The most consequential stories are usually the ones powerful people don’t want journalists to write.
Threaded through the robodebt royal commission’s evisceration of the “cruel” and illegal data-matching scheme is the constant effort by bureaucrats and ministers to stonewall journalists trying to investigate the unfolding tragedy, and the self-serving narratives fed to other reporters considered more likely to do the then government favours.
As concerns about the data-matching grew in late 2016, the Department of Human Services received a query from Guardian Australia’s Christopher Knaus, asking: “Is the department aware of any issues that are causing the automated compliance system to issue higher rates of incorrect debt notices?”
The royal commission report makes it clear the department was indeed already aware but the response, cleared by a senior public servant and a minister, said exactly the opposite: “The department is confident the online compliance system, and associated checking process with customers, is producing correct debt notices.”
Defending the policy, rather than considering its increasingly obvious failings, was to become a pattern.
Knaus, who with Guardian Australia’s Luke Henriques-Gomes and reporters from other mastheads worked doggedly to expose robodebt over many years, has described the assignment as like “bashing your head against a wall”.
In the report the commission observed of the Department of Human Services:
“[Its] approach to the media, particularly during the period of intense publicity in the early months of 2017, was to respond to criticism by systematically repeating the same narrative, underpinned by a set of talking points and standard lines. There was no critical evaluation of this messaging, or its accuracy, because the ‘gatekeepers’ of its content were more concerned with ‘getting it [the media criticism] shut down as quickly as possible’, and ‘correcting the record’ with standard platitudes that failed to engage with the substance of any criticisms.”
Even when “the chorus of criticism was deafening”, ministers, reciting departmental talking points, kept insisting nothing was wrong.
After another Guardian Australia article on 12 January 2017, based on internal Centrelink records, the commission records then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull asking then human services minister Alan Tudge for information and Tudge replying: “My assessment is that, apart from ABC and Guardian, this is now no longer a story of any significant size. We have staff leaking to ABC – DHS is very highly unionised – which we have to manage. I gave our position to ABC yesterday re latest allegations of theirs.”
As well as illustrating how journalists were obstructed when trying to do their jobs, the report lays bare the “particularly mean-spirited” way the government used “more friendly media” to spread a “counter narrative.”
A departmental officer observed that: “News Corp isn’t interested in the line being run by left-leaning media – but is keen on the alternative view. As such, the focus will be on working with News to achieve this.”
It documents how the Australian’s Simon Benson was provided with information and the paper published an article headlined “Centrelink debt scare backfires on Labor”.
“Labor’s attempts to mount a repeat of its discredited Mediscare campaign against Centrelink’s automated debt recovery system have been exposed, with at least two-thirds of those publicly claiming to be victims of Centrelink found to owe significant debts to the taxpayer,” the report began.
The same day, Tudge was interviewed on Radio 2GB, and described it as a “very significant story”, without disclosing his office had been its source.
There will always be armies of political media advisers and departmental officers employed to provide information and try to get favourable coverage for government programs, or to ask for corrections if journalists get something wrong.
But the royal commission details the consequences of “managing” a story to the point of turning a blind eye to facts.
Of course, journalists will always receive information from those same advisers.
But robodebt demonstrates all too starkly that it can never be accepted uncritically, and that the most important and consequential stories are the ones they desperately don’t want us to know.
There are many more pressing lessons from this calamitous policy failure, but intertwined with them is an obvious demonstration of the value of legitimate journalistic inquiry. Imagine the suffering that might have been avoided if someone receiving those early media inquiries had dared to ask: “I wonder if there’s something going wrong here?”
