Alan Tudge’s former media adviser Rachelle Miller told a royal commission that she placed stories with “friendly”, “right-wing” media outlets to counter critical media coverage of the robodebt scheme, before releasing the personal details of victims.
Miller told the commission in a statement on Tuesday that by early 2017, negative coverage of the robodebt scandal had cascaded into a “media crisis”, which Tudge gave “firm” instructions to “shut down”.
The royal commission, which was established in August last year, is investigating how the illegal robodebt scheme was established in 2015 and was allowed to run until November 2019, before ending with a $1.8 billion settlement with nearly 400,000 known victims.
Under questioning, Miller said she devised a media strategy to counter the negative coverage seen in “left-wing” media that revolved around placing stories with to more sympathetic outlets across the News Corp stable, about how the Coalition was “catching people who were cheating the welfare system”.
“The media strategy we developed was to run a counter narrative in the more friendly media such as The Australian and the tabloids, which we knew were interested in running stories about welfare system integrity and the supposed ‘dole-bludgers’,” Miller wrote in a statement to the commission.
Miller said the office wasn’t particularly worried about the negative coverage of the scheme in late 2016, which was at the time being led by Guardian Australia, because “it wasn’t unusual” for the left-leaning press to be “attacking us over social policy”.
Once the issue began to attract coverage in other outlets, she said, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull became “unhappy” with what he was seeing. Tudge as a result became adamant the government should defend itself and be “correcting the record”, the commission heard.
Tudge sent his former chief of staff an article written by Peter Martin in The Sydney Morning Herald in an email, saying “PM sent me this one and has the clearest critique”, the commission was shown.
In the story, Martin wrote: “The humans charged with applying the law didn’t issue debt notices unless they had evidence debts existed. To do so without evidence would be to break the law.”
Miller told the commission that Turnbull liked reading The Sydney Morning Herald. When asked where the Herald fit into her spectrum of partisan media coverage, Miller told the commissioner, Catherine Holmes AC SC, it fit into the “left-wing” media camp.
“Left wing!” Holmes responded.
The bolstered media offensive then saw the minister’s office and the department actively seek to fisk claims made by victims of the scheme in the media.
Miller said Tudge requested the files of “every single person” who appeared in news reporting on the scheme, so “we could understand the details of their case”.
The bolstered media strategy, she said, included “correcting the record” in instances where victims had gone to media with their stories and made claims the department and the minister’s office deemed incorrect.
She was asked about the process that led to the release of personal details belonging to a welfare recipient after they had criticised the scheme in an article.
The commission heard that Miller discussed the partial release of information against the recipient with Bevan Hannan, her media counterpart at the department, and chief counsel Annette Musolino, who cleared the release, which only drew more criticism.
One example of the office used right-wing media to combat criticism shown to the commission was a story written on January 26, 2017, by Simon Benson in The Australian, headlined: “Centrelink debt scare backfires on Labor”.
The story said the department “confirmed” that a number of victims who said they were wrongly targeted by the scheme had “in fact” accepted that the debt averaged by the scheme was owed.
“That was an article we liked,” Miller said.
Tudge has repeatedly rejected and denied Miller’s claims, and is scheduled to appear before the royal commission on Wednesday, before former attorney-general Christian Porter appears on Thursday.
Miller alleged in 2021 that Tudge was abusive towards her during a consensual affair, and later accepted a $650,000 settlement from the federal government after claiming she suffered hurt, distress and humiliation during her time working for both Tudge and Michaelia Cash.
