Australian Public Service awaits findings of robodebt royal commission report

A compliance officer in Queensland until July 2017, Ms Taylor last December told the robodebt royal commission of the gaping flaws she saw firsthand in the system.

From 2015 the Coalition government raised debts against social welfare recipients by comparing their reported income with averaged annual pay data from the tax office.

The onus was placed on recipients to prove the debts were incorrect, demanding enormous and often impossible efforts to collate evidence.

It was a dramatic shift from a system which had used income averaging sparingly and directed Centrelink workers to check discrepancies between tax office data and declared income, Ms Taylor told the royal commission.

The scheme ran until November 2019, when the government's top lawyer found it unlawful, though draft legal advice from government lawyers had raised questions earlier.

At least 430,000 people were affected, and the government has since paid $1.7 billion in financial benefits, after a class action lawsuit was settled in June 2021.

The damage wrought prompted the now Public Service Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer to posit that parts of the service had "lost its soul" during robodebt.

Commissioner Catherine Holmes is due to present her final report to the Governor-General by July 7, including recommendations to prevent any failures of public administration she identifies from happening again.

Ms Taylor was among other public servants who told the royal commission their concerns had not been taken seriously, and the report will resurface questions of why the APS didn't listen to its own staff, or the people it served.

When an email from then Department of Human Services secretary Kathryn Campbell landed in Ms Taylor's inbox in January 2017, telling staff there had "been no changes to how we assess income or calculate and recover debt", she knew it was wrong.

She wrote back the woman who led her agency, telling her she had been "misled".

"Please allow me as a loyal employee of many years standing who has only ever raised concerns in-house to respond to you directly as your Statement tells me that you are being misled and I want to ensure my words reach you," her February 2017 email read.

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Colleen Taylor subsequently met with senior officials and was assured her suggestions were being considered. She retired in July 2017, convinced nothing would change, and that the program was ramping up.

Robodebt continued for more than two years, costing lives in the process.

In the final day of hearings, the commission heard from Kathleen Madgwick, whose 22-year-old son Jarrad died by suicide in 2019, after learning of a debt raised against him.

"An automatic system will always fail to pick up vulnerability if nothing appears on a person's file, even though the vulnerability may be there," her statement to royal commission read.

Government ministers and senior public servants have been hesitant to comment on the impending report, wary of preempting findings, which could include key public servants involved being investigated for breaches of the APS Code of Conduct.

"I'm not doing hypotheticals," Dr de Brouwer said, asked earlier this month about the implications of the report.

"Let's see how the thing evolves, what the findings are, and what the consequences of those findings are."

The Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Melissa Donnelly said the report, and the government's response to it, must enshrine accountability.

"Robodebt represented a real crisis point for the public service. It has had ongoing implications in terms of the community's trust in public services, it has had ongoing implications for the workforce's trust in the senior leadership of the public service.

"So what we want to see from this report and the government's response is accountability."

There must be implications if individuals have adverse findings made against them in the report, Ms Donnelly added.

"It was a really difficult period for so many CPSU members and Services Australia workers, who knew there were problems with the system, who identified that, told their supervisors, told senior leadership and were absolutely railroaded during this process.

"So our members really want to see accountability and protections in place to ensure this can never happen again."

Experts say the APS must do more than quick fixes, that there is structural damage within the bureaucracy which drowned out warnings about the scheme, even from within.

"This is an opportunity to get the Public Service Act and to get the public service culture, right," honorary professor of public policy at the Australian National University Andrew Podger said.

"That there's been a trend over a couple of decades, I think in the wrong direction, and ... here's an opportunity to fix it."

Mr Podger, a public service commissioner between 2002 and 2004, prepared a report for the royal commission in which he argued the public service had become excessively responsive to the government.

Agency heads, who were once hired on a permanent basis, are now appointed on five-year terms, leaving them on uncertain ground about how their "frank and fearless" advice to government ministers will be received. Enhanced security of tenure could bolster the relationship between secretaries and minister.

"I think the [Senior Executive Service] not providing that advice is a flow on from the failure to have reasonable tenure at the top," Mr Podger said.

But the influence of those in the APS ranks and who are based outside of Canberra should not be underestimated, University of Canberra associate professor Russell Ayres argued.

Professor Ayres worked in the Department of Social Services until 2016, but was not involved in the robodebt scheme.

"One of the things that was obvious in the robodebt examples of people who had front desk exposure and experience with the clients, who were subjected to the damaging impacts of robodebt, [was that they] weren't listened to," he said.

"And, or felt that they couldn't raise their concerns, so it's also about people outside of the sort of Canberra hothouse, if you like."

Pulling those more junior employees up into senior leadership meetings could hold those in the higher ranks to account.

"Because there's somebody junior in the room there's less risk of that necessary building of trust between senior officials and ministers sort of curdling into a damaging over-alignment with the ministers interest," Mr Ayres said.

Ms Donnelly too, called for public servants who work in service delivery to be given more say.

"I think we need to change the culture of how we appreciate the work of frontline public services and give employees input into into policies and programs.

"Every front-line worker I've spoken to about this says it was obvious from day one that this system wouldn't work and so many of them raised those concerns and they were just ignored, they were silenced, and in some circumstances, they were even threatened when they were making these concerns."

Dr de Brouwer has promised not to run from the findings of the report, which will become public once it has been tabled in Parliament.

"I don't see any appetite frankly, either within the APS as a whole or the leadership of the APS, to not talk directly and fully and engage with staff and the public about the role of the service, what it means for the public service from all of that."