Administrative Appeals Tribunal became so bloated by Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government appointees that Liberal Party cronyism began to eat away at its reputation. It is to be abolished and a new tribunal created in 2023

ABC News, 16 December 2022:

One of the most notoriously politicised bodies, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, will be abolished after the attorney-general declared its reputation had been irreversibly damaged.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the former government made dozens of politicised appointments to the AAT in its time in office, and that he would end the "cronyism".

"By appointing 85 former Liberal MPs, failed Liberal candidates, former Liberal staffers and other close Liberal associates, without any merit-based selection process … the former government fatally compromised the AAT," Mr Dreyfus said.

"Australians rightly expect honesty, integrity and accountability in government."

A new review body will be established in the new year, and already-appointed tribunal members will be invited to continue with it.

For almost 50 years the AAT was tasked with reviewing the decisions of government, including on matters of taxation, immigration and social security.

Appointments to the AAT were made by the government of the day for terms of up to seven years, though members could be re-appointed.

Mr Dreyfus said the new body would have a merit-based process for appointing tribunal members, after he accused the former government of sometimes appointing members to review issues such as taxation despite having no expertise in the area.

"The AAT's dysfunction has had a very real cost to the tens of thousands of people who rely on the AAT each year to independently review government decisions that have major and sometimes life-changing impacts on their lives," Mr Dreyfus said.

"Decisions such as whether an older Australian receives an age pension, whether a veteran is compensated for a service injury or whether a participant in the NDIS receives funding for an essential report."….

Accusations of politicised appointments have been levelled at former governments of all stripes, though progressive think tank The Australia Institute found a significant rise in what it deemed political appointments after the Coalition won office in 2013.

The think tank found around 5 per cent of AAT appointments under the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments had been made to people with political connections, but that jumped to more than one-third of appointments under the Morrison government.

It also found a quarter of senior AAT members who were political appointments had no legal qualifications.

Plum jobs that paid as much as $500,000 were sometimes offered to people in the dying days of government before a federal election.

Former NSW state Liberal minister Pru Goward, former WA Liberal minister Michael Mischin, and Mr Morrison's former chief of staff Anne Duffield were among those appointed to the AAT in the final days of the Morrison government.

The AAT had also faced several accusations of bullying by its members since 2016.

Bill Browne, The Australia Institute's democracy and accountability director, said reform was urgently needed.

"Whatever body replaces the AAT must be robust and independent, and that means the AAT’s replacement must be carefully designed with an open and transparent appointment process that ensures only qualified, independent members are appointed," Mr Browne said.

Australian Lawyers Alliance spokesman Greg Barns SC welcomed the AAT's abolition.

"Mr Dreyfus has the chance to create a new, impartial and fully independent tribunal that deals with thousands of cases each year involving Centrelink issues, tax issues and military compensation, to name some of the areas," he said.

"Today is a win for the rule of law."

Justice Susan Kenney has been appointed as the acting president of the AAT to guide its transition to the new system.

Mr Dreyfus said the new review body would be given 75 additional staff to help clear backlogs, at a cost of $63.4 million.

He said legislation to establish the body would be introduced next year, though likely not until the second half of the year.

BACKGROUND

ABC News, 7 November 2022:

Administrative Appeals Tribunal reveals 17 members have faced bullying or harassment complaints since 2016

Seventeen current members of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) have had more than one bullying, harassment or discrimination complaint made against them since 2016.

Allegations have been made against 19 members in total, with two members no longer working with the AAT.

They include senior officials and a deputy president, with the head of the tribunal unaware until Monday that they were still serving despite the multiple complaints.

The Klaxon, 3 September 2022:

AAT member paid for two gov’t jobs – for over five years

The top public official responsible for penalising medical practitioners who rip-off Medicare was paid for two Federal Government jobs for her entire five-and-a-half-year tenure.

The Klaxon can exclusively reveal Professor Julie Quinlivan, the long-time head of the Federal Government’s Professional Services Review agency, was also paid as a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Quinlivan has been employed as a “part-time member” of the Federal Government’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) – in a position paying tens of thousands of dollars a year – since July 2015.

She was also employed as the full-time “director” of the Professional Services Review (PSR) agency from February 2017 until six weeks ago, when she quietly departed, seven months before her contract was due to expire.

