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RICK:

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

The Robo-debt Royal Commission has exposed an insidious scheme that turned the machinery of an entire government against its own people. The plan was to raise billions of dollars from welfare recipients by convincing them they had fake debts. Those who imagined, designed and delivered it put their personal ambition above the well-being of the people they were meant to serve. But there were some on the frontline who from the very beginning knew this government shakedown was wrong.

One, Colleen Taylor, who spoke up then and came forward at the Royal Commission. She was the one who told the truth and helped crack one of the greatest scandals in Australian government history wide open.

Today, we speak to Centrelink worker turned whistleblower Colleen Taylor about what really happened when Robo-debt was first rolled out.

This is episode two: The whistleblower.

It's Tuesday, July 11.

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

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RICK:

Hello.

COLLEEN:

Hello. Welcome in!

RICK:

Colleen!

COLLEEN:

Thank you. It's lovely to meet you. Come in. Finally.

RICK:

Finally, I mean, a very strange moment for me, having seen you on the royal commission.

COLLEEN:

Welcome. Have a seat...

RICK:

Thank you for having me.

COLLEEN:

That's alright. Would you like something to coffee? Tea?

RICK:

So I've just walked into Colleen's house and it is small, it's really small. She lives here on her own and she's wearing this little polka dot top and has already offered me coffee, I think about three times. And she'll go on to offer all of our guests coffee and tea and biscuits. Probably between 12 and 20 times before the end of this recording.

COLLEEN:

So now here we are.

RICK:

I'm teaching myself as I get older. That would be rude not to have the food thats on offer!

COLLEEN:

Just help yourself out.

RICK:

Here might be a little bit of my mother. I must say. She's got statues and ornaments all around the house and behind her. As we start talking, there's these statues of three meerkats who pop their heads up above the den, I guess, and are on the lookout. And I don't know. It seems perfect. That's Colleen. She is this small force of nature, methodical, wanting to do the right thing and always on guard.

COLLEEN:

So I'm Colleen Taylor and I guess really I was a career public servant because although I did work in private industry from 18 onwards… I joined the public service in 1984…

RICK:

Colleen has spent almost his entire career in the Australian Public Service. She joined in 1984, first with the Commonwealth Employment Service and then for Centrelink proper, where she moved into roles in compliance and quality review. She became essentially a fact checker, always on the lookout for what was real and true, checking her colleagues and making sure that the welfare system was running as it should.

COLLEEN:

You know, it was very much the culture then of… we call it… getting it right, and so getting it right related to the customer because you had to be correct, but you had to be consistent as well.

We also knew that so many people were trying desperately to do the right thing. But often it was the Centrelink procedures that prevented them from doing the right thing. And that's where it was so important that when we were investigating cases and looking at it, we're talking to people about why this happened and looking at what letters they were sent and what they were told. And we used to waive debts, because we could see quite clearly that this person had not intentionally tried to defraud the government.

RICK:

See… Colleen was used to a system that used to help people; that gave them the benefit of the doubt. But that changed in 2015… when something very strange started to happen at Centrelink.

COLLEEN:

It was a departmental head and he came and it was an all staff information session. He was going around to all those various teams and he came to us in Brisbane.

RICK:

Frontline workers get a visit from one of the big managers and they're told, Hey, we're going to do things a little differently around here. That different thing was what we now know as Robo-debt.

COLLEEN:

And he said, What's going to happen is we're going to be able to raise debts from using the PAYG data from the Tax Office and just averaging it out over that PAYG period. And we all went, What? How's that gonna work?

RICK:

At the very least, in 2015, Frontline staff who were briefed on this change knew it was morally and mathematically wrong.

COLLEEN:

We knew that this was something that we would avoid. And here he was saying, no, we're going to go full steam ahead and we're going to be able to average across the PAYG period when everything we did was to avoid that as much as possible.

