Robodebt architects fail to impress
Robodebt architects fail to impress
The Robodebt Royal Commission highlights many concerning practices of senior bureaucrats among a culture that developed under the previous Coalition Government.
Of the nine-hundred-thousand automated debt notices spammed out to a chunk of Australia’s population by a porous and malignant piece of poorly optimised government software called Robodebt, four-hundred-thousand of them were wrongly targeted, and thousands of those recipients are no longer alive. In a period that has seen the cost of living painfully thrust into the household equations of millions of families, the damage left behind by Robodebt can still be felt by so many, and for some the hardship was too much.
Senior public servants from the Department of Social Services and the Department of Human Services have been in the dock at the ongoing Robodebt Royal Commission, answering enquiries about one of the most questionable, inhuman and damaging policies in modern times. The commission has showcased the clear negligence and disdain demonstrated by senior figures for those caught up in the broken scheme, and a callousness from those who oversaw it. The hearings further reveal a bureaucratic class that enacted government objectives without adequate scrutiny or humanity, and in the case of DSS, without divulging pertinent reports it possessed detailing its unlawfulness.
The commission heard revelations that the DSS ignored draft recommendations from law firm Clayton Utz declaring Robodebt unlawful and omitted them from submissions to the Ombudsman. The former Director of Payment Integrity and Debt Strategy at the DSS, Richard Hurman, struggled to avoid the devastatingly large elephant in the room, admitting that he was responsible for not adopting a course that was full and frank with the Ombudsman. He joined former DSS Manager Russell de Burgh in struggling to concede the scheme was unfair and contrary to the law. These omissions helped to sweep the faults of Robodebt under the rug and informed its rationale, enabling it to continue despite its fatal flaws, and prefilling the checklists of anyone tasked to scrutinise it.
The inaccuracies of the scheme were known by the Department of Human Services for some time, but the top legal counsel at the department decided against pursuing them, lest they cease the orders of magnitude more cases they were able to process under the defective automated process. Before the commission, recognising that some findings were unlawful but highlighting the legality in being allowed to forge ahead anyway, former chief counsel at the Department of Human Services Annette Musolino said “it was understood it was ultimately lawful to make a decision”. Her decision factored in an augmented DSS position that supported her own, knowing it was also incorrect.
Throughout this fiasco that has inflicted profoundly real human consequences, the former DSS Director Kathryn Campbell has been the public face of Robodebt. Early on in the saga while sitting at the helm, Campbell went on the record to refute the correlation between Robodebt recipients and increased mortality rates. Before a recent commission visit, in the shadow on the lives stained by this devastating program, she defaulted that the DSS only used income averaging as a “last resort”. This method was last resort for the tens of thousands of Australians who were affected by tens of thousands of dollars of inaccurate debt imposed on them by a broken robot.
One of the most socially destructive policy decisions of the modern era is being dissected before a Royal Commission in all its horrors, and the revelations continue to reflect the failure of DSS leadership to protect the welfare of Australia’s most vulnerable. But somehow, all this still hasn’t stopped Kathryn Campbell from being awarded a shiny $900k role as a roaming ‘AUKUS adviser’ with no direct reports. She joins the winking deputy getting the top job at the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, the Murdoch trust fund lawyer in charge at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and the tranches of former partisan hacks that loiter within the top jobs of our precious public institutions.
Instead of questioning the impositions of politicians on the public entities they lead to act as a stiff bulwark to protect the people’s interests, executive leadership teams at valued public institutions like the DSS now work alongside governments to pack down social infrastructure on top of the public they are supposed to serve. The ongoing commission if further proof of this practice in actions.
Australians are sick of senior public servants on anywhere up to $1 million defending their partisan incompetence at hearings and appalled by the kind of people that seem to consistently land these plum positions: former conflict of interest riddled candidates hand-picked for plum jobs from the insular political class. Australians notice the same people directly responsible for gross negligence being rewarded with second chances in important public roles. Most of us see the abject failures of the DSS, we can’t believe the defiance of those like Campbell, the excuses and the omissions by those under her, and everyone ultimately drops their heads at the crumbling public institutions that have been turned against Australians.
The defiance on display from a bunch of self-inflated senior public servants does not get lost on Australians, it whittles down public confidence, and the true cost is the swathes of people losing trust in the systems that are meant to make the country viable for those who live in it. The previous era of counterintuitive Coalition policy also coincided with the rise of jobs for mates, and many that rose to the top of public institutions like the DSS did so under a culture that rewarded subservience over prudence. The Robodebt Royal Commission shows the product of these cultures and puts the people who thrived in them under the full glare of the public gaze, but it also demonstrates the challenges ahead in combatting this poisoned status-quo fostered and encouraged by the previous government.
Allan Tudge and Christian Porter are due to appear in front of the royal commission in the coming days, and although they represent the damage that the Coalition did to social services, a social services hatchet job was to be somewhat expected from the previous government. The DSS, the DHS and the high-level bureaucrats who oversaw this maligned program truly failed vulnerable Australians by choosing to facilitate, perpetuate and preserve the legacy of a deeply flawed, inhumane and ultimately illegal experiment. The human resources previously assigned to the task of assessing the unique and individual human factors for each case, became protectors of the machine, acting as a buffer to allow its work to continue despite its known (fatal) flaws. The damage will be felt for many years to come.
Now another royal commission is confirming another grouping of incompetence, negligence and moral abrogation nestled amongst another pocket of our precious public institutions. People have lost their lives being ground down by the robotic judgements of a system that was known to be flawed, those who protected and continued Robodebt under these circumstances should no longer be allowed to work for the public interest, nor should they be promoted diagonally into similarly vital roles for favours owed by the political class. The Australian people voted for a new government to put an end to these practices, and many eyes are on them to do so. Ceasing the bipartisan practice of ‘jobs for mates’ and legislating measures to prevent these shady practices are what is required, and what is expected, to ensure public institutions work in the public interest again.
Thank you for your well thought out and dissecting article Joel. I ask myself how do we get here? There are enough Australian voters who put the LNP into power for nearly 10 years? Are these voters stupid? Are they ignorant fools or just plain morons? Do they think they are going to get rich? What motivates their voting? What do they believe in? The LNP are only really serving the interest of the top 10% wealthiest voters, and they don't give a shit about the rest of voters who get them there unless they're in marginal seats! Morrison delivered this Robodebt monstrosity to the people when social services minister and its carriage lasted all this time, How???? Are we as a Society a pack of distrusting venal individuals and always looking to punish the alleged unworthy? I think back to Paul Keating and his dislike of the Public Service and then introducing Contracts to senior positions and now we see the end results of this with this horrific scandal! Finally, i think of John Howard who spawned the birth of a new extremist fascist like right wing LNP and with his Sprog delivering us Reith, Downer, Ruddock, Alston, Minchin, Andrews, Abbott and now the likes of Morrison, Porter, Tudge, Cash, Fletcher, Payne, Ley, Taylor, Hawke, Joyce, Dutton and so many more. Such a pack of cretinous, venal. lying, corrupt, soulless, heartless, scrupulous, cunning, born to rule, thugs, war lusting mongers, and bastards you will ever find. Please Australian voter think hard about your vote and keep these evil and nasty mother fuckers out of power for ever and vote genuine progressive independents to turn Australia into a more caring, fairer and decent society were everybody matters not just the rich 10%. Thanks Spiros.