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

I take note of the answer by Senator Ruston to my question about robodebt and whether the government would now implement recommendation 1 of the 2017 Senate inquiry into the robodebt debacle, which basically said that robodebt should be put on hold until the procedural unfairness issues have been addressed. You would think, from listening to not only the answers from Senator Ruston but also some of the points made during take note, that there is nothing to look at here: 'Don't you worry about that. It was Labor's fault. They were doing something a while ago. But don't forget: there's a whole lot of money spent on welfare'—or what they say is welfare.

I'll just remind the chamber that, when the government talk about 'all of that money spent on welfare', they're talking about assistance to the aged—in other words, the age pension. They're talking about veterans and their dependents. They're talking about people with disabilities, and the NDIS. They're talking about the family tax benefit. The government imply that there are a whole lot of people cheating out there and we're spending a lot of money. But we are rightfully spending money on the people in our community that need it.

The government would have you think that there's no problem with robodebt. 'We've just made a slight change.' Well, they've actually fundamentally agreed now with recommendation 3 of the Senate inquiry, which specifically dealt with income averaging. Recommendation 3 said:

The committee recommends that all people who have had a debt amount determined through the use of income averaging should have their debt amounts re-assessed immediately …

Well, it's 2½ years later—2½ years of more and more Australians, thousands of Australians, who have had debts generated by income-averaging, because that, and reversing the onus of proof, is at the heart of robodebt. This system is fundamentally flawed. Would the government have told us, I wonder, and would Minister Robert have come out and done that short media conference last week, if there had not been leaked emails saying that the process had changed? Perhaps not. Perhaps we would not have found that out for some time. Fortunately, we did.

The government have a lot of unanswered questions. They said there are only a few affected. Well, that's nonsense. We know that income-averaging is at the heart of the robodebt fiasco. Instead of trying to change the name that we were using—that is, 'robodebt'—perhaps the government should have focused on making sure this system was fair and didn't hurt all those Australians who have been hurt. I have sat across the table from a large number of people who have been deeply distressed and traumatised. They felt stigmatised and humiliated that they had been accused of cheating. People were in tears because of the stress of robodebt. I have listened on the phone to people in tears because of the stress of robodebt. I have had innumerable phone calls into my office, because of robodebt, that my staff have handled.

But not only were the government not satisfied that for 2½ years they've been running this program when they must have known that its legality was questioned and that they were hurting people; they have continued to perpetrate this debacle on people. When I asked, 'Would the government apologise?' I did not get an answer. Will they apologise for the hurt and trauma that people are suffering? On top of their issuing of these hundreds of thousands of letters on robodebt, they have now started garnisheeing people's tax returns and family tax benefits for debts that people did not owe. The fact is that the government does not know how many people have been affected by income-averaging.

Will they compensate people for the trauma, distress and hurt they have caused? Will they repay all the money that people have already paid? How many supposed debts have people simply agreed to repay that they do not accept they owe but have just given up fighting with the government about, because Centrelink is so hard to deal with? They've managed to get the debt, perhaps, reduced a little bit, and they've just lost any ability to fight any further. This is a debacle, and it should stop.

Question agreed to.