Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question as to the Prime Minister. The Albanese government has fulfilled its election commitment to establish a royal commission into robodebt. How many people were hit with unlawful debt notices as part of the scheme? And what toll did robodebt have on Australians?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Newcastle for her question and for her very strong advocacy, including on this issue. You do measure a society by how it treats its most vulnerable and robodebt was a cruel failure of this fundamental test because of trauma and fear. In the name of the Australian government, 443,000 people were falsely accused of owing the government money. Australians were hounded and harassed over debts that did not exist. At the height of the scheme, the member for Aston, who was human services minister, said:

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

What we know is that at the very time the government knew that it was illegal and unlawful, in black and white.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Aston is warned.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think about people like Tony, who lived in my electorate at the time. Tony had cancer twice in two years. The second time, he received support from Centrelink while he went through chemotherapy, once his sick leave ran out, for a period of time. He is an honest man but he was dealing with these life-changing health issues. He was in his 20s. He made a full recovery and went back to work as soon as he could, because that's the kind of fellow he is. But five or six years later, he started getting these aggressive letters accusing him of owing nearly $5,000. For Tony, it wasn't just the stress of finding the money—he'd done it so tough—it was the suggestion that had lied and taken money as if he hadn't been sick, when he had been undertaking chemotherapy and had gone through the trauma that having cancer in your 20s will bring. But that's what happens when you take humans out of human services, which is what those opposite did: human services stripped of humanity, social services without social conscience. We are, through the robodebt royal commission, trying to get to the bottom of this to make sure that it can never happen again. We do need to have answers to this. The robodebt royal commission is playing a critical role in exposing the events that led to such trauma for hundreds of thousands of Australians. We owe it to them, including those who aren't around anymore, to get to the bottom of these facts.