Showing posts with label robodebt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robodebt. Show all posts

Saturday 25 March 2023

Tweets of the Week

 


 

 

Saturday 11 February 2023

Tweet of the Week

 

 

Sunday 6 November 2022

Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme is slowly but surely revealing the nastiness at the core of what was an extreme federal government & an increasingly politicized public service

 

Details of Scott Morrison's seven year war on the poor and vulnerable are being exposed.... 


The Saturday Paper, 5-11 November 2022:


Robo-debt: Liberals knew it was illegal before it started

Rick Morton, senior reporter.

@SquigglyRick

November 5, 2022


David Mason was the first person to give advice about a thought bubble program that would become robo-debt. In an email, he called it for what it was: a program with no legal basis that would result in serious reputational harm if it was allowed to go ahead.


His assessment should have been the end of the perverse experiment. Instead, this algorithmic program was used to terrorise welfare recipients for more than five years.


Mason was an acting director within the Department of Social Services (DSS) means testing policy branch when he was asked, in October 2014, to provide the advice. The service delivery arm of government, then known as the Department of Human Services (DHS), had cooked up a potential budget savings proposal that involved splitting taxation data into fortnightly blocks, when social security benefits are also paid, and using this to figure out if a welfare recipient had earned too much money and needed to pay back a debt.


We would not be able to let any debts calculated in this manner reach a tribunal,” Mason warned. “It’s flawed, as the suggested calculation method averaging employment income over an extended period does not accord with legislation, which specifies that the employment income is assessed fortnightly.”


Again, Mason reiterated that the team could not “see how such decisions could be defended in a tribunal or court, particularly when DHS have the legislative authority to seek employment income information from employers”. He stressed that “the approach could cause reputational damage to DHS and DSS”.


On October 31, 2014, the team asked for a second opinion from within the DSS’s legal branch. The same person who had sought advice from Mason, Mark Jones, emailed principal lawyer Anne Pulford to note that the two departments were working together on payment assurance, as was normal, but noted “a strategy is being considered that requires legal advice prior to proposing it to government”.


This is important in establishing a provenance for the controversial robo-debt idea: although governments enthusiastically set expectations for savings in budget cycles, the robo-debt scheme itself was the brainchild of someone or some group within the DHS.


The legal advice from DSS, provided by lawyer Simon Jordan on December 18, 2014, was almost as unambiguous as David Mason’s: “In our view, a debt amount derived from annual smoothing or smoothing over a defined period of time may not be derived consistently with the legislative framework.”


This advice was a co-opinion from Pulford, who features repeatedly in the years to come.


Unemployed people are… almost by definition, they have vulnerable cohorts within them. There would be people who would enter into agreements to repay debts which they had not incurred in the first place.”


Five days later, Scott Morrison became the minister for Social Services.


The end. Or there things might have rested were it not for a gruesome lack of imagination on behalf of dozens of players across government. It is not that they lacked the ability to conceive or design this wicked hunter’s trap of a debt policy – that is well recorded – but that these figures apparently possessed an inability, at all levels of the public service, to wonder what the final outcome of such a hideous program might be.


And it was this: at least seven families believe the suicide of a loved one was connected to the receipt of a robo-debt letter. Hundreds of thousands of Australians were hounded by government officers and debt collectors for money they never owed.


To be clear, these people owed no debt – not because of some administrative technicality but because the Department of Human Services concocted a system that literally made them up, despite the above advice being provided before the program even made it into pilot form.


Commissioner, we anticipate that the evidence to be adduced may be sufficient to show that the reason why no authoritative advice on the legality of the robo-debt scheme – and by that I mean from the solicitor-general or other eminently qualified counsel external to the department – the reason why no advice was obtained prior to the advice of the solicitor-general in September 2019 was because advice in one form or another within the Department of Social Services or Services Australia [formerly DHS] created an expectation within those departments that the external and authoritative advice may not be favourable in the sense that it may not support the legality of the scheme,” senior counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, Justin Greggery, KC, said on Monday.


Indeed, what has emerged in an explosive first week of full hearings is information that has been actively hidden from the public for almost six years. This includes multiple rounds of “advice” seen by the most senior people in both departments over many years before officials finally scurried to ask the solicitor-general for advice in 2019. The answers to questions sought by Services Australia in September of that year should have surprised nobody who had been paying attention.


