- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2150
Photo: goodfon.com
Robodebt was a huge scandal for the Morrison government. On Morrison’s watch as Social Security Minister and continuing during his other jobs, Centrelink hounded innocent people, driving some to suicide. The whole exercise was aimed at saving money, but it cost the government a fortune. At the time, it fulfilled an unspoken priority, which was to make the then government, especially Morrison, look good through performative cruelty towards unemployed people.
The idea was straightforward: find out who was being ‘robodebt’ unemployment or disability allowance, and get the money back using computers to make the whole exercise cost-effective. Nothing could be simpler.
What was wrong with it was simple too. The computers took all the earnings a person had made over a period of time and averaged them out over a year, then pinged people for overpayments on the assumption that they’d been paid the same amount every fortnight. So if someone had worked a lot from March to May, but had no work in the rest of the year, they would be entitled to unemployment benefits for the months in which they hadn’t worked, but the computer programs would average their earnings out over the whole year and report an overpayment for the other months. That method produced a lot of false notices.
The error was compounded, and made more dangerous by sending out automated debt letters and demanding that people prove their innocence of these debts over a period of seven years, adding a warning that the debt could be sold on to debt collectors and that legal action could be taken. That’s what caused the suicides. This paper has reported on the scandal (see Guardian #2124, November 2024). There has been a Royal Commission, and a book (Mean Streak, by Rick Morton).
Now, according to a major academic study published by the Journal of Euripean Public Policy and reported by Australian website The Mandarin, both Defence and Home Affairs failed to communicate with their staff about any lessons learned from Robodebt. Even though the Defence Department Secretary, Greg Moriarty called robodebt “a very fundamental crisis in the public service.” Departments talked about robodebt, but delegated actually doing something about it to individual departments and agencies. The study says that this “enabled moments of policy inaction.”
The study found that when robodebt was talked about at a high level, they didn’t go into detail about what had gone wrong, and always added the excuse that “it’s important to remember … many good people were trying to do the right thing.”
Robodebt cost a lot of people a lot of grief, and some people their lives. It’s not good enough to brush it away with “there were failures of leadership and judgement” and leave it at that.
