[Theme Music Starts]

RICK:

From Schwartz media, I'm Rick Morton. And this is 'Inside robo-debt', a special series from 7am.

Robodebt should never have made it into the real world but, once it did, its gatekeepers got greedy and turned the scheme on full throttle. Without warning, in late 2016, more than 100,000 people across Australia were swamped by life altering debts stretching back years.

That became a political problem. A scheme politicians thought was a neat and tidy solution to their own ambitions, quickly spiralled into a humanitarian disaster.

But instead of fix it, the politicians decided to spin it. Against all the evidence, they tried to convince people Robo-debt was working; that it was fair, and that it was good.

Today we speak to one of the people whose job was to create this alternate reality: Rachelle Miller, the former media adviser to human services minister Alan Tudge.

This is episode four: The Minister’s Advisor.

It's Thursday, July 13.

And a warning, this episode contains discussion of suicide.

[Theme Music Starts]

RICK:

Rachelle Miller, thank you so much for joining us.

RACHELLE:

I'm glad to be here.

RICK:

I know we've kind of been out of some of this territory before, but just to place yourself in the story, you began working with Alan Tudge, who was the Human Services Minister at the time, on the 17th of August 2016.

RACHELLE:

Yes, that's right. I was a former media adviser to Alan Tudge when he was the Minister for Human Services. And my role as a media adviser was effectively to talk him through, “these are the main things that I need you to say in this interview.” So we really were the people behind ministers speaking publicly, and we were the people who were dictating the messages.

RICK:

Rachelle Miller started in the lumbering Human Services portfolio at a historically important time. It was an agency that cost the federal budget a lot of money and the Coalition, well, they wanted savings.

The Liberals and Nationals were desperate for a budget surplus because this — they’d been telling us since Costello — was the key indicator of good economic management. Deliver a surplus, stay in power. That is how they saw it.

RACHELLE:

Oh, look, from day one, the priority within the entire government was budget savings. So obviously Department of Human Services, or Services Australia, as it is now, is responsible, was responsible at the time, for about 35% of all government spending. So, obviously with a target to achieve budget savings, we were going to have a lot of pressure put on us. Because obviously we're the ones that spend all the money.

RICK:

Yeah.

RACHELLE:

They were estimating that there was over about $4 billion worth of overpayments, or fraudulent payments, paid out between 2010-2018, which was kind of largely the period that Labor was in government. We were obviously going to try and put the pressure on them for their period of that time.

RICK:

It's a win-win because you get to say “we're saving money”, but also this is what Labor didn't do.

RACHELLE:

That's exactly right. We're saying we care about the integrity of the welfare system. People should be getting what they're entitled to, but not a dollar more, not a dollar less, you know. And that that was kind of the narrative that we were pushing at the time. And it was absolutely a key focus from the beginning of my time in that office.

RICK:

So, that was the government’s motivation. Rachelle Miller’s boss, Alan Tudge, however, well, he had a more personal stake in this matter.

Tudge was ambitious and he was stuck in the human services portfolio. It was a ministry that was unfashionable, and most Coalition politicians actually didn’t want anything to do with it.

That’s because the department was huge, and expensive, and there was little room to actually do anything because the policy for various payments like social security and Medicare sat with other ministers.

So when Tudge came to the portfolio he was looking for a way to be useful, to show he could make human services important to the government’s re-election hopes and earn a lot of media attention.

To do that in a portfolio that largely runs itself? That required cunning.

RICK:

And was that the sense you got from Alan Tudge?

RACHELLE:

Absolutely. I mean, of course as soon as I started working for Alan, I sat down with him and said, “Well, what do you want to achieve? I mean, I'm your media adviser. What's your approach to media? Do you want to do a lot of media? Do you want to just do the media that's necessary?”

And certainly the job of Human Services minister was viewed within the government as a kind of training ground for future cabinet ministers. So it was that step up for Alan coming from parliamentary secretary into a junior ministry of his own, but he was certainly very focussed on the next step up to Cabinet. And so he was looking to impress his colleagues. And if Alan’s promoted to Cabinet then, then I'm promoted as well.

RICK:

So, around this time you have to remember, the government was desperate for savings and they wanted to get them from welfare, social services, and any payments the government was giving to people.

Needless to say, Tudge is overjoyed when he finds out, on being appointed to the ministry, that the vast majority of that $10 billion figure could be found in his department.

That was what Robo-debt promised.

The Coalition announced the acceleration of Robo-debt in the 2016 July election campaign, just a week before the polls. They were returned to power with a wafer thin majority.