The director of the PSR is responsible for reviewing allegations of “inappropriate practice” against Medicare by medical practitioners – including double-billing – and is paid almost $400,000 a year.

The payments to Quinlivan while she held both the AAT and PSR positions totalled over $2 million.

ABC NEWS, 14 April 2022; 

Government unnecessarily extends jobs ahead of election

Plum jobs worth up to $500,000 a year were extended to Liberal Party-linked individuals by the Morrison government in the lead-up to the election, and many were not due to end for another two years. Some had their tenure extended by Morrison & Co to 2027.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February 2019:

Morrison government moves to re-appoint Abbott-era AAT members

The Morrison government is moving to re-appoint dozens of Abbott-era Administrative Appeals Tribunal members despite their terms coming to an end six weeks after a May federal election.

Crikey, 27 November 2019:

AAT accused of ‘intimidating’ robo-debt victims out of appealing

In the last financial year, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal contacted almost 800 people who wanted to appeal their Centrelink debt. Around half of those contacted withdrew their appeal, a figure that has alarmed experts.

Crikey, 25 September 2019:

Members of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal are steadily losing their jobs and being replaced with people less qualified.

Terry Carney lost his job as a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) via a short, blunt email. It arrived five months after he delivered a tribunal decision which declared Centrelink’s robo-debt scheme to be illegal — a finding that angered the federal government.

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.

The centrepiece of the Morrison Government’s “Living with Covid” program is a call centre outsourced to former robo-debt collectors and staffed by workers on casual contracts with no medical experience

 

“On January 17, as the nation recorded another 39,000 cases of the disease, with hundreds of thousands of active cases, the first phase of the “transitioning to Living with Covid” plan went live at the national hotline…..Health Minister Greg Hunt first announced what was then an information line for people worried about the novel coronavirus on January 31, 2020. Although hosted by healthdirect – a sort of national cabinet for government health advice across every jurisdiction in Australia – the call centres were set up by Stellar Asia Pacific Pty Ltd, now a wholly owned subsidiary of its former rival Probe Group.” [Journalist & author Rick Morton writing in in The Saturday Paper, 5 February 2022]

The Saturday Paper, 5 February 2022:

The centrepiece of the federal government’s “Living with Covid” program is a call centre outsourced to former robo-debt collectors and staffed by workers on casual contracts with no medical experience.

A cache of documents and testimony obtained by The Saturday Paper reveals the inner workings of the National Coronavirus Helpline, which is being run by private-equity owned Probe Group and its subsidiaries on contracts worth more than $270 million.

This information hotline has now been asked to triage people who have tested positive for Covid-19, or who believe they are infected, as part of the Commonwealth’s pivot to managing the disease in the community.

In practice, it has outsourced a key front-line health service to a small battalion of low-paid, poorly trained workers on insecure contracts. People staffing the hotline do not have medical qualifications. Many were previously unemployed and subject to the welfare system’s “mutual obligations”, which threatens penalties and payment suspensions if they refuse reasonable offers of work.

Training offered to new Probe recruits lasts only two hours.

Accounts obtained by The Saturday Paper show workers have described being placed under extreme stress while managing an overwhelming variety of callers, with limited information or ability to actually help them.

For instance, the coronavirus helpline is listed as the No. 1 point of contact on almost every government department, including Home Affairs and for disability and Aboriginal health services, despite there being no specific resources for team members to even provide advice.

Although scripts for call centre operators advise patients to seek rapid antigen tests if they are available, it is not part of the helpline’s remit to actually provide these tests or information on where they might be obtained.

Helpline workers are also fielding calls from people who are experiencing family violence, poverty or other types of extreme stress and are expected to arrange welfare checks or talk them through complex problems with little support.

Where problems do arise, employees are encouraged to phone their team leaders and not put anything in writing to ensure a “quick response”. Employees have requested access to more resources and training but in some cases have had no response from management or, where concerns have been heard, a two-page “cheat sheet” is provided.

There have been frequent occurrences of callers who have been given incorrect isolation advice from the National Coronavirus Helpline or who have complained about misleading public statements by politicians compared with the advice for different jurisdictions offered by the hotline.

In other cases, callers have been directed to see a doctor but have been sent away from GP clinics and even emergency departments, contrary to the advice offered over the helpline…..

Read the full article here.

Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott John Morrison continues his inglorious progression through 2021

 

The following April 2021 news media excerpts indicate that the current Australian Prime Minister is not good at the practicalities of governing a nation.