The solicitor-general was very clear: the use of smoothed or apportioned tax office data “cannot itself provide an adequate factual foundation for a debt decision”. Further, his advice noted that the government couldn’t use the same data in the same way to essentially shake down past or current welfare recipients by presenting it to them and demanding they provide evidence that they did not incur a debt.


This advice continued a piece-by-piece demolition of the entire framework for robo-debt, noting that – as Greggery put it – compliance officers are required to investigate other sources of information, such as employer records, to justify the assumption that a debt exists. They cannot simply outsource this to welfare recipients by issuing threatening letters.


Failure to respond does not provide positive proof of a debt, and the decision-maker cannot speculate about why a person may have failed to respond and to treat that speculation as evidence of a fact,” Greggery said on Monday, summarising some of the solicitor-general’s reasons.


The question raised by the solicitor-general’s advice is whether the Commonwealth government was, prior to that point, recklessly indifferent to the lawfulness or otherwise of the use of averaged PAYG ATO data obtained from the taxation office to allege and recover debts.”


Reckless indifference” is a phrase no barrister uses lightly. It is also a crucial element in the civil law of misfeasance in public office. In its own advice on the tort, the Australian Government Solicitor notes that the element of “bad faith” requires one of two things: either intentional harm caused by knowingly acting beyond their legal power or the defendant having been “recklessly indifferent to whether the act was beyond power and recklessly indifferent to the likelihood of harm being caused to the plaintiff”.


The story of robo-debt is one in which those responsible for it gradually knew less and less, and with less certainty, about its dimensions, about what it was going to be used for and how. What happened between 2014, when departmental advice cast near total doubt over the legality of robo-debt, and 2019, when the solicitor-general’s advice was finally delivered and led to the scheme’s ultimate end, is a collective act of leaning in to a studied ignorance.


We now know, from the evidence so far, that departments had all the legal power needed to compel information from businesses but that, apparently, the government “didn’t want [the] burden to be on employers”, according to a senior official at the DHS.


We know that design decisions were made in relation to the debt letters sent to robo-debt victims, which shunted them deliberately online rather than providing a contact number, because “past experience shows that if an alternative phone number is provided a significant proportion of recipients won’t engage online”.


We know the DSS, faced with an investigation by the Commonwealth ombudsman in early 2017, considered withholding the 2014 legal advice from that office and, even though it appears to have relented, had new advice drawn up by the same co-author of the 2014 document, Anne Pulford, which was used to hoodwink the ombudsman’s office and “show” robo-debt was legal.


We know that, once this convenient deception was established in the eyes of the ombudsman, its subsequent reports declaring robo-debt to be consistent with the legislative framework were used by the DSS as de facto legal justification for a scheme that was – and that they had every reason to expect was – illegal.


You must have understood,” Justin Greggery put to Pulford during questioning on Wednesday, “that you were being asked to walk back the clear terms of the 2014 advice in the context of what was happening in the public arena with the robo-debt scheme.”


It was Greggery’s contention that nothing had changed in the question put to Pulford in 2014 and again in 2017, but somehow the answer had.


This was the most hypothetical advice that could be provided to legally justify some aspect of the scheme then in existence,” he pressed, adding that it had no practical application at all.


Pulford agreed it was “hypothetical” but said she believed she was answering a “quite narrow and quite technically focused general question” put to her by acting group manager Emma Kate McGuirk, who emailed on January 18, 2017, and asked: “As discussed, I am looking for advice, please, regarding a last resort method of debt identification for income support recipients … is it lawful to use an averaging method as a last resort to determine the debt?”


Pulford says she does not recall the robo-debt program being mentioned in this context. That being the case, Greggery pushed, why did emails written by Pulford mention a “business need” to “justify” the question being asked?


The difficulty with you saying that you don’t believe the robo-debt scheme was raised is the evidence that you have given that you simply cannot recall the context of what was occurring socially, or politically, or within the office, or within your department, at the time that you were asked this question,” Greggery said.


As a purely academic question about administrative decision-making, one doesn’t need to have regard to a business need do they?” No, Pulford agreed. She was then asked if she felt pressure from above to massage her advice.


I believe I felt pressure from Ms McGuirk to provide an answer that justified taking action in circumstances which the broad general advice in 2014 would not have supported on its face,” she said.


I now cannot recall whether that was done in full awareness of the robo-debt scheme being in full flight or not.”


