- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2162
Photo: goodfon.com
Victims of the Morrison government’s ‘robodebt’ scheme will get a further $475 million, after the largest class action in Australian history. It’s ironic that the original rationale was to save money. The scheme was started when Scott Morrison was Minister for Social Services. The scheme involved averaging out any income earned by welfare recipients and averaging it out to produce possible overpayments.
Why ‘robo’ is in the name is that the process was then automated – people who hadn’t been overpaid at all received threatening letters from debt collectors. There were suicides. Lives were ruined. It was a massive scandal.
The scheme was rushed through because the priority was to save money and for the government to look like it was being tough on welfare ‘bludgers.’
Overall, it wasn’t a roaring success, even for the Liberal government. The last two federal elections showed that Australian voters aren’t all-in on mindless bashing of public services. They’re also not all on board with attacks on public servants, as Peter Dutton found out after his badly-bungled promise to sack large numbers of government workers didn’t pan out. A lot of Australians use ‘welfare’ at some stage of their lives, and a lot of people want public services to run well. That’s not a bad thing, it shows that many of us know that we live in a society.
So Robodebt has left the scene, expensively and disgracefully. The bad ideas behind it remain in the attitude that ‘welfare’ is a bad thing, a cost that must be cut down or avoided. In fact, welfare is part of having a society worth living in.
We can see this mentality in the government’s attitude to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The NDIS has always relied on private agencies, much as JobNetwork does. That makes it more expensive than it has to be. Now the government is trying to cut costs on the NDIS, hence proposing to create a separate agency for people with autism. Labor doesn’t ostentatiously bash welfare recipients the way the Morrison government did, but it loves to announce ‘savings.’
Curiously, Labor doesn’t have this penny-pinching approach to AUKUS. Quite the reverse – it’s given $4 billion to US shipyards to keep them building nuclear-powered submarines we don’t need.
This country needs a government that puts people first. What we have is a government that puts private companies and the USA ahead of Australians.
