The Robodebt saga is without doubt the most disgraceful failure by the Coalition government since it came to power in 2013. And the failure lands squarely in the lap of the current prime minister.
Scott Morrison was the social services minister when the idea of using automated collections for welfare recipients was initially conceived. He was Treasurer when doing so became a budget imperative to help the bottom line. And Morrison was Prime Minister when the collections were crucial to the surplus he was campaigning on ahead of the 2019 election. Getting the budget “back in black”.
That is why heads won’t roll for the shameful treatment of some of Australia’s most vulnerable citizens. There is no point blaming Stuart Robert, he’s the minister now left to clean up the mess. There’s also no point blaming Christian Porter, the social services minister when Robodebt was rolled out.
He inherited the idea from Morrison and Alan Tudge as the junior minister had primary responsibility for the implementation which was clearly so flawed.
You can’t really blame Tudge either frankly, because he only was a junior minister, at first instance acting on the wishes of his senior cabinet minister, Morrison — initially as social services minister then as treasurer.
Why is Robodebt such a disgrace? Take your pick, there are plethora of reasons. Financially, the settlement has cost taxpayers $1.2bn — the biggest settlement of its kind in Australian history. The waste of taxpayers dollars certainly makes Morrison’s mock outrage at former Australia Post CEO Christine Hollgate signing off on $19,000 worth of watches as bonuses for executives look over the top. Don’t forget he insisted she step down.
Then there are the deaths and mental anguish the Robodebt collections may have caused. To be sure, proving causality is always difficult, but literally hundreds of welfare recipients who incurred Robodebt have taken their own lives.
Many surviving family members have claimed they did so because of the stress of the automated payments they incurred. It makes the outrage from Liberals over the Pink Batts program look over the top when they show no outrage whatsoever over the deaths of these vulnerable Australians.
The Coalition instituted a royal commission into pink batts. Will they do the same for Robodebt? Of course they won’t.
The attempts at a cover-up by the government have also been shameful.
Claims that there was nothing new in the automated payments used via Robodebt. That is completely false. Yes, automated payments are nothing new. Yes, Labor in government also used them. But not on the scale of Robodebt, which is why when it was first conceived the likes of Morrison, Tudge and Porter spruiked it so heavily.
Past usage of automated payments did not exclude human review processes the way Robodebt did. They didn’t target the vulnerable the way Robodebt did. The use of income averaging was done in entirely different policy terms prior to Robodebt, not applied to people who live hand to mouth when receiving payments, thereby unable to pay back money when the system put them over their payment caps.
When it became obvious there were flaws with Robodebt the government Morrison by that time led stuck to its guns, fighting against the rulings, continuing to seek payments from the vulnerable. All because they were campaigning for a political goal: a surplus. The harm done in that process was immense.
Morrison was the chief architect and proponent of this capricious system, and he was the chief beneficiary of it too as it propped up budgets and his “back in black” campaign to win the last election.
Yet he won’t take account for the failures now that they are apparent for all to see. The most he’s offered is a half-baked apology, with workshopped lines thereafter to try and minimise the political fallout.
Robodebt is a scandal that dwarfs all others.
Sports rorts, water buybacks along the Murray Darling River and Angus Taylor’s use of a forged Sydney City Council document pale into insignificance alongside Robodebt and the pain and suffering it has caused.
Yet not a single soul will be held to account, even though the failures go to the very top of this government.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.
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