Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Families and Social Services (Senator Ruston) to a question without notice asked by Senator Kitching today relating to the Income Compliance Programme.

I just want to say at the outset that Senator Ruston said that we were on a unity ticket with this government in this space. That is not entirely correct. I suppose she is correct in that no working Australian, no taxpayer, wants anybody to be availing themselves of the welfare system incorrectly or inappropriately. But what has happened in this space is really instructive. There have been two Senate inquiries that have made recommendations in this space: one that Senator Siewert alluded to and one that Senator Kitching alluded to. But I am going to put on the record what the Commonwealth Ombudsman said. The Commonwealth Ombudsman said, 'In the first iteration of the income compliance program, deliberate emphasis was placed on customers providing information, not the department seeking information from employers.' So the system changed.

The system was quite simple. If there was an aberration in the figures, people would be asked to provide information. If they did not provide the information, their employer would be asked to provide the information, and that information would come back to the department. The department would look at the two sets of information, decide whether there was a debt to be raised or not, and, if there was, they would action it. What has happened, clearly, is that a new system has come into place.

The new system started with an interim rollout of a new compliance approach from 1 July 2015. DHS identified 100,000 discrepancy cases for manual assessment. However, this process differed from the previous process in several ways. The first is that it placed greater emphasis on the obligation of customers to provide DHS with current and accurate information about their circumstances, including changes to earnings, and DHS staff would no longer seek this information from employers for the purpose of calculating a debt. So it put all the emphasis on the customer.

I'm sure that there are people on Newstart or welfare payments who keep impeccable records, but I'm also very sure that there are some people in unfortunate circumstances and getting a Newstart payment or a welfare payment who have no records—who have no idea—and who, when confronted with a formal notice from a government department, go into panic mode. They have no idea what to do and, in a lot of cases, they do nothing at all, so the debt is then automatically generated.

This system has been challenged by two Senate committees, and the Commonwealth Ombudsman has made relevant and pertinent observations. Placing the onus on people right down the system, recipients of welfare payments, to prove they don't have a debt could well be not the legal way that this country should operate, and it may be that there are legal moves—outside the parliament, clearly—which have changed the minister's mind. The government will make no apology for it. It was driven off a desire to build their surplus from wherever they could. They just did a robodebt calculation and sent it out.

The intriguing thing for me is: if this robodebt system is so good, why don't they use it to collect superannuation from recalcitrant employers? Why don't they use it to prevent wage theft? The taxation department is getting its 32c, its 18c or its 47c. They know what wages should be paid or what isn't being paid. Why is this robodebt collection model designed to focus on the least able to pay and the most vulnerable people in our community? The answer is: it's what's they do. That's what makes that lot over there different from this lot over here.

We on this side don't set out to have a punitive regime, going down to the most vulnerable in the community, ticking over debt and sending them a notice, knowing full well that they'd have no records. There wouldn't be too many people who've been on Newstart or a welfare payment who would keep seven years of payroll records just on the off chance that Centrelink is going to ask them for a bit of evidence about how much they got. They rely on the system working. The ATO feeds the information to DHS. DHS saw an opportunity to up their revenue collection by—what was it?—two-point-something billion dollars. They are extremely harsh against people who are vulnerable. (Time expired)