McGuirk, who had involvement with robo-debt for only a matter of weeks and who took the stand briefly on Wednesday afternoon, said she could not recall this conversation with Pulford but accepted one must have happened, as it is referred to in the email.


Greggery and Pulford argued back and forth about whether the 2017 advice was just a “rehash” of the same 2014 question with a different answer. Greggery’s view concluded like this: “Despite all the investigation in the world, if all you’re left with is smoothed income, you still arrive at the same answer that you gave in 2014. Legally, the absence of evidence doesn’t amount to positive proof of a debt, correct?”


Pulford wrote a separate email in February 2017 to a colleague in which she noted that “DSS policy has become more comfortable with the DHS approach of using smoothed income, given it is being applied as a last resort”.


She continued, “This appears to represent a change in DSS position, although it doesn’t represent a change in the legal position.”


On the stand, Pulford accepted that this meant the robo-debt scheme was, and remained, “legally flawed”.


In isolation, it is conceivable that the different cogs in the social service machine really had become aligned with the original DHS proposal. After all, despite early and significant doubt over its legality, the idea still made it to the minister’s office in a joint executive minute alongside a bundle of options presented for the 2015-16 budget.


A new minister at that time, Scott Morrison, with his eyes on the Treasury, liked the “PAYG” element. Once he had seen it, there was apparently no turning back.


Minister Morrison has requested that the DHS bring forward proposals for strengthening the integrity of the welfare system,” DSS branch manager Catherine Dalton wrote to Pulford in January 2015.


DHS has developed the attached minute and, given the quick turnaround required to the Social Security Performance and Analysis Branch, has provided comments highlighting the need for legislative change, as well as the shift away from underlying principles of social security law.


We would appreciate your scrutiny of the proposals and advice on any legal implications/impediments. What action would need to be undertaken to resolve legal issues, as well as some indication of the lead time required to obtain legislative change?”


This, of course, was never done. After the PAYG option was cleared for advancement by Morrison, DHS drafted a “new policy proposal”, including a checklist that indicated “no legislation is required”.


So far the inquiry has heard only from DSS public servants.


What began as an idea floated within the public service to please political masters had done exactly that. Now that it involved the knowledge of those politicians, the pressure to deliver was many orders of magnitude higher than before. All of this was happening despite additional “legal questions” being identified in 2015 by internal DSS lawyer David Hertzberg. Handling a jarring disconnect between what was now being asked, and the ever-growing certainty that robo-debt had no legislative basis whatsoever, required an unlearning of unhelpful facts or the almost comical evasion of knowledge.


Take the events of mid-2018, when the DHS referred an Administrative Appeals Tribunal to DSS to consider an appeal. At stake was a robo-debt case that threatened to derail the program, or at least add to mounting and sustained public backlash.


The AAT decision so alarmed DSS officials that they punctured a longstanding refusal to get outside legal counsel regarding the legality of robo-debt and enlisted the private law firm Clayton Utz to provide an opinion on the matter.


In the eyes of those same officials, it was not a good opinion.


In our view, the Social Security Act in its present form does not allow the Department of Social Services to determine the Youth Allowance or New Starts recipient fortnightly income by taking an amount reported to the ATO for a person as a consequence of data-matching processes and notionally attributing that amount to or averaging that amount over particular fortnightly periods,” the draft advice says.


This draft advice was sent to DSS principal lawyer Anna Fredericks on August 14, 2018, and must have produced an extraordinary cognitive dissonance among legal officers there.


Fredericks emailed colleagues and said the advice from Cain Sibley and John Bird was “somewhat unhelpful”.


[They] called me to discuss as the advice is somewhat unhelpful if the mechanism is something that the department wants to continue to rely on,” Fredericks said in the email, sent to Melanie Metz and Pulford. “Cain advised that they might be able to rework the advice subtly if this causes catastrophic issues for us, but that there is not a lot of room for them to do so.”


Backed into a corner, someone within DSS decided to deal with the problem by pretending it didn’t exist. The Clayton Utz invoice was paid but the department never asked for the draft advice to be “converted” to final, more “official”, advice.


Was this not extraordinary? No, Pulford said, because this kind of thing happened all the time. If the advice on any given matter was not favourable or judged as no longer needed, it would not be finalised.


