Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister representing the Prime Minister (Senator Cormann) and the Minister representing the Minister for Government Services (Senator Ruston) to the questions without notice asked by Senators Keneally, Kitching and Wong today.

We have seen the parlous state of this government's morals on display today and ever since this scandalous robodebt was put in place back in 2016. There has been no regret or apology from the government about this issue until today, and there is still none from the finance minister, or from Senator Ruston, who has had to oversee this program. Every inch of the way in this place, time and time again, this government came in and tried to justify income averaging of ATO data and comparing that to the details that people properly reported to Centrelink as a justifiable way of issuing and raising debt notices.

Hundreds of thousands of these debt notices have been sent, and I, like many others—and I'm sure it happened to those opposite as well—have had people in tears calling our offices about these debt notices. People have been demonstrating profound mental health impacts because of these debt notices. And what did I hear back from the government? 'Well, if you don't owe a debt, you've got nothing to worry about.' But that was far from the case. The onus of proving you didn't owe a debt was on you. That is a breach of any debt policy and any debt law around this country. Debt collectors aren't supposed to be able to come after you unless they've got legitimate proof that a debt is owed.

This government had no legitimate proof that these debts were owed. Why? It is because they calculated these debts on a completely spurious basis. Senator Cormann said, 'Oh, well, the opposition, when in government, used to use ATO information to issue debt notices.' And, indeed, we did. But we had a pair of eyes—human engagement—to work out whether the debt was valid or not and whether it had been properly calculated. Even then, people had a proper process where they could have explained to them how their debt was calculated.

I have sat on the phone with Centrelink officials, asking them, 'How did you calculate this person's debt?' and they have refused to say how they had done it. They simply refused to say how they had calculated someone's debt. They refused to say, 'Actually, what we've done here is average out how much they earned in that financial year and used it to calculate whether we think, by averaging that out, they would have been eligible for income support over that time.'

The simple fact is that someone is entirely entitled to income support. Say, for example, that in the first half of the year you're working from July to October, that you have a reasonably well-paid job, and that then you lose your job. Maybe you get a little bit of casual work after that. Then, for the rest of the financial year, you're on income support. Centrelink took that money which you earned in the first half of the financial year, averaged it out and then said, 'We think you might have been claiming payments and we think you've got a debt.' No, it wasn't that they thought you'd been claiming payments; they said: 'Here is your debt notice. Here is the notice that says that you owe us money because you claimed payments from us improperly. And, if you think otherwise, please bring us your payslips and your bank statements and prove it to us that you don't owe the government money.'

This is spurious and outrageous, and it is absolutely incredible to me that it has taken until 2020, when this bad behaviour started back in 2016, for this government to be properly called out on it. And it took the courts to do it, not the blatant unfairness, not the complete lack of morals and not the mental health impacts of this policy on people. No! We had to have the issue go to court. (Time expired)