The royal commission into robodebt is shaping up to be something not seen in a long time in Australian politics: an issue that deserves inquiry with such vast powers.
Some commentators have been analysing Thursday’s announcement like any other piece of partisan theatre.
We have grown used to royal commissions being established to present a government with advice on some area of public policy failure for which there isn’t money to fix anyway.
This royal commission appears to be moving down a different path; an investigative inquiry focused on exposing wrongdoing with some of the oldest powers in Australia – including the ability to force people to testify, surrender evidence, issue search warrants and jail those who refuse.
Inquiries like this have traditionally been called a government’s last resort; once established they are off the chain and can investigate anything.
Famously a royal commission into the the Painters and Dockers Union ended up exposing huge financial mismanagement and tax evasion in a federal Liberal government.
A more recent fishing expedition into the union movement blew up in the Coalition government’s face when the Commissioner was exposed giving a speech at a Liberal Party fundraiser before officially deciding he was not biased.
It is not likely the government would enter into such a risk if it were seeking only to give Scott Morrison the usual kicking on the evening news against a new backdrop.
Peter Dutton calls the move a “witch hunt”, but every early indication is that this is a royal commission with a rare focus and political legitimacy.
Bill Shorten made a royal commission a core election policy in 2019, calling debt tracking dangerous.
“Robodebt was a shameful chapter in the history of public administration in this country; it was a massive failure of policy and law,” he said
“We still don’t know who conceived of this.
“Until we have these answers, we will never be able to have full restitution for the victims.”
Mr Shorten has helped lead a campaign of rare consequence for a large group of Australians who were long ignored.
It does not seem conceivable that legislating a promise made years ago will meet any objections.
Some have argued a new government ought not create an inquiry and turn it on an Opposition, but there is no other way.
Only governments can create them and give them directions too – an incumbency advantage but one in use in Australia since the colonies and England many, many centuries before that
Over 430,000 people were subject to automatic debt collection via robodebt, which the government has publicly admitted was hugely inaccurate.
The system’s haywire calculations often had the Centrelink in-house software seize huge sums from bank accounts without people realising what was coming,
Lawyer Guy Tiffany spoke to hundreds of robodebt victims while working on a class action lawsuit.
“It caused severe distress, anxiety and angst, and it often affected people at just the worst time in their lives,” he said.
That meant, he said, cases of no medicine, no school supplies or cutting complicated but crippling deals to pay off income support payments by reducing future income support payments.
Centrelink’s complaints system is not, he says, very responsive.
All debts were wiped in 2019 because the practice was declared illegal as it was so unreliable. Justice Bernard Murphy of the Federal Court of Australia stated this should have been obvious to the government.
The government then paid $1.8 billion to the hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients it had been illegally taking money from and admitted in court there was no basis for its debt collection
Government figures show 2030 people who had received a robodebt notice died between July 2016 and October 2018..
Coming to a definitive answer is another very strong point in favour of an inquiry and one backed by dozens of grieving relatives with stories about the pain this has caused them.
The government is emphasising a modest aim of learning about robodebt’s failure so that hundreds of thousands of people on low incomes do not experience such trauma again.
That this went on for well over two years after a Centrelink whistleblower first said the very basis for the debt collection was fake suggest the focus of the inquiry could move eventually to the Coalition frontbench
Among the Coalition MPs who held ministerial responsibility for the troubled portfolio were Scott Morrison, Alan Tudge and Stuart Roberts.
They will face politically difficult questions about why this scheme was brought out so early and not withdrawn much earlier given a very public campaign alleging its widespread abuse.
