At nearly 500 pages, Rick Morton’s Mean Streak provides a detailed account of the development and collapse of the robodebt scheme, which started in 2014 and is, in some ways, not yet finished.
The book’s primary source is the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, which conducted hearings between October 2022 and March 2023. The printed report, published in July 2023, is nearly 1,000 pages long. There are also four analytical reports and 770 submissions within the commission’s terms of reference.
The final 50 pages of Mean Streak are statements from a number of public servants and politicians mentioned in the book who dispute the findings of the Royal Commission.
Morton is to be congratulated for bringing the complex evidence and arguments from the Royal Commission into a more accessible format for the public – and policy makers – to understand.
Review: Mean Streak – Rick Morton (Fourth Estate)
In addition to reading the published evidence and watching the hearings, Morton has spoken to or corresponded with a number of people affected by events. These include Colleen Taylor, who worked in the compliance area of Centrelink and attempted, early on, to have robodebt stopped within the Department of Human Services, and Glyn Fiveash, a former lawyer with the department, who pointed out the unlawfulness of income averaging in 2017.
Other sources include Darren O’Donovan, a legal academic from La Trobe University who has written extensively on robodebt, and Asher Wolf, a journalist and digital rights activist, who started investigating robodebt in August 2016.
Mean Streak also includes case studies of anonymous and named individuals who received false debt notices. Morton has spoken to Jennifer Miller, mother of Rhys Cauzzo, a young man who committed suicide on Australia Day 2017. Cauzzo had received 12 letters and five phone calls from Centrelink between May and October 2016, then six letters, two text messages and 13 phone calls from Dun and Bradstreet, a private debt collection agency, between October 2016 and January 2017. It was claimed he had a debt of almost $18,000.
Burdens of proof
Many aspects of robodebt were well known before the Royal Commission, as the result of federal court cases, media attention and community activism. The media and public attention effectively started from 2016, when the first stages of the compliance program commenced and large numbers of people came to be affected. Despite the public and political attention, what was actually happening was deliberately obscured until 2019.
The strength ofMean Streak is its detailed account, drawn from the Royal Commission’s report, of the lead up before 2016, when robodebt could have been stopped before it started.
The story begins in May 2014 with the first budget of the Abbott government, which among other initiatives proposed massive cuts to support for the young unemployed. The failure of the Senate to pass these and other measures became the background to the government’s continuing search for savings in social security, the largest single component of Commonwealth government spending.
Separately, work had been going on within the compliance branch of the Department of Human Services on a concept that would involve averaging – dividing annual income by 26 to estimate fortnightly income – and shifting the burden of proof from the department to current and former payment recipients.
Shifting the burden of proof meant that, when individuals whose reported income appeared different to the income reported for tax purposes, they had to provide evidence that they did not have an overpayment (and thus a debt). Shifting the burden of proof enabled a massive increase in the number of computer-generated “debts”, without a massive increase in the number of compliance staff.
Both income averaging and shifting the burden of proof are unlawful.
Zombie measures
Morton’s account establishes the sequence that starts in 2014 with the internal work on the concept, initially at middle and lower executive ranks. Discussions with the Department of Social Services – which was actually responsible for social security policy – started in October 2014.
In early November 2014, the acting director of the rates and means testing policy branch in the Department of Social Services concluded that the proposed concept “does not accord with legislation”. In early December, the legal branch of the department further concluded that the concept was not lawful.
It is not clear that these conclusions were communicated to the Department of Human Services. The concept was presented to the new Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison, by the department secretary, Kathryn Campbell, in a briefing on 30 December 2014.
Once the concept gained the attention of a senior minister and later became a formal budget proposal, dislodging it would require reversing the savings booked into the forward estimates and increasing the budget deficit. The failed budget proposals from 2014, such as raising the pension age to 70, remained in the forward estimates for four years as “zombie measures”, adding to the political incentive to pursue the scheme.
From concept to catastrophe
The subsequent stages of robodebt are well-established in Mean Streak. The process between December 2014 and March 2015, when the Expenditure Review Committee met to consider the New Policy Proposal, was crucial.
The subsequent briefing from the two departments referred to policy and legislative issues that needed consideration. The Cabinet submission stated that the measure did not require legislation. The Expenditure Review Committee consideration of the policy proposal occurred in the afternoon and evening of March 25, 2015. Both the Department of Social Security and Department of Human Services secretaries were in the room when Cabinet agreed to the proposal.
