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

I rise to take note of the minister's response to the resolution of this place and the comments that she has just made in the chamber. I reject the basis on which the government are claiming public interest immunity. I put it that they're actually claiming government interest immunity, because this is about protecting the government and trying to make sure that the community does not get access to the information that the community affairs committee has, I will note, repeatedly asked for. I will remind this place, as I did yesterday—and, in fact, as Senator Pratt was just commenting on—that it has never been accepted by the Senate nor in any other comparable representative assembly that legal professional privilege provides grounds for a refusal of information in a parliamentary forum. What we have here is a system that illegally claimed debts from people who had received income support, and it made people pay $1.7 billion to the government. On top of refunding the $1.7 billion to all those hundreds of thousands of people that were affected deeply by this scheme, the government also had to pay $112 million to cover interest. That's not compensation. That's just paying back the debts. But nobody could ever, I would argue, fully repay and compensate the people that were affected by this scheme, because it caused untold damage.

What this government is saying is that other people who weren't covered by the class action may in the future want to bring action against the government. The government wants to protect itself against Australians who consider that their debt was also raised illegally. That's what the government is saying here. The sorts of things that we are asking about I don't think are unreasonable. Did the government get legal advice? If it did, when did it get it? Who provided it? As I said, I don't think that these requests are unreasonable.

As we know, this Senate inquiry is ongoing. We had a hearing on 19 August and we had Mr Grech from Gordon Legal, as mentioned yesterday, present evidence to us, and he made a number of observations when I asked about the ongoing case and issues around the claim of public interest immunity. Mr Grech went through a number of these specific issues and that the court upheld the government's claim of public interest immunity. But that is not how I understood the evidence that Mr Grech gave us yesterday. He said that some documents, the judge agreed, were covered by public interest immunity but others were not. He said in answers to questions from me:

Having said that, I must say that one of the concerns we had throughout the conduct of the proceeding was what we considered to be the Commonwealth making quite spurious claims of legal professional privilege and parliamentary privilege in respect of documents. The record will show that there were very extensive court processes involved in persuading, and at times it required judges to make orders to coerce the Commonwealth to abandon some of the claims it made. I think it is a quite concerning feature, increasingly, of the way the Commonwealth litigates disputes—that it tends to claim both legal professional privilege and parliamentary privilege over a very, very wide array of documents.

He then went on to say, amongst other things:

… there is a deep concern that we have—and I know it's been expressed in academic circles as well—of how those privileges are being abused.

He went on:

When governments abuse those privileges, it brings the whole system into disrepute and creates an enormous undermining of public confidence in the way our governments operate and, in particular, in the relationship between our public servants and the government.

I support very strongly what Mr Grech said during this inquiry. We expect the government to be model litigants. Mr Grech elsewhere talked about the fact that that's what the government should in fact be, and yet they are claiming in this case parliamentary privilege over a very, very wide array of documents. He said, I reiterate, that it creates an enormous undermining of public confidence.

The government has already undermined confidence in it and the way it operates our social security system by the very fact that robodebt happened in the first place. It caused such distress. The government further undermined confidence in governments by the fact that they now seek to hide it, because that is what they are doing. Let's make no bones about it. They are seeking, repeatedly, to hide very, very important details about this whole sorry saga. Unless we actually identify what went wrong, the Australian community has no guarantee that this sort of thing will not happen again. Saying you're sorry, which is sort of what happened with robodebt—there was a sort of sorry—should mean that you mean it and that it won't happen again. As I just said, we have no guarantee that this won't happen again if the government doesn't come clean.

By seeking to perpetually claim public interest immunity, the government build further the case for a royal commission on this issue. I can tell you that all the people who contact me about robodebt express complete lack of confidence in the government and the way they handled robodebt. These people continue to feel upset that they were hounded—with debt collectors at the door in some instances, or on the phone, making them feel intimidated, scared, like they'd done something wrong. I had pensioners crying in the hearing—literally with tears streaming down their face—unable to speak because they were so choked up because they thought that the government and the community thought they had stolen money, thought they had cheated the Commonwealth, and they had done no such thing. That causes deep psychological distress.

We don't want to see that happening again in this country, but we are at risk of seeing that happen again if this government continues to hide behind public interest immunity. I hope that this place will continue to try and hold this government to account, to get access to this information, information that the Australians affected by this deserve to know. I urge the government to reconsider and not just—with all due respect—cut and paste, yet again, their excuses for not presenting the information that the committee is after. We are after whether legal advice was sought, whether the advice was provided internally or externally and the dates when the legal advice was sought and provided. The minister has not articulated how the release of this information could possibly prejudice ongoing court proceedings.

Senator O'Neill interjecting—

Exactly, Senator O'Neill. You just claim it; you don't explain it. It's not good enough for our community. We expect better, particularly in the face of how outrageous this robodebt scheme was.