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

I'm very mindful in this time in making my first substantive contribution about matters topical that's provided in this forum to acknowledge the COVID crisis and how that's changed how business has been operating here in the parliament and how people want consensus and not division. But I want to assure the Australian people, hundreds of thousands of them, who received a robodebt, that I will not be silent on their plight: robodebt is an egregious breach of trust between the Australian people and this government, and it is an unforgiveable act by an Australian government.

The government want to sweep the issue under the rug for a while, and the issue is that they unlawfully established debts that they sent out to the people of Australia. At the very end of Friday, 29 May, Minister Stuart Robert announced an end to this program of taking money from Australians raised by debts that were the result of averaging by the ATO. He finally came out, after denying and hiding and denying and hiding for many, many months the fact that he'd sent hundreds of thousands of Australians erroneous debts, and admitted it. But there was no apology, there was no admission of guilt and there was no acknowledgement that what this Liberal-Nationals government that has been governing this country for seven years had done was wrong—no grief, no apology, no sorrow.

I want to make clear who should bear the blame for the design and the implementation of this unlawful attack on the Australian people by its own government. There are three key players: Mr Morrison, Mr Porter and Mr Stuart Robert. It is indeed the Prime Minister—who was the Treasurer, scraping for dollars in his budget management—who, absolutely without care for the people he was targeting, in 2016 announced the robodebt scheme. There have been iterations of it since, but the architect who made the announcement—the man who went after Australians' money illegally—was Mr Morrison; he started it all off. If you've got a robodebt—and there are hundreds of thousands of Australians out there—please remember: it's Mr Morrison who set that system up and sent you that debt notice.

And the Attorney-General, Mr Christian Porter, was absolutely intimately involved in the design of the scheme. He is now the first law officer of the land—the Attorney-General for Australia. He should have been seeking, at the time, legal advice about what they were proposing to do to change the way in which they were to account for Australians receiving short-term support, and they changed it in such a way that did not allow for any human oversight. The current minister, Stuart Robert, has shown all the promotional qualities that the government relies on. He has been able to deflect blame. He has been able to deny responsibility. In fact, he became a master of it with regard to the failure of the Centrelink computer system. At least he said sorry for that, in a sort of perverse way, when he agreed it was 'his bad'—'My bad', he said—when he attributed the failure of the Centrelink system to a cyberattack, when in fact the failure was a failure of himself, as the minister, and his own department to prepare for the scale of need amongst Australians.

But that's what you get from these three men, Mr Morrison, Mr Porter and Mr Stuart Robert: a set of choices characterised by arrogance and greed. This government could have pursued multinational tax avoiders. They could have pursued those who had capacity to pay. But instead they made a choice and announced in 2016 that they would hound and kick down the doors of the most vulnerable in our community, and they unleashed debt notices for thousands and thousands of dollars, with private debt collectors chasing them up, driving people into despair and in some cases driving them to a point where they could no longer bear the burden of the attacks from their own government. In the very sad case of Rhys Cauzzo that was reported over the weekend, his mother had these words to say about the government:

They need to apologise. Not just for the likes of myself - and obviously many more families in that situation - but for people that have had to put their life on hold to try and scrape back thousands of dollars.

It wasn't right and they knew that in the beginning.

Apologise so that we can move forward, but don't think you are going to get out of anything.

That is the voice of a mother who buried her son because he could no longer withstand the hounding of this government, who sent him an illegal debt notice—a government that knew this in September, a government that denied it, a government that refused to answer questions at Senate estimates and in hearings of the Community Affairs References Committee. This government is in denial about what they have done to this country, and it is a great shame. It is a telling indictment.

So, where are we now? According to evidence on the public record, we've got more than 470,000 unlawful debt notices from the government, who supposedly are going to receive $¾ billion in repayments. But that's not going to happen straightaway, even though the government knew this was going on. They're delaying the return of that money, which should never have been taken from Australians, until July. Here we are in the worst economic crisis that living Australians have experienced and the government, who took money unlawfully from those Australian citizens, refuse to return it in a timely way, having denied and denied and denied that they were doing the wrong thing. For years they denied it under questioning.

The things that concern me are that the numbers that the government throws around are so bad and their practices with regard to robodebt so unconscionable that I'm not even sure that that's the correct number. Is it 470,000 or is it 740,000? This is the government that lost $60 billion just a couple of weeks ago. They're not really good at the numbers. What they're good at is creating false debts, hounding and pursuing Australian citizens literally to their death or demise. This is a stain on the nation, led off by Mr Morrison and Mr Porter and backed in at every opportunity by Minister Stuart Robert.

We know that the government has only come to this point of public acknowledgement of failure because the matter is to be debated in the Supreme Court. In some perverted effort to try to contain any further information coming to public light, this government is attempting keep their ministers out of the witness box. The robodebt scheme always was and is to this day indefensible. It cannot stand up to legal scrutiny. The government have sought in estimates hearings to use public interest immunity, to say it is against the interest of the Australian people, for them to tell the truth. They hid behind that. The level of obfuscation that's going on is just a disgrace.

The Attorney-General, Christian Porter, says that robodebt was legally insufficient, but it wasn't legally insufficient for him when he was the Minister for Social Services and used that scheme to hound Australians into poverty. How can you be the nation's top legal officer when you are actually an architect of an unlawful scheme that allowed theft to run under your nose for years and years? In some perverse use of language, the three efforts that this government made to change some of the most egregious parts of the robodebt scheme they simply called 'refinements'—refinements! All they were doing was creating sharper tools to torture the Australian people.

As hundreds of thousands of Australians were forced to seek jobseeker during this unprecedented economic crisis, they did so in good faith that the government was there to support them. The last thing they want as they struggle to get back into the job market and struggle to keep their lives together is to be further harassed and victimised over bogus debts. The scheme was unlawful, it remains unlawful now and news on 2 June that the government intends to consider bringing in legislation to re-establish the veracity of their disgraceful robodebt program is an absolute embarrassment. Australians need support from this government, not the continuation of the practices that the government have so egregiously inflicted on the nation through the robodebt scheme.