Archival tape – Rick Mortin:

“It's 10:48 a.m., and I'm just getting up. I've already got the Royal Commission website open, so I'm getting prepared in case the Robo-debt Royal Commission website crashes under the weight of public interest, which is the good kind of web website crash if you ask me. It's amazing how often significant moments in life come down to whether a web page is uploaded or not. All right, here we go, here we go. Found it on the APH website. Okay. Report volume one, wow 1039 pages according to this, but who’s quibbling. Oh, it's upside down. Are you fucking kidding me? Fine. Whatever. Fine.”

[Theme Music Starts]

RICK:

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

Australia was gaslit by its own government, from ministers to public servants, they backed something that was illegal just to shake down innocent people for money, then lied about it for years.

Archival tape – Anthony Albanese:

“Thanks for joining us. This morning the government received the final report of the Royal Commission into the Robo-debt scheme.”

RICK:

The scheme and those behind it were devoid of empathy. It targeted the vulnerable. The findings of the Robo-debt Royal Commission are unequivocal, but there is so much we still have to do with it.

Archival tape – Anthony Albanese:

The Royal Commission has found that the Liberal Party's Robo-debt scheme was to quote “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals.”

RICK:

So today we speak with Bill Shorten, the minister who will have to implement many of the recommendations, and pursue many of the findings in this Royal Commission.

This is episode one, The Shorten interview.

It’s Monday, July 10.

[Theme Music Ends]

Archival tape – Anthony Albanese:

“Under the former Liberal government, this scheme unlawfully raised $1.76 billion in alleged debts against some 526,000 Australians. This tragedy caused stress, anxiety, financial destitution, and sadly had a very real human toll.”

Archival tape – ABC News:

“It destroyed and cost lives. Innocent people were hunted, hounded by Centrelink for money they didn't owe.”

Archival tape – Channel 7:

“A bombshell report from the Robo-debt Royal Commission has just been released detailing the harrowing ordeal that impacted half a million Australians who were illegally sent debt notices by Centrelink. Former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison and a number of his former ministers, all central figures in that scandal.”

RICK:

Minister, we're speaking after you've had it almost a day, I guess, with the findings from the Royal Commission into Robo-debt. And I just wanted to start by asking, you know, looking at all the stories that you've seen and heard about political scandals, misfeasance in Australian politics, where does what you've now been handed, where does that rank?

BILL:

Pretty shocking, I think, with the peacetime administration of the Commonwealth of Australia, It's right up there. It's a shocking abuse of power and it's a real failure of the system. It's a failure of the Parliament. It's a shocking failure within that former Coalition government. It's shameless unlawfulness, and it's conspiratorial. It was organised, it was deliberate, and it was prolonged.

RICK:

That's what really gets me when it comes to this story. And you must have known some of this stuff was coming. But when you actually get the report, I imagine you're trying to read little bits of it, but you're also getting briefed on it as soon as you can ahead of a press conference. What is your first reaction to it in terms of the detail.

BILL:

The commissioner didn't miss.

Archival tape – ABC News:

“Commissioner Catherine Holmes painted a picture of a near collapse of proper process within government. An ill conceived idea rushed to cabinet by public servants wanting to oblige ministers on a quest for savings. What was truly dismaying, she found, was the dishonesty and collusion that stopped its legal issues from coming to light.”

BILL:

And she has a turn of prose which is forensic and certainly rare in public life. She's gone to the heart of darkness in this scheme.

Archival tape – ABC News:

“In three volumes and nearly a thousand pages, came answers of how Robo-debt unleashed misery on some of the country's most vulnerable. Summed up as an extraordinary saga of venality, incompetence, and cowardice.”

BILL:

And she's not willing to accept the ordinary excuses, and the rubbish, and the spin. So that's what I initially thought. I also thought about the victims, and I did think this Royal Commission might actually go a little bit of the way to rekindling and rebuilding people's faith in the system. That the karma abuse does eventually come along, and that governments at the end of the day, or the system of our democracy can, with enough effort, and enough persistence, eventually hold the wrongdoers to account.

RICK:

I think he made the point yesterday, and that's all true, and I think we have to believe that. But it was also, it shouldn't have taken a change of government to get to this point, because if there wasn't one, we wouldn't have had any of this, would we?

