Attorney-General: I can’t apologise for robodebt

Christian Porter admits scheme forcing thousands to wrongly pay back benefits was flawed but ‘we don’t concede negligence’.

Attorney-General Christian Porter says the scheme was flawed but he can’t apologise.

Attorney-General Christian Porter won’t apologise for the faults of the robodebt scheme that forced thousands of Australians to wrongly pay back benefits, citing continuing legal action.

Mr Porter has admitted the government’s controversial program was flawed, and said debts raised before 2015 with income average could be unlawful. However, he said there would be a statute of limitation on those cases.

Asked if the Commonwealth could be liable for cases prior to 2015, Mr Porter told the ABC on Sunday: “There will be a statute of limitation on those.”

Asked if he would apologise, Mr Porter said: “I’m not going to use that word because there’s litigation ongoing and as Attorney-General I can’t use that sort of language in the context of the litigation.

“There’s litigation ongoing and it argues negligence and we don’t concede that.”

.@cporterwa says there will be a "statute of limitation" before 2015 on cases involving average of ATO income data for the purposes of assessing welfare debt. #auspol #insiders #robodebt pic.twitter.com/FKNCeJ7mJF

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) May 31, 2020

It comes as the Morrison government announced on Friday it would refund more than 370,000 Australians $721m recouped under its welfare overpayment scheme after Government Services Minister Stuart Robert said the system was “not sufficient under law”.

With a class action over the scheme still pending, Mr Robert said all welfare payments the government had recovered that had been calculated using the Australian Taxation Office’s discredited income averaging method would be repaid, along with interest and recovery fees.

Asked why it took the coronavirus pandemic to bring businesses and unions together on industrial relations reform, Mr Porter said all of the parties had been “arguing for many years around pretty considerable spoils of 29 years of uninterrupted growth, and in many sectors the spoils are gone.”https://twitter.com/InsidersABC/status/1266889268510654464

It comes after Scott Morrison announced last week he wants to draw on the collaboration with unions and business during the COVID-19 pandemic to improve outdated industrial relations laws.

But Mr Porter warned the reform process wouldn’t completely satisfy all parties.

“The purpose is to find the best compromise position,” he said. “It may be a position that not everyone absolutely loves.”

Asked whether the enterprise agreements “better off overall” test should be scrapped, Mr Porter said it needed to be reviewed, declaring “we need again to look at that test and how it’s applied in practice”

Mr Porter refused to rule out journalists’ homes being raided by police in the future after the Australian Federal Police last week dropped charges against News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst,

“That depends on all the circumstances. What I wouldn’t accept is the contention there will never be a circumstance where a journalist can’t be the subject of a warrant.”