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

I wonder what advice the minister at the time received. I wonder what input the minister received to start collecting 24 per cent of the debt through income averaging. I wonder what input subsequent ministers in the Labor administration had. It's this government that has taken the point to say that solely using income averaging is insufficient, even though the Labor Party followed this practice throughout all their years in government. Indeed, on 9 May, the then opposition leader, Bill Shorten, stated in response to a question on Labor's support for income compliance: 'We want to make sure that people aren't receiving welfare they're not entitled to. No-one gets a leave pass on that.' Thanks, Member for Maribyrnong.

And yet, the Parliamentary Budget Office's 2019 post-election report of election commitments, released in June 2019, confirmed that the Labor Party had made no provision in its welfare costings for the revision, scaling back or closure of the income compliance program—none at all. Indeed, Labor's social security policies that they brought to the 2019 federal election did not include the reversal of what they're calling robodebt. Labor's own budget plan banked the savings of the income compliance to fund their election commitments. The hypocrisy of those opposite! They started using income averaging at scale, kept it on scale for income averaging through the time of their government, jumped up and down about income compliance and yet, in their own election policy costings for 2019, banked all the savings. The level of hypocrisy does not get any greater than that.

As a government, we take responsibility for upholding the integrity of the welfare system seriously. The income compliance program was developed to make identifying welfare overpayments more efficient. It assisted with reviews where customers didn't respond or fully engage with requests to clarify discrepancy between income reported to Centrelink and that to the ATO. In November last year, I announced that changes were being made to the way debts from welfare payments were raised as part of that program. From that time, debts were no longer raised wholly or partially using average ATO income data—a practice that had been going on since 2007, and a practice that those opposite used extensively. We've announced, from July this year, Services Australia will refund all the payments made on debts—

Ms Ryan interjecting—

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