By the time Rachelle Miller joins Tudge’s office —just a month after the 2016 election — the department says it is ready to pull the trigger on the full scale monstrosity, with zero human oversight. Tudge approves the plan.
Now, Rachelle says that she and her minister never had any reason to doubt it was legal.

But in any case it was a catastrophe.

RACHELLE:

At that time, I was being told that the system was working as intended. And that if errors are occurring, and people are getting debts when they don't think that they have a debt, it was because they were not meeting their mutual obligations. So the head of the media team in the Department of Human Services, at the time, kept coming back to me and saying, “Nope, that's exactly the way this program is supposed to be working. And all those people need to do is get in touch and show their payslips and we can fix that up for them.” And we did see that happen with a lot of people, who did get in touch and had their debts cancelled.

RICK:

Let’s just call it the Summer of Robo-debt. It’s late 2016 and all hell breaks loose. Ironically or otherwise, it’s mathematics that, again, gets the government in trouble. They’ve gone from a few thousand manually checked debts, to a machine that automatically spits out those debts at a rate of 20,000 per week.

These are riddled with errors.

And soon, people went to the media with their stories. And — at least in independent media — they started blowing up!
By the 3rd of January 2017, deep in the Christmas-New Year quiet period of that summer, former Treasury economist Peter Martin writes a scathing column in the Fairfax press in which he accused bureaucrats of “misapplying the law”. He was right. And the column even grabs then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s attention who calls Alan Tudge back to the country from London, where he’s on holidays, and demands answers.

Tudge was myopic, and together with Rachelle Miller, he was determined to turn what he saw as a media crisis into a media opportunity.

RACHELLE:

It needed the crisis media strategy, because, as you know Rick, there's nothing more powerful in the media than somebody, a real person, a talking head, coming out and telling a story.

RICK:

Yeah.

RACHELLE:

You know, somebody sitting there and saying, “I've got this debt, I'm a disadvantaged person, and the horrible government has given me this debt notice. And I don't I don't believe I have this debt.” So, we were, sort of, having to fight that. And we did notice that these stories were almost entirely appearing in the left-wing media. And we kind of realised that, well, you're swing voters and you're centrist, kind of, voters who aren't really engaged with politics day to day, aren't reading that sort of media. They're picking up the Daily Tele, or maybe seeing a headline on Seven News.

So we then developed our narrative, and used that media to provide a kind of a counter narrative that balanced the negative media out. And that counter narrative, of course, was the government is protecting taxpayer dollars. We are recouping money that Labor just let go. We're using new technology to uncover, you know, fraud and overpayments that before we weren't maybe able to detect.

You saw during that period there was a lot of media around that, and we did that intentionally to try and give that counter-narrative.

RICK:

It's so, like, weird to hear it explained so succinctly. But who was finishing those case studies? The department, wasn't it?

RACHELLE:

Department. Yeah, and I was driving the department to provide all of those statistics around. So every single case that appeared in the media, we'd instructed the department to make sure that they got immediately in touch with that person to resolve their issues, but we also had statistics on how many, for example, how many of those people who were speaking out in the public actually had legitimate debt. So that's what we're calling it, like actually real debts. And on the analysis we did at the time, it's about 50%, so 50%, even though once they handed over all their information still did have a debt, 50% their debt was cancelled. So, we were kind of using that as a way to sort of say, “Hey, this program is not perfect, but it's working and we're putting in places things to improve it.”

RICK:

But here's what I don't understand. Right. So, you know, on your own analysis, right, it's 50/50. It's a coin toss about someone has been told they've got the right information. And I know that the Kathryn Campbell approach was, “well, all we wanted was for that person to come and get in touch with us.” Right.?

RACHELLE:

That’s right, that’s right.

RICK:

And you wouldn’t have known this at the time I don’t think, but there were briefings, or documents in the department where they knew that wasn’t true. That they had actually designed the system on the assumption that the people wouldn’t get in touch. That they would just pay the money.

RACHELLE:

Yeah I had no idea of that. You've got to remember that I had a huge amount of pressure on me from my boss to promote the positives that were coming out of his portfolio. I mean, he expected, and he used to demand, “I want a front page story every week.” And it was unrealistic, and I mean, that was the reason that Robo-debt was really uncovered by us in the first place.

When we first put it in the media, I think it was in December or November of 2016, I had found that there was this compliance program that was happening at the time, that was bringing in serious amounts of money. I mean, I looked at it and my media adviser from the department said to me, “oh, look, we've got this little pilot program and, you know, it seems to be delivering really great results in retrieving and recovering debts.” And I said, “oh, yeah, what are the figures look like?” And he said, “it's about 4.5 million worth of debts owed to the Commonwealth per day.”

