Former prime minister Scott Morrison was looking for budget cuts ahead of policy, and showed little empathy for welfare recipients in the process, the robodebt royal commission has been told.
Serena Wilson, former a deputy secretary to the Social Services Department, told the inquiry into the illegal scheme it was her recollection that the government rarely started policy discussions about the problems but rather focused on “finding cost savings”.
Asked on Thursday about Mr Morrison’s comments of being a “welfare cop”, she said the government “appeared to be looking for a problem”.
In December, Mr Morrison told the inquiry that he was focused on tackling welfare fraud and not privy to departmental discussions over the legality of the disastrous robodebt scheme. He said being the “welfare cop” was “one of my many responsibilities”.
“That’s how I colloquially described it often. I’m the son of a police officer,” he said.
In one email, Ms Wilson wrote: “They (the former government) had a strong view of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. In my opinion, there was little empathy for, or understanding of, those needs [of disadvantaged people] within the Coalition government and ministerial staff.”
Ms Wilson said this was exemplified in Coalition budgets between 2014 and 2018, where the vast majority of her work involved identifying savings options to cut social security expenditure.
She said the government held a “fairly pejorative view” of many people on welfare, particularly those on Newstart – now JobSeeker – or youth allowance who were receiving the payments due to being unemployed.
The commission has been told senior bureaucrats were aware of the potential illegality of the scheme but were either overruled by the people in charge of deciding the department’s policy or too scared to come forward.
Earlier, the Human Services Department’s former acting chief counsel Tim Ffrench said “the culture and environment at that time prevented people from asking the questions that they should have asked because of the fear that those questions would be seen as potentially impertinent”.
Both Mr Ffrench and Ms Wilson pointed to former Human Services Department secretary Malisa Golightly, who has since died.
Ms Wilson said she felt “intimidated and bullied” when she worked with Ms Golightly in a previous role.
But she said she had no reason not to take Ms Golightly’s assurances about the income averaging scheme.
“I didn’t believe she was a deliberately untruthful person,” Ms Wilson said.
She said she was “surprised” when Ms Golightly’s assurances that income averaging wasn’t being used were wrong.
Ms Wilson also denied deliberately looking the other way to palm off responsibility to other bureaucrats.
She said she failed to pick up income averaging was being used in a document – which she had marked by hand – that outlined more than 860,000 “likely incorrect payments” from tax file data between 2010 to 2013.
The income averaging method using tax office data was later ruled to be illegal. She said it wasn’t deliberately ignored.
“I regret that it slipped through,” she said.
Ms Wilson said she had been distracted by other tasks, as Commissioner Catherine Holmes said it looked like it was “right under your nose”.
“It wasn’t a ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ situation. We were an extremely stretched area of the organisation,” Ms Wilson said in response to the accusation she turned a blind eye.
She said the fact a lot of opportunities to raise concerns and act to stop a legally dubious program “falls very heavily on me”.
She said she had the impression former ministers Marise Payne and Mr Morrison were keen to progress the compliance program despite warnings that possible legislative change would have been needed.
Senator Payne will reappear before the commission next week, having previously given evidence in December.
Two other former ministers – Stuart Robert and Michael Keenan – will front hearings for the first time next week, while the chief of staff and a former policy adviser to another former minister, Alan Tudge, will also appear.
– with AAP
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