The same questions still consume Colleen Taylor.
They have persisted in her mind, unanswered, in the half a decade since she quit Centrelink, despondent that her efforts to raise the alarm about robodebt were being ignored at the highest levels.
Now, in little more than 24 hours, the robodebt royal commission may finally give her some answers.
“We would all like to know: how did it come to this?” Taylor tells the Guardian from her home in south-east Queensland. “How did it happen and how did it go on for so long? And why was nobody listening?”
The robodebt royal commission will on Friday hand its findings to government. They are likely to be released to the public a short time later.
The report will likely confirm much of what is already known about the profound injustice of the system.
That it destroyed countless lives, eroded faith in the public service, and laid bare the consequences of a political strategy that demonised welfare recipients, ridiculed dissent and turned lives into numbers, from which savings could be gleaned with unparalleled zealotry.
What the royal commission is likely to tell us for the first time, however, is whether the government knowingly implemented an unlawful scheme, and whether senior departmental officials deliberately hid concerns about the legality of income averaging, the deeply flawed process used to calculate and allege debts.
The royal commission considered 1m tendered documents and heard from more than 100 witnesses across nine weeks of public hearings, including public servants, ombudsman staff, ministers, two former prime ministers, and victims.
Taylor, then a low-level public servant in a 30,000-strong workforce, was one of a number of former frontline Centrelink staff to give evidence.
She told the royal commission that she had been so dismayed at what was happening that she penned an email directly to the Department of Human Services secretary, Kathryn Campbell, in February 2017, a time when the government was continuing to rubbish critics of the scheme.
Taylor warned her she was being “misled about robodebt”. She gave her departmental head a forensic account of the scheme’s failings and its impact on the most disadvantaged.
“As a compliance unit, we should not be the ones stealing from our customers,” she wrote.
Taylor displayed a trait supposedly held sacred in the public service. She offered frank and fearless advice, no matter the personal cost.
Her concerns were brushed aside. She resigned, unable to continue perpetrating what she describes as a fraud of the nation’s most vulnerable.
“It became a mathematical exercise, rather than something that had human beings attached to it,” she said.
“I thought ‘this is fraud, out and out fraud’ against our customers. All these things that had been part of our psyche – getting it right, duty of care, public service values, codes of conduct – all just went out the door.
“There were so many people complicit in it that I think we all have to hang our heads in shame for what was being done to people, because these were not criminals. These were people who did the right thing and were being hounded. Sending out debt collectors, it was just horrific.”
Taylor is clear-eyed about what she wants to flow from the royal commission’s findings.
She wants it to call out the lie that people did not commit suicide due to robodebt.
She wants certain individuals removed from any role within the public service where they can wield influence over people’s lives.
And she wants permanent reform, of a kind that prevents a shameful episode like robodebt from ever repeating.
“How do we do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen again because I don’t know – do we know that the lessons have been learned?”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. International helplines can be found at befrienders.org
