Early critics of robodebt have said they are shocked, appalled and outraged by how long the Coalition government persisted with the unlawful scheme.
The independent MP Andrew Wilkie and former the administrative appeals tribunal member Terry Carney were responding to the release of the royal commission report on Friday.
The commission, which made referrals for possible civil action and criminal prosecution of unnamed individuals, credits some politicians, civil society and whistleblowers for speaking out about the scheme in its early days.
These include Wilkie, who repeatedly raised the issue of constituents’ incorrect debt notices, the former senator Nick Xenophon, Labor’s shadow human services minister, Linda Burney, the Australian Council of Social Services, and Carney, who warned the scheme was unlawful in 2018 after he was not reappointed to the AAT.
Carney, who as an AAT member frequently wiped robodebts due to the unlawful process of income averaging, said he was “appalled and outraged that it did take so long to confront the bleedingly obvious”.
“It wasn’t a sophisticated legal issue, it was clear cut and as we now know lots of people within relevant bureaucracies did actually from early on appreciate it was illegal unless legislation was passed to authorise it,” he told Guardian Australia.
Carney said the royal commissioner, Catherine Holmes, was “spot on” in identifying the culture of demonising welfare recipients as a cause of the failure of administration. He said Australians were “the world’s greatest demonisers of dole bludgers”.
Wilkie said: “We all knew it was a flawed data matching system, spitting out incorrect notices, and damaging people terribly.”
But the member for Clark said it was still shocking to learn that “public servants and politicians knew it was illegal and every time they responded to … inquiries, they were basically just lying to us”.
“It was such a complete failure of governance, and potentially criminal behaviour. That has shocked me.”
Those accused of misconduct “deserve their day in court”, he added, but if the royal commission’s findings were accurate “then frankly they should throw the book at these people”.
“For many of the victims there is no satisfactory remedy. Their lives were impacted so greatly and, of course, the people who self-harmed and suicided, those families will never get their loved one back. Nothing will ever make this fully right.”
On Sunday Burney told ABC’s Insiders that Labor had publicly warned that “the algorithm was unjust and unfair and that there was no human involvement in it”.
“This is a shocking indictment of it not being stopped,” she said. “And it just it just says to me there has to be consequences.
“I can’t articulate exactly what they should be because I don’t know what’s in the sealed section.”
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has conceded that “mistakes” were made by “individuals” involved in the unlawful robodebt scheme, while warning against a “trial by media” on the findings of the royal commission.
The education minister, Jason Clare, said that Dutton had shown “all the empathy of a rock” in responding to the royal commission report.
“The fact that Peter Dutton on the day that this came down, went straight to politics showed that this bloke doesn’t get it,” he told Sky News.
Clare said Scott Morrison, his ministers and bureaucrats “are going to have to live with this on their conscience for the rest of their lives.”.
Morrison has said he “completely” rejects adverse findings, claiming they were “wrong, unsubstantiated and contradicted by clear documentary evidence presented to the commission”.
As the cabinet minister who brought the robodebt proposal to cabinet, Morrison said he had “acted in good faith and on clear and deliberate department advice that no legislation was required to introduce the scheme”.