RICK:

‘Per day’. And that was such an extreme figure that even the minister questioned it. Right?

RACHELLE:

We did, straight away. I was shocked. And Alan said to me, “Look, make sure you go back to the department and double, double check that. That's got to be right. If that's not right, we can't put that in the media. You know we’ve got to make sure that this program is working well.” And we were told that he had been through all these series of pilots, that they'd started the program very small, and they were slowly ramping it up, and it was going really, really well, that it had been going on for quite some time. I've received nothing but assurances from the department that everything was good, all the boxes were ticked, and they were about to ramp it up to full capacity.

So we ran that story on the front page, you know, of the Australian, the welfare debt squad out to recover however much it was, 4 billion a year or 4 billion over eight years. And that's… again goes back to that approach you can take as a minister, you can go low profile or you can go high profile. And when you're demanding a front page story every week, and we're desperately pressuring the department, and you heard the department talk about the pressure they were under to find those budget savings, and to put in place new initiatives to promote the work the government was doing. And that was me pressuring constantly. What else are we doing? What else can I give to the media? And that was all because, effectively, Alan wanted to be seen to be doing a good job in supporting the initiatives of the government. And for a while there, that's exactly how he was seen.

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“We will find you, we will track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison.”

RACHELLE:

During the time that I worked for him, he regularly received text messages from his colleagues, you know, “Well done, mate. Another front page story.” You know, he's starting to build his profile as a good operator. Everybody was just drinking the Kool-Aid. You know, everybody was telling the minister, and telling me, what we wanted to hear.

RICK:

By the sounds of the conversation there was an acknowledgement that there might be incorrect information being used to raise a debt, but perhaps not any telegraphing yourself into someone's shoes, saying, “Well, actually how would that feel to be told that I owed something that might be incorrect?” And, you know, that's not a legal question, that's a moral question. Like, how do you feel about that if that's happened even once? Is that a good thing?

RACHELLE:

I actually think empathy makes for a much better media adviser, but it makes the job much harder for you. And I, at the time, didn't have the same levels of empathy for people who were disadvantaged that I do now. And that is because I've been through my own, you know, mental health battles, and I've sort of reflected on that and said, “well, imagine if I was, you know, in this situation I’m in now with very severe mental health condition, and I get a debt letter.” And I don't have the support of a family and money around me. You know, that's an absolutely big deal. And that, of course, is why I immediately got in touch with the Royal Commission and said, look, I think I've got something to say. I think we should learn from this experience. And that's why I obviously did it.

RICK:

We’ll be back after this

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Archival tape – Reporter:

“The Federal government is refusing to scrap its controversial Centrelink debt recovery system, despite a growing public backlash.”

Archival tape – Reporter:

“Meanwhile, the Federal Government minister responsible for the controversial new Centrelink debt recovery push has finally broken his silence, to defend the system. The Human Services Minister denies the attempt to claw back overpayments is flawed.”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“We’re not going to scrap the welfare compliance system as the Labor party suggests. Our welfare compliance system is working.”

RICK:

So we’re now into the depth of the summer of Robo-debt, and Alan Tudge is the Minister responsible. He’s in charge of human services, and people are in the media saying “We don’t owe these debts, something has gone horribly wrong.” And rather than respond to this problem as the policy issue that it is, Tudge sees it as purely a media problem. And the best way to deal with a media problem is to shut the story down.

Now the thing about Tudge, the thing that brought him to the particular attention of the Robo-debt Royal Commission, is that his office went further than almost anyone else has before in their attempts to completely erase this story from the headlines.

They took the personal information of people who had complained about their Centrelink debts and they released it to the media.

Now Rachelle says that at the time, it was an incredibly simple process to plant these stories to counter the critical attention Robo-debt was getting, because she just had to look to her favourite journalist.

RACHELLE:

I had journalists coming from those types of media outlets who were effectively “just re-cut the statistics and give us a new stat on how many people you're catching. And that's a front page story for us.”

RICK:

Yeah.

RACHELLE:

“Can you give us a bit of colour? Can you tell us if they're male or female? Can you tell us if they're old or young? Can you…” you know, constant pushing for… to put that collar around the cheaters? You know, that narrative assisted us at the time because it became a, kind of, perception that all of those people who are whingeing in the media, they've probably just got a debt and they just don't like it.

RICK:

And because the minister had a file right, in his office, of every person that complained.

RACHELLE:

Yes. And that was predominantly because he wanted to make sure that those people, the department was getting in touch with those people and those people were having their cases sorted out.

RICK:

And he wanted to see it for himself, right?

