Seems Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's personal war on the poor and vulnerable may have its roots in the right-wing American culture he so admires

Stricter eligibility requirements when applying for Centrelink benefits, allowances and pensions. Reducing the scope of human intervention in decision making. Automated assessment of ongoing eligibility. Automatic suspension of cash transfers.

Sound familiar? Well it seems that the U.S.A. refined applying punitive measures to the poor and vulnerable long before Australia's right-wing warriors in the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government began their all out class war.

American began limiting eligibility and applying algorithms in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The Guardian, 14 October 2019: 

All around the world, from small-town Illinois in the US to Rochdale in England, from Perth, Australia, to Dumka in northern India, a revolution is under way in how governments treat the poor. 

You can’t see it happening, and may have heard nothing about it. It’s being planned by engineers and coders behind closed doors, in secure government locations far from public view. 

Only mathematicians and computer scientists fully understand the sea change, powered as it is by artificial intelligence (AI), predictive algorithms, risk modeling and biometrics. But if you are one of the millions of vulnerable people at the receiving end of the radical reshaping of welfare benefits, you know it is real and that its consequences can be serious – even deadly. 

The Guardian has spent the past three months investigating how billions are being poured into AI innovations that are explosively recasting how low-income people interact with the state. Together, our reporters in the US, Britain, India and Australia have explored what amounts to the birth of the digital welfare state. 

Their dispatches reveal how unemployment benefits, child support, housing and food subsidies and much more are being scrambled online. Vast sums are being spent by governments across the industrialized and developing worlds on automating poverty and in the process, turning the needs of vulnerable citizens into numbers, replacing the judgment of human caseworkers with the cold, bloodless decision-making of machines. 

At its most forbidding, Guardian reporters paint a picture of a 21st-century Dickensian dystopia that is taking shape with breakneck speed. The American political scientist Virginia Eubanks has a phrase for it: “The digital poorhouse.” 

As one recipient described it: “You owe what you have eaten.” 

In the UK, we investigate the secure government site outside Newcastle where millions are being spent developing a new generation of welfare robots to replace humans. Private companies including a New York outfit led by the world’s first bot billionaire, are supercharging a process which has spawned a whole new jargon: “virtual workforce”, “augmented decision-making”, “robot process automation”. 

The government is rushing forward with its digital mission despite the pain already being inflicted on millions of low-income Britons by the country’s “digital by default” agenda. Claimants spoke of the hunger, filth, fear and panic that they are enduring.

In Australia, where the Guardian has reported extensively on robodebt, the scheme that has been accused of wrongly clawing back historic debts through a flawed algorithm, we now disclose that the government has opened a new digital front: using automation to suspend millions of welfare payments. Recipients are finding their money cut off without notice.

Read the full article here.

It is not hard to draw a line between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's admiration for all things Republican and religiously conservative in America and his apparent desire to place all welfare recipients on the Indue Limited cashless debit card before the next federal election in 2022.

Scott Morrison's war on the poor is being expanded under the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Income Management to Cashless Debit Card Transition) Bill 2019 which is currently before the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs which will report to the Australian Parliament on 7 November 2019.

To date no welfare recipients have made submissions to the Senate standing committee on this bill. I suspect that this is due in large measure to the fact that Centrelink in particular has released personal information about welfare recipients who have gone public in the past and, there is anecdotal information that certain recipients who have spoken out publicly about life on the cashless welfare card have been sanctioned in some manner.

Federal Liberal MPs dislike people calling a spade a spade

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"If the government actually though that calling it robodebt caused more anxiety, they'd have named it that themselves"  [@RichardAOB, 4 October 2019]

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The Guardian, 4 October 2019:

The Coalition’s controversial debt recovery scheme should not be called robodebt, Liberal MPs say, in part because the phrase is causing anxiety in the community.

A day after the Liberal senator Matt O’Sullivan told the first hearing of a Senate inquiry into the scheme “robodebt” was a “misnomer”, his colleague, Hollie Hughes, admonished representatives from Western Australia’s community legal centres for using the term.

Hughes also told the inquiry on Friday the term robodebt was “a bit of a misnomer, particularly under the current system”.

“And I think using that term is probably creating a bit more anxiety than is required,” Hughes said. “If we’re trying to reduce the anxiety around this, probably not using that term particularly in these sorts of settings would be helpful.”

Despite noting improvements to the program, including increased involvement from Centrelink staff and outreach to affected welfare recipients, the WA legal centres said on Friday that the scheme was still having an adverse impact on vulnerable people.

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"I actually agree with the politicians saying that ‘robodebt’ is a misnomer... it implies there was actually a debt in the first instance. Maybe ‘robotheft’, ‘robowehatepoorpeople’ or ‘robofuckyou’ would be more appropriate?”  [@LukeLPearson, 4 October 2019]

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Centrelink sends in the debt collectors.....

 

Forget establishing that an actual debt exists – this is 2018 and come hell or high water the Turnbull Government wants to use Centrelink to prop up its financial bottom line in time for the May 2018 budget papers.

To that end Centrelink management has increased the number of alleged debts referred to contracted private debt collectors working on commission.

On 12 April 2017 The Guardian reported that: Centrelink has used private debt collectors to pursue 43% of the debts raised by its controversial “robo-debt” system, a rate vastly higher than normal.

By the end of the 2016-17 financial year Services Australia/Centrelink had raised 2,384,91 welfare recipient debts with a calculated worth of $2.8 billion, of which $1.64 billion is said to have been recovered - an est. $126,100,000 to $126,280,000 by private debt collectors.

BACKGROUND

The Canberra Times, 9 June 2017:

Centrelink's controversial robo-debt program has been blamed for a huge surge in legal challenges by people facing the welfare agency's demands for money.

Centrelink debt cases at the federal appeals tribunal have soared by more than 50 per cent since mid-2016 and The Greens have laid the blame for the surge, which might take years to work its way through the system, squarely at the feet of robo-debt.

My office has worked tirelessly to assist scores of people who received incorrect Centrelink debt notices. In one case someone received a notice demanding $12,377.93 before we challenged the debt on their behalf & Centrelink conceded that they didn’t owe a single cent (1/2)

— Peter Khalil MP (@PeterKhalilMP) February 20, 2018

My daughter got a debt FBT debt, she had no idea about until ATO took it out of her tax
She contacted her local MP for help
She got her money back plus an extra 1k due to same errors #robodebt @AustralianLabor please reinstate Social Security where we help not hinder vunerable

— DameJenntheAmazing Research Fellow of Smartarsery (@Jenn1964Hussey) February 21, 2018

After a surprise call from @Centrelink alleging 10k of decade old debt and requesting bank statements dating back to 2008, @Centrelink have the gall to say I’m asking for “too much information” to see written proof of said debt. #notmydebt @not_my_debt Sorry WHAT?!

— cam (@cam06056055) April 19, 2018

Update for 10yr old 10k robodebt. Have received NOTHING in writing @Centrelink. Got multiple calls requesting bank info from 10 yrs ago that ANZ can’t provide. 2day I was threatened with final call asking for these unattainable docs before the “algorithm” is applied @not_my_debt

— cam (@cam06056055) April 20, 2018

For more examples go to  
https://twitter.com/not_my_debt 
or 
https://www.notmydebt.com.au/stories/notmydebt-stories