What’s slowly emerging from the robodebt royal commission is one of the worst episodes of maladministration in the history of the Australian Public Service.
Once again, Scott Morrison is at the centre of it, but the true scandal pertains to the behaviour of senior bureaucrats in the Human Services and Social Services departments.
To the extent that it wasn’t clear before, we now know senior officials understood that income averaging was unlawful, but were so attached to achieving a set savings target from welfare payments that they ignored that advice and made sure it was watered down so that Morrison, then Social Services minister, could be assured what would become robodebt would work.
The evidence of DSS managers Andrew Whitecross and Murray Kimber yesterday spells out the process that went on in DSS in late 2014 and 2015 when the Human Services department proposed automated income averaging. Whitecross specifically cited legal advice that using income averaging in the way proposed was likely to be found unlawful, requiring legislative change.
Senior managers expressed frustration with his advice and suggested his observations on the DHS proposal be watered down. In the minute that ultimately went to Morrison, what were originally cited as “fundamental impacts on social security policy and legislation” were softened to “significant implications”.
That change was made by a more senior DSS executive, Catherine Halbert, who says she can’t remember directing anyone to water down the critical language toward income averaging, and says dumping “fundamental impacts” was a mere stylistic change.
Kimber recalled seeing DHS’ draft New Policy Proposal in 2015, which stated that legislation would not be required. He pointed out to DHS that legislation would be required given the unlawful nature of the proposed use of income averaging. There was, of course, no legislative change to make robodebt legal.
Other than outright corruption, it’s hard to think of a more serious case of maladministration than senior executives overlooking the likely unlawfulness of a policy change, with the goal of securing an identified level of savings, via a mechanism that inflicted massive trauma on welfare recipients and led a number to take their own lives.
The apparent desire of DHS officials to pander to a minister’s “reform” agenda, and the apparent willingness of DSS officials to fail to accurately convey the unlawful nature of what was being proposed, led to appalling outcomes.
This is where “responsiveness”, that KPI of the quality public servant for the last three decades, has led a once-respected bureaucracy: being so willing to be “responsive” to a minister’s desires that illegality is overlooked, downplayed, ignored, fudged in the quest to anticipate and meet ministerial demands.
It starts with lineball cases where legal advice is sufficiently vague to permit proposals to go forward despite awareness of the potential for a court to rule against the Commonwealth. But there was nothing lineball about the unlawfulness of robodebt, as senior officials were repeatedly told.
This was as plain a failure of public sector leadership as it’s possible to have. Senior executives and secretaries are supposed to act as a check and a filter on more junior managers; they’re supposed to have the authority to push back against ministers and staffers when necessary, to offer the fabled “frank and fearless advice”. Instead, it seems, they dismissed accurate warnings in favour of pandering to a minister.
People died as a result. Thousands of families, perhaps tens of thousands, suffered profound stress. This should be a “never again” moment for the APS, and those responsible should become living examples how not to lead.
A government determined to rebuild a discredited public service would ensure that this happens. But politicians of good will can only do so much. The APS’ current leadership should be doing some deep soul-searching.