RICK:

What management came and told Colleen and her colleagues was this: Compliance officers were no longer to look at the files of people on welfare that they already had access to in their system. Further, they told them ‘Donb;t go out and find information. Centrelink had the power to go to employers and get payslips; to go to banks and ask for statements. None of that happened. That was the change. Instead, all they did was automatically take the declared income to the tax office over a full year and average it into equal discrete amounts over 26 fortnights in their year. They were going to use that to tell a customer that they had a debt, even if they knew that they didn't.

COLLEEN:

Even if you think, well, forget about, you know, you obviously have no concern about the customer or maybe talk about yourself then. Wouldn't you find it easier to check the record? 30 seconds sometimes is enough. Than send the debt notice out, have the customer, then have to try and contact, then have to ask for a review, then have to go and review the debt. There's a whole process that has to be gone through, which could have been stopped in 30 seconds from going out. But there was this gung ho... It became almost like an accounting machine that, you know, was devoid of all humanity.

RICK:

They could never have known then that the powerful people who cooked up the idea had legal advice that should have unequivocally killed the idea before it ever began. Instead, they found themselves in a maddening battle for the truth as people started dying, perhaps more than anyone in the then Department of Human Services, it was Colleen Taylor who fought that fight. It almost ruined her.

Archival Tape – Radio Host

"And welcome back to Richo! In our Canberra studio is Scott Morrison the man who stopped the boats and is now going to stop who knows what… Gday Scott!"

Archival Tape – Scott Morrison:

"Gday Graham!"

Archival Tape – Radio Host:

"Now, who are you going to crack down on because a bloke like you isn’t going to sit around and do nothing so does that mean that anyone on the dole needs to look out?"

Archival Tape – Scott Morrison:

"Well anyone who is trying to rip it off does… anyone who is trying to rip off the welfare system."

RICK:

Even deep within the department of human services, Colleen realised this change was part of something bigger – in fact, hating people on welfare had become a national sport. And she realised that this, was a part of it.

COLLEEN:

And everyone bought into this. Okay, We've got 95% of people or more, are ripping us off. So let's get stuck into them. And I'm really ashamed of the whole, you know, from politicians to shock jocks, media, newspapers, the public, public writing in, you know, everyone bought into this, you know, oh, let's get stuck into them. They're all ripping us off, you know? And how much must that have made people feel? But it was also from us as well, because, you know, you felt ashamed to be a public servant, that we knew this was wrong. But, oh, here we were. We were just going along with you about it, you know? And it's like, where was our moral fibre?

RICK:

So this approach of averaging income, it was raw greed. Robo-debt could never have made the billions of dollars forecast for the government without the assumption that every last one of those so-called discrepancies was going to result in a debt. And to do that, everything had to be averaged. And so this became a policy and it was rolled out to staff like Colleen.

COLLEEN:

It never occurred to us that this was illegal. Why would we? We think, okay, this is something that's been formulated and it's come down and this is what you've got to work with. So we thought, okay, well, this is what we've got to deal with. Let's make it as fair as we possibly can.

RICK:

But Colleen had evidence the system wasn’t being rorted. She was being asked to hunt down people she knew from experience, were not trying to do the wrong thing. She was being asked to be complicit.

COLLEEN:

That was when I said, You're asking us to commit a fraudulent act and we have a fraud plan which is supposed to be about identifying fraud within the employees. And I said this should stand for our customers as well. You are asking us to commit a fraudulent act by allowing a debt to go through by saying, okay, I know there's something on the customer record process, no debt, but sorry, that was provided two years ago and we can't use that.

RICK:

Here's what I find so compelling about Colleen Taylor as a person. She's methodical and she applies this rigour to her own morality. You know, here watching this new system unfold against a backdrop of demonisation. She is so disturbed by what she sees that the, you know, the ordinary procedures are not enough. She told her direct manager nothing happened. She told the assistant director and was rebuffed. And what's a good, hardworking employee to do? She reminds me so much of these meerkats in this moment, because they meerkats on the lookout for danger just for themselves. They're doing it for the group, and Colleen is doing all of this for other people. