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

Tonight I wish to discuss robodebt. I take the advice from before about not coming to conclusions given the royal commission is underway, but I think it is important that we look at some of the history of this in this place. Back on 13 February 2017, I moved a motion in the House calling on the government to basically come clean and condemning the then Minister for Human Services for his failure to respond to growing community concern and calling on the then Prime Minister to intervene to halt the system and fix it before age pensioners and those with disabilities were also terrorised with a debt they might not owe. That was in 2017, five years ago. I said to the House:

This has been like one of those mail scams where thousands of fake invoices are mailed out or emailed and, if even just a handful of people pay up without checking whether they are real, it nets a tidy profit for the scammers.

A Senate inquiry, initiated by Labor, then went on to look into the issue, and I'm pleased to say we now have a royal commission initiated to look into the who, why, where, when and how of this disgraceful scheme that is a stain on this nation's character.

You don't need the conclusion of a royal commission—because there's been a $1.8 billion settlement—to know that many thousands of Australians have been adversely affected by this. Of course, we'll wait for the findings of the royal commission before we go further on that. But the royal commission has been conducting public hearings over recent weeks. It's been absolutely gut-wrenching to watch it and to listen to the evidence. Finally, we may get to the bottom of how this was perpetrated on the Australian people.

We already know that the scheme unlawfully claimed almost $2 billion in payments from 433,000 people, many of them low-income Australians who had no capacity to pay. Imagine getting a notice in the mail, saying, 'You owe the Australian government money and you must pay it back,' and you know you don't owe it but you just have no facility to challenge it. People paid up because people trusted the government to get it right. They trusted the government, and their own government was stealing from them. It was absolutely disgraceful.

A report from the Ombudsman and two separate Senate inquiries reached the same conclusion. Time and again, it was found there was a lack of fairness with the calculation of debt, that the scheme targeted vulnerable people and that it was causing widespread harm.

In 20 November 2020, the former government agreed to settle a class action lawsuit out of court and the following year a final settlement of $1.8 billion was approved by Justice Bernard Murphy, who described the program as a 'shameful chapter' in Australia's social security history. Shameful, indeed. The former government had the audacity to send debt notices to innocent Australians for money they did not owe, stealing the money of their own citizens, some of them the most vulnerable citizens in the country. Imagine the shock, anxiety and trauma caused by receiving a debt notice from the Commonwealth, with all the power and symbolism of the Commonwealth, with that crest on it, for thousands of dollars for a debt you do not owe, cannot repay and have no way of disproving. It was absolutely heartless, and the tragic outcomes are well documented.

There's been evidence to the royal commission that one young man, Rhys Cauzzo, took his life aged 28 after reportedly being told he owed $18,000 and being contacted by an external debt collection agency. There was a second case of a woman being sent a robodebt letter even though inquiries later showed—I'm getting this report from the Guardian newspaper—there was no possibility she could have owed a debt to the government. The commission was told that, under the robodebt scheme's processes, a woman may have been required to seek pay information from the same employer where she had been bullied. A loved one subsequently reported that she had taken her own life, attributing this in part to the stress caused by the letter. It is a shameful chapter in Australia's history. I urge anybody listening to this broadcast to check out Laura Tingle's piece on 3 February, which goes into detail about the sorts of actions that need to be taken to make sure this shameful thing can never happen again.

In the few seconds left, I draw the House's attention to the comments of members of this place. The member for Fairfax said in 2017 that robodebt was 'a normal, responsible process'. He's now on the opposition frontbench. The member for Banks said robodebt was 'appropriate and sensible'. He's also on the opposition frontbench. They should be held accountable for their comments and for their support for this disgraceful— (Time expired)