Robodebt was known to be illegal by the public service from the time it was first proposed yet it was approved by cabinet and run by the Department of Human Services for nearly five years before a court case brought it to a screaming halt.
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The royal commission into the robodebt scheme is about halfway through a very forensic exploration into this public policy disgrace.
It seems a good time to look what we have learnt as to why robodebt got beyond being a public service brain dump to a policy that damaged where it did not destroy the lives of vulnerable Australians.
The evidence on the origins and implementation of robodebt points to a more complex and troubling story than one of blameworthy decisions by rogue public servants and politicians, though it certainly had plenty of those.
It is better understood as the result of a perfect storm of rampant ideology and institutional malfunction, that facilitated a dereliction of public duty and provided a cover for political and moral carelessness on a large scale.
While responsibility certainly needs to be sheeted home to those who did not discharge their legal and professional duties with due care and diligence, scapegoating a few key individuals including the minister for social security and the department secretary of DHS does not go nearly far enough.
We need to pay careful attention to the broader developments that enabled robodebt.
The first development is the rhetorical war against welfare and the demonisation of welfare recipients from 1996 onwards that was carried on enthusiastically by the Coalition when in government right through to its electoral defeat in 2022. We might label this as the neoliberal turn in public policy.
Social welfare in this rhetoric is talked of as a cost, an expense, a drag on the economy rather than justified as a critical element of social support that helps hold the community together.
Not surprisingly the department justification for robodebt was a concern with cost cutting in a budget context. By contrast a faint memory of the previous community-oriented approach to social welfare can be detected in some of the evidence from mid-level policy officers in what is now the Department of Social Services.
This is an issue for the Albanese government to address in their rhetorical framing of future welfare policy.
The next issue and one clearly of deep concern to the commission in its questioning of witnesses was the impact of the doctrine of public service responsiveness to the minister as providing the guiding light and framing the overriding responsibility of senior public servants.
There is very clear evidence that giving responsiveness priority undermined senior public servants' willingness to provide advice on robodebt, that took explicit account of the need to change legislation.
The evidence was that in the Social Services which was responsible for policy advice on robodebt somewhere just above branch manager level the pressure of being responsive to the minister began to determine the way senior staff in that department provided advice to the minister.
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The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have a very full agenda if they are going to shift the mindset of senior public servants in the face of the manifest failures in this case.
Finally, there is the impact of the institutional division between policy, the responsibility of Social Services and program delivery the responsibility of Centrelink, subsequently Human Services and now Services Australia.
Over the decades since the initial split between policy and service delivery machinery of government changes have increased the size and range of payments managed by Centrelink with the ambition of its management resulting in its transformation into a standalone department.
On the evidence before the commission, Human Services seems to have become a law unto itself in running a policy agenda.
When it came to robodebt, its technical gurus drove data use possibilities forward with backing of senior management with little regard for legal limitations policy effectiveness and an eye only reducing budget expenditure.
This seems to have been accompanied by a willingness at a senior level to deliberately bamboozle not only Social Services as to what was happening in the development of the robodebt policy but also the Australian Taxation Office over the uses of its data in implementing the policy.
It will be very surprising if the commission does not have some strong recommendations on both restructuring of responsibilities across the social security portfolio and management of the integrity of protocols governing data use.
- Dr Douglas Hynd is an adjunct research fellow at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture at Charles Sturt University.