In fact they suggest that if Scott Morrison started his working life with any form of management skills, they were and still are, best suited to the lowest rung of middle management in a modestly-sized business.

The Saturday Paper, 10-16 April 2021:

The National Disability Insurance Scheme has set up a secretive “sustainability action taskforce”, which is instructed to “avoid” a forecast budget overrun by cutting access to the scheme and the level of funding to participants, leaked documents reveal.

An internal memo, marked “sensitive” and obtained by The Saturday Paper, shows that senior agency figures know there will be a “forecast… cost overrun in the 2021-22 financial year… on top of the scheduled increase in annual budget allocation”.

The document, dated April 2021, notes that the Sustainability Action Taskforce (SAT) has been working on “actions we need to take to avoid this forecast overrun”.

In order to do this, the SAT plans to limit both the number of new applicants joining the NDIS and growth of spending on current participants.

The memo provides the clearest evidence yet that a suite of proposed legislative reforms to the NDIS, key among them the introduction of mandatory “independent” assessments, are smokescreens for severe cuts to the scheme’s budget.

“The actions of the SAT will make immediate changes to slow growth in participant numbers, slow growth in spend per participant and strengthen operational discipline,” the memo reads. “We need to act now to ensure we can deliver a better NDIS.”

“From the very beginning of the Morrison government trying to force these changes upon disabled people we said very clearly, ‘We can see exactly what you are doing because you feel disabled people are a burden on government finances’.”

For further information, the document directs some staff to a “Scheme reform intranet hub”. Details from this reform hub were sent to staff as recently as last week with updated “talking points” regarding the rationale for the changes.

Senator Jordon Steele-John, the Greens’ disability spokesperson, told The Saturday Paper that this leaked document is “the smoking gun”.

“It reveals the government’s real intention with these reforms is to kick disabled people off our NDIS,” he said on Tuesday. “In addition, from the very beginning of the Morrison government trying to force these changes upon disabled people we said very clearly, ‘We can see exactly what you are doing because you feel disabled people are a burden on government finances’.

“And every single time the Morrison government looked us in the eye and said, ‘You are being ridiculous.’ ”

A spokesperson for the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) told The Saturday Paper that “any long-term financial risks will always be a consideration for government”…..

The Saturday Paper, 16 April 2021:

Back in 2015, when he was Social Services minister, Scott Morrison distinguished between disability support and welfare. He argued there needed to be cuts to welfare to help pay for the NDIS rollout. His distinction was that those on welfare are somehow blameworthy, or at the very least prone to cheat the system. Those with a disability, meanwhile, were seen as hapless victims of fate worthy of support so they can live with as much dignity as possible.

But now people with disabilities are to be seen through the same prism as those on welfare. By the Morrison government’s thinking, they are a burden on the budget and a taskforce has been established with the aim of cutting the growth in funding packages and participant numbers. This comes with the revelation that the public servants who designed the illegal computerised “robo-debt” scheme are busy at work for debt recovery from the disabled.

One of the original architects of the NDIS, Labor’s Bill Shorten, says the plans are a disgrace and a betrayal. There is also anger on the government’s backbench. So much so that the portfolio’s former minister, Stuart Robert, feared his plans to introduce privatised tick-and-flick assessments would not get approval from the party room.

Veteran Liberal MP Russell Broadbent says people with disabilities and their families “deserve special care and consideration”. He says, “They need all the support that is promised by the NDIS.” The new NDIS minister, Linda Reynolds, isn’t inspiring confidence, telling The Age she supports quality outcomes that are “fair and affordable” – a loaded motherhood statement if ever there was one. What’s affordable is what the government is willing to spend, according to its value judgements.

Overlooking people with disabilities in the vaccine rollout is symptomatic not only of the government’s poor priorities but of the mess the whole project has become.

Morrison began the week by resorting to Facebook to retreat and regroup. He ended it by putting the national cabinet – the Zoom meeting with premiers and chief ministers – on a weekly war footing. What exactly that means, and how it will meet the almost inexcusable shortfall of vaccines, isn’t clear. We may need to rely on more leaks from the public service and revelations from the disgruntled to find out.

