Dan Repacholi (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Could the Prime Minister please respond to the revelations in the final report of the royal commission into robodebt?

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

I think the member for Hunter for his question. The robodebt royal commission exposed a shocking abuse of trust, an illegal program that was used to crush vulnerable people, an illegal program used to attack the defenceless. This was not business as usual. Commissioner Holmes wrote on page 102:

The Commission rejects as untrue Mr Morrison's evidence that he was told that income averaging as contemplated … was an established practice and a "foundational way" in which DHS worked.

That is just a fact that was found by the royal commission.

Alarm bells were going off. Every member of parliament had people coming to their electorate office saying that they had these notices for debts that they didn't actually owe, and when representations were made to ministers, on every occasion that my office made a representation, the debt was either completely waived to zero or was waived substantially. Yet those people who were most vulnerable were those who were most likely not to have found their way to the electorate office of a member of parliament. They were grappling with fake debts and the trauma that came with that, trying to fight a system designed to keep them down. The royal commission's final report also stated:

… Robodebt's unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty became apparent. It should then have been abandoned or revised drastically …

It said:

Instead the path taken was to double down …

Since the royal commission was handed down, I've heard members of those opposite, people who had the honour of serving as ministers of the Crown, saying, 'As soon as we were alerted, we shut it down.' Not true; they doubled down. They didn't shut it down; they doubled down and continued to attack those people. Yesterday the member for Cook suggested there was only one victim of robodebt: him. So much self-pity, so little self-awareness. The Leader of the Opposition backed him in last night on 7.30. He's called the royal commission a witch-hunt, but he's got nothing to say about vulnerable people hounded for money they didn't owe or the fact some of them were driven to their deaths. His only sympathy is for Liberal MPs who created the scheme and doubled down on it even when the alarm bells were going off. The same ideology that leads the Liberal Party to oppose public housing for vulnerable people is what led them to this robodebt disaster.