Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. The government is moving forward on collecting or seeking income compliance debts from 2013-14. There are still existing debts where customers have been sought to respond from prior to that year. But when it comes to the issue of income compliance it's important to understand where this all began. I refer to Rick Morton's article on 6 January 2017 in The Australian. He wrote:

Labor's leadership team of Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek pioneered the "robo-debt" data-matching system …

It turns out the member for Sydney and the member for Maribyrnong are the virtual godparents of robodebt.

Now, where would Rick Morton have got that from? He got that from a media release dated 29 June 2011. It was a joint media release issued by the member for Sydney and the member for Maribyrnong. The media release says, 'New data matching to recover millions in welfare dollars.'

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