ABC News, 16 April 2021:

Having last year promised to put Australia at the front of the global coronavirus vaccination queue, the Federal Government now finds itself under pressure over the pace of its vaccine rollout.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison this month defended the Government's record, claiming Australia had outperformed Germany, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan at the same stage of their vaccination rollouts.

"It is true that at this stage of our rollout, it is actually better than where Germany was, better than where New Zealand was, better than where South Korea and Japan was, and so I think there will be some important context in the weeks ahead as we see the significant ramp up of the distribution network," he said.

How does Australia's vaccine rollout compare? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict

Mr Morrison's claim is misleading.

When he made his claim during an April 6 media conference, Australia's vaccination program had been underway for 43 days.

At that point, a total of 854,983 jabs had been given — equivalent to about 3.4 for every 100 people.

That was slightly behind where Germany was 43 days into its vaccination program, but ahead of New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

Mr Morrison was therefore not accurate when he suggested Australia "at this stage of our rollout" was outperforming all four of the countries he chose to list.

Moreover, by the standards being set by member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Australia's vaccination program was slow to get started, and has ramped up more slowly.

The OECD's 37 member nations had delivered an average of 6.2 jabs per 100 people at the 43-day mark of their respective vaccination programs, compared to Australia's 3.4 doses.

And in terms of their overall efforts, an average of 22.4 doses per 100 people had been given across all 37 OECD nations by April 6.

Whether Australia's relatively cautious approach when it comes to vaccine approval — and hence its slower start for the rollout — represents a prudent strategy is a different question.

Moreover, not all vaccines are equivalent, making international comparisons difficult…….

Mr Morrison made his claim 43 days after Australia began its rollout, and compared its progress with that of Japan, Germany, South Korea and New Zealand.

Fact Check, therefore, assessed the rollout of vaccines across various countries 43 days from when their first jab was given.

The cumulative number of vaccines is expressed as a rate per 100 people, to account for variations in population.

Mr Morrison adopted the same approach when using a Facebook post to argue Australia's rollout was advancing in a manner consistent with other countries.

In terms of assessing a country's progress, the focus would ideally be on the number of people partly and fully vaccinated relative to the population, rather than on cumulative vaccine doses…...

Mr Morrison appears to have chosen for his vaccine comparison countries that are among the most sluggish in the OECD.

After 43 days, Australia's rate of 3.4 jabs per 100 people placed it eighth lowest in the OECD, ahead of Mexico, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Canada, France and Chile.

It was also below the OECD average of 6.2 jabs per 100 people.

After 43 days, Israel had administered about 57 jabs per 100 people, while Switzerland and the UK had both administered more than 10 jabs per 100 people. In the US, 9.6 shots per 100 people had been given…..

The Guardian, 17 April 2021:

It’s not entirely clear how encouraging words cleared the gritted teeth of the New South Wales health minister, Brad Hazzard, this week, but he managed it.

The precursor to Hazzard gritting his teeth was Scott Morrison dropping a statement to media outlets on Tuesday night declaring the national cabinet would resume meeting twice a week to deal with the mess of the vaccination rollout.

Morrison was rewarded with amplifying headlines on Wednesday morning about the country returning to a “war” footing – whatever that meant. It was unclear whether Australia (led by new defence minister Peter Dutton) intended to invade Europe and storm the factories of Big Pharma to commandeer some jabs, but in any case, Hazzard responded to his conscription to national service by observing that collaboration across the jurisdictions was welcome.

Previously, Hazzard thought, when it came to the vaccination program, decisions had “largely been a one-way street, with states and territories being told that this is how it is going to work”. The minister kept rolling. “That hasn’t worked so well so far, so maybe it’s time to have a rethink”. For good measure, Hazzard also noted “vaccine rollouts are state and territory core business”.

If you aren’t fluent in the passive-aggressive dialects of commonwealth-state relations, this short homily from Hazzard could be a little opaque.

So let me spell this out.

According to well-placed people who have been involved in the management of Covid-19 since the beginning, the states and territories (and some other experts) have been telling Morrison and the federal health minister, Greg Hunt, for months that their preferred mode of rollout of coronavirus vaccines carried significant downside risks.

Objections from the states and territories have been expressed at the level of health and treasury ministers.

Premiers and chief ministers have also raised the risks at national cabinet. As one person put it to me candidly this week: “We’ve been watching this slow-moving train wreck right from the beginning.”

There are two main issues: the design of the vaccination program, and decisions about procurement.

