Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Chair of the Community Affairs References Committee, I present the report on the better management of the social welfare system initiative, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and the documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This is of course the report of the inquiry into what is commonly known as the Centrelink robo-debt debacle. Officially, it is called the Online Compliance Intervention program. This report makes 21 recommendations, which I will come to in a minute. But I want to start with a quote from Ms Kym Goodes, who is the chief executive of the Tasmanian Council of Social Service. She says:

The question that we ask the committee to consider in its deliberations is: where is good government, good decision- making and leadership when a system is failing? Where is the leadership that is bold enough to say: 'We got this wrong. We will pull it back. We will rework it. We will review it. We will talk to the stakeholders, who know best, to try and get it right.' Where is good government in understanding and taking seriously its duty of care to its citizens to protect the most vulnerable and not cause vulnerability or harm to its own citizens?

That is an extremely good question. We have heard many experiences of people who have suffered under this process. Our conclusions and recommendations find that there is a key flaw of this program—it filtered through the whole process and continues to—and that is a fundamental lack of procedural fairness. That is evident in the fact that there was a lack of consultation in this program. They did not consult the stakeholders and the very people who will be affected and were subsequently affected. They did not do a proper testing phase. They did not do a risk assessment of the impact. Why did they not think that sending out hundreds and thousands of incorrect letters would not have an impact on some of the most vulnerable members of our community. They did not even consider that they should not send all those thousands of debts to debt collectors when the letters came back addressed to the wrong address. They did not bother to find out the correct addresses—and 6,600 debts went to the debt collectors because of that. There was a lack of fundamental fairness and procedural fairness in the fact that they automatically charged a 10 per cent recovery fee. The program goes back six years, but on the portal it says that you are to keep your documentation for at least six months. That, when it was pointed out, was very quickly taken off the portal.

The committee's first recommendation is that the Online Compliance Intervention program should be put on hold until all procedural fairness flaws are addressed and the other recommendations of this report are implemented. If these issues are addressed, the OCI should only be continued in its new form after the new one-touch payroll system is implemented in 2018—in other words, those debts are able to be checked through the online payment system, so they have those employment details.

The lack of procedural fairness, of course, continued in the averaging of people's incomes. The government knew full well, when it was sending out these letters, that many of them were in error because they did not have from the ATO the employment details and periods for people. So what do they do? They average it and take out human oversight. This is absolutely critical—human oversight was taken out.

The committee strongly recommends that the rollout of a redesigned system must include a robust risk assessment process which includes consultation with expert stakeholders. We further recommend that all people who have had a debt amount determined through the use of income averaging should have their debt amounts reassessed immediately by a team of departmental officers with specialist knowledge of the OCI program using accurate income data sourced from employers. This reassessment must include the full range of unpaid, partially paid and fully paid debts incurred by the current income payment recipients and those debts outsourced to debt collection agencies.

There were so many flaws in this program that I cannot go through them all in the time I have available. I would like to read out a quote from somebody who gave us evidence. I should say that there were a number of people who were put off giving evidence to us because of the government releasing their personal details. We had quotes from people—for example, from the Victorian Council of Social Service, who said they were going to have a person come but they were not even allowed to mention this person's case because they were so scared that they may get retribution from the government, such as the release of personal details. We make recommendations about that. The government should not be releasing people's personal details. I would like to quote somebody who spoke to us during the inquiry and said:

That figure of my debt of $3,154.11 was remarkably precise, but if there was any kind of detailed computation behind it I have never seen it. I have even pulled an FOI on my case and I cannot make head or tail of how that figure was arrived at. They came up with this figure, but they provided no accounting for it and they provided no explanation, initially, as to how it arose. They just said, 'Here's your debt; pay it or prove you don't owe it.'

Some people only found out about their debt when their income support payment started getting garnished for repayments. Then they found out that they supposedly had a debt. Some people started paying the debt because they rather naively believed that the government must have it right. So they did not question the debts—they just started paying them. We do not know how many of those people out there, but I urge anybody who is caught up with this system to ask for a reassessment. That was another one of the problems: people did not know their rights. They did not know that they could ask for a reassessment and more formal review and go through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

People spoke of their intense emotional distress—how they felt like they were being called frauds and cheats. I cannot tell you how much that distressed people. Again, there was such a lack of procedural fairness that has resulted in these peoples feeling this deep emotional stress and trauma. You are talking about very vulnerable Australians. This made their situations worse. One witness said that it has actually put him off trying to find work because he is so scared that he is going to make another mistake and be put through the trauma of having to prove that he does not owe a debt.

As I said, there are 21 recommendations. Some of those, as I said, relate to the recommendation that this should be put on hold, looking at reassessment of the debts, looking at the fact that the government should be practising best practice. They certainly did not do that through this process.

Before I conclude, I want to thank all the witnesses. I know that going through it again deeply affected many of the witnesses who appeared before us. I want to thank them for their evidence. I want to thank all those people who put in submissions; we received many. And we received many short emails. I want to say to those people: 'We did note them. We understand your distress and we hope this report helps deal with this issue.'

I want to thank our committee secretariat who once again went above and beyond. Honestly, they have pulled some really late nights—and weekend work. They have really done a sterling job. I cannot thank them enough. I would also like to thank my colleagues for the work and effort they have put in, in going to all the hearings. It was deeply moving to hear people's evidence. I think the whole of our committee would agree with that. I commend this report to the Senate and I urge the government to implement the recommendations—21 of them. Please get on with it: tomorrow.