Only six months after losing the highest office in the land, Scott Morrison has been upbraided for his poor listening skills as the Robodebt royal commission centred on the bigger question of whether he’d been paying attention in office.
The former prime minister is at the centre of the inquiry into the illegal scheme, which sought to reclaim money owed from those on welfare payments but consistently got it wrong and unlawfully seized $750 million from clients’ bank accounts with sometimes disastrous results.
In a lengthy appearance before the inquiry on Wednesday, Mr Morrison described himself, in a reprise of a self-bestowed title about crackdowns on recipients as the “tough cop” on the welfare beat. But he did not seem to have made the same demands while serving as minister in charge of welfare programs.
In a moment that reflected Mr Morrison’s at times ungainly manner as a witness, that evidence was contradicted by a briefing note in which he had circled “pursue” to signal his instructions to staff.
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Scott Morrison fronts royal commission into robodebt
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The Commissioner, Catherine Holmes, SC, took issue with an apparent contradiction between the former PM’s claim he only wanted policy options drafted and the documentary evidence. But before Mr Morrison concluded his train of thought, she took him up on another point.
“The evidence before the commission is that when discrepancies were flagged, a review would be undertaken … Are you listening at all?….,” a frustrated Ms Holmes said.
On another occasion, she urged Mr Morrison to “stick to the question”.
“I understand you come from a background where rhetoric is important. It’s necessary to listen to the question and just answer it without extra detail, unnecessary detail,” she said.
In other sometimes awkward passages on Wednesday, Mr Morrison was chided after he seemed to take an inordinately long pause to answer a question and then changed his account about whether he, as minister, believed the scheme would need a supporting new law.
Ms Holmes interrupted Mr Morrison to suggest that he think twice before diverging into another long analogy in his evidence.
“Just answer without detail,” she said.
But Mr Morrison resisted being caught on another point of fact when he said he had not been mixed up about whether the scheme would need a law underpinning it.
It was, he said, the public service that had changed its stance.
“By the time of the submission going to cabinet, that view … had changed and advice was given that legislation was not required, by the department,” he said.
Robodebt was riddled by inaccuracies, wrongful and sudden and stories of shabby treatment from those at its mercy.
Some $1.8 billion was paid out by the federal government to victims of the scheme in a class action after it finally ceased running in 2019.
Labor’s former leader Bill Shorten, now Government Services Minister, had called for Robodebt to be suspended years earlier.
As a former social services minister, Mr Morrison was one of several leading Coalition figures who had responsibility for the scheme. But he told the inquiry he had not even seen the policy for Robodebt in February 2015 when it was first put to his office.
Others include Marise Payne, during her tenure as human services minister. Senator Payne told the royal commission on Tuesday she had no knowledge of why legal issues flagged in earlier briefings were omitted from the final policy proposal.
Asked who held responsibility for advancing any concerns, Senator Payne said ministers were always ultimately responsible but they received advice from their departments.
Stuart Robert, a former government services minister, has always denied the Coalition invented the scheme.
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