Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has told a royal commission he never considered the legality of robodebt and that he trusted Alan Tudge knew what he was doing in regards to the scheme.
Turnbull took the witness stand via video link on Monday morning and shared a number of printed-out WhatsApp messages from 2017 where he and Tudge — then human services minister — discussed negative media coverage of robodebt.
The messages included one sent by Turnbull on January 7 2017 to Tudge alerting him to a Sydney Morning Herald article that suggested the debt recovery scheme could be unlawful.
Tudge wrote back to defend the scheme, saying “it is not correct that we simply take the average of the income declared to ATO and apply that average across 26 fortnights”.
Turnbull said that while he failed to recall many details from the time, he remembered accepting what Tudge said because he was the “responsible minister”.
He said he saw Tudge as a “technocrat” who understood the system.
“I didn’t regard him as being a negligent or incompetent or careless minister,” Turnbull said.
Turnbull also said he never considered whether robodebt was legal or not.
“Look, I did not turn my mind to the legality of the program. It never occurred to us that it was unauthorised,” he told the commission.
“Because we assumed that it was as it had been represented.”
The commission has heard the robodebt system did indeed use the income averaging system described in Tudge’s message, often incorrectly presuming a recipient’s income would be the same in each two-week period.
The onus was then put on welfare recipients to prove to the government they didn’t owe money.
A Federal Court judge found in 2019 that income averaging was unlawful, echoing previous advice to the government.
Tudge has previously told the commission he didn’t understand the scheme was unlawful, and that in any case, he would have had no power to change it because he was a junior minister.
“They were the cabinet decisions, which I didn’t have the authority to overturn,” he said last month.
Tudge has since quit Parliament, sparking a byelection in his Victorian seat of Aston scheduled for April 1.