BILL:

No, there's a string of matters which, but for them occurring, we wouldn't have got to this result. I'm a big believer that there's a lot of what we do in life, if we didn't do it, someone else would do it, you know, that could be the same about writing, or playing football, or public life. But sometimes, but for what you do, or but for an event, things get changed. And I truly think that but for the Victorian Legal Aid work finally getting the Commonwealth into the Federal Court, because for years they've resisted actually testing the legality of their position, and but for the helping organise the class action, and but for then convincing my colleagues about the merit of a Royal commission and, but for then a change of government, we wouldn't have got to this. But we have. I mean, I remember very clearly that it was only three or four months after the 2019 election defeat when I said we should have a class action. I know that some in the press gallery, and certainly the then government dismissed it as a relevance deprivation stunt. And I thought, “oh, they're not seeing the real picture here.” And then again, when we announced the Royal Commission, some of the sort of chattering know it alls, then the opposition benches, because we had won by then said, “you'll never find anything and it's just a waste of time.” Well, thank goodness we didn't listen to them.

RICK:

And that's true. You've only had a few hours with this report. And one of the things that has really kind of fascinated me about this all the way through is that you've been accused of doing a political witch hunt, but the public servers are massively implicated in this. And you're now the Minister for Government Services. So it is now your problem to resolve.

BILL:

And that's good. There has been a pattern in Australian political life — much more conservative than progressive — where if you're on welfare, you're treated as less than human, that you're second class, that somehow the system's doing you a favour by giving you some modest financial income support when you're doing it tough. I have a different view of the world. It's a human right. I don't have a minimalist deficit view of our social services safety net. I have a view that that's why we have a government. It's why we pay our taxes. It's a recognition that life can, and your journey in life, can sometimes bowl you up circumstances where you do need some modest support. But the previous government, and it was not just the Morrison government, the Abbott government, Turnbull government seem to indulge in this, sort of, right wing fantasy that it's okay to give tax subsidies to the top end of town, that's called business. But when it's people on welfare getting a, you know, a few hundred dollars, somehow it seems to strike a nerve in some conservative souls that the poor are getting a special deal. Stupid, isn't it?

RICK:

If that's the case, trade places with them.

BILL:

Yeah, that's right.

RICK:

The public service is fully implicated, and certainly senior people in it.

BILL:

Yeah, it's a terrible, terrible stain. There's a lot of very good public servants, A lot of very good public servants. But what's amazed me since the evidence has come out about different people's behaviour, is people say, “Oh, we always knew X was a bully, always knew that Y had a particular, sort of, political partisanship.” And I'm thinking, why, if people know these stories, do these people get to persist for so long? And if we didn't have the Royal Commission, would it still just be accepted, this sort of conduct? So, I hope that this Royal Commission remains a guidebook for the public service for another generation. Just give us the free and frank advice. If we have ideas as politicians, tell us what we can do, but tell us where the guide rails out. Tell us where the swim lane is, and what's out of bounds. And we've got to not just have groupthink within organisations, where the only way you get promoted is by kissing ass on the way up or by telling your bosses the good news and only the good news. I suppose I'll take a bit of my old union rep health and safety background where I've been to funerals of people who've been killed at work, and been to hospitals where men have been terribly maimed or burned. And it was the employer who would say, “If only we knew we could have prevented this.” Well, the reality is they did know, just they had no way of filtering the bad news. So, we've got to get back to a public service who, just, can give you the things you don't always want to hear, as well as the things you want to hear. And it shouldn't be a block to your promotion by telling the truth.

I mean, I guess, it's chicken and the egg. Was it a bad government who didn't want to be told bad things? Was it an over obliging senior public service, or was it a senior public service who had bad views? And was it an incurious, intellectually unquestioning, just there for the white car limos and the titles government who just did whatever they were told by the public service? Whoever was the initiator of some of this unlawful, shameful conduct, they're all in it together. And so I don't distinguish between the senior public service or the ministers. They're all getting the big bucks. They're all holding the trust of the people. And in a combined fashion, they collectively let everyone down.

RICK:

Yeah, it's a really good way of putting it, I think, because you can't separate them. And there is a very clear political dimension to all of this. And you're now a minister in essentially the same shoes as Scott Morrison, Alan Tudge, Stuart Robert. And there was that dangerous combination of curiosity, and I would say malice, in some cases. What can you possibly do to guard against people like that, in jobs like those, because they're elected officials, right?

