Potentially "catastrophic" external legal advice that could have shut down Robodebt appeared to have been disregarded after the government failed to elevate it beyond a draft form, a royal commission into the scheme has been told.
The commission, being held in Brisbane, has been hearing evidence from public servants involved in formulating the earliest legal and policy advice about the bungled Robodebt scheme that wrongly claimed hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients owed debts to Centrelink through a process of income averaging.