RACHELLE:

Yeah. And he was very much like that. Very much a hands-on micromanager. It created a culture around him where everybody just said yes, and that is a real problem. And I saw that a lot towards the final years where I was in government advising ministers, where you've got these very, very young people, who really you can't call advisers, they were effectively gophers. You know, they did everything the minister said. And I used to push my boundaries a lot with Alan, you know, but I just got very very quickly put back in my box.

So I learnt pretty quickly that it was a lot easier to just accept everything he was saying, even if it was completely unreasonable, because it was just easier to get through that way. And I was of course, you know, really worried about keeping my job.

RICK:

Yeah. Did you get the sense that, you know, to the extent that Alan did care about the problem, i.e. getting the files brought up, making sure the department's actually getting in contact with these people, do you get the sense that he cared about the people or that he was just fixing a media problem for him?

RACHELLE:

Oh, definitely. It was fixing a media problem. You know, putting yourself in people's shoes, when you work in Human Services, should be the first thing you do when you come into that portfolio. Instead, we were pressuring the department to save money.

And I think that effectively is how culture was built both in the ministerial office, that then was reflected in the department. Because the department tries to service a minister's office. And I think in this occasion, the influence was very strong from our office.

RICK:

In one of the most egregious examples of how the minister weaponised Centrelink recipient’s own details against them, was in the case of Rhys Cauzzo.

He was a young man, an artist, you’d all be familiar with him by now, who lived in Melbourne, trying to build a life for himself.

And he killed himself in January of 2016 after receiving a mountain of debt notices generated by one of very early iterations of Robo-debt.

Now ,the case was reported in The Saturday Paper, and immediately messages began flying in the minister's office.
From the Royal Commission we know Alan Tudge requested details of Rhys’ case.

And that Rachelle Miller — infamously now, I would say — emailed her boss and her colleagues to say “what a great start to the weekend, because I thought this was a shocking beat up.”

Of course it wasn’t, it was Robo-debt, and all of that reporting has now been vindicated. But that didn’t stop them at the time. Rachelle Miller was there, in Tudge’s office, as it looked, to retaliate.

RACHELLE:

Look, I have a lot of things that I'm self-reflecting on at the moment. And certainly I know at the time I lacked an understanding and empathy for the barriers that are in place for people like Rhys. And instead, at the time, I tried to look at every reason why that journo was wrong. I think I texted somebody and said, “look, it's a disgraceful piece of reporting.”
I mean, we kind of sat there and thought, “well, there were obviously a lot of other things that were going wrong in Rhys’ life at the time. I think that's how we justified it. We kind of went, “Oh, well, he got a debt notice. Yes. But there was obviously a lot of a lot of other things that contributed to his ultimate decision to suicide”, which is absolutely tragic. And, you know, I kind of view it now and I look at it that that letter was probably that straw, that just became too much. I mean, when you're getting a letter from, what would be perceived to be a very powerful organisation like Centrelink, you know, you sort of equate them to the police. And in fact at the time we were promoting how we were also using the police crackdown down on welfare for fraud. So I think for somebody like Rhys, that would have been very devastating. And I can completely see that now. But then, I don't think any of us had enough empathy.

RICK:

No. And like I mean, and again, I've done things in my own career that I'm ashamed of, Right. But, you know, I do think, you know, when you get to the point where you're arguing about a technicality over someone who's killed themselves…

RACHELLE:

It is kind of out of perspective.

RICK:

Like it's wild just now listening to that, and I know that you're thinking backwards in time to…

RACHELLE:

I'm trying to think backwards. Yeah, and then trying to think about how I feel about now. And, you know, I sat in the Robo-debt Royal commission. I gave evidence.

Archival tape – Royal Commission:

“Thank you commissioner. Can you tell the commissioner your full name please?”

Archival tape – Rachelle Miller:

“Rachelle J Miller”

Archival tape – Royal Commission:

“And Ms Miller, were you served with a notice to give a statement…”

RACHELLE:

I knew at the time that I was getting completely smashed by people on Twitter saying that I was a heartless, horrible person that had no empathy. What I was trying to do, and what we do a lot in media, is just say what I needed to say in that room, and then deal with my emotions later. And I, after ten years of being in politics, and the sort of treatment that I got from Alan and others, I'm very good at separating what I need to do, from how I feel about this.

RICK:

Yeah.

RACHELLE:

I'm still having problems acknowledging the trauma that I've been through. I'm not proud of what we did, but we did have a lot less information back when we were making these decisions, than what we see now. And I still take responsibility for what we did. Even when you're in the trenches, you still need to have a way. And ministers particularly need to find a way in which they can put themselves in other people's shoes, particularly the people that they're creating policy for. And that's really what I wanted to say, because we didn't do that anywhere near well enough. It was really just about “we've got to kill this story because it's damaging the government.”

