“I’m appalled.”
Those were the deflated words uttered by commissioner Catherine Holmes AC SC at the conclusion of evidence given by Department of Social Services principal lawyer Anne Pulford.
It was a grinding, sequential and laborious day at the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, punctuated by persistent failures of redaction that prevented documents from being displayed on the screen after mobile phone numbers and addresses went up, prompting non-publication orders.
Even so, the day lifted the lid on how multiple internal legal red flags raised by bureaucrats at the initial stages of the creation of the robodebt scheme were bypassed or shelved to pursue a dubious New Policy Proposal (NPP) that became a reality, raising more questions to remain than answers.
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