The robo-debt royal commission made 57 recommendations for systemic reform, including that peak advocacy bodies should be consulted before changes are made to the social security system.
It also said Services Australia, which oversees Centrelink, “should put in place processes for genuine and receptive consultation with frontline staff when new programs are being designed and implemented”.
Sealed section
The royal commission said a sealed section of the report, which is subject to a non-publication order, “recommends the referral of individuals for civil action or criminal prosecution”.
It is important to note that the identity of those individuals is not known. Two former ministers, Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert, have said they are not named in the section but it is unclear who is.
“I am also submitting relevant parts of the additional chapter of the report to heads of various Commonwealth agencies; the Australian Public Service Commissioner, the National Anti-Corruption Commissioner, the President of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory and the Australian Federal Police,” Commissioner Catherine Holmes, SC, said.
What was robo-debt?
The robo-debt scheme, which ran between July 2015 and November 2019, was aimed at identifying people who had been overpaid Centrelink benefits by using an automated system to identify alleged discrepancies between their reported income and income data held by the Tax Office. But the scheme was flawed and resulted in debts being calculated based on incorrect data. In some cases, people had debts seized from their bank accounts and tax returns without warning.
In 2019, the Commonwealth government settled a test case about the lawfulness of the scheme and conceded key aspects of it were unlawful.
Critical findings about former ministers and bureaucrats
1. Scott Morrison
The commission concluded that Morrison, who was the social services minister behind the robo-debt scheme rollout in 2015, “allowed cabinet to be misled” about the scheme. He rejected all adverse findings against him.
“He failed to meet his ministerial responsibility to ensure that Cabinet was properly informed about what the proposal actually entailed and to ensure that it was lawful,” the report said.
The royal commission heard the Department of Human Services advised Morrison in February 2015 that the robo-debt scheme would require legislative change. However, the policy proposal submitted to cabinet later that year did not say this was required. Morrison said he believed the legal issues had been resolved and his department “did come to a view in their formal advice that legislation was not required”.
Morrison “allowed cabinet to be misled because he did not make that obvious inquiry” about why bureaucrats’ advice had changed, the report said. “Only a few weeks previously he had been told of that caveat; nothing had changed in the proposal; and he had done nothing to ascertain why the caveat no longer applied.”
The commission also said it “rejects as untrue Mr Morrison’s evidence that he was told that income averaging ... was an established practice and a ‘foundational way’ in which DHS [the Department of Human Services] worked”.
Income averaging referred to a process, subsequently found to be unlawful, under which Centrelink used data from the Australian Taxation Office to estimate the income of recipients of social security payments. This was a key plank of the robo-debt scheme.
This automatic calculation created errors in some cases because it averaged out income into fortnightly periods, which may not have reflected the actual income received by recipients in that period. Centrelink then raised debts on the basis of that incorrect information.
2. Alan Tudge
The commission referred in detail to steps taken by Alan Tudge, who was human services minister between February 2016 to December 2017, to respond to criticisms of the robo-debt scheme in the media.
“Mr Tudge’s use of information about social security recipients in the media to distract from and discourage commentary about the scheme’s problems represented an abuse of that power,” the report said.
“It was all the more reprehensible in view of the power imbalance between the minister and the cohort of people upon whom it would reasonably be expected to have the most impact, many of whom were vulnerable and dependent on the department, and its minister, for their livelihood.”
Tudge responded: “I strongly reject the commission’s comments of the way I used the media and that I had abused my power in doing so. I reject that finding in the strongest terms. At no stage did I seek to engage in a media strategy that would discourage legitimate criticism of this scheme.”
He said the information released was “generally de-identified” and was released to “correct the public record”.
3. Christian Porter
The royal commission says Christian Porter, the social services minister between September 2015 and December 2017, “could not rationally have been satisfied of the legality” of the robo-debt scheme on the basis of his general knowledge of the policy process.
“Mr Porter could not rationally have been satisfied of the legality of the scheme on the basis of his general knowledge of the [policy proposal] process, when he did not have actual knowledge of the content of the [proposal], and had no idea whether it had said anything about the practice of income averaging,” the report said.
“As minister for Social Services, Mr Porter should at least have directed his department to produce to him any legal advice it possessed in respect of the legislative basis of the Scheme.”
4. Stuart Robert
Stuart Robert was briefly responsible for robo-debt in mid to late 2019. The scheme was shut down in November 2019 after the Commonwealth settled a test case and agreed to orders declaring that key parts of the scheme were unlawful.
The royal commission said it “rejects Mr Robert’s claim to have acted to end the Robodebt Scheme quite as promptly as he professes” and former Department of Human Services secretary Renee Leon took the first steps to end the scheme.
“There is no reason to suppose, however, that had Ms Leon not taken the step she did, the government’s announcement of the cessation of the practice would have been far behind,” the report said.
Robert had defended making public comments supportive of the scheme when privately he had misgivings.
“It can be accepted that the principles of Cabinet solidarity required Mr Robert to publicly support Cabinet
decisions, whether he agreed with them or not,” the report said. “But Mr Robert was not expounding any legal position, and he was going well beyond supporting government policy.
“He was making statements of fact as to the accuracy of debts, citing statistics which he knew could not be right.”
5. Kathryn Campbell
Department of Human Services secretary Kathryn Campbell was criticised by the robo-debt royal commission for failing to act when confronted with information pointing to the unlawfulness of the debt recovery scheme.
“Ms Campbell had been responsible for a department that had established, implemented and maintained an unlawful program,” the report said. “When exposed to information that brought to light the illegality of income averaging, she did nothing of substance.
“When presented with opportunities to obtain advice on the lawfulness of that practice, she failed to act.”
Campbell served as secretary of the Department of Human Services from March 2011 to September 2017, which covered the period in which the automated debt assessment and recovery scheme was introduced.
This is Michaela Whitbourn signing off on the blog for today. Thank you for reading.