Robodebt started to be put into effect in 2016. Following extensive complaints from affected individuals and negative media reporting, there were two reports by the Commonwealth ombudsman and two parliamentary inquiries.
In November 2019, the Federal Court concluded in the Deanna Amato robodebt case that central features of the program were unlawful. As in a number of other examples cited in the book, Deanna Amato’s “overpayment” was calculated on the basis of income that she had received before she started to receive a payment.
The federal opposition facilitated a class action in September 2019. The government conceded in May 2020. In November 2020, a settlement was reached in the Federal Court. The Commonwealth agreed to repay the $720 million in debts already collected, drop further claims of $398 million, and pay $112 million in compensation to approximately 400,000 eligible individual Group Members, including legal costs.
Despite the narrative clarity of much of Morton’s book, the story is complex and, in many ways, remains difficult to follow, not least because the departments involved sought to obscure what was going on until the program had to be abandoned as the result of the Amato case in 2019.
I would suggest the next edition of the book should either have an index or a list of the main characters and their positions at different stages, and a table setting out the chronological development of robodebt from concept to budget proposal to implementation and collapse.
Anti-welfare rhetoric
If the 2014 advice from the Department of Social Services that the proposal was unlawful had been clearly communicated, then it is unlikely robodebt would have progressed.
Legislation that retrospectively created debts would not have been likely to pass a hostile upper house. It would likely have failed in the High Court if appealed. And it would have had seriously destabilising effects on Australia’s part-time labour market.
But anti-welfare rhetoric was a notable part of the build up to robodebt. In early 2015, Morrison labelled himself “a strong welfare cop on the beat”. His stance was reported as a “warning to would-be dole bludgers, Disability Support Pension rorters and terrorists who want to wage war while on government benefits”.
Stigmatisation was an essential element of the scheme. Morton quotes Darren O'Donovan describing Centrelink’s compliance letters as “the social engineering of shame”. The government’s narrative that there was widespread rorting of the system was enthusiastically supported in sections of the media.
I recently moved office and, as I went through the piles of paper accumulated over the years, I found, quite by accident, a 2004 report from the Department of Family and Community Services, one of the predecessors to the current Department of Social Services. It was titled: “Fear, guilt and shame in public information campaigns to encourage benefit compliance.”
The department’s paper no longer seems to exist on the internet, but there is a 2010 journal article based on the research. Its title is Fear, guilt, and shame appeals in social marketing. The abstract reads, in part:
The motivation of the study was to provide formative research for a social marketing campaign designed to increase compliance with income reporting requirements. This study shows that negative appeals with this group of people are more likely to invoke self-protection and inaction rather than an active response such as volunteering to comply.
The conclusion is even more stark: “this study shows that, for income support recipients at least, overt use of compliance strategies is likely to have the opposite effect from that intended”.
The discovery of this report struck me in two ways. First, it provides evidence of a government department, tasked with administering beneficial legislation, commissioning research into the effectiveness of fear, guilt and shame as ways of influencing the behaviour of disadvantaged people. Second, the research shows, a decade before robodebt, that such an approach is unlikely to be effective.
But this is only one part of a larger story, in which sections of the public service ignored what should simply be regarded as common sense. Shamefully, they attempted to mislead the public, while punishing people who were innocent.
I have argued elsewhere that, ultimately, people make decisions. The policy decisions leading to robodebt were made by individuals. But those decisions were made within a layered context of precedents and established processes. Social, economic and political and bureaucratic environments structured the choices the individuals made.
Robodebt proceeded because once a large savings item was listed in the budget papers and forward estimates, taking it out would derail the path towards a budget surplus. It was an actual zombie that harmed real people. But it started and continued because of the attitudes that decision-makers, politicians, media and many in the public have towards people receiving social security payments.
The preface to the Report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme states: “politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments […] Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism, useful for campaign purposes. It is not recent, nor is it confined to one side of politics”.
As Morton demonstrates in harrowing detail, robodebt took for granted what the Royal Commissioner Catherine Holmes described as “the narrative of taxpayer versus welfare recipient”. Mean Streak reinforces the message that the populism of some politicians and some of the media must be put behind us if we are to ensure robodebt is never repeated.
Peter Whiteford receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He previously worked in the Department of Social Security before 2000 and has subsequently received funding from successor Departments. He prepared a pro bono report for the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
