[Theme music starts]

RICK:

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

There is one story that had radiated through the witness list at the Robodebt Royal Commission and profoundly altered the shape of that inquiry: the story of Rhys Cauzzo. In many ways, he became the focal point of a systemic horror. There were many cases like his, but Rhys Cauzzo’s experience under Robodebt sparked a fight for justice that continues still. Rhys Cauzzo killed himself in January 2017. The public servants and ministers responsible for this illegal debt-raising scheme didn’t just hide the truth about how it worked. They started a PR war to smear a dead man. One woman, his mother, Jenny Miller, never gave up on finding the truth about what happened to her son.

This is episode five: The Mother

It's Friday, July 14.

And a content warning - this episode contains discussion of suicide.

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RICK:

Can you do that again?

JENNY:

Yeah. Hi, I'm Jennifer Miller, and I have fought the fight for my son, Rhys.

RICK:

Where do you even begin with Jenny Miller? She’s regional Queensland Erin Brockovich. That’s all you need to know, really. Don’t mess with her or her family. Because she will sort you out. I suspect she lives on this isolated little acreage behind the Sunshine Coast as much to give her 28-year-old horse Chex a peaceful retirement as she does to calm her own outlook. It’s the opposite of a cold and unfeeling machine out here, it’s nature. You can hear the birds and the garden is rippling with life. And it’s from here, Jenny, Rhys Cauzzo’s mum has really staged the battle to find out what happened to him. In the final months of his life, she heard her son mention having a debt. It was definitely a problem, but certainly, she had no idea this fact alone was strangling him inside. Then, on 26 January 2017, Rhys killed himself. Jenny flew to Melbourne to begin the search for answers.

Thank you for joining me. I guess I just wanted to go backwards to 2017 and you are one person. I'm a pretty strong mother type. I think I can say...

JENNY:

You know, mama bear.

RICK:

A very scary mama bear. You want answers. How do you even go about doing that at that point? Because you know nothing about what really happened.

JENNY:

So when I first went to Rhys’ place the day after he passed, that's when I'd been looking for a message. You know, “Mom, I'm so sorry”, but never found any of that. But what I did find was all the letters and communications and then pictures on the fridge that, you know, showed suicidal tendencies because of debt. And I thought, I know my son really well, and he has not taken his life because of a girlfriend or, you know, anything like that. This is something that's really rocked him.

RICK:

The letters addressed to Rhys, who at the time was a student working as a florist, said that he owed the government a large sum of money – around 18 thousand dollars.

JENNY:

Initially I thought it was 28, but as I became more aware of how the things were set up, it was around 18.

RICK:

Yeah. Which is a huge amount of money for anyone.

JENNY:

Yes.

RICK:

Let alone someone who is kind of an artist. He’s enrolled in design.

JENNY:

Exactly. Yes.

RICK:

Rhys had a big heart. He was creative, played music, and he felt things deeply. Any mother would have been proud to have raised such a gorgeous kid. Basically, he was good. Which is what made the letters so difficult to explain. These letters on Rhys' fridge were sent from an agency called Dun and Bradstreet, a private debt-collection company paid on commission by Centrelink. It was common practice at the time.

JENNY:

So the Dun and Bradstreet letters were so threatening, it wasn't funny, you know, And it was like, We're going to take your car, we're going to garnish your wages, we're going to garnish your tax.

RICK:

We’re going to ruin your life.

JENNY:

Yep. So that $18,000 was due on the 23rd of January. On the 25th of January, he went to his doctor and said that he was struggling, particularly financially, and he took his life on Australia Day. The correlation of all the information just absolutely points to the fact that he was pushed into taking his life.

RICK:

There was no doubt in Jenny’s mind then, or since, that her son’s death was directly linked to the debt notices. It was critical that she let the Department of Human Services know this, to stop any further harm to someone else. So she tried to tell them. At what point do you get in contact with Centrelink or the Department of Human Services once you've discovered a few more details? And what do they tell you?

JENNY:

Well, my initial call was a young girl that I was talking to and I was still very highly emotional. And I said to her, ‘You've you've caused my son to commit suicide’ and lost connection, dropped out. And the one thing they did say, ‘Oh, you've got to ring Dun and Bradstreet to let them know’. So I did ring Dun and Bradstreet. I lost it with the young girl there as well. I spoke to them on Saturday, so I think it was a Sunday that the CEO of Dun And Bradstreet rang me to apologize. And, you know, we’re so, Sorry, I'm taking his life. Even then I said to him, It's not that girl's fault. I said, Your training is at fault.