Commissioner Catherine Holmes, who has shown herself to be a fair but direct chair of the inquiry, simply said: “I am appalled.” ……


After the first full week of her royal commission, a few things are clear. Robo-debt was a wicked scheme. It was illegal, and many people knew or ought to have known it was illegal from its conception. Despite this understanding, which never vanished, it was rolled out in such a way as to herd past and current welfare recipients, like cattle, through deliberately designed gateways that maximised the amount of money they could be forced to pay.


For many, they never owed a cent. This was a particularly cruel abuse of the Australian public, at scale, by their own government, which persisted – indeed, which was covered up – for five years against truly overwhelming evidence that it should never have been allowed to begin.


Read the full article here.



Friday 4 November 2022

Evidence before the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme hints at possibility Scott Morrison knew that the infamous Robodebt scheme was unsupported by social security legislation & regulations and therefore unlawful

 

Scott John Morrison the current Liberal MP for Cook sits on the Opposition benches in the House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament, holds no parliamentary party positions and sits on no parliamentary committees.


As Minister for Social Services from 23 December 2014 to 21 September 2015, Treasurer from 21 September 2015 to 28 August 2018 and Prime Minister from 24 August 2018 to 23 May 2022, Morrison had considerable influence on the creation and implementation of social security policy and programs.


Including the infamous and unlawful ‘Robodebt’ debt recovery scheme which appears to have its genesis during his time as Minister for Social Services and Marise Payne’s time as Minister for Human Services in the Abbott Government.


Christian Porter followed Morrison as Minister for Social Services from 21 September 2015 to 20 December 2017, Stuart Robert followed Payne as Minister for Human Services from 21 September 2015 to 18 February 2016 and later becoming Minister for Government Services from 29 May 2019 to 30 February 2021 responsible for Services Australia, while Alan Tudge was Robert’s Assistant Minister for Social Services from 30 September 2015 to 18 February 2016 and then Minister for Human Services from 18 February 2016 to 20 December 2017, thus all three men had a hand in refining and implementing the punitive horror that was Robodebt as envisioned by Morrison and Payne


Approximate tenures of assorted departmental heads during the period December 2014 to December 2021:


  • Secretary of Dept. of Social Services - 

Finn Pratt (18 December 2013 to 18 September 2018)

Kathryn Campbell (18 September 2018 to 22 July 2021)

Raymond Griggs (22 July 2021 to present day)

 

  • Secretary of Department of Human Services - 

Finn Pratt (September 2009 to 7 March 2011)

Kathryn Campbell (7 March 2011 to 17 September 2017)

Carolyn Edwards, Acting Secretary, Department of Human Services (September 2017)

Renée Leon (18 September 2017 to 16 March 2020)

 Name change to Services Australia -

Chief Executive Officer Rebecca Skinner (16 March 2020 to present day)

 

The commencement of successful legal actions, in an individual filing by a person who received a debt recovery notice and a class action on behalf of a group of persons receiving Centrelink pensions, benefits or allowances who had received debt notices, saw the Morrison Government end the Robodebt scheme. 


The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme was established on 18 August 2022 and commenced its public hearings into the circumstances surrounding this scheme on 22 September 2022.


In particular the Royal Commission is seeking information with regard to the following matters:


  • who was responsible for the scheme’s design, development and establishment

  • why it was considered necessary or desirable

  • any advice or processes that informed its design or implementation

  • any concerns raised about its legality or fairness

  • the use of third party debt collectors under the Robodebt scheme

  • concerns raised following the implementation of the Robodebt scheme. In particular;

    • how risks were identified, assessed and managed in response to concerns raised

    • the systems, processes or arrangements in place to handle complaints about the Robodebt scheme

    • whether complaints were handled in accordance with those systems, processes or arrangements

    • whether complaints were handled fairly

    • how the Australian Government responded to legal challenges, including decisions made by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal

    • when the Australian Government knew, or ought to have known that debts were not, or may not have been, validly raised

    • whether the Australian Government sought to prevent, inhibit or discourage scrutiny of the Robodebt scheme

  • the intended or actual outcomes of the Robodebt scheme including;

    • the impacts that the scheme had on individuals and families

    • the costs of implementing, administering, suspending and winding back the scheme, including associated costs such as obtaining advice and legal costs.


On Monday 31 October 2022 the Royal Commission published Exhibit 1-0001 - CTH.2013.0012.5070_R - Advice prepared by Solicitor General to AGS re use of apportioned ATO PAYG data which in my opinion clearly shows that a competent Prime Minister, Minister for Social Services, Minister for Human Services, any other relevant ministers and their department heads should have been aware or were aware that the Robodebt debt recovery scheme that had been in operation since April 2015 was at best legally fraught and at worst unlawful in all or part of its design, implementation and compliance measures. That this situation was being discussed at some level during 2015 and 2016 and was widely known by August-September 2018.


From 24 September 2019 there was a 46-page legal opinion to that effect — written by the Solicitor-General Stephen Donahue QC, Nicholas Owens SC and barrister Zoe Maud — available to then Prime Minister Morrison, relevant ministers and department heads.


At its 31 October hearing the Royal Commission heard evidence from Victoria Legal Aid and two women who made ‘debtors’ by the Robodebt scheme.


The 1 November hearing heard evidence from:

  • Principal Lawyer, Department of Social Services; and

  • Former Assistant Director, Payment Review and Debt Strategy Team, Social Security Performance and Analysis Branch Department of Social Services.


At the 2 November hearing evidence was heard from:

  • Group Manager, Redress Group, Department of Social Services;

  • Former General Counsel, Programme Advice and Privacy

Department of Social Services; and

  • Former Director of Payment Integrity and Debt Management

Department of Social Services.


Over the course of 1 and 2 November hearing days it became clear that government departmental awareness of the probability of a lack of legislative support for and flaws in the Robodebt scheme preceded that of the general public.


Matters revealed in evidence should become quite interesting in coming days, weeks and months.


The full witness list for the period 31 October to 4 November 2022 can be found at: https://robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/2022-11/witness-list-31-october-2022.pdf


Hearing transcripts for 2 to 4 November 2022 can be found at:

https://robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au/hearings


A mainstream media perspective…….


ABC News, 2 November 2014:


...The commission, being held in Brisbane, has been hearing evidence from public servants involved in formulating the earliest legal and policy advice about the bungled Robodebt scheme that wrongly claimed hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients owed debts to Centrelink through a process of income averaging.


Counsel assisting the commission Justin Greggery KC questioned Social Services Department lawyer Anne Pulford about external legal advice the department obtained in August 2018 that raised concerns about income averaging by scheme.


The advice was sought after a decision was handed down in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal relating to Robodebt.


Mr Greggery drew Ms Pulford's attention to email comments from government lawyers about the external advice including one describing it as "somewhat unhelpful" and another which stated: "They might be able to rework the advice if this causes catastrophic issues for us but there is not a lot of room for them to do so."


He asked Ms Pulford if she appreciated "that, at that point, the department had in its possession an external legal advice which said the Robodebt scheme was not lawfully sustainable".


Ms Pulford said she didn't recall the details of the advice but presumed she did appreciate the significance.


Mr Greggery drew Ms Pulford's attention to an email she sent, noting the income-averaging approach was not supported.


"You are signalling there that this advice if accepted means the end of the Robodebt scheme," he said.


Ms Pulford said she did not recall what she was trying to signal by the words.


Under questioning from Mr Greggery, Ms Pulford said that, from information she had seen, the external legal advice was not converted beyond a draft advice form.


She said that, if an external advice was not formalised beyond a draft, then it was "treated as not representing the departmental preferred view and arguable still open to discussion or comment or potential revision".


The reference prompted Commissioner Holmes to ask if, when the department received unfavourable advice, was it "just left that way and then never represents anything that you deal with, is that the approach?"


Ms Pulford replied that the scenario occurred "regularly" and it happened many times "that I had seen it".


Commissioner Holmes responded by saying: "I'm appalled".


Asked by Mr Greggery who would have made the decision about leaving the legal advice as a draft, Ms Pulford said the decision-making within the policy area was a matter for the internal organisation.


"I couldn't necessarily comment on saying whether that would have been if such a decision were made, it would be necessarily made at director level or at a different level,'' she said.


The commission has previously been given evidence that Ms Pulford was co-counsel on legal advice formulated by her team in 2014, which indicated the then-proposed scheme was illegal. [my yellow highlighting]


Inquiry shown emails relating to draft brief prepared for Scott Morrison


Earlier on Wednesday, the inquiry was told lawyers in Ms Pulford's section appeared to come under pressure later — when the scheme was being formulated — from then-social services minister, Scott Morrison, in relation to providing advice so it could be submitted to the Finance Department.


The inquiry was told lawyers in Ms Pulford's team provided more advice in 2015 because the Department of Human Services was advised that "Mr Morrison indicated he wants a number of potential proposals in an attached briefing [to] be brought forward for portfolio budget statements".


