‘A shameful chapter’: how Australia’s robodebt saga was allowed to unfold

The consequences of the robodebt scheme were unprecedented: hundreds of thousands of people received unlawful demands for money from their own government. Photograph: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

When Cameron Brown learned of an idea to tighten Centrelink welfare debt collection in late 2014, he was “almost immediately” concerned.

It was around the same time copyright holders had been sending so-called “speculative invoices” on a mass scale to people who may have illegally downloaded films – the so-called Dallas Buyers Club saga.