Every letter that I wrote to whatever government department didn't matter whether it was the ombudsman or the coroner's. All of them basically came back and said, Well, he's dead. We can't do anything about it. I got these letters back going, We can't help you. We can't do this for you. We can't release that information.

RICK:

Jenny kept hitting brick walls, and through a circuitous connection from her son's employer, the florist, she managed to get in touch with the Saturday paper's then national correspondent, Martin McKenzie-Murray. She decided to go to the media because she didn't know how else to get answers.

JENNY:

So I kept going to media. I kept trying to push it as much as I could to get that information.

Archival Tape – Reporter 1:

“Jenny Miller’s son Rhys Cauzzo was 28 when he took his own life in 2017.”

Archival Tape – Reporter 2:

“Desperate for answers, she wrote to then Human Services Minister Alan Tudge several times.”

JENNY:

You look at that letter from Tudge when he sent it to me…

Archival Tape – Reporter 1:

“The Commission heard Minister Tudge told Ms. Miller, his department had reviewed her son's case…”

JENNY:

You know, minor administrative error…

Archival Tape – Reporter 1:

“But overall it was handled appropriately and sensitively.”

JENNY:

They did not actually admit what the administrative error was.

RICK:

But there were, at that point in time, maybe 30 to 50 people in the public, in the department, in government, who all had a little piece of the puzzle. And when you put them all together, it says Robodebt. It was illegal. It's designed this way. All these clues were out there. But how do you… you know at this point in time, everyone's operating in the darkness.

JENNY:

Including me.

RICK:

And they kind of rely on that, don't they?

JENNY:

They rely on people not understanding what's going on and not questioning. And of course, I had big questions.

RICK:

But so in terms of stuff that you got in writing from the department over the years, did you ever get much at all?

JENNY:

I didn't receive a great deal of correspondence.

RICK:

And what you did get was purely administrative?

JENNY:

Exactly.

RICK:

The problem for Jenny, and hundreds of thousands of others, is that the Department of Human Services just would not admit how they were calculating debts. It wouldn’t even tell her when the alleged overpayments were made. All the department said was that Rhys had earned too much money while working for a Brunswick florist and that pushed him over the threshold allowed while claiming Centrelink benefits. But all people on payments know they must report their income to the agency. It’s a requirement. And so they do, every fortnight. How on Earth did this happen? Jenny wrote to everyone she could think of, including the Commonwealth Ombudsman. Even if they could help a dead man – they said they couldn’t – it would have been useless. The Ombudsman was being actively lied to by both the Department of Human Services and the Department of Social Services. This independent agency apparently never even knew it was being tricked. It fell for the cover-up and declared Robodebt to be consistent with the law. It never was. You tried FOI as well. Freedom of Information.

JENNY:

Yes, I did. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what we did, because I could not get any information from Centrelink, I had my accountant through…

RICK:

Through the Secret Society of Accountants…Information Handbook.

JENNY:

He was able to get me his earnings for the year, but it still didn't break it down enough.

RICK:

You still had to kind of guess at it? Jenny had begun putting the pieces together herself. There was no institutional help; no government oversight body or bureaucrat. And so, alone, she vowed to get to the bottom of what had happened.

Through freedom of information requests and the help of an accountant she began to figure out what Rhys was really earning. This was the smallest of starts, but it was enough to provide Jenny with a heartbreaking clue: there’s no way Rhys’ debt could ever have been fairly generated.

JENNY:

So it was useful. I had quite a few of Rhys’ payslips and stuff, so I was going back and back and trying to calculate everything out.

RICK:

In fact, it was impossible he owed as much as the debt notices he was sent. Jenny continued to build an understanding of what had happened to her son, brick-by-brick, and at every turn her suspicions hardened. This looked and felt like a Robodebt.

JENNY:

And then, of course, when I get everything by virtue of the commission, you could see on that first page that he was inputting his income as Fresh Cut Flowers. That's it. He was working at Fresh Cut Flowers, but the company was Direct Fruits.