Ms Pulford agreed with counsel assisting Justin Greggery KC: "That it appeared pressure was coming from a clearance by minister Morrison to have a new policy proposal developed to the point where it might be submitted to the Department of Finance".


She agreed the advice was being sought in relation to proposals, such as the capability to detect, investigate and prosecute suspected fraud and noncompliance in the context of social welfare payments.


They also included the "utilisation of new technology to increase data analytics, complex network analysis and geospatial analysis and establishing a capability for real-time monitoring and risk-profiling".


The inquiry was shown internal emails between lawyers within the Social Services Department in 2015 relating to a draft brief being prepared for Mr Morrison.


Those emails referred to Mr Morrison requesting the Human Services Department "bring forward proposals to strengthen the integrity of the welfare system".


The emails went on to say the social security performance and analysis branch had provided comments highlighting the need for legislative change as well as the shift away from underlying principles of social security law.


Under questioning from Mr Greggery, Ms Pulford acknowledged the emails were seeking advice about what legislative changes were needed to get the proposal up and running.


Other emails revealed the need to provide preliminary advice to the Finance Department within just two days — a timeline that Ms Pulford agreed was "short".


The Guardian, 3 November 2022:


Plans for what became the robodebt scheme “almost immediately” concerned policy advisers at the Department of Social Services and were viewed by one official as “unethical”, a royal commission has been told.


Cameron Brown, a former director of payment integrity and debt management at the Department of Social Services (DSS), said he was responsible for seeking advice on the policy idea from its internal legal team in late 2014. [my yellow highlighting]


That was in response to a proposal from the Department of Human Services to use “income averaging” to raise welfare debts – the central plank of what became the ill-fated robodebt scheme.


At the time the DSS led the development of social policy while the Department of Human Services was responsible for administering services such as Centrelink, including welfare debt recovery.


It remains unclear whether this damning legal advice was shared with the Department of Human Services, which was responsible for the plan.


Brown said he and his team were “almost immediately” concerned about the “unethical” debt recovery proposal.


Brown compared the proposal to the so-called Dallas Buyers Club “speculative invoicing” saga in which copyright holders sent legal demands to alleged downloaders of the 2013 film for large amounts of money in the hope they would settle. [my yellow highlighting]


He noted many of the people targeted by robodebt were vulnerable and the “onus of proof” was unreasonable given much of the pay information they would need to source went back years…..


Read the full article here.


Monday 6 June 2022

New Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten announces user service audit of "myGov" website and a robodebt royal commission


The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 June 2022:


Labor wants to end the “digital workhouse” approach to people trying to get government payments, with new minister Bill Shorten planning to turn using myGov from an often-frustrating experience into a seamless one.


Shorten is taking briefings on his new government services portfolio but wants to get moving immediately on a user service audit of myGov, the online entry portal into services such as Centrelink, Medicare and the Australian Taxation Office.


His ultimate aim is to make it “a much more seamless exercise” that doesn’t force people to spend hours of their own time applying for payments or updating details, the new minister said in an exclusive interview.


They’ve created digital workhouses, basically. You know, workhouses were a 19th century place where the kind-hearted burghers of Victorian England and Australia said, ‘Well, if we’ve got to pay you for three meals a day, you can go and work in a workhouse,’” he said.


And I think that we’ve used, in some cases, digital technology to create two classes of Australians.


We haven’t privatised the service. We just privatise your time. You spend hours on it. I’m amazed there’s not more rage out there.”…..


Services Australia is effectively the delivery shop for a huge range of other portfolio areas, administering payments for everything from childcare subsidies and Medicare rebates to disaster relief and paid parental leave, along with the more traditional welfare payments such as pensions and JobSeeker…..


However, it has come under pressure in recent years for increasingly forcing people online to make those claims, with nearly 30 Centrelink or Services Australia shopfronts closing around the country, leaving 318 dedicated outlets. Shorten has previously said people seeking support and services must have the option to speak with real people, not merely be pushed onto a website or sit in an automated phone queue.


Another top priority for Shorten in his new role is launching a royal commission into robodebt as soon as possible…... 


As new Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme Bill Shorten is looking to reform those elements of the scheme which are shortchanging people with disabilities



Brisbane Times, 3 June 2022:


Labor has vowed to crack down on providers overcharging for services claimed on the National Disability Insurance Scheme and to clear the backlog of thousands of legal appeals for funding, while delivering COVID-19 booster shots to people with disabilities.


