Scott Morrison apologises for 'hurt or harm' caused by robodebt rollout.

Extract from The Guardian

Centrelink debt recovery

Prime minister regrets ‘any hardship’ but government services minister says debt collection will resume after Covid-19

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Thu 11 Jun 2020 18.01 AEST Last modified on Thu 11 Jun 2020 18.02 AEST

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the government services minister, Stuart Robert. The PM has apologised for ‘hurt or harm’ caused by robodebt but Robert says it will resume after the pandemic. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Scott Morrison has apologised for any “hurt or harm” caused by the way the Coalition rolled out the controversial robodebt scheme, but the government services minister, Stuart Robert, has flagged regular debt collection will resume on the other side of the Covid-19 crisis.
In response to a series of questions from Labor about whether the government took responsibility for rolling out an unlawful scheme, and whether it intended to apologise to the people affected, the prime minister told parliament he deeply regretted “any hardship that has been caused to people in the conduct of that activity”.
“I would apologise for any hurt or harm in the way that the government has dealt with that issue,” he said.
Years after vowing to recoup at least $3bn from welfare recipients and doggedly defending robodebt’s legality, the government in late May agreed to pay back hundreds of thousands of people who were hit with unlawful and incorrect Centrelink debts over a four-year period as a consequence of the botched scheme.

Guardian Australia reported this week the true value of all welfare debts unlawfully issued is expected to easily exceed $1bn.
The scheme unravelled after it was challenged in court actions in 2019, but the government was warned about its shaky legal foundations as early as 2017 when a senior member of the administrative appeals tribunal ruled five times that debts raised under the scheme were unlawful.
An ombudsman’s report in 2017 on the rollout of the automated debt recovery service also identified multiple failures that placed unreasonable burdens on welfare recipients and staff.
The government faces a class action brought by Gordon Legal, which is also seeking interest and damages on behalf of claimants. Last week Gordon Legal senior partner, Peter Gordon, called on the government to apologise, and has given an undertaking not to use any expression of regret in the court proceedings.
“We are prepared as the lawyers acting for the applicants and the group members to not use the fact of an apology in court if the government is willing to give a proper and genuine apology,” he said.
During question time on Thursday, the opposition spokesman on government services, Bill Shorten, invoked a case study of “cancer-suffering grandfather Raymond” who had to sell his house and move into his shed to afford medical treatment. Shorten said Raymond had said debt collectors “ripped him to shreds over a $2,300 robodebt while he was in hospital”.

While expressing regret for any distress caused by the rollout of the scheme, Morrison said: “The business of raising and recovering debts on behalf of taxpayers is a difficult job and it deals with Australians in many very sensitive circumstances.”
His instruction to government agencies was to be “sensitive to people’s circumstances”. He said where there were lessons to be learned from the botched scheme, “they will be learned”.
Robert said the collection of debts was “a lawful responsibility of all governments” and 939,000 Australians had debts adding up to $5bn “that the government lawfully has to collect across a whole range of programs”.

“The government has paused all debt collection across all programs as we work our way through the Covid-19 crisis,” he said. “But the government will have to restart that debt collection and will do it sensibly and do it engaging all people, do it in a very transparent manner.”