Department officials involved in the unlawful robodebt scheme’s design will appear for a second time at a royal commission on Wednesday after a frontline Centrelink worker gave a searing indictment of the scheme.
The inquiry will take more evidence from former mid-level Department of Human Services officials Scott Britton and Jason Ryman, who helped devise the debt recovery scheme for the 2015 budget.
Ryman and his then-manager Britton appeared at the inquiry in November, where the commission was told Ryman had been responsible for obtaining legal advice about the proposal. Britton said he’d never been provided with legal advice on the plan, while Ryman said the advice he sought didn’t consider the ultimately key question of the lawfulness of the “income averaging” method used to calculate debts.
Emails subsequently published by the commission show Britton and Ryman expressing confidence in the legality of the proposal during the budget process. It was eventually signed off by cabinet in 2015 after ministers, including the then social services minister, Scott Morrison, were told it could be implemented without legislation.
A frontline Centrelink worker, Jeannie-Marie Blake, told the commission this week she would never forget what staff were “forced” to do victims of the program.
Blake, who remains employed by Services Australia after starting at DHS in 2000, said she and her colleagues had raised concerns about the robodebt scheme from its inception in 2015 but those warnings fell on deaf ears.
She became emotional when she was asked why she chose to give evidence to the commission.
“All the management … that I’ve sat and listened to through this, who can’t remember, can’t recall, can’t recollect, ‘couldn’t put your mind to it’ – I can’t forget,” Blake said.
“And I know there are many more staff like me, who can’t forget what happened and what we were forced to deliver to customers.”
The commissioner, Catherine Holmes AC SC, has flagged concerns about the evidence being given by witnesses, saying this month: “Everybody says it was really somebody else’s doing, and it’s a bit hard to get to the bottom of whose doing it was.”
Blake said she wanted victims of the scheme to know, “I do remember”.
“We [staff] deserve a voice in this room, as much as every manager you’ve heard, everyone who can give you a reason on how they didn’t know … why they didn’t know,” Blake said.
“I may be the only person that wants to stand here and say I work for Services Australia and I have been proud to work for Services Australia.”
Blake said after Morrison’s “glib apology” to victims of the scheme in 2020, she also suggested staff should receive an apology.
“My manager took it to the management team and she came back and told me I wasn’t entitled to an apology because I was a public servant being paid,” she said.
Blake’s evidence follows the testimony of another frontline worker, Colleen Taylor, whose complaints to the head of the department, Kathryn Campbell, were not acted on.
Tim French, who was acting chief counsel at the Department of Human Services when the scheme faced legal challenges throughout 2019, will also appear at the commission on Wednesday, as will the department’s former general counsel Matthew Roser.
The commission continues.
