Robodebt scandal a lesson in bad public administration

Apart from the odd slice of emotionalism, the royal commission report into the Robodebt scheme by Catherine Holmes SC, Queensland’s former chief justice, has detailed a litany of bad decisions by the previous Coalition government, and poor implementation, for which past and present politicians and public servants deserve to be held accountable. Incompetence, waste and damage to citizens from government programs are not new. But even by the standards of school halls and insulation batts, Robodebt was an abject failure. One of the worst aspects of the saga is that ministers were reportedly warned of problems with the scheme but failed to act. The Weekend Australian understands as many as 20 of those involved have been referred to agencies such as the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Public Service Commissioner, National Anti-Corruption Commission and the president of the Law Society, which should remind officials about the need for integrity and efficiency in public administration.

If not, the commissioner outlined, the consequences can even be fatal, such as an account of a young man’s suicide. He was one of “a number of people”, the report found, who were pursued for debts who died by suicide. “The disastrous effects of Robodebt became apparent soon after it moved, in September 2016, from the last part of the limited release, involving around 1000 recipients, to sending out 20,000 notifications per week,’’ Ms Holmes wrote. “In December 2016 and January 2017 the media, traditional and social, were saturated with articles about people who had had demonstrably wrong debts raised against them, and in many instances heard of it first when contacted by debt collectors. The human impacts of Robodebt were being reported: families struggling to make ends meet receiving a debt notice at Christmas, young people being driven to despair by demands for payment.’’

The Australian Council of Social Service, the commissioner said, wrote to the then minister for human services in December 2016, pointing out the inaccuracies that were being produced by averaging instead of applying actual fortnightly income figures. ACOSS also pointed out the unfairness of charging a penalty where it was not established that a recipient had even been contacted, the difficulty for people in recovering information from employment years past, the technical difficulties with the online system, lack of assistance from Centrelink officers, and the commencing of debt collection often without warning to the recipient. The beginning of 2017, the report said, was when Robodebt’s unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty became apparent. It should have been abandoned or revised drastically, “and an enormous amount of hardship and misery (as well as the expense the government was so anxious to minimise) would have been averted’’.

In the end, the scheme was a financial failure. “The commonwealth incurred estimated total costs of $971.391m in implementing, administering, suspending and winding back the scheme,’’ the report said. “The net cost of the scheme is approximately $565.195m, which represents a net impact of its estimated totals of $971.391m, offset by the estimated savings of $406.196m.” Scott Morrison on Friday expressed “regret for the unintended consequences” of the scheme but rejected “completely each of the findings which are critical of my involvement in authorising the scheme and are adverse to me’’.

The scandal will not be resolved until the agencies to which individuals have been referred work through due processes. Ms Holmes was right to refer the matters. She is on less solid ground, however, calling for politicians to “lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments’’. We hope she is correct when she says the evidence before the commission was that fraud in the welfare system was minuscule. But, she claimed, anti-welfare rhetoric is “easy populism’’, useful for campaign purposes. “It is not recent, nor is it confined to one side of politics.’’ The Weekend Australian believes welfare is a stopgap measure for those in real need, to be overseen carefully to minimise the burden on taxpayers. Encouraging welfare recipients to work is vital. But that is no justification for the bureaucratic bullying and botch-ups set out by the report. Income averaging, Ms Holmes found, was “a patently unreliable methodology’’, without other evidence, to determine entitlement to benefit. It was also remarkable “how little interest there seems to have been in ensuring the scheme’s legality, how rushed its implementation was … Truly dismaying was the revelation of dishonesty and collusion to prevent the scheme’s lack of legal foundation coming to light”. Equally disheartening was the ineffectiveness of checks and balances – such as the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office, the Office of Legal Services Co-ordination, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal – in hindering the scheme’s continuance. It is now up to Anthony Albanese, Government Services Minister Bill Shorten and cabinet to work through the report’s 57 recommendations and respond sensibly and methodically.