The illegal robodebt scheme besmirched the reputation of the APS long before the royal commission began in late 2022, meaning institutional leaders had years’ of notice to transform itself and do better.
While everybody waits for retired Queensland Supreme Court chief justice Catherine Holmes to hand her final report to the government, and the document to pass through the various protocols before it can be made public this morning, it is safe to assume that there will be a lot of rot to dissect in the royal commission’s report.
But it is also worth noting on this sombre day that a report surmising the full, sorry mess of the scheme is delivered, that a team of hard-working public servants at Victoria Legal Aid, along with some internal whistleblowers helped to eventually unravel the wicked scheme.
The lawyers of VLA’s economic and social rights program in Melbourne helped to run early test cases challenging the legality of the federal welfare debt-collecting program. This was instrumental in kicking the can down the road to get to a series of royal commission findings, and ultimately led to a class action settlement worth at least $1.8 billion for debts against 433,000 people and wrongful recovery from 381,000 people.
It cannot be said comprehensive justice has been delivered yet, or that the chips of accountability will fall on the right heads. It would also be very fair to say that whatever the outcome at this point, the consequences are too little, too late.
Given the devastating fact at least two known robodebt victims who were hounded by commercial debt collectors to repay erroneous sums they were told they owed died by suicide, there hardly seems recompense adequate enough to fix the damage that has been caused.
Official data reveals many others also died after receiving illegal debt notices, nearly a third of whom were classified as “vulnerable”.
The scheme also disproportionately impacted people with mental health issues or who spoke English as a second language.
The contrition of current public service heads is already on the record.
According to new APS commissioner Gordon de Brouwer, the only way public servants can learn from when mistakes are made is to be honest about them. He called for accountability to be embraced with searing honesty and empathy, by APS leaders in particular.
The commissioner told the IPAA ACT podcast in April (one month before his appointment to head the APSC) that the position of the secretaries board on the robodebt saga would be apparent once the final report landed.
“It’s talked a lot around the service and it matters to people. People see others who acted with courage [and spoke out] through that process. They also see just how easy it is to be the frog in the boiling pot — if you get a bit of pressure for asking questions, if there’s a bit of discussion or view [around] the nature of hierarchy,” de Brouwer told Work with purpose.
“Is hierarchy a way to enable people to do their job and take responsibility and make decisions? Or is hierarchy a device to control, tell people, and direct them? Those discussions really matter. Setting the tone and having continual conversations [about these issues] is really important,” he said.
The secretaries board is a powerful group of top bureaucrats who have spent months – published documents suggest at least since early 2023 (but presumably much earlier than that) — mulling over the various aspects of the royal commission that will affect the APS.
At around about the same time as de Brouwer’s podcast where he apologised to the community for the robodebt fallout, we know the secretaries board were considering how to handle the complicated, delicate process of procedural fairness and risk to individual reputations.
The commonwealth, via the Attorney-General’s department, had made a submission to the inquiry about how things might be handled in the event the royal commission made some adverse findings against people in the ranks of the public service.
The public pillorying some in the community want, as well as those victims most injured by the illegal scheme, may not materialise in the fashion the mob might prefer.
Rebuilding trust within the APS about its own capability and purpose, and across the wider community will also take time, de Brouwer told the podcast.
Dr de Brouwer said some of the structural changes which had been made to address this included an overhaul of the performance management of SES-level staff so that both delivery and behaviour measures were given equal weight when it came to career development and promotion opportunities.
“The way you perform with both delivery and the behaviours you exhibit matter to your position in the service, your promotion, and actually whether you stay in the service,” de Brouwer said.
“Most people, if the culture says ‘delivery and behaviour matters’, the vast majority of people will respond very enthusiastically to that. That’s the starting point, but you also need a performance management system that formally assesses it and, frankly, screens people out who can’t engage on that.”
There were many examples of actors in the robodebt saga who emerged during the bloodsport of the royal commission hearings as examples of bad apples – such as the late Department of Human Services deputy secretary Malisa Golightly, who died in late 2021.
The inquiry heard recounts of her shouting at staff, making personal comments and losing her temper. It also heard that she denied “incoming smoothing” was taking place, and if it was as a matter of last resort.
Golightly had the primary carriage of the scheme. It serves nobody, least of all the truth, that her side of the story will never be aired.
But the systemic failures, which saw the scheme snowball to become what Federal Court Justice Bernard Murphy would call a shameful chapter in the administration of the commonwealth social security system and a “massive failure of public administration”, cannot possibly sit on the shoulders of one person (it should be noted Golightly later moved to take a deputy secretary role at the Department of Home Affairs).
Much more powerful decision-makers — ministers and secretaries — wear the shame of the punitive scheme. The extent of that will be made clear in Holmes’ final report.
In conversation with The Mandarin last week, the commissioner shared that many of the expectations about workplace behaviour were fairly garden-variety hallmarks of how to respectfully deal with others and as an adult.
“That’s where the stewardship idea, frankly comes in as a value,” de Brouwer said of the changes made to the Public Service Act in June.
“I can say this actually is an empirical statement because we know from the feedback that this is what most people think in the public service — Most people want to take responsibility for where their workplace is, and they want it to be good and effective now, and they want to leave it better off when they leave.”
To illustrate how the concept was easily applied to a concrete scenario, de Brouwer gave the example of an APS3 public servant working at Services Australia. The aim was to get government employees to understand that they represent something beyond themselves – they represent institutions that people want to be able to trust and rely on, he said.
“If you’re doing data inputting, and then you’re doing that with someone who needs the services; you want to make sure that your records are accurate. That’s part of your contribution to making that system work — your records are accurate, and the person who comes in can easily access and understand what you’re doing,” de Brouwer said.
“Similarly … when a member of the public is dealing with you as a public servant, or Services Australia or ATO employee, they generally don’t see you as a person. They see you as ‘Services Australia’, or ‘the ATO’ or a public servant.
“You’re really representing your workplace, your institution, the public service, the government to the public — stewardship [in this case] is that people trust the service more, people trust the public sector more, and they trust government more from your interaction,” he explained.
Indeed, the submissions from public servants working for the affected agencies released by the royal commission this week, outline a whole cohort of staff who felt disbelief, outrage, and a sense of having been lied to or duped concerning the robustness of the scheme.
Some public servants shared disgust when they realised they were working for an organisation that had such disrespect for natural justice and quit. Others expressed frustration about the feedback they were receiving from victims not being taken seriously by leaders. Some retired earlier than they had intended because they could not cope with the stress of the situation.
Centrelink senior complaints officer Judith Stolz told the royal commission:
“All of us were staff of long-standing and knew how to read the Act and that this new process was illegal,” she said of the robodebt’s rollout.
“However, no discussion could move anyone from their view that robodebt was perfectly legal.”
According to de Brouwer, the only way to sustain public service delivery was to have the right behaviours underpinning them — in this way, being able to meet ministerial wishes but stay within the bounds of the bureaucracy’s values, principles and code of conduct should not be challenging.
“You can do both — it’s actually not that hard,” de Brouwer said.
“They’re not contrary distinctions, they’re not alternatives — they go together.
“When it comes to things like integrity, it’s not a woke concept; it’s actually the law — a basic legal requirement for you doing your job. Understanding means you can do the delivery, all of that, but with integrity,” he said.
:
Transformers vs Care Bears: How an APS culture war produced the monster of robodebt
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