NDIS Minister Bill Shorten said he was disturbed by the "twin pricing system" for services to people with disabilities and says restoring trust between scheme participants and senior bureaucrats was vital.


The National Disability Insurance Agency has come under fire for cutting the funding packages of disabled people as it faces rising costs. Shorten said it was an obscenity that there were 5000 appeals on NDIS packages before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal…..


"Under the last regime, we're spending more money on the process of fighting people for amounts which are less than the amount we're spending in the fight. How did we end up in that parallel universe?"


The number of appeals on NDIA decisions that make it to the AAT has more than doubled over the past year and legal costs are running at tens of millions of dollars.


The NDIS will cost almost $36 billion in 2022-23 and costs are forecast to keep increasing.


Shorten acknowledged the need to tackle the pricing of services charged to NDIS packages, saying it seemed to be a "black box" where providers come up with fees but "you don't know the magic of how they're coming to it".


"I'm disturbed at the twin-rate system or the dual system where if you don't have a package, you pay X dollars, if you do have an NDIS package, you get charged X plus $100. The scheme can't cross-subsidise everyone else," he said.


Making sure people with disabilities - both NDIS participants and those on disability support pensions - have quick access to their third and fourth COVID boosters is also a priority for the new minister…..


Shorten's longer-term goals include working with the states to improve support in schools, community mental health services, housing and bed block in hospitals as a way of tamping down NDIS costs.


But he said he was wary of any approach to the rising NDIS costs that suggested people with disabilities were the problem.


"I think there's been a level of incompetence and wastage. I think there's a breakdown in trust," Shorten said.


Monday 14 June 2021

That "massive failure in public administration" of Australia's social security scheme, by way of the creation of the unlawful 'Robodebt' automated data matching program, has to date cost the Morrison Government: (i) est. $8.4M in Federal Court applicants' awarded legal costs; (ii) approx. $751M in debt repayments to applicants; (iii) a further $103.6M in settlement distribution costs; (iv) the forced abandonment of recovery of up to $1.01 billion in debts claimed by Centrelink but not yet realised; and (v) government having to absorb its own legal costs as well as the former unlawful program's multimillion dollar administration costs.

 

ABC News, 11 June 2021:


A Federal Court judge has delivered a withering assessment of the unlawful Robodebt recovery scheme, calling it "a shameful chapter" and "massive failure in public administration" of Australia's social security scheme.


He also ordered the Commonwealth to pay costs of $8.4 million to Gordon Legal, which brought the class action against the Commonwealth on a no-win, no-fee basis.


"This has resulted in a huge waste of public money," he said.


Justice Murphy's judgement gave legal effect to a settlement reached between the Commonwealth and people wrongly pursued for debts last year.


The Commonwealth agreed to fund compensation, pay back wrongly raised debts and drop debt recovery actions, but has not admitted liability.


Robodebt was an automated debt collection system in place between July 2015 and November 2019 that used data-matching in an attempt to identify the overpayment of social security benefits.


More than $750 million wrongfully recovered


The court heard that as part of the scheme, the Commonwealth had unlawfully raised $1.73 billion in debts against 433,000 people.


Of this, $751 million was wrongly recovered from 381,000 people.


"The proceeding has exposed a shameful chapter in the administration of the Commonwealth social security system and a massive failure of public administration," Justice Murphy said.


Justice Murphy said he "could not help but be touched" by the "heart-wrenching" stories of people who had suffered as a result of the scheme.


"One thing … that stands out … is the financial hardship, anxiety and distress, including suicidal ideation and in some cases suicide, that people or their loved ones say was suffered as a result of the Robodebt system, and that many say they felt shame and hurt at being wrongly branded 'welfare cheats'," he said.


He said ministers and public servants should have known the method of using taxation income records to estimate a welfare recipient's average income was flawed.


"However, it is quite another thing to be able to prove to the requisite standard that they actually knew that the operation of the Robodebt system was unlawful," he said.


"There is little in the materials to indicate that the evidence rises to that level….


In settlement of Prygodicz v Commonwealth of Australia the Morrison Government made no admission of legal liability with regard to any aspect of the unlawful Centrelink debt collection program.




BACKGROUND


Prygodicz v Commonwealth of Australia (No 2) [2021] FCA 634 (11 June 2021)