Bases loaded as robodebt royal commission gets underway

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The much-publicised royal commission into the automated debt raising and recovery system known as robodebt starts today but it has been given a head start by the wealth of work done by parliamentary committees, the Federal Court, and the commonwealth ombud.

Just one look at the committee reports and Hansards available online provides an audit trail of the issues the royal commission will need to consider as it starts to dig deep into why the Online Compliance Intervention program — the actual name of the robodebt scheme — turned into the problem that it did, resulting in a $1.8 billion settlement from the government last year.

Consider the evidence of the now former Department of Social Services secretary Kathryn Campbell to the senate on 31 July 2020 on the way in which income was being determined for the purposes of assessing whether a person receiving benefits owed money.

Campbell — who has worked across a range of commonwealth government departments, including finance, foreign affairs and trade, as well as social services — told the committee looking at robodebt that it was legally insufficient for the department to use ATO averaging as a basis for determining whether somebody had a debt to the government.

This particular senate committee hearing saw Campbell refer to legal insufficiency on more than one occasion as she was pressed by Labor senator Deborah O’Neill on the methods used to determine whether somebody owed a debt.

At one point during that hearing, O’Neill asked whether Campbell could take on notice a question related to how the concerns of 2,700 people who had received an incorrect debt were addressed, and why the risk-assessment plan failed to address “the unlawfulness of robodebt”.

Campbell responded by naming herself as a person who held the view that it was legally sufficient to use ATO averaging as a method for determining whether someone owed money.

“We’ve talked about the fact that the legal insufficiency comes from using ATO averaging. ATO averaging has been used for many years. I was the secretary at the time when we implemented this program,” Campbell said.

“I was of the view that it was legally sufficient to use ATO averaging when other information was not available or the customer did not engage with the department.”

O’Neill continued to press Campbell further on this issue of averaging methodology as well as the placing of the onus of proof on the benefit recipient to demonstrate they had no debt.

“You put the onus of proof on them to prove that the debt that you had illegally raised was their problem to solve. That’s why we’re in this mess. It seems to me that you had fair warning from this document and from reports from your own frontline staff that there were serious issues with the scheme,” O’Neill said.

“The tinkering that has happened has not met the need and is now being shown to be completely at odds with what Australians expect of your department.”

Campbell responded:

“The legal insufficiency relates to the averaging of data. That was always the case. So, whilst staff may have been concerned about using averaged data, that has been the case for a very long time, since at least the 1990s.

“We appreciate and we accept that this is legally insufficient, and that’s why the government has announced that further proof points will be used for resolving debts from now on.”

Another rich vein of inquiry may be the way in which the administration of the robodebt arrangements impacted public servants working in the department while the practices were active.

A letter sent by the Community and Public Service Union to the then-minister Stuart Robert outlining a range of concerns on behalf of public services was read into Hansard by O’Neill.

“We, the experienced (in compliance and debts) Centrelink staff have been reprimanded by Team Leaders and the Assistant Directors (their line managers) that we are ‘being negative’ when we have continually expressed our opinion that averaging earning is incorrect — over almost 4 years since this started,” the CPSU letter said.

“We have had to endure endless talks about our negative attitudes and that we are not being ‘positive’.”

The letter pointed to conversations with public service managers about the need to reach quotas and that it was “just about numbers to upper SES management”.

There was also the media coverage of the distress of people and suicides of customers.

“To read the stories of suicides and customers’ distress in the news made a lot of us feel sick. I have had nights where I could not sleep thinking about conversations, I have had with customers regarding their robodebts. Some have talked about suicide on the call,” the letter from the CPSU said.

“To hear a grown man crying on the phone, whose wife had died recently, and he is the carer for his young children, is heartbreaking.”

O’Neill stopped reading the letter during the hearing and asked Campbell whether she would apologise for the hurt caused to staff and the members of the community.

Campbell told O’Neill that apologies were forthcoming.

“We have apologised for the hurt to the people on whom the debt was raised. I too apologise to staff, but I would note that this had been going for some time,” Campbell said.

“For the staff to say, as they describe it in this letter, that robodebt was something new, unfortunately, is just not true. Staff in the agency have to deal with very difficult circumstances on many occasions.”

The hearing was also full of other tense exchanges between O’Neill and Campbell with the latter stating she did not know what robodebt meant when pressed by the senator.

O’Neill reinforced the point by referring to reports of suicide of people who had received debt notices.

“People have died over robodebt, and you don’t even acknowledge the word!” the senator said.

Campbell told O’Neill she did not accept that “people have died over robodebt” and elaborated further.

“We know that suicide is a very difficult subject. We know mental health issues are very difficult,” Campbell said.

“We have apologised for the hurt and harm; none of us can imagine what goes on in individuals’ lives. So I do not accept that.”

The royal commission represents the delivery of an election promise by the Albanese government but what, if anything, it means for the various arms of government that administer benefits or collect funds from citizens is anybody’s guess.

What is clear is that there will need to be a focus on the impact of the administration of a program such as the one for which the term ‘robodebt’ was coined by frontline public service staff, and whether there are broader lessons that can be learned by the public service about when performance measures — such as the meeting of quotas of some description — are inappropriate.