Robodebt is the emblem of all that went wrong with the Coalition governments of 2013–22. If the kindest thing that could be said about the scheme is that it aimed to ensure welfare payments were well managed… well, a lengthy royal commission found it was ill-conceived and poorly executed. And when democracy’s guardrails — the bureaucracy, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the ombudsman — raised questions about its legal foundations, they were ignored or finagled.
A year after the royal commission’s report, Rick Morton has traced the whole wretched saga from start to finish in Mean Streak. This is a thoroughly researched, passionately written and sometimes sprawling book that would have benefited enormously from an index. It shows that robodebt was born of a budget crisis and a long-held conviction among Coalition politicians that many welfare recipients are bludgers and scroungers. Remember Scott Morrison, upon becoming social services minister in 2014, promising to be a “strong welfare cop on the beat”?
Robodebt put the onus on welfare recipients to show they hadn’t been receiving more than they were entitled to. This was bad enough for people living on or under the poverty line. Add crippling stress and shame and the result, in at least two cases, was suicide.
Income averaging — the means by which the bureaucracy determined whether a person on welfare had received more than they were entitled to — was never going to capture many welfare recipients’ irregular work patterns. The scheme was also illegal, though exactly who knew this and yet went ahead anyway, and who spoke up against it, is something that preoccupied both the royal commissioner, Catherine Holmes, KC, and Morton as he reported the hearings for the Saturday Paper.
Morton was driven to document the scandal at least partly because he missed robodebt’s significance when it was hatched, despite being social affairs reporter for the Australian at the time. There was another reason too: in Mean Streak he recalls early memories of his single mother becoming exhausted and afraid as she “begged and bartered” for her entitlements on the phone with Centrelink. What struck him even as a child was that “the support system was itself abusive.”
It took him some time to realise just how much more abusive the welfare system had become with robodebt, partly because Morton steered clear of the issue after he “mucked up” a story about the scheme and partly because — as he recently told me — he was recoiling from the editorial culture at News Corp, where ‘“welfare crackdown’ and ‘dole bludgers’ are always stories that will get a run.”
Murdoch’s media outlets occupy an ignominious place in the robodebt scandal. In late 2016 the Coalition’s relatively new human services minister, Alan Tudge (a “media tart,” in Morton’s words), was champing at the bit for an “announceable” about the welfare compliance measures he had inherited from Morrison. He and his media adviser worked on a news release headlined “New Technology Helps Raise $4.5 million in Welfare Debts a Day” that was then “dropped” to the Australian’s Sarah Martin. The newspaper duly ran a news report on 5 December headlined “Welfare Debt Squad Hunts for $4 Billion in Over-Payments.”
That night Tudge went on Channel Nine’s A Current Affair, and delivered the kind of message favoured by the tabloid news program: “We will find you, we will track you down, and you will have to repay those debts, and you may end up in prison.” The comment provoked outrage from people like independent MP Andrew Wilkie and the Australian Council of Social Service’s Cassandra Goldie and created fear among welfare recipients.
Unknown to the minister, though, others had begun to notice what was brewing behind the headlines. A few months earlier, in August 2016, a whistleblower inside the public service messaged Asher Wolf — a “seemingly omnipresent digital rights activist,” according to Morton — and pointed her to a government gazette notice about a “new data-matching” activity between Commonwealth government agencies.
Although the notice didn’t relate to robodebt as such, Wolf told Morton that “data-matching always means surveillance and surveillance was something that I was interested in because the way that I had built up followers online was my fixation had been privacy and security.” Wolf began noticing the sheer volume of debt letters being sent out, and the anxious conversations on Reddit among those who had received them. She could sense that “something’s really, really up.”
The story was broken in the mainstream media just before Christmas 2016 by Christopher Knaus of the Guardian Australia, with Ben Eltham following it up in New Matilda. Peter Martin, then economics editor for the Nine newspapers, was perhaps the first commentator to make it clear the robodebt program was founded on illegality.
Tudge reacted strongly to these stories. In late January 2017 he “dropped” to Simon Benson of the Australian a fifteen-page dossier about fifty-two Centrelink debt victims who had by now been mentioned by the Guardian Australia, the ABC and other outlets. He personally edited the dossier, saying of an earlier version that it was “not robust enough.” On 26 January — yes, Australia Day — Benson’s story ran on the front page of the Australian under the headline “Debt Scare Backfires on Labor.”
(One of Morton’s interviewees, lawyer Darren O’Donovan from La Trobe University, told him there is a pattern of “dole bludger” stories appearing in the media at just the time when people are resenting the return to work after their long summer holidays.)
Tudge told Benson that “many of the personal cases that Labor has fed to the media are examples where they received an overpayment because they had not declared all their income to Centrelink.” He claimed that 35 per cent of all the cases reported in the media “had nothing to do with the online compliance system” — a misleading assertion, writes Morton, because the figure didn’t include the year-long manual trial of robodebt before the automated system began in 2016. Both systems relied on the “same mathematical forgery.”
While one part of the news media marched in lockstep with the Coalition government on this issue, other parts continued to dig into what was actually happening. At this stage that was far from clear.
In 2018 Luke Henrique-Gomes arrived at Guardian Australia and began reporting on Victoria Legal Aid’s federal court challenge to robodebt’s legality. He also began telling the stories of people affected by the scheme. Despite these revelations and commentary, though, it took a long time for the issue to gain traction, says Morton. Eventually, in May 2020, amid the global pandemic, Scott Morrison, by now the prime minister, announced the dismantling of the scheme. By that point, 470,000 incorrect debt notices had been issued.
A year later, the scheme was further condemned in a Federal Court ruling by Justice Bernard Murphy. He approved a $1.8 billion settlement against the government, including repayment of debts paid, the wiping out of outstanding debts, and legal costs. Another year later, the newly elected Labor government announced the royal commission that would win widespread praise for its thorough, rigorous and compassionate conduct.
Morton is critical of Labor’s claim that it accepted all of Commissioner Holmes’s recommendations, given that attorney-general Mark Dreyfus actually didn’t accept the recommendation to repeal section 34 of the Freedom of Information Act, the section that exempts cabinet documents from disclosure. The royal commission had been alarmed by how the government departments responsible for robodebt had routinely appended documents to cabinet submissions as a way of avoiding scrutiny under FOI.
In truth, both major parties have been guilty of this practice since the FOI Act was passed in 1982. In opposition, politicians love to denounce government abuse of the cabinet confidentiality exemption; in government, their tune changes. Which means Mark Dreyfus was probably never going to accept Commissioner Holmes’s recommendation, though that by no means negates the need for change.
Like many, Morton is also unhappy about the National Anti-Corruption Commission’s failure so far to charge anyone over robodebt:
I am fundamentally changed as a result of doing this book. I no longer have any hope that anything key will change as a result of the robodebt scandal. I feel like I’ve seen something that I can’t unsee. I also feel like I was naive and missed things that I should not have missed. Everything now comes from a political point of view and nothing is right or wrong on its own merits.
It is hard to argue with this bleak assessment, unless and until the corruption commission changes its mind about prosecutions. •
Mean Streak
By Rick Morton | HarperCollins | $35.99 | 512 pages
