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Robo-debt royal commission

This Month

Anthony Albanese and Bill Shorten at the ALP confference

With a half-smile, Bill Shorten bows out of politics on his terms

The former federal Labor leader has no regrets about calling it quits to become a university vice chancellor.

  • Jennifer Hewett

June

Taxation Commissioner Rob Heferen is four months into the job.

‘Deeply offensive’: ATO boss slams robo-debt comparison

New Tax Commissioner Rob Heferen was forceful in his first appearance before Parliament, rejecting criticism of a Tax Office program to chase small debts.

  • Tom McIlroy
Gail Furness at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Anti-corruption commission robo-debt call to be investigated

Gail Furness, SC, the independent inspector tasked with holding the NACC accountable, on Thursday said the decision came after nearly 900 individual complaints.

  • Ronald Mizen

Anti-corruption commission rules out robo-debt inquiry

Former Coalition government ministers and senior public servants have avoided another investigation into the illegal welfare payment recovery scheme.

  • Tom McIlroy
Suncorp’s Adam Bennett said a shortage of skills risked reducing AI-based productivity gains.

Key workers left as invisible bystanders to the AI revolution

A hype-driven, tech-led approach to AI adoption will harm workers, disappoint investors and damage the economy, we must listen and learn from workers at the coalface.

  • Nicholas Davis
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November 2023

Tax Office scraps robo-debt style push on repayments

Officials conceded they caused unnecessary distress in pursuing historical debts from tens of thousands of taxpayers.

  • Tom McIlroy
The federal government has accepted all 53 recommendations from commissioner Catherine Holmes’ robo-debt report.

New laws to make federal algorithms and AI explainable

New federal transparency laws to review machine decision-making and to explain how these decisions are made, will be introduced.

  • Tom Burton
Robo-debt exposed core failings in the federal public services says Finance and Public Sector Minister Katy Gallagher says.

New rules to sack top mandarins

Departmental heads will have their performance tracked and face dismissal if not satisfactory, under a revamp following the robo-debt royal commission.

  • Tom Burton

August 2023

Australians are owed a royal commission into the pandemic

A proper commission of inquiry should not be conceived with payback in mind but with a view to how things could be done better the next time.

  • Phillip Coorey
Newly installed Australian Public Service Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer is promoting a new legal “stewardship” requirement.

Robo-debt crackdown is just the start, public service chief warns

The first response to the toxic and bullying leadership behaviours exposed in the robo-debt scheme will legally require all officials to be ‘stewards’ for good government.

  • Tom Burton

July 2023

Former prime minister Scott Morrison says the government is spending its energy on “a political lynching”.

Robo-debt royal commission was a ‘political lynching’: Morrison

Scott Morrison noted Labor went to two elections counting the savings from robo-debt in its own budget costings.

  • Phillip Coorey

Robo-debt ‘bullies, sycophants’ not the public service Shorten knows

A cabal of bullies and sycophants was responsible for suppressing frank and fearless advice about robo-debt, Bill Shorten says.

  • Ronald Mizen
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten.

Labor to scrap Coalition’s $200m ‘welfare calculator’

Stopping development of the $200 million entitlement engine project comes in the wake of the bruising robo-debt royal commission report.

  • Tom McIlroy and Andrew Tillett
Kathryn Campbell, the secretary who developed and rolled out the robo-debt scheme, has resigned from her highly-paid government job.

Robo-debt’s Kathryn Campbell quits $900k a year job

The former head of the Human Services Department resigned from her job as an adviser on AUKUS last week, the Defence Department has confirmed.

  • Andrew Tillett and Tom Burton
Scott Morrison appears at the royal commission into the robo-debt scheme last year.

Where has our empathy gone?

Researchers agree there’s a problem, but there is also a solution to the diminishing levels of emotional literacy.

  • Peter Quarry
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Former Liberal minister Michael Keenan has assumed his first non-executive role.

Robo-debt minister Michael Keenan kicks off board career

The former human services minister has been appointed to the board of $12 million Singapore-based biotech Osteopore.

  • Updated
  • Myriam Robin
Royal commissioner Catherine Holmes took a dim view of some uses of “behavioural insights” in her final report.

How Sydney Uni behavioural boffins tried to improve robo-debt letters

Royal Commission exhibits reveal the planning phases of a “collaboration” with the University of Sydney, aimed at boosting compliance.

  • Updated
  • Myriam Robin
What’s lost in the debate is that the Voice is an attempt to rectify systems of government which utterly fail many Indigenous communities.

Downward envy and the politics of robo-debt and the Voice

Welfare bashing and scare stories about the Indigenous Voice have their roots in the same populist appeal, and the same basic failures of practical government.

  • Laura Tingle
It’s debatable whether the solution proposed by the royal commissioner, Catherine Holmes is the right one.

Not all royal commissions are equal

The media are a lot more interested in scandals like robo-debt under a Coalition government than in Lawyer X under a Labor government in Victoria.

  • John Roskam
Robodebt agencies

How a spreadsheet error spawned the $4.7b robo-debt monster

An analysis created by junior officials looked at just 418 welfare cases and contained a fundamental error. Their bosses seized on it anyway.

  • Tom Burton

Original URL: https://www.afr.com/topic/robo-debt-royal-commission-6fpk