RICK:

Yeah, Different names.

JENNY:

Same ABN. How come that wasn't picked up? He wasn't earning double income, which is what they're saying.

RICK:

This was the brutal design feature of Robodebt. There was no evidence and no way to tell the machine it was wrong. Simple administrative errors, like two different company names for the same employer double counted as income, were deliberately ignored. Unknown to Jenny, Centrelink compliance officers, including quality checkers like Colleen Taylor, had picked up these errors over and over again but were told to leave them be. They were told, by more senior people, that if there were mistakes welfare recipients would get in contact and have them corrected. But that assumed they ever even got the letters. That assumed the letters even told them there was a problem, which at first they didn’t. And the public servants, the people who designed it and operated it, simply didn’t care. Actually, they applauded. The budget savings could never have been delivered any other way. There are so many ordinary people in Australia who just saw this for what it was, and yet an entire department claims they didn't realise there was an issue.

JENNY:

“Oh we never saw that.”. Look, the more I see, the more I learn, the more I hear, the angrier I get. We live from week to week pretty much, we’re workers always have been, you know. Yes, we're not highly educated, so to speak, I've got a hell of a lot of life skills. And I'm not stupid, so don't treat me like that.

RICK:

In February 2017, the first senate inquiry into Robodebt is launched. Many, like Jenny, hope this will pierce the veil of secrecy around this program. Despite the best efforts of some senators, especially Greens Senator Rachel Siewert, neither this, nor a second inquiry in 2019, would even come close to approaching the truth.

Jenny paid close attention as the hearings rolled by, and understandably, continued to pursue every last avenue available to her in the search for the truth about how those threatening letters ended up on Rhys’ fridge.

In November 2019, a class action led by Gordon Legal was filed in the Federal Court of Australia. This represented the single best chance so far to find out what the hell had been going on. Robodebt had run for four years before finally being paused that month.

Now, people wanted the truth.

JENNY:

I was involved with the class action and I did present with Justice Murphy, and he was thoroughly disgusted.

Archival Tape – Reporter:

“In a blistering judgement, Justice Bernard Murphy said Robodebt had exposed a shameful chapter in the administration of the Social Security system and a massive failure of public administration which he acknowledged caused financial hardship, anxiety and distress and in some cases, suicide.”

RICK:

The first person in authority, really, who's not a politician to say what this was.

JENNY:

It was the first acknowledgement. And he said to the Centrelink gurus that were there and he said, ‘So you can't tell Mrs. Miller, whether her son's debt was manual or not?’... ‘No. We can't tell her that.’

RICK:

But the department could have told her. We now know, through the Royal Commission, that they knew exactly how Rhys’ debt was raised. They always knew. They simply kept it from a mother trying to find out what happened to her son…
We’ll be back after this.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

RICK:

The class action brought Jenny the very first serious recognition of the role Robodebt played in her son Rhys’ death. It also proved the final push needed to end Robodebt once and for all. By May 2020, then Government Services Minister Stuart Robert is forced into one of the most astonishing backdowns in the history of public administration in Australia. But the class action is bittersweet. It doesn't end with the admission of any wrongdoing from the federal government. It doesn't provide proper compensation to the victims. And by virtue of the fact that it was settled, key documents that would have explained how this thing was designed and implemented when it was clearly illegal, never got to be surfaced in court. And so. Stuart Robert got to stand up and simply say, ‘here's a $1.8 million settlement. Move along.’

Archival Tape – Reporter 1:

“Stuart Robert takes the Friday afternoon ministerial walk of shame, rubbing out Robodebt. The Government was facing a massive class action after a Federal Court ruling last November deemed one of the debts illegal. The minister decided to payout.”

Archival Tape – Stuart Robert:

“And we'll be refunding $721 million to 373,000 individual Australians for 470,000 debts. Noting that some Australians have a number of debts.”

RICK:

And then of course, in 2020. You hear that, Stuart Robert has just stood up and said, we're going to refund 700 something million dollars worth of these debts. No admission of wrongdoing, no apology. Almost like a procedural “Ah we just going to do this thing? And there's no reason don't ask any questions.

JENNY:

Exactly.