RICK:

Well, I mean, and it worked at the time, and it almost worked forever.

RACHELLE:

Well, that's right. It worked at the time. And, you know, and then Alan, of course, was moved into other portfolios and promoted, and I left politics.

RICK:

Rachelle Miller alleges she was in an abusive relationship with Alan Tudge at the time of these events.
But she also says the atmosphere in the office, more generally, in the workplace was abusive. And she says that this environment meant it was hard to see, with any moral clarity, with empathy, what was playing out around her, and particularly her role in it.

Alan Tudge continues to strenuously deny the allegations of an abusive relationship – he wasn’t asked about it at the Royal Commission, but he was asked about the culture in his office…

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“And did that in sensitivity reflect the mindset or culture within your office that really this system was catching people who owe debts and people who were getting caught or were whingers?”

Archival tape – Alan Tudgey:

“No I don't, I don't accept that that was the culture that was put in my office at all. I mean, this was a tragic case. I broadly remember this case. Yeah.”

RICK:

Like when we talk about this stuff, it's like, what are we really doing here? We're trading information for power. And we're funnelling information for power, for someone's ego, essentially, at the end of the day. And that information is about real people like and, you know, and I don't like again, like, you know, I'm sure you've thought about it, but like, do you really do you really kind of does it keep you up at night or is this something you want to come back to?

RACHELLE:

It does bother me. One of the really difficult things about thinking about how traumatic the Robo-debt program was for people, is that it was also extremely traumatic for me. It was one of the main reasons why I'm, at the moment, not working. And I have a diagnosis of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder. The list goes on.

RICK:

Rachelle eventually left politics. And went to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers, also known as PwC.

Interestingly, PwC has a small but notorious role to play in the story of Robo-debt.

Now as the complaints about this scheme mounted, and the media attention started to really really bite. The department realised they might have to do something to try and get this back on the rails really, they hired PwC, via Kathryn Campbell, the secretary, with Tudge’s approval, to look into what was happening, and try and come up with a roadmap to do it better. To reconfigure the whole thing and maybe they could get those budget savings after all.

They went to PwC to get that so-called ‘independent advice’, and PwC dutifully did the investigation, and they wrote a 100 page report. Suddenly there was some kind of arrangement where the department of human services said to PwC “actually we don’t want that report, we don’t want to have seen it.”

The report, by the way, cost one million dollars.

RICK:

Did you ever find out what happened to the report while you were there?

RACHELLE:

I was told that the report was not delivered to the government. And I didn't ask any more questions, but I very desperately wanted to see that report. And I know I don't think anybody has yet seen that report.

RICK:

Rachelle admits, as many suspected, that referring something like Robo-debt to external consultants for a report was really just a media solution. It wasn’t a genuine search for answers, it was a holding strategy.

RACHELLE:

PwC served its purpose for me at the time as a media adviser, because I could say — it was a holding line for Alan — “We have referred this to the experts at PwC.” Effectively, you're buying, you're buying the brand, you're buying the name of PwC to deflect from any other questioning. We've got the expertise and it will all be sorted. Don't you worry about it.

RICK:

Now, looking back at everything Rachelle still struggles with the part she played in Robo-debt, and her role in Alan Tudge’s office, and frankly I think that’s a good thing.

For her, the Royal Commission was a searing microscope into the conduct of her workplace, but also her own conduct. And I think that self reflection is important because forward to give that evidence was not easy, and I remember watching it unfold on the day when she was on the stand and thinking “Jeez, this is not good, you do not come out of this looking good.” It’s unedifying for everyone involved.

What I really wanted to know from Rachelle was whether she managed to sit through any of the other testimonies. Like Jenny Miller, his Mum, given her own role she played in all of this. And whether that stirred something in her at all, or not.
Did you manage to sit through any of the like, any of Jenny Miller's testimony, any the victims?

RACHELLE:

Yeah. And that was why I immediately just got on my email and said, “okay, I’ve… I should speak to you about what actually happened behind the scenes here, because it's a tragedy and for some people they'll never ever get over it. When I came into Human Services and I was told by our minister that I'm seeking as much media publicity as I can get so I could promote myself to get into cabinet. Really, it should have been, I'm looking at ways in which I can help the most disadvantaged people in our society.

RICK:

Rachelle Miller, thank you very much for joining us. Appreciate it.

RACHELLE:

That's all right. You're welcome.

RICK:

In tomorrow’s episode, you will hear from Jenny Miller. The mother of Rhys Cauzzo.

Talking about her search for truth and what answers the Royal Commission has managed to bring her.