When it comes to the design of the rollout, at issue is Morrison and Hunt’s decision to have GPs and pharmacies deal with the jabs as “critical partners” rather than handing over the program to the states to manage.

If you ask around the government why this decision was made, the explanation you get is simple. GPs and pharmacies are politically influential and seen as largely friendly to the Coalition (community pharmacy in particular). People say Morrison and Hunt saw political benefit in a successful national vaccination program being run by friendly health groups, and this was preferable to having to run the gauntlet of the states and their endless naysaying and nitpicking.

This Canberra-led delivery model would enable Morrison and Hunt to own the success of the rollout and sail forth in triumph to the federal election.

People say nobody seemed that focussed on the political risks of owning a debacle, even though the potential for that seemed reasonably high, given the number of moving parts and vagaries outside the control of the Morrison talking points complex…… [my yellow highlighting]

YahooSport!, 17 April 2021:

Another visit to a footy match on Friday night has again landed the nation's leader in the crosshairs of footy fans, with loud boos ringing out at West Coast's Optus Stadium at the appearance of the PM in the crowd.

Mr Morrison was shown sitting next to former finance minister Mathias Cormann on a big screen at the ground, prompting footy fans to loudly boo the PM.

The Prime Minister's approval rating has taken a hit in recent weeks after a number of scandals involving the Liberal Party including his government's response to sexual assault allegations and claims of inappropriate behaviour inside Parliament, as well as the Covid-19 vaccination rollout....

From being booed at the footy in WA to being flipped the bird in SA:

'Just Adelaide Things' has this video of an old fella walking up to Scott Morrison and flipping the bird in his face in South Australia https://t.co/G2IobEiYnA pic.twitter.com/TW5JSZ1cBG

— Josh Butler (@JoshButler) April 18, 2021

Australian Government, Dept. of Finance, retrieved 17 April 2021:

The Emergency Response Fund (ERF) was established on the commencement of the Emergency Response Fund Act 2019 (ERF Act), on 12 December 2019. On establishment, the ERF was credited with the uncommitted balance of the Education Investment Fund, which has now been closed.

The ERF allows the Government to draw up to $200 million in any given year, beyond what is already available to fund emergency response and natural disaster recovery and preparedness, where it determines the existing recovery and resilience-building programs are insufficient to provide an appropriate response to natural disasters.

As of 31 December 2020 the total credits and earning held by the Emergency Response Fund (ERF) was $4.34 billion.

As of 17 April 2021 it appears that neither Prime Minister Morrison, Treasurer Frydenberg or Finance Minister Birmingham have allowed even one cent of this money to be dispensed to fund either emergency response or natural disaster recovery and preparedness.

To date, mainstream media still characterises monies held in the ERf as "unused".

The Australian, 7 April 2021:

The fund is supposed to pay out $200m a year to help local governments deal with cyclones, floods and bushfires, with $150m set aside for disaster recovery and $50m for mitigation, but no money has been spent since the fund was announced in April 2019 and legislated in December 2019. 

A Senate estimates hearing last month revealed there were 74 flood prevention projects worth a combined $250m that had applied for ERF funding but were yet to be assessed. 

Queensland councils in flood and cyclone-prone areas along the coast have criticised the federal government for failing to use the fund. 

Federal Emergency Management Minister David Littleproud said the reason no money had been paid from the disaster recovery tranche was because the legislation prohibited the fund from being used before other disaster funds, such as the bushfire recovery fund, were exhausted. 

He blamed the lack of money for mitigation projects on the time required to set up the proper processed to assess applications. “As soon as the legislation passes, you can’t just administer the funds right away,” he said.

“You have to set up the governance around it.....

If readers go to

 https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2019A00090/bd972cb5-be04-4687-807d-674c011df330 and examine the legislative provisions it is not hard to imagine that the ERF was never intended to fully function for the stated purpose of emergency recovery.

It is also noted that the National Bushfire Recovery Fund (NBRF) was announced by Morrison on 6 May 2020. It has a total of $2.1 billion committed over four years if the Economic and Fiscal Update, Appendix A of July 2020 is correct.

Over 11 months later and Morrison & Co. has allocated barely half of those funds, with little or no guarantee that any or all of that amount of financial assistance has as yet actually reached bushfire affected communities, families and individuals. 

 This is a similar scenario to other disaster related funds.