David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's been a very long week, and tempers are fraying at the end of a very busy week, but we are continuing to do what people put us here to do, and that is to be wise and sage with the way we manage taxpayers' dollars. It's not our money; it's their money. It is taxpayers' money. Governments don't have their own money; we are managing theirs. Income compliance measures are the duty and responsibility of any government.

People in this chamber can sometimes be selective in the way they rewrite history. We can all play that game. There was a bit of schadenfreude and a bit of own-goal activity by the member for Maribyrnong today when he brought in this MPI. I had the opportunity of going back through the records, and the member for Maribyrnong, the member for Sydney and the member for McMahon have multiple quotations regarding their initiation and almost their pride in instituting a robodebt program and automation. Speakers on the other side have referenced the court case. We've all read about Deanna Amato, and well done her. It's a question of the young, little person beats the giant—David and Goliath, except it's Deanna and Goliath. It has proved a point. But this automation, which is meant to be the sin of this side of parliament, actually happened in 2011. The member for Sydney said on 29 June 2011:

If people fail to come to an arrangement to settle their debts, the Government has a responsibility to taxpayers to recover that money.

The member for Maribyrnong himself said:

The automation of this process—

these are his own words—

will free up resources and result in more people being referred to the tax garnishee process, retrieving more outstanding debt on behalf of taxpayers.

The member for McMahon mentioned:

It is important that the Government explores different means of debt recovery to ensure that those who have received more money than they are entitled to repay their debt.

We are responsible for managing income support for 950,000 people. That's $180 billion. That is a huge slice out of all taxpayers' incomes, so it's our duty to monitor and do this. There have been refinements over many years, even including refinements by the party that initiated this, and that is the other side. In fact, compliance activities have been going for 30 years. This is not new; it's just that, as I said, refinements have been made.

Human review does occur in current processes. The people who have discrepancies identified are sent a letter, they have to engage in the process and they are given the opportunity to correct the data that has been collected about them. I too, like many on the other side and many on this side, have had members of the public who got a real shock when they got the letter. But compounding it by not engaging in the process has, in the past, made it worse for them. The system does have an ability for them to appropriately update their data, and then the good officers of Services Australia—talking, walking, breathing people; not computers—assess it and the process moves on from there.

The other thing that we've got to remember is that people have said this wouldn't happen in any other business. That's got some verity to a degree, but the Social Security Act does empower the department to convert an overpayment into a debt. That's why the initial letter talks about a debt.

It is part of our duty as a government to observe what taxpayers are paying, obviously. We have a tax compliance system, and we have a compliance system to monitor the support we give people who are going through a period in their life when they need support. Compliance is part of life, particularly when you look at the amount of money that we commit— (Time expired)

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