Extract from ABC News
For nine weeks, a Brisbane hotel ballroom has been the stage of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.
But it's been no waltz for more than 100 witnesses, including two former prime ministers, sworn to tell the truth.
They were questioned forensically for hours – sometimes days – by King's Counsel and a former Queensland chief justice about one of the country's most egregious failures of public administration.
Public servants and politicians were taken through emails, conversations and even scribbled notes dating back to 2014 – the genesis of a government program that would unleash misery on the country's most vulnerable.
The royal commission has done what even a court could not.
It has penetrated the iron curtains of legal professional privilege and cabinet confidentiality to expose the corridors of power.
Fundamentally flawed
Under the Robodebt scheme, the Commonwealth unlawfully accused hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients, from 2015 to 2019, of owing the government money.
An algorithm matched recipients' reported earnings with averaged income data from the tax office to allege overpayments, with little to no human oversight.
But the calculation method was fundamentally flawed.
Under social security law, welfare payments are based on fortnightly earnings, which tend to fluctuate.
Aged pensioner Rosemary Gay was working two days a week in her 70s when she received a letter for a fabricated debt of almost $65,000.
She was one of the scheme's victims to take the stand.
"I've never earned that much money. How could I owe that much money?" Ms Gay told the inquiry in January.
Some who received debt letters took their own lives, like Kathleen Madgwick's only child, Jarrad, a few weeks shy of his 23rd birthday.
Ms Madgwick gave tearful testimony on Friday, the final day of public hearings.
"In rolling out this system, there has been a lack of duty of care," Ms Madgwick told the inquiry.
The royal commission has been probing who knew what, and when.
A multitude of missed opportunities
It has uncovered numerous opportunities to stop the scheme in its tracks – including before it began.
There was the November 2014 legal advice from the Department of Social Services (DSS).
It said a debt raised using the Department of Human Services' (DHS) proposed process of income averaging "may not be derived consistently with the legislative framework".
Still, the proposed budget measure that became Robodebt rolled on.
An early 2015 executive minute to then social services minister Scott Morrison flagged the need for legislative change, albeit with "watered down" language.
But by the time the proposal reached cabinet, a sentence referring to "income averaging" was removed and the proposal indicated no legislative change was required.
"That was the clear advice from the department included in a cabinet checklist," Mr Morrison told the inquiry in December.
The DHS secretary at the time, Kathryn Campbell, could not explain why the advice in the proposal changed.
"I don't know when that changed," Ms Campbell told the inquiry in December.
Softened words and withheld documents
The summer of 2016-17 presented another opportunity to stop the juggernaut.
People who received debt notices started going to the media, and amid a flurry of complaints, the Commonwealth Ombudsman launched an investigation.
But as the inquiry has learned, DHS withheld key documents that cast doubt on the legality of the scheme during its development, and the ombudsman allowed the department it was investigating to influence the wording of the 2017 report, which the Coalition government used to defend it.
Meanwhile, people were appealing their debts in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), and the judicial body was making a growing number of decisions in the favour of recipients.
Former AAT member and emeritus Professor Terry Carney adjudicated the first challenges in 2017 and decided debts were being calculated illegally.
But DHS chose not to appeal his findings, which meant they were kept secret.
Professor Carney said if DHS had appealed and lost, the findings would have been published and potentially halted the scheme earlier.
"It would have been a lot quicker than the three or more years that nearly half a million people had to suffer," Professor Carney told the commission in January.
Then there was the damning PricewaterhouseCoopers report, which was shelved in 2017 during the final stages of drafting.
The report found Robodebt needed to be remodelled, but as the inquiry discovered, the final version was "not required" by the department running it.
Fast forward to 2018, when DSS sought external advice from the law firm Clayton Utz.
That advice also found Robodebt was illegal, but it was left in draft form, which meant it did not need to be acted on.
It was not until September 2019 that the solicitor-general's advice finally saw the scheme shut down.
Former government services minister Stuart Robert was warned continuing the scheme could amount to misfeasance in public office — a civil wrong alleging the abuse of power, which could be used to argue a class action.
Indeed, a class action was brought against the Commonwealth in November 2019, after the federal court ruled Centrelink had raised an unlawful debt against an individual.