BILL:

I will tell you some things I do, which hopefully keep my feet on the ground. I visit the front line staff of Services Australia and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. So I visit. So I don't just talk to the secretary of the department, or the very senior people. I talk to people right through the organisation. I've visited… Well, I know I visited more Centrelink or Service Australia service centres around Australia than the combined Coalition government did in their ten years. So there is a different approach. I'm not saying that there's not going to be, in the future, individuals in either the Centrelink system or the Social Security system or the NDIS, will be happy with government decisions. And that doesn't always make the unhappy person right. And I'm not saying there's not going to be personality conflicts within big organisations. I'm not going to say that there won't be people who feel unfairly treated, and each of those people count, and their point of view deserves to be heard.

But what we saw Robo-debt was an industrial scale gaslighting of the nation, gaslighting of the workforce, a gaslighting of the victims, a gaslighting of the advocates, a gaslighting of the media, a gaslighting of the opposition. Where Mr. Morrison and his cronies, and it was even before Morrison as Prime Minister, it was in the time of Turnbull and even Abbott. They said that this Robo-debt proposition had been invented by Labour. It hadn't. But they kept lying for years, and journalists would write their lies. And it was a lie, and there was no evidence for it. And the Royal Commission has now called out that lie. But they kept pretending that nothing had ever changed. They decided there was a mountain of gold being misclaimed by dodgy second class welfare recipients. They were going to get it back in the name of justice, and ironically they were practising injustice against people who didn't know the money.

RICK:

I wanted to talk to you about that because I was one of those journalists back in 2017, that didn't know what he was looking at. And I put questions into Tudge’s office, saying, “what is this? It looks like a continuation is… what's changed, What's different? Or was it really designed by the former Labour government?” And I don't know. It didn't come up with the Royal Commission, so I don't know what their response to me was. But I wrote a story saying, you know, Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek were the architects of this or the pioneers, and it just wasn't true.

BILL:

It was a falsehood.

RICK:

I feel ashamed about it.

BILL:

Well, but they were saying that to everyone, you know, do I criticise people who write what they're saying? That's what they're saying. And they were saying that they persistently said that, they kept saying it. I think that Mr. Morrison and some of the others learnt a very bad strand of right wing politics, which sort of says if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

RICK:

I mean, I've witnessed that. You know, in first person at press conferences when he announced the Royal Commission into Aged Care where, you know, he was the Treasurer when $2 billion went out of the budget, and he just flat out denied it. How do you fight against that kind of misinformation?

BILL:

Well, eventually we do.

Perhaps some true believers of that brand of politics will always believe he's a martyr, but he's not. It's not about him. It's about the people.

In the Netherlands, on a comparable but smaller matter, a cohort of Dutch citizens were targeted for their welfare by a government and by an algorithm, the use of an algorithm, that government resigned.

No one thinks the Morrison government would resign, for anything.

RICK:

We’ll be back after this.

RICK:

Bill Shorten. RoboDebt was illegal. And it was stopped because it was illegal. But the legislation could have been changed, and technically it could have continued and it would have been, quote unquote, fine. Right. And we see examples every week where people are brutalised by their interactions with government services, whether they're in the right or in the wrong. It's just that the system itself can be brutal. And I know that… so you've put in I think you've put a stop to, as of July, just gone, the use of external debt collectors in Centrelink.

BILL:

That's right.

RICK:

And presumably the legislation is still there that requires any debts owing to Centrelink to be recovered. But how do we make that a better system?

BILL:

I now meet with, and I've sort of encouraged Service Australia to turbocharge their engagement with welfare rights organisations, Economic Justice Australia, and other groups. First of all, the best way to avoid a Robo-debt again, is not to make a mistake initially with a payment. Now, with single touch payroll, it's a lot easier when you have got a welfare recipient just seeking their legitimate payment for the two weeks just gone. A lot of that detail is now, their economic income is pre-filled. First way to avoid an argument about a mistake is not to make the mistake, so that that has improved. We're not using the form of income averaging which the previous government used, so we won't do that. But also I've looked now at the really basic things, like if there is a genuine debate about has someone claim something which, based on real time income doesn't seem quite right, I've now changed the letters. Like, Services Australia moved from the sort of nasty debt letters, “Hey, you're going to go to jail if you don't do this” to what they call accounts payable. But I've asked them to take that off their letters too now. Because there's still an assumption that the letter’s right. I think the first communication between a government and a citizen is the government says, “hey, we think there's a question here”, but I don't want the person to feel that when they get the letter, the government asserts they’re right. It's a question. And we've also got to make clear the rights of people from the get go, rather than just assume in any fashion, guilty until proven innocent. I also want the language to be simpler. Now, I have found out as you scratch the surface, there's a lot of legacy IT. And there's so many different parts of Social Security legislation, that even something as basic as sending a civilised letter outlining rights, actually sounds harder than it is. But that's not an excuse not to do it. So I think it's re-imagining your relationship with someone claiming welfare. It's… this person, you can assume, has an entitlement until proven otherwise. Not that you don't have an entitlement until you can prove. So, it's just re-imagining a more civil respect for the person seeking what is their legal right.

