One change could prevent a repeat of my Robodebt hell
I still get a knot in my stomach whenever the notification appears: “You have a new message in your MyGov inbox”.
These days, the alerts are generally inane: income summaries, tax return reminders.
But for 14 months of my life, whenever those new messages appeared, I lost sleep, stressed over what fresh hell Centrelink had in store for me.
I had no idea of the debt I apparently owed to the government’s welfare agency until I received a call out of the blue, in which a pleasant enough man asked how I’d be paying the $3500 bill – which was long overdue, by the way.
At first, I thought it was a scam. But it turned out the debt collection notices had been sent by snail mail to an address I’d long since left.
(I’d later tearfully ask one of the many Centrelink staffers I spoke with why they could access years of Tax Office data to raise the decade-old debt, but not to glean my updated mailing address. Privacy reasons, they said.)
I was working in one of my first “real” jobs after university, where I received Youth Allowance while I studied. I had some money in the bank, but the idea of handing over that kind of cash made me want to throw up.
I requested a hold be placed on the debt while it was reviewed. What seemed like petulance at the time would eventually save me thousands of dollars.
Services Australia – the government department under which Centrelink falls – called it “Online Compliance Intervention”. Anecdotally, it was “income averaging”. We called it Robodebt.
Introduced by the former Coalition government in 2016, it’s a calculation method that averaged income over 26 fortnights. Centrelink used that number to reappraise the benefits owed to people whose income fluctuated – students, single parents, the unemployed – and, wouldn’t you know it, we’d all been overpaid!
Just over half a million people were pinged for debts they didn’t owe. Many were in the tens of thousands of dollars and dating back years longer than the one I received.
Recipients despaired as their credit ratings crumbled and bank balances dwindled, and a handful took their own lives, this mountain simply too tall a climb for some of the most-marginalised people in our community.
Now, as many as 100,000 Australians find themselves in a similar position, and the government risks retreading that dark path.
In the year or so after I fielded that first baffling phone call, I spoke with Centrelink representatives on the phone and in person dozens of times. I know because I still have the notebook where I shakily noted down every interaction: dates, names, topics discussed. They’re agonisingly repetitive.
A new debt notice was eventually issued for the same amount – down to the cent – as the original. I requested another review, contending no human could have come up with that figure twice, and this time I had proof.
In the dark recesses of my email inbox, I found almost every single payslip relating to the reporting period in question.
In a remarkable display of pettiness, I sent the documents – about two years’ worth – to Services Australia one-by-one and requested that this time they show their working. For months, the communications fell silent, but the general sense of uneasiness lingered.
And then, another debt notice. This one for less than 10 per cent of the original sum.
I had always diligently reported the income I earned working in retail and behind bars while I was at uni, and it turned out I’d mixed up net and gross income, which caused the small discrepancy.
So, in a tiny act of revenge, I arranged to pay it off in the smallest possible instalments – around $5 a fortnight. It took more than a year.
In 2022, three years after the Robodebt scheme was scrapped and $1.2 billion had been repaid to citizens caught up in the scandal by way of a class action lawsuit (which didn’t include me, because mine was one of the few debts to be reviewed and reconciled), a Royal Commission was established.
It publicly ventilated the rot in our welfare system and recommended 57 unnamed individuals be investigated for their role in Robodebt’s implementation.
When the final report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme was handed down, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it “a gross betrayal and a human tragedy” and accepted almost all of the 57 recommendations in full, and the rest in principle.
The vast majority have now been implemented by the government and department – with the crucial exception of a statutory limitation on social security debts.
And, so, here we are again.
Figures surfaced in questions on notice in the second half of 2024 have revealed Services Australia is working to recoup almost $5 billion in unpaid debts, the oldest among them dating back as far as the late 1970s.
The department’s own investigations have shown almost 150,000 of those 829,266 debts (relating to about 100,000 people) may have been raised through a calculation method called “income apportionment”.
If you want to split hairs, it’s a slightly different approach to the one used in the dark days of Robodebt: instead of averaging it over 26 fortnights and calling it a day, Services Australia recalculated entitlements on a fortnightly basis if an employer’s pay cycle didn’t line up with Centrelink’s reporting period and/or if an individual’s payslips didn’t specify which days they worked during a given fortnight.
It was in use from the early 1990s to late 2020, when the Department of Social Services began re-assessing historic debts according to an updated construction of the legislation.
The new debts were put on hold pending the outcome of a Federal Court appeal against an Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) decision.
On Tuesday, Justices Thomas Thawley, Lisa Hespey and Geoffrey Kennett of the court’s Victorian branch dismissed that appeal, effectively confirming the government’s position that the new calculation method is legally above board and opening the door for the resumption of debt recovery.
But we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if, as Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne put it, welfare debtors were on “even footing” with everyone else who owes the government money.
Of course, governments can – and should – pursue legitimate debts and the fraudsters who game the system.
But what we learned on the first go ‘round is that deception and genuine mistakes – like the one I made – can be viewed in the same way when the methodology is bad. And when you’re asking people to dig up documents from a decade ago, the likelihood they’ll be able to prove their case dwindles.
Moreover, welfare recipients are, by-and-large, low-earners. If history tells us anything, it’s that most of those new income-apportioned debtors are probably blameless or unable to pay, or both.
To proceed in pursuit of those debts is a risk the government can’t take again, lest they repeat a term-defining betrayal.
And so there can be no option but to waive debts raised through income apportionment and commit to implementing a statutory time limit on all welfare debts, and urgently.
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