In 2021, a federal court judge approved a settlement worth at least $1.8 billion, with the Commonwealth agreeing to pay back wrongly raised debts and fund compensation.
Last year $101.7 million in compensation was shared between more than 380,000 class action members.
Throw in $30 million for the royal commission, and what started as a budget savings measure has ended in an enormous waste of taxpayer funds.
So who's ultimately to blame?
There's no single individual responsible, according to Darren O'Donovan, a senior lecturer of administrative law at La Trobe University.
Dr O'Donovan is one of thousands who have watched the live stream of the commission every day.
He has been following the Robodebt scandal since December 2016, when some of his own students received debt letters.
"A couple of students came to me in tears, and I sat in my office, and I saw what was being done," Dr O'Donovan told the ABC.
"I had just taught the students my subject administrative law, and they were holding pieces of paper that violated every principle that I had taught."
Dr O'Donovan said weighty responsibility for Robodebt lies on the public service.
"There is no one big bad villain. But rather, across four years, what we see is reinforcing failures," he said.
"Departments had legal advice, saying 'don't do this'.
"They had modelling which said, 'if you do this, the debts will be over calculated, if they even exist'.
"Despite having all the warnings, no written briefs were raised to ministers directly warning them."
Ministers who oversaw Robodebt have consistently used that line to defend their failure to stop it.
"Whichever politician it was, they circled the same themes. 'I did not know. I relied on the public servants to tell me about any risks they perceived'," Dr O'Donovan said.
"The Australian Public Service is under obligation to give frank and fearless advice, and that was the most common failure that drove all of this: the failure of careerist public servants to speak out, to show the courage that their frontline staff, their whistleblowers were showing at an enormous personal cost to themselves.
"And that's the irony: that the courage, strength and leadership that was on display in this royal commission was not in the people who held the fancy titles and the enormous wages.
"The strength, courage and leadership came flowing out of victims who fought off the debts, who kept a roof over their heads, who cared for their kids, even when their government did not listen to them."
Will the architects of Robodebt face consequences?
The royal commission is not focused on professional consequences, but it may recommend that fresh investigations of people's conduct occur, Dr O'Donovan said.
"What would generally happen would be that [the royal commission] makes a referral for professional bodies like the Australian Public Service Commission to evaluate the facts of the matter for themselves and satisfy themselves as to what happened," he said.
Privileges applied to evidence given at a royal commission prevent a witness's testimony being used against them.
"In a hypothetical scenario, where criminal conduct is disclosed, the matter must be proven in accordance with criminal law procedures. And it must be proven again, afresh in that very separate and different context," Dr O'Donovan said.
The two words that 'allowed Robodebt to happen'
Professor Paul Henman from the University of Queensland's School of Social Science said although public servants should have been more "frank and fearless" in their advice, their political masters are also to blame.
"Those ministers created the culture in which they wouldn't have wanted that legal advice," he said.
"They don't want to tell the minister what they think the minister doesn't want to hear.
"Often they make assumptions about what the minister wants to know."
Dr O'Donovan said two words allowed Robodebt to happen: "welfare cop."
It was a phrase Mr Morrison used repeatedly on television and radio in early 2015 as the policy was being developed.
"[It] was the way this was justified to the Australian public. 'We are putting a strong welfare cop on the beat'. And that branding reflects what we've got to change," Mr O'Donovan said.
"Until that happens, I'm really concerned that the mindsets that drove this will reassert themselves."
Commissioner Catherine Holmes is due to report back to the government with her findings and recommendations by June 30.
Dr O'Donovan hopes better record keeping will be among them.
"The Australian public have been exasperated by public servants unable to recall verbal conversations, by public servants who printed out emails and said they'd pass them on," he said.
"Those are systemic failings, because as a public servant, what obligation you have is to make sure your actions can be inquired into, that when you do something, it's recorded.
"And if we need to find out what you did with the power we gave you, we can find that out."
More transparency would be needed to prevent a repeat of Robodebt, he said.
"We are in big trouble if we have to fall back on royal commissions to get facts, and we have to have a big conversation about that.
"Unless we do something, it could happen again."
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