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

I stand here today with a simple plea to those opposite: kill robo-debt. Burn it to the ground and scatter its ashes to the wind. Robo-debt is a program that has no place in civilised society. It is a racket. It is a criminal undertaking that would make a Mafioso weep with envy. Robo-debt steals money from people. It coerces Australians into handing over money they do not owe and which, in too many cases, they can ill afford to lose. Robo-debt is government-sponsored, government-authorised theft. It is theft of the worst kind—it takes from those who have the least to give.

The intentions behind robo-debt may have been simple enough: to issue demands of repayment of moneys that should not have been paid in the first place. It's a fair enough proposition. Few would dispute that people should be pursued to repay moneys they were not entitled to. But the implementation of this scheme has been flawed. At the heart of that flaw is an imprecise algorithm which demands repayment of moneys despite little evidence the money is actually owed. Too many people who've received income support have been told to repay money they have been perfectly entitled to receive. Many have repaid the money upon receiving the government's demand, believing, not unreasonably, that government, with all the resources at its disposal, would surely know better than them what they do or do not owe. But, no—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 16:14 to 16:31

But, no, this government has proven itself too lazy, too inept or too scheming to ensure that, before generating hundreds of thousands of letters of demand, people actually owe the money being demanded of them. Tens of thousands of Australians with the courage to dispute the demand have been vindicated. For many it's been a time-consuming and expensive process. It turns out the algorithm that estimated their repayment compared data apples with data oranges to come up with a data pumpkin. Unbelievably, despite the flaw having been proven, the government simply continues with this scam, this fraud against the Australian people, because it's a nice little earner. This government continues to call in the bullying debt collectors and takes Australians to court to demand repayments only to back off when it comes to the crunch because it knows it's on shaky ground. The stories are shocking and heart-rending, and I encourage members to visit the website and Twitter handle @not_my_debt, which has done a terrific job highlighting the human wreckage of this policy disaster. There's no limit to the depravity of this policy. It needs to end and it needs to end now.