Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion put by the member for Maribyrnong. I think it is a serious issue that we should be debating. We should be clearing everything on this particular issue because it is a shameful stain on this House and on Australian democracy. It is one thing to talk about policies on electricity prices and the cost of living, which are very important, but it's another thing to talk about a government ripping off its own citizens, and that's what the previous government did.

Around 2017, people started coming to my office or ringing or emailing about debts that they were receiving—not one or two but quite a few. For each and every one, as I do for every single constituent, I would write to the minister and ask him to investigate. We did a survey of the results of those investigations in my office, and 70 per cent were either reduced or dropped altogether. In any business or association, if you had a 70 per cent error rate in a particular area, you would investigate and see what was going wrong. Those opposite were told by many backbenchers, by shadow ministers and by the current minister, and what did they do? They did nothing. All they did was pursue the poorest of the poor to try and get a few dollars out of them. That was wrong.

In Holland we saw a similar case a couple of years ago. They were taking back money that they'd paid out to particular constituents, and the entire cabinet and government resigned over it because it was wrong. This lot, when they were sitting on this side of the chamber, kept on covering up. Yet only yesterday we saw a debate on transparency for multinationals and they voted against it. They voted against transparency for multinationals but were quite happy to pursue the poorest of the poor, pensioners, our part-time workers, students and the unemployed. They were quite happy to squeeze as much as they could out of them, to squeeze every single cent out of those people. But yesterday they were quite happy to vote against the transparency bill on the multinationals.

They heard, over and over again, that this was wrong. I had people ringing me from the department, whistleblowers, telling me they were told not to speak to any client that had a robodebt. I even had one say to me, 'We could tell that they were wrong, and we knew that there was something wrong with it, but we were told to leave them as they were.' This was not happening by a small business out there trying to rip money off people, this was the government of Australia. And to say that we're wasting time in this place discussing it or moving this motion is absolutely wrong. The Australian public needs an unequivocal apology—not an apology with why and what they did and cover-ups but an unequivocal apology.

The royal commissioner himself said that this was wrong, that it was basically a criminal act that shouldn't have taken place. Any other government in the world would have hung their heads in shame and resigned. We're here to look after those people—our pensioners, our part-time workers, our unemployed—to try and assist them. What the former government did was try to chop them at the knees and bury them. In fact, they did do that to some of them.

I support the member for Maribyrnong's motion. They should be supporting it as well, unequivocally.

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