Robodebt: ‘Taking out the trash’ a cynical move

Government Services Minister Stuart Robert. Picture: AAP

The late Friday afternoon release of the Robodebt news by the government was the nadir of political spin. A cold and ruthless calculation.

It is a well worn tactic in political circles to “take out the trash” late on a Friday afternoon. In the hope that the evening news won’t pivot and carry the story, but even if it does Friday evening news is the lowest rating night of the week.

The further hope is that Saturday newspapers won’t carry the story prominently, because unlike daily papers which often pivot late, Saturday newspaper production is a more longitudinal affair, with splashes and spreads sometimes laid out well in advance.

By Sunday the political strategists calculate that the news they dropped late on the Friday arvo is “old news”, and hence won’t hit the front pages of those newspapers either.

All very clever.

The previous Friday the government dropped the news about the $60b JobKeeper bungle, giving us two weeks in a row now of low brow marketing strategy to try and diminish the coverage bad news for the government gets.

We will soon see if this long weekend Friday they do the same, or determine that doing so is too clever by half and take a week off the practice.

But let’s be very clear about the Robodebt story – it is an utter disgrace. The Commonwealth was found by the Federal Court to have illegally demanded payment of nearly three quarters of a billion dollars from nearly half a million of Australia’s most vulnerable people. It was told prior to this pandemic that it should pay the money back, but waited until now to announce its intention to do so.

It has therefore left vulnerable people feeling even more vulnerable during one of the most stressful times in people’s lives.

There are now suggestions that thousands of people who were hit with those illegal payment notices have since committed suicide, presumably with at least some causal links to the stress the whole sorry saga put many of them under.

To say there needs to be a much deeper dive into this sorry saga is an understatement. And this government has had the temerity to point the finger at the Rudd government over the pink batts saga it presided over.

We haven’t even had an apology from the government, much less anyone held accountable.

On Friday afternoon the minister responsible, Stuart Robert, was told he could make the announcement only after the Prime Minister had finished his media conference on the name change of COAG to National Cabinet. Not before, because the PM’s strategists didn’t want his big announcement derailed by questions about hundreds of thousands of lives damaged by an illegal act by his government.

If this sorry episode doesn’t make you cynical about the base spin of politics, nothing will.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University