Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to respond to this gross failure to actually tell the truth, to come clean and to give to Australians who had robodebt inflicted upon them access to the information they need about what the government knew and how they organised this terrible experience of public policy that has seen the government have to pay back to its own citizens $1.8 billion that it illegally charged them through robodebt. They sent you a bill you should never have received, and, if you didn't cough up without question, they chased you. They chased you and chased you.

I don ' t care what names the people on the other side of this chamber call me, because I ' m going to keep coming in here and raising this on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who had a debt inflicted on them by their own government. We have the minister claiming that hundreds of questions were answered by public servants. This government has claimed public interest immunity in those hearings over and over, and said it is against the public interest for them to know the truth about how Mr Morrison cooked up this scheme — how he oversaw it with Minister Robert, Minister Tudge and now Minister Reynolds . They are continuing to try to hide from the Australians what they did and how they decided to make this historic mistake. They refuse to provide that information . It ' s just not good enough. Going forward, this has got to be fixed.

We ' ve got Senator Reynolds coming in and saying : ' Oh, on this occasion, no, the government didn ' t give any response. When it was a Labor government, you didn ' t give a response. ' Let me give you a few back. In 2007, the then Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Kevin Andrews, released advice in relation to the power to cancel the visa of Dr Han ee f. So, b efore you try to convince people that you don ' t have to fess up and don ' t have to give these documents , because that has never been done, let ' s tell the truth here for a change, shall we? Of course governments hand it over if they have any integrity, and that ' s what Minister Andrews did. In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard advised the House of Representatives that she had made available to the Leader of the Opposition, who was then Mr Abbott, the advice of the Solicitor-General on asylum seekers and offshore processing. Yes, legal advice is handed over. Even Christian Porter handed over information about the eligibility of Mr Dutton. This claim that no documents about legal information get handed over ha s to be put to bed once and for all.

I ' ve got a feeling we ' re going to be back here debating this , because I can tell you I will not let this rest. I will not leave all those people who were attacked by their own government hanging in the wind with this litany of lies . The government come forward and they start talking all th is gobbledegook —legal professional privilege and public immunity claims—as if they can snow the Australian people under with this professional language. But the Australian people , especially those who were impacted by robodebt , are onto this government. They know what was said so clearly by one of our witnesses last week, who described what the Australian government had done to its own people as a shakedown. That ' s how they d escribed what happened to them.

We ' ve heard from amazing witnesses who told us that this problem is actually continuing. Ms Eagle came and spoke to the committee. She spoke about the problem that happened with robodebt continuing today, and that ' s why it ' s so important that we get these documents. The government cannot continue to hide behind the smokescreen that it ' s against the public interest to tell us how you got this so wrong. The public deserve to know. You should be coughing up these documents. You should not be able to again do to the Austr alian public what you did then.

Ms Eagle says this is how it rolls at the moment:

A client receives a call from a private number, perhaps on a Saturday, and they ' re told they need to make an arrangement to repay a Centrelink debt. This is the first contact they ' ve had. They ask what the debt is about. They ' re told they have to look on myGov or at the app. So the client checks, and there ' s no letter there that explains how the debt arose.

It goes on and on. The litany of failures and the abuse of artificial intelligence against human rights being perpetrated by this government on its own citizens continues. That is why the mistake of robodebt has not yet been acknowledged by this government. Despite the fact they paid $1.8 billion back, they still need to come in here and cough up the documents.

Question agreed to.