Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[Appearing via video link] I want to speak about the ministers' completely underwhelming response to questions about robodebt today. We all know that robodebt has been an unparalleled disaster. It was illegal and it was executed atrociously. Hundreds of thousands of Australians had to go through the unnecessary stress and heartache of disproving their liability for debts that they didn't even owe, and while governments have previously matched ATO data with Centrelink data, this government automated it, taking out the human oversight element and moving from 20,000 cases a year to 20,000 cases a week.

I'm a member of the Community Affairs References Committee. We've handed down Centrelink's compliance program: Third interim report on robodebt, as it's known. We heard evidence and read submissions from witnesses whose lives were completely devastated by this program. Let's remember that the government's intent was to rip hundreds of millions of dollars out of the pockets of people who have been on extremely low incomes. They wanted to do everything they could in the hope of getting cash for their fantasy surplus, no matter how dubious the methods were. Instead, they've now been ordered to drop the debts, to repay discredited debts which were already paid and to pay millions in compensation and legal fees. This has resulted in a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars in government legal and administrative costs.

Robodebt was illegal; it was against the law—there are no ifs, buts or maybes about it. It wasn't just 'legally insufficient', as a government official tried to tell me in a hearing into robodebt, it was plain illegal, and the government's explanations today just weren't good enough. People were treated as cheats and debtors by their government. In fact, 430,000 people were treated like this—430,000 people repaid the government when they didn't owe them a cent. This is money that they usually use to pay for rent, electricity, food and other daily basic living expenses. These people went through enormous stress and suffering. People died; people committed suicide. Lives were ruined by this program and now, today, in question time, the government were warning us about speaking about it with a sense of respect. Well, it's a shame they didn't have that same sense of respect when they were harassing people.

We all know whose brainchild robodebt was and who the Treasurer was who announced it and who the Prime Minister now is who didn't stop the implementation of his own botched policy. Yes, it was Mr Morrison in all three positions and that probably explains why we can't find out what the government knew and when they knew it. Personally, I think there's a fair bit of protecting your own backside going on on that side of the chamber, and maybe in the Prime Minister's office too.

This should never have happened. It shouldn't have taken a class action on behalf of thousands of people to rectify the mistakes of this government. The government dragged their feet on the class action for months and have spent years trying to defend the program, even though they were warned 76 times over the years about their actions. What I really don't understand is why the government had to get to the point of settlement instead of listening to the victims concerned. I'll say it again: this must never be allowed to happen again. The government settled on the cusp of the trial without admitting any liability, but obviously knowing they were wrong. The Australian people really need and deserve to know who was responsible. We need to determine how it happened that ministers of the government either knew that the law was being broken and did nothing about it, or never bothered to find out if the law had been broken in the first place. We need to discover how we got into this situation with senior public servants authorising a scheme which was illegal, because if we don't do that, if we don't find out how this disaster occurred, how can we ensure that it won't happen again?

Labor will continue to push for a royal commission into robodebt. It's the only appropriate outcome. The government unjustly enriched itself with $720 million-plus of people's money. It did so at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs and legal fees, before having to hand all the funds it raised back and pay compensation. This process, this policy and this program were incompetence at the highest level. Australian taxpayers and robodebt victims deserve an explanation for this— (Time expired)