legal oversight. It was the active and direct exploitation of people’s vulnerability. The department’s own research into the letters sent confirmed they generated terror and confusion. We learned it even held modelling that debts raised under the programme were inflated.

Writing in The New Daily, economist Michael Pascoe reported on evidence before the Commission from Serena Wilson, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Social Security: She was a rare creature at the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme in November – she put her hand up, admitted she failed in her duty and said she was ashamed she did not do more to try to stop the illegal monster. She made an act of contrition we’ve not heard from other key perpetrators. A pleasant change. Hell will freeze over before a politician fesses up.

And now Ms Wilson has made a supplementary statement that is as damning of the Coalition and its facilitators as anything the Commission has heard. Importantly, it is an insight into the mentality of successive Coalition ministers and their staffers wanting to target the “undeserving” poor – ministers and their staff not interested in the plight of human beings who were their ministerial responsibility.

‘The Coalition government took a different attitude to the social security system or, as they preferred to call it, the ‘welfare’ system, from the previous government,’ Ms Wilson says in her statement. ‘They had a strong view of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. From the 2014 budget through to the 2018 budget, the vast majority of my work involved identifying savings options to cut social security expenditure. I had built a career trying to improve lifetime wellbeing and address the needs of disadvantaged people, but (in my opinion) there was little empathy for, or understanding of, those needs within the Coalition government and ministerial staff.’

In the final session of evidence before the Royal Commission, a victim of the illegal scheme (Mathew Thompson) summed up what he felt drove Robodebt: It seems to me that the powerful people are always able to take advantage of vulnerable people, as the gap between rich and poorer increases still. And no matter how many Royal Commissions we have, that always seems to be the case. And I hope this Royal Commission can change that.

Commissioner Holmes could only give a simple human response. Somehow, all at once, it spoke to her commitment, the limits on her role, the history of Royal Commissions and the reality of the system as it currently is: I’m afraid I can’t promise you that. But we’ll do what we can.

The simple fact is that the Morrison government deliberately designed Robodebt to target vulnerable people in an attempt to extract money they did not owe and could not afford. It had so intimidated senior public servants (like the courtiers in The King’s New Clothes) that they were afraid to tell the responsible ministers the truth – that Robodebt was illegal and the government was naked and exposed to justified claims from around 800,000 West Islanders. Thus, Robodebt became Robodisaster to many citizens, including some who took their own lives in desperation.

The final report of the Royal Commission is certain to be damning of many former West Island ministers and senior bureaucrats – but will any pay a price? And will the integrity of the public service be restored? After all, public servants are supposed to give “free, frank and fearless” advice to executive government, not run cowering into the corners under threat of retribution from callous ministers seeking to exploit the nation’s poor for political advantage. As a nation, we must fix this broken system – we cannot afford a future Robodisgrace.