Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Simplifying Income Reporting and Other Measures) Bill 2020. I am speaking in support of the bill but also in support of the very sensible second reading amendment that was moved by the shadow minister for families and social services, the member for Barton, which raises serious concerns about the government's ability to implement these changes properly—and I'll come back to that.

In the second reading amendment, the member for Barton has referenced this government's bad faith and ultimately what amounts to casual cruelty through its actions in the social security sector. Much of this bill should objectively improve the accuracy of Centrelink information and social security information; indeed, that's its real purpose. However, it becomes difficult to separate the intentions of this legislation from the reality of the people who will be charged with implementing and executing its promise.

This is not a group of people—and I'm referring to the government—who in recent memory have covered themselves in glory when charged with similar projects of advancing the use of digital technology to make lives easier for Australians—the recent conga line of Liberal governments that this country has endured, right up to the current Morrison government, in particular to the charming but accident-prone Minister for Government Services, Mr Robert. I'm referring to the litany of digital disasters they have presided over. It is a litany, which makes the public realise that this government doesn't have a great record of rolling out new technology. We will be watching closely to ensure that Single Touch Payroll does not enjoy the suite of catastrophes that the Australian public has learned to expect from any Liberal digitisation project.

As this government boldly takes us into the world of Single Touch Payroll and social security, let me remind people about My Health Record. Almost $2 billion was spent on an e-health scheme that many doctors and patients refuse to use because of legitimate privacy concerns, including breaches. Then, of course, there's one of my favourites: the 2016 census. For almost 48 hours, Australians were unable to access the census website, due to a series of denial-of-service attacks, incurring a $30 million cost blowout to the Turnbull government. More recently, there was the 2019 myGov outage where, euphemistically, technical difficulties brought down the entire online government service portal for a day when people tried to access the ATO accounts and lodge financial year tax returns. Australians need access to functional government services, not for taxpayer money to be wasted mopping up mistakes because the Liberals cannot be trusted with digital service delivery.

The bill may contain the term 'simplifying income reporting', but what is this really about? Is it an attempt to cure the disease that this government has concocted in its artificial intelligence laboratory and unleashed on the social security recipients of Australia, better known as robodebt? Perhaps we should call the bill by its real name: the 'Trying to quietly fix our robodebt mess' bill. Some of the measures here should help that cause. They should make government information more accurate, not because—as this bunch of bunglers would have you believe—there are hordes of welfare recipients giving the government inaccurate information; it's quite the opposite. Under robodebt, the government has been punishing welfare recipients with the government's own inaccurate data and dodgy mathematics.

The government's robodebt scheme unleashed a faulty algorithm against social security recipients who, even if they had reported their income 100 per cent correctly, were slapped with debt notices sometimes in the thousands of dollars. Robodebt used a crude, lazy calculation of averaging annual income and pretending to average that over every fortnight as if all Australians earn the same amount of money every fortnight. This would then discover a discrepancy by comparing it to a Centrelink recipient's reported fortnightly income, which may not conveniently fit into the artificial intelligence of robodebt. Many Australians have lumpy income due to insecure or intermittent work in the gig economy—casualisation, often balanced with study and other commitments. Many Australians rarely have the same number of hours each fortnight, yet robodebt simply assumed they did and, if there was a discrepancy between the reported fortnightly income and the artificial averaging of an income over a year, the person was issued with a debt notice. This was crude accounting at best. The work experience kid could have spotted the fault in the logic; yet, upon these shaky foundations, the whole robodebt edifice was constructed.

Using this dodgy algorithm, a red flag would be created against a person's name and a debt letter would be issued to the recipient. In some cases, a decade had passed since the reporting period in question, leaving many—often former—social security recipients shocked and distressed that they would have to retrieve pay slips from an old employer, who may have gone into liquidation or simply not kept the records, in order to disprove a discrepancy alleged by the government. Others, including vulnerable people on the bread line, were forced to find the money to pay their bank for statements to show what they had known all along—that they had always reported carefully and that no debt had accrued. The government would pretend that this process of issuing debts had human oversight, but it didn't have human oversight where it mattered. There was no checking and no interrogation of the algorithm's results. There was an almost religious faith in the artificial intelligence of the algorithm. Robodebt was king, so why bother worrying about hiring and paying humans to ensure that what it was spinning out was actually just and fair? We believe it is important to provide efficient, user-friendly government services and systems. We don't support the ongoing agenda of cuts to the Public Service and the outsourcing of key government work to labour hire companies.

With robodebt, we have also seen that a great deal of injustice occurred for people. People in the flood zone of Townsville received robodebt letters. We've had parents report that their adult children have taken their own lives because of the stress of robodebt. Figures obtained through the Senate have found that almost 2,000 people died after receiving a robodebt notice. But, unfortunately, all the talk of unfairness over the last three years wasn't enough to stop the government from simply marching ahead. At estimates, it was revealed that the department took money from 73 estates of people who had died.

Following the election, I certainly formed the view that robodebt didn't even have a legal basis. It didn't even have a basis in law giving the government the power to issue these debt notices. So the question is: how long did this government know that it didn't have the power to issue robodebt debt notices based upon the use of the algorithm-averaging system? The minister is at the table, so perhaps he could answer that question.

We have discovered—through a document which the government didn't want released, but Labor and the Greens were able to get the numbers in a Senate committee to put this letter up online—that the chief counsel of the Taxation Office wrote to the Chief Commissioner of Taxation late last year and said, 'Actually, we'd better stop garnishing people's tax bills, because the Department of Social Security has informed us that we don't have the legal power to issue the notices.' Hang on, read that again. This is a smoking gun of a document. What it says is that someone in government's told someone senior in government that we have been told there is no legal authority for what the government has been doing with robodebt. But have we heard from the government how long they knew before that day?

There are only two interpretations of what's happened. Either this government, in a belief in its own superiority, never checked for 3½ years if it had the power to issue robodebt notices—for 3½ half years. Are we seriously to believe that this bunch of incompetent bunglers—and, actually, when you say it is aloud, it is possible—issued notices and never checked to see if they were allowed to issue the notices? This is a scandal. How did we get to a state of affairs in this country where a government, with all of the power of departments, can simply issue debt notices and then at some point, 3½ years after the process started, simply discover, 'Actually we can't do this'?

One interpretation is that they never thought to ask. One interpretation is that they decided: 'We're just going to shame the poor. We're going to say that we are going to have a welfare compliance campaign to prop up our fake budget numbers,' and they didn't care about the detail. That is entirely possible. The alternative is that they knew before 19 November last year and just didn't tell anyone. That would actually be worse. But there's no happy ending for people who, for the last 3½ years, have been subjected to this robodebt scheme.

This single touch legislation is sensible, although we put question marks around the ability of this government to ever implement anything. I wouldn't send this government down the street to the milk bar to get a litre of milk. They'd get that wrong.

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