Archival Tape – Stuart Robert:

“We're doing that because the best advice we have is that raising a debt wholly or partly on the basis of ATO incomed average or average income is not sufficient under law. So therefore we will return that money…”

JENNY:

So to me, that was admittance of mistakes.

RICK:

Now that she knew that Robodebt was illegal because of the Solicitor-General's opinion, Jenny asked for an inquest from the Victorian coroner to be opened into the death of her son Rhys. She wanted more details and she wanted someone to say that these things were connected.

JENNY:

So I requested an inquest for Rhys’ death because I didn't believe that he would have taken his life for any other reason. They weren't advised that he had actually applied for disability allowance, that he had a vulnerability indicator that they declared was a manual debt and that all this so-called information attached proved it was a manual debt.

RICK:

Wilful or otherwise misreading of what Robodebt was, because whether it was manual or not, it didn't matter.

JENNY:

No, but it was deliberately lies to the coroner.

RICK:

Well, because that was one of the things that came out of the royal commission that was, I think, under-recognised, was that the chief counsel of the Department of Human Services basically said, ‘let's not send the whole record to the coroner’. But why do you think they didn't send the whole file?

JENNY:

Because they were lying.

RICK:

And they knew that they'd get caught.

JENNY:

Yeah.

RICK:

The inquest is just another avenue that Jenny tried to go down where she hit a brick wall. And again, like the ombudsman, she hit a wall partly because the Department of Human Services actively tried to mislead the coroner. We now know that the chief counsel of the Department of Human Services, Annette Mussolino queried, withholding certain files belonging to Rhys Caruzzo from the coronial investigation because those files included details about how vulnerable Reese was and the state of knowledge the government had about his vulnerability. When they chose to hound him with private debt collectors. Jenny was thwarted here, too. And so like almost everyone else involved in Robodebt, the announcement of a royal commission into the illegal scheme was both incredibly welcome but also treated with a little bit of cynicism because they'd been promised answers and never been given them many times over before.

And so the royal commission is.. literally in that first address from Justin Greggery KC, the opening. We find out that they had the legal advice, the legal advice said it's illegal. Shock horror, 2014 before the thing even begins. And then throughout weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of hearings, which you watched, we learned not just the fact that they knew it was mathematically inaccurate, the fact that it was illegal, but the fact that more than a few senior public servants wilfully enacted a cover up. It wasn't just that they turned a blind eye. They actually participated in the cover up. Yes. And so you're sitting here watching all of those things as someone who lost her son. How do you actually put that together in your brain without losing complete faith in humanity? Because I did.

JENNY:

Some days were just enormously heartbreaking. Look, I do have to say listening and attending, I literally had to hold onto my seat so that I did not get up and slap them across the face. There were a few times, especially when I started getting to the pointy end of questions being asked about Rhys, from Rachelle Miller, Tudge, all of those. I would be shaking and burst into tears.

RICK:

I can understand why everyone wanted the politicians to squirm, but it certainly seems like the public service led the dog as much as followed orders. They came up with the idea and pitched…

JENNY:

Exactly.

RICK:

…a program that was illegal.

JENNY:

Yep. Yep.

RICK:

And whether the ministers always…

JENNY:

You’ve got a duty of care in your office. Yeah. As a public servant, whether you are Prime minister or not, to do the right thing. You work for the people of Australia. Just do your job. You know, it's easy.

RICK:

There are codes of conduct. There are professional obligations on the public servants. But typically we can't name them if something goes wrong. You know, were it not for this royal commission, we wouldn't have known any of this stuff.

JENNY:

Oh. It actually blew me away how much we have found out. Yeah. And when I initially started attending, I did expect it to maybe be a little bit politically biased if you understand. I was probably quite a bit daunted. I certainly didn't think there'd be that many solicitors sitting there and certainly all the solicitors for the opposition so to speak, for the Commonwealth. But they were very respectful. I actually thought it was ran really, really well and all the commissioners’ staff, all the helpers, just they were very caring and very supportive. So I never felt uncomfortable until I had to watch the lying on the stand. That's when it made it more difficult. But, seeing how the commissioner took everything in and questioned anything that she had a doubt about. And she did it with utmost finesse, you know, and Justin Gregory, of course, you'd sit there all day, someone's going, can't recall, can't recall, can't recall.