RICK:

It is really the bare minimum, isn't it? I like to treat people as human beings right.

BILL:

As I've scratched the surface, and again, you'd think writing letters shouldn't be an arcane process, but as we've discovered, it's a crucial process. I'm shocked to have discovered, I think there's some better standards even in retail electricity companies, by the way they send bills to people, and communicate with people than there is in government. I want the government to be best practice, not crap practice.

RICK:

One of the things that fascinated me in this final report was that the commissioner, kind of, said that there won't be a compensation scheme, that there probably can't be one. She did, kind of, make a foray into policy, and say if the money that would have been spent on compensation would be better off going into the rate of unemployment benefit. Do you take a view on that?

BILL:

Well I think that what we've increased the rate would already be far greater than what I think the commissioner would have… can imagine. So every increase in the rate does have a bottom line cost. The Labour government wants to improve the rates. I get that, we're not going to insult anyone's intelligence and say that life is easy or straightforward when you're on that minimum new start rate, so I won't try and pretend. The Government has significantly increased Commonwealth rent assistance. But anyway, I appreciate her observations, and I think there's a general admonition to all governments in her writing and the values behind her words, which says that the welfare system isn't a minimal deficit, “it's your fault you're there, just, here's your bowl of soup”, a la an 1850s workhouses. It's a human right. We've signed up to UN protocols which say it's a human right. The ultimate decisions on rates is made by the whole government, not me. But I want to make sure that for the delivery of the service, it's as humane, empathetic, people focussed as we can make it. There's a lot of good people in Service Australia trying to do that. I get that the numbers in Service Australia are not what I'd like, but I guess that's an argument for me to have within the government to try and lift numbers of people doing the job. We've brought a lot of the jobs in house. I want to give people careers in the public service. I don't view working in the public service as something to be ashamed of, as a vocation, as a calling. One of the things I'm working on is keeping my own public servants safe, in their frontline service. So I want public servants to feel they've got a government who respects their work, and I want to encourage them, as they do, to be as empathetic as possible to individuals. And there is no judgement of someone seeking the help of the government safety net. It's what is there for.

RICK:

Yeah, and that really is what led to all of this. And just finally, Minister, you know, to sum it all up I guess, this report, it's revealed ghastly things. You know, it's an unlawful system that was turned against Australians. It speaks to this culture that fermented for decades of that shifting blame and fearing transparency. And really transparency goes to the heart of this. I mean, Robo-debt lived as long as it did because people were not open about what was going on and tried to hide things. We may have ratted out some of this stuff, but can you really… can you or can anyone really say that, you know, we will never see anything like this again in Australia? How do we say that?

BILL:

I can say it for the duration of where I, and I know my colleagues who work in this area are engaged, it won't be repeated. What we've got to do is create a system which doesn't depend on the ideological persuasion of the politician, or the generosity and skill of the leader. We have to create a culture where receiving government support is not viewed as a second class activity, or immediately is a shameful thing, or immediately makes you to be treated like someone trying to cheat the system.

What we've got to do is step back and understand that Australians, we all have different journeys and sometimes you need a hand. The job of government is to help, not hurt. We need to get to a system which doesn't depend upon the character of individual politicians or particular leaders of the public service, but just an overall respect that, you know, we all know defence is important. We all know that Medicare is important. We all know that getting some superannuation is important for retirement. We should all know that people who use our government services, sometimes you're going to need to, and that's just that. And you just leave judgement at the door.

RICK:

Bill Shorten, thank you so much for joining us.

BILL:

Thanks, Rick. Appreciate the interest.

RICK:

You’ve just heard from Bill Shorten. Throughout the rest of the week in our inside Robo-debt special series you’re going to hear from the people who fought to uncover what Robo-debt was. And from those who fought even harder to keep it secret.