Campbell: Dutton attack on Shorten comes with large dose of irony

Peter Dutton may have a potential comedy career after trying to chide Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese for seeking to make political gain from the Robodebt scandal, writes James Campbell.

Public life in Australia being the po-faced business it is, we should celebrate and cherish those rare occasions that bring a smile to our faces or, as was the case with Peter Dutton’s remarks this weekend, actually cause us to laugh out loud.

Until this weekend I had not considered that the Leader of Opposition might have a career in comedy if he ever gets sick of this politics thing.

But, on Saturday, he delivered lines which suggest he might be one of the great deadpan ironists of our age.

Speaking of the Robodebt royal commission report handed down on Friday, Dutton, with a straight face, actually tried to chide Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese for seeking to make political gain from the scandal.

The reason this cracked me up is because it is exactly eight years’ ago today that Shorten found himself in the hot seat at the Trade Union Royal Commission to answer for his time as an official of the Australian Workers Union. Afterwards, he joked to reporters that appearing before one of Tony Abbott’s royal commissions had become something of a “rite of passage” for Labor leaders.

Then opposition leader Bill Shorten gives evidence at the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption in 2015. Picture: AAP Image/David Moir

The TURC devoted an extraordinary amount of time and money to investigating the conveyancing on Julia Gillard’s house back in the 1990s. And, earlier in Tony-time, Kevin Rudd had been hauled before a star chamber in Queensland to answer questions over the four deaths associated with the failed pink batts scheme.

As for the TURC, it was an out-and-out hit job on the then leader of the opposition. That became obvious the moment it was clear that, while the commission could find time to go into the minutiae of whether workers were better or worse off under AWU enterprise agreements negotiated by Shorten, there was apparently no time to look into allegations of bikie-related criminality across the construction division of the CFMEU.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton tried to chide Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese for seeking to make political gain from the Robodebt scandal. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

The irony will not have been lost on Shorten on Friday as he stood before the media talking about the Robodebt report, which had just recommended a number of officials – and possibly ministers – be referred to the National Anti-Corruption Commission and the Australian Federal Police.

Receiving the pink batt report back in September 2014, Abbott said it showed a grave and detailed “ litany of failings arising from a dysfunctional culture” and vowed to “focus on ensuring that such a catastrophic policy failure never happens again”.

Whether you think this response was a Duttonian example of “glee” is a matter of judgment.

What is undoubtedly true is that even as Abbott was making this promise, bureaucrats in the Department of Human Services were three months into cooking up the disaster that would become Robodebt.

Catherine Holmes’ report is an absolute shocker. I’m sure someone will write in to correct me, but if there’s been a worse public policy failure federally I’d love to hear of it.

Catherine Holmes during the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. Picture: Liam Kidston

It’s hard to single out which revelation in Holmes’ report is the most shocking – and I use that word deliberately. My candidates include the finding that in 2014, months before the scheme began, officials already knew that 95 per cent of the debts calculated using Robodebt were likely to be wrong.

Then there’s the fact they pressed on with the scheme even though there was clear legal advice that without a legislative change it would be unlawful.

Or that by early 2017 – by which point its “unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty” had become apparent – instead of abandoning it “the path taken was to double down, to go on the attack in the media against those who complained and to maintain the falsehood” that no changes had been made to it because of its shortcomings.

If that wasn’t bad enough, in 2018, when officials finally got around to acting on the fact they kept losing Robodebt cases in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, they sought an outside opinion on its lawfulness from Clayton Utz. When the draft advice came back that no, it probably wasn’t legal, it was “never put into a final form or acted on”.

Bill Shorten might well be loving himself sick at the way this has turned out for his opponents. And given he was the man who drove the case against Robodebt, why shouldn’t he?

Especially as those opponents ran a bullshit royal commission designed to destroy him.

Originally published as Campbell: Dutton attack on Shorten comes with large dose of irony