Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I rise to discuss the pain that is being felt in my community over this government's Centrelink robo-debt-recovery-system failure. Sadly, this government has failed us yet again by the way it has abused the system, once again attacking the most vulnerable in our community.

Labor have time and time again made clear our commitment to a transparent and efficient Centrelink system. We support Centrelink cracking down on people who are trying to rort our welfare system. But it is obvious that the Turnbull government cannot even get a crackdown right. They came out last year with all the bells and whistles claiming they were going to claw back $4 billion believed to have been incorrectly paid to welfare recipients. They were out there spruiking the new automated system that would match a welfare recipient's details with information from the Australian Taxation Office and generate 20,000 debt notices a week—up from 20,000 a year—in their so-called crackdown when it came in in July.

They had the cheerleaders out in support. Victorian Senator Derryn Hinch said it was 'bizarre' that billions of dollars were being wrongfully paid to welfare recipients. He congratulated the government for going after the greedy. Queensland Senator and Liberal buddy Pauline Hanson called the welfare system 'wrong' and pushed her agenda to issue identity cards to supposedly reduce the rates of fraud. But the icing on the cake was when the Minister for Human Services himself promised to jail anyone who owed money to Centrelink. To quote Minister Tudge:

We'll find you, we'll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison.

Doesn't the minister know that studies like the HILDA report in 2016, from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, show that Australian welfare dependency is at historical lows? He is clearly not alone because this came after a mass email campaign by the police and Centrelink that also threatened welfare recipients with jail if they did not provide accurate information.

This country should pride itself on helping out the most vulnerable in our society. It should be able to say to people, 'In times of trouble, we are there to help you.' But instead this government is out there chasing them down, chasing down people for debts they never owed, and it is just plain wrong. I have lost count of the number of constituents who have come to me worried and upset about the system's calculations of their debts. I have heard so many stories of the stress it puts on people with disabilities, on families with children to support, on honest people trying to just keep their heads above water. These people work hard just to make ends meet, and Labor have made a commitment to them to make sure we provide an accessible Centrelink system when they need it. This government, however, is slapping down debt after debt without properly assessing each case, which means that hundreds of Australians are left feeling helpless and abandoned. It is not the Australian way.

Take for example a woman from my electorate of McEwen who worked for Centrelink for 15 years, and yet even she has fallen victim to this welfare sham. After falling ill for a period of time, she was forced to take leave and benefited from Centrelink's sickness allowance during that time. When she received a message from the automatic debt recovery system saying that she owed $1,200, she immediately realised that they had calculated her debts incorrectly.

I wrote to the Minister for Human Services to raise her concerns, but this should not have happened in the first place. I wrote this letter back in December, and I have only just received an interim response from the department, so I imagine there are probably a few thousand letters on the minister's desk awaiting his signature on matters like this. Luckily for this constituent, she knew the system well, and she was able to correct the calculations. But what about all of those people who do not know the system? What about how this debt recovery system deeply affects them?

Another one of my constituents came to me about Centrelink's wrongful assessment of her debt. Throughout her law degree at Monash University she received Centrelink payments. After graduating, she was contacted and informed that she owed almost $7,000.

Why? Because Centrelink assessed that she was not a full-time student between February and October 2016. She was then forced to pay this money, to pay this so-called debt, besides the fact that it is an ongoing appeals process. It is plain outrageous. For a 25-year-old recent graduate seeking employment and living at home, these debts caused emotional distress and strained relationships with family. Centrelink later on admitted that she did not have to repay the debt, but it was far too late. She felt that it was unconscionable and unfair because the error led to the disaster of her family relationship breakdown.

The Centrelink automated debt-recovery system targets so many residents in McEwen I continue to receive these countless messages asking for help and guidance to navigate the system. Recently, I was approached by a couple from Doreen, telling me that Centrelink assessed they owed $4,000 for a period in which the husband was briefly unemployed—working on a casual and part-time basis between 2011 and 2012. This couple were shocked because not only were they struggling to support their family but also they were sure they had diligently reported all their earnings to Centrelink's requirements. These people, despite the minister's assertion, were neither ignorant nor careless. Like many others, they felt lost because they knew it would not be easy to prove their earnings from a casual job over five years ago. And of course, Centrelink did not stop there. No, they added a recovery fee to their debts, which was another layer of insult and financial injury. The couple contacted Centrelink a few times, and got conflicting answers about where their debt stood.

It is concerning that this mismanagement of documentation under this government and Centrelink is so negatively impacting the constituents in my electorate and many others around Australia. The couple was considered guilty until they proved their innocence. It is demoralising and it is inexcusable. Centrelink forced them into a repayment plan and the couple told me that Centrelink's actions had caused a lot of unnecessary strain—on a family just trying to survive.

There are many people in McEwen who are being forced to pay unnecessary debts like this all the time. And it is not just the financial stress it is the emotional stress and the pain that they feel when they are being treated like criminals for something they have not done. It is an exact failure of this government and this government's ability to manage an economy and to manage a welfare system.

Some say that 20 per cent of these debts identified in the Centrelink data-matching system are wrong. That is 20 per cent. But who knows what the figure actually is. Even The Age's economics editor, Peter Martin, suggests the rate of mistakes in the initial letters could be as high as 90 per cent. Where is the government's apology on this? The system is flawed, yet the government has done nothing as usual.

Prime Minister Turnbull's former digital transformation chief, Paul Shelter, said that if Centrelink were a commercial company with a 20 percent failure rate it would be out of business. So why, exactly, are we expected to sit around and accept this abject failure? This is dealing with peoples' finances. It is dealing with people's budgets. It is jeopardising their mental health, their family relationships and their ability to stay afloat. It is unacceptable. These are law-abiding citizens paying debts that they do not owe, because they trust the government—which, as we have learnt, is a bad thing to do—because Centrelink's bureaucracy is too much to deal with and because, sometimes, the necessary records get lost in the system.

We have seen whistleblowers reveal the truth that the government is constantly trying to hide. We have been told that Centrelink staff are being ordered not to use records in Centrelink's possession to change the debt notices. We are told that Centrelink staff reviewed hundreds of debt notices and only found a few dozen were correct. We are also told that Centrelink staff were advised to only lightly assess the debt conclusions, letting most of them get through. What kind of system is this?

This government is trying to make money by scaring and harassing the people who can least afford it, and forcing the people of Australia to pay ridiculous debts that do not exist. Tell me, did the government also contact IBM to set up the robo-debt system? The whole mess seems pretty similar to the government's last debacle, which, of course, was the census. These kinds of avoidable mistakes have made constituents lose confidence in Centrelink to properly record and store the documentation they submit.

They have no confidence in getting timely service and attention, either in person or on the phone.

The Centrelink automated debt recovery system is, to put it simply, a catastrophe. The government is dragging innocent Australians into their absurd system, labelling them as fraudsters and expecting them to fork out thousands of dollars that they never owed. We are not going to stand by and let this havoc continue across my electorate. It is time the minister came out and apologised for his failings.