Attorney-general Mark Dreyfus has confirmed the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme has been given a second allocation of extra time, as many present and past senior officials of the Australian Public Service brace for potentially career-ending adverse findings flowing from the probe.
Dreyfus on Thursday revealed that the governor-general has now “amended the Letters Patent to extend the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme” so it has until July 7 to present the report, a slip potentially created by lengthy procedural fairness requirements surrounding potential adverse findings that could result in public servants being sacked, demoted or having their medals stripped.
One of the challenges of the royal commission is just the sheer volume of material it has been required to plough through after thousands of people affected by the illegal shakedown of social security recipients lodged submissions as evidence of how they were affected.
Such is the volume that public submissions were still being posted online last week as part of the official record of the inquiry.
“I am grateful for the class action, but the amount I received as compensation was around $150 which considering all the damage done to my mental health, my credit rating and my housing situation was never going to do anything,” one recent submitter wrote.
“The question was also never answered. Where does the debt go when I kill myself? How was I meant to plan for a future when a basic support structure could retroactively decide that I deserved to be hounded by debt collectors?”
A big issue for the government is how it will respond to the findings, particularly adverse findings against public servants who may contest any action taken against them.
One of the biggest surprises of the royal commission was just how easily many public servants accepted that robodebt was legal and properly authorised without basic checks and balances to affirm the scheme’s legality before raising illegal demands for money.
There are also signs that tough lessons from the royal commission are yet to sink into the minds of the most senior APS officials after the commonwealth argued the weight of evidence from a key expert — former Australian Public Service Commission chief Andrew Podger — should be lessened.
Podger was particularly critical about the difficulties public servants involved in robodebt had in forming and conveying frank and independent advice to ministers about the scheme’s problems.
The commonwealth’s efforts to discount the weight of his evidence surprised many, including Podger himself, who emphatically stood by his evidence that there has been a systematic erosion of the principle of ‘frank and fearless advice’.
A key decision for the government is the degree to which it will use the royal commission’s findings to clean out clearly underperforming parts of the public service that allowed such hugely defective programs like robodebt to be stood up.
Labor entered government on the promise of restoring the public service capability after a decade of outsourcing rather than repeating the agency chief sackings the Coalition became famous for, but there remains a basic question as to why many several public servants should not be officially sanctioned and penalised for their role in robodebt.
One of the reasons the report for the royal commission is running late is the difficulty and long time it took to extract evidence from key witnesses at what was previously the Department of Human Services.
The official line from the royal commission, prior to its report being released, is that more time is required for “administrative reasons”.
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