Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments. The evidence before the commission was that fraud in the welfare system was minuscule, but that is not the impression one would have got from what the ministers responsible for social security payments said over the years—they're not my words; they're the words of the royal commission. And yet we had the member for Bradfield, a senior minister in the former government and now Manager of Opposition Business in the Reps, trotting out the same lines about hardworking Australians paying for social security and completely ignoring the words of the royal commission.

I want to address this point before I get to the body of my speech. Today's hardworking Australian is tomorrow's person who's busted their back. Today they're a hardworking Australian; tomorrow their relationship has broken down, they've lost half their income and they need support. Today they're a hardworking Australian; tomorrow they might suffer an emotional breakdown and need income support. We are in this together. This nasty politics of pitting hardworking Australians—taxpayers—against those who require income support at some time in their lives has got to end. It was a plea from the royal commission. Just stop it! And yet we had the member for Bradfield continuing it this morning. I'm so distressed to hear it because what we had in those years of robodebt were hundreds of thousands of Australians damaged by having debts unfairly raised against them—money they did not owe—that they were ordered to repay. It was a disgraceful and shameful chapter in Australia's history, and yet the member for Bradfield seems to have learnt nothing.

For four years, from 2015 to 2019, robodebt unfairly and illegally racked up debts against innocent Australians—Australians who deserved help and assistance from their government but instead received betrayal and humiliation. Over four miserable years, robodebt billed $1.8 billion against nearly 435,000 Australians, including more than 4,300 in my electorate who had fake and illegal debt notices issued to them. Concerns about automated income average debt recovery, robodebt, emerged early. By late-2016, the Australian Council of Social Service was saying, 'You've got to stop this.' Our electorate offices—I'm sure it's the case for the Deputy Speaker and everybody in this chamber—were being inundated by people saying they were being forced to pay back debts they did not owe.

By January 2017, Labor formally called for the program to be stopped. I recall, four weeks later, in February 2017, that I stood on that side of the chamber asking the government why it hadn't responded to our call for this scheme to be halted. I made many of the points I'm making now back then. And yet it continued till November 2019, nearly three years later. The member for Bradfield would have us believe it was some sort of divine prophecy that they decided to go ahead with it.

But why 2019, you may ask? That's when ministers and senior public servants would have had to give evidence in a class action against the Commonwealth for the scheme. It was only then, four years after robodebt started stealing from Australians, that the Liberals finally admitted that they had no legal basis to raise the debts falsely issued to 435,000 victims. That was it. It took that, and they kept it operational up until the last minute. Presiding judge Justice Murphy referred to robodebt as a 'shameful chapter' and a 'massive failure in public administration'—not just a failure but a shameful chapter overseen from start to finish by the Member for Cook first as a minister and then as Prime Minister. We pledged at the election that we would have a royal commission, and we put one up under Catherine Holmes, a former Supreme Court justice in Queensland and commissioner of the Queensland floods commission—a very eminent Australian. She delivered a report with 57 recommendations. It makes for very tough but required reading for every member of this House. The testimony of former ministers and senators and of senior public officials displayed disturbing levels of wilful ignorance, and the heroes were the low-level officers who tried to sound the alarm. The heroes were also, of course, the victims and their families who testified.

Never again should we see such a shameful chapter in Australian governance.

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