Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

The robodebt scheme was announced with great fanfare by the Prime Minister in 2015, when he was social services minister. Members of this government—including the current Attorney-General and the current Minister for Government Services—boasted about robodebt as a hallmark of their economic brilliance, as they gloated about all the money they were pulling in from all those poor people who they claimed had been overpaid by the Department of Social Services. But this government's self-congratulatory boasting about robodebt ended very abruptly, in November 2019, when legal action forced them to finally admit that the scheme was illegal. The government then faced a class action from hundreds of thousands of victims of robodebt, and, of course, the government fearfully surrendered before the hearings commenced and, more to the point, before any of its ministers, or the senior ministers responsible for the scheme, could be called to explain themselves and their blatantly unlawful scheme under oath.

Instead of putting its money where its mouth was, the Morrison government put taxpayers' money where its mouth was. We may never know just what this scheme has cost taxpayers, but rather than raising the over $2 billion the government claimed when the scheme began, it has instead been a massive financial liability, with the government agreeing to pay back all the money the scheme raised over the years it operated, plus interest, compensation and legal costs. We still haven't found out what it cost taxpayers for the Morrison government to run this brutal, failed scheme for more than four years, including what was paid out to consultants and to the third-party debt collectors who were part of it too.

But the financial cost of robodebt, as appalling as it is, pales next to the toll of human suffering that this government callously inflicted on the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Australians who received unlawful robodebt debt notices. How can we assess the stress and misery experienced by those hundreds of thousands of Australians who received a debt notice or were hunted by debt collectors? And we may never know how many vulnerable people were pushed over the edge by those notices and took their own lives. What is unforgivable is that this government was advised on multiple occasions that the robodebt scheme they had devised and let loose on vulnerable Australians was unlawful, and yet they continued with it until court action forced them to admit that their scheme was not only cruel but also illegal.

When asked about the robodebt scheme this week in parliament, this government again refused to take responsibility for the monster that it made and for the harm that it caused. No; it again fell back on the same marketing spin and slippery falsehoods that are the hallmark of the Morrison government. On Saturday, Peter van Onselen described the robodebt disaster as:

without doubt the worst example of maladministration and callous indifference to vulnerable Australians since the Coalition took office in 2013.

That's quite a hurdle to clear, because this government has quite a record when it comes to maladministration and callous indifference to vulnerable Australians. For example, Australians will not forget this Prime Minister and his ministers slithering around trying to avoid responsibility for the 685 deaths of people in aged-care homes, despite manifest failings making up more than two-thirds of the total death toll from this terrible disease. Australians will not forget this Prime Minister refusing last year to meet with retired emergency services chiefs who were desperately trying to warn him about the coming fire season and of the urgent need for more resources and preparation for our nation to be ready. No; this Prime Minister refused to meet with them. And when Australia started burning, the Prime Minister thought the best approach was to jet off to a secret holiday in Hawaii.

Reasonable minds may differ about what was the very worst example of maladministration and callous indifference to vulnerable Australians the Morrison government is responsible for, but I think the vast majority of Australians would agree that this Prime Minister has set a new low in failing to take responsibility for his government and his ministers' failings, and failing to hold himself and his ministers to any standard whatsoever.

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