Archival Tape – Justin Greggery:

“Do you recall whether the brief prepared by Cath Albert countersigned by Miss Wilson, addressed the question of legality of the scheme?”

Archival Tape – Finn Pratt:

“No, I don't. I don't recall that I. I imagined… Well, I imagine it probably did, actually. I don't recall seeing it in it. It seemed to me that the thinking was clearly that this was lawful…”

JENNY:

And then all of a sudden he puts something up on the screen. Well, you notice this email.

RICK:

Does this aid your memory?

JENNY:

Yeah!

Archival Tape – Justin Greggery:

“I've been provided with two documents over the break. The first is an email which attaches what appears to be a draft response under your name, although it's not signed given its draft nature.”

JENNY:

And I could have just kissed him. Honestly, it was like. I've been waiting all day for this.

RICK:

Yes. Yes, We knew it was. Why? Well, we hoped it was coming.

JENNY:

And it did.

RICK:

Royal commissions are often called because people want to figure out how something went wrong. Think about aged care or the banking Royal Commission. There was an added layer of value with the Robodebt Royal Commission because the government never admitted that this was a deliberate design. They never admitted that this was the planned outcome, to trick people into paying debts that they never owed. So the value of truth in this case is so much higher because it was never given to victims. They were lied to. They were essentially made to believe they were crazy for thinking that a government could orchestrate something on this scale against its own citizens. In fact, when the royal commission was floated as an idea, Coalition members from the other side of Parliament were so sure that it would find nothing that they mocked the Labour Party for it. They openly mocked them and egged them on and said, 'Well go and see what it brings up'. Now we know what it brought up. The people were right. They were right all along. They were lied to, and they knew that the government was scheming. That it wasn't an accident. That they had assumed that people who were vulnerable, who were disadvantaged, who were dealing with mental health crises and sporadic employment–they assumed that those people would not fight the debt notices, that they would not get in touch with the government. The government committed a mass fraud against its own citizens. And this royal commission, led by Commissioner Catherine Holmes, has finally told everyone what really happened.

The very real power of this commission, the very vital service of this commission, is to serve as a warning to anyone in the public service or in a ministerial position in the future to think twice about what they are doing. You are not going to be protected by your power. You're not going to be protected by apathy. If you look the other way, if you collude and deceive and practice dishonesty at such a magnitude, you will be named and you will experience something that people who were Robodebt-ed experienced many hundreds of thousands of times over. You'll be shamed. And I think the value is that maybe maybe that will be enough to prevent something this odious from happening again.

And now that we've got that hard work out of the way, people like Jenny can focus on tying up loose ends. She's now focussed on getting the inquest into Rhys’ death reopened. That might represent something approaching closure. If there is such a thing.

Just because I'm obsessed with numbers, but how many brick walls do you reckon you hit? Like, in terms of different enquiries, different avenues.

JENNY:

My God, I would have to say probably about 80. Yeah, if not more.

RICK:

You still haven’t given up.

JENNY:

You know, no, I don't give up easily.

RICK:

You'll be in the grave and still fighting.

JENNY:

I probably would be, yeah.

RICK:

It's just the fact you won't get Rhys back. But is there a point at which you will be like, okay, I did what I had to do. It's done now.

JENNY:

I think even for myself, I have got the truth about what occurred. And as much as I fear the fact that they're not going to really get too much except for a rap over the knuckles, there will be some outcomes. Once we've got those outcomes. I'm hoping I can get some of my life back. Look, I am really pleased that we got this far and, you know, the fight has been worth it.

RICK:

Yeah.

JENNY:

Because I did not want my son to be tagged as a fraud.

RICK:

Gees he'd be proud of you.

JENNY:

I could just see him now. Yeah, he'd be. He'd be really proud.

RICK:

Jenny Miller, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

JENNY:

No, it has been wonderful. Thank you.

RICK:

Inside Robo-debt has been a special series from 7am.

It has been produced by Zoltan Fetch-o and Yeo Choong.

The lead producer was Kara Jensen-Mackinnon.

Our editor is Scott Mitchell.

Sarah McVee is our Head of Audio. Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Andy Elston, Travis Evans, and Atticus Bastow.

Our theme music was composed by Alex Gow.

I’m Rick Morton, this is 7am. Ange McCormack will be your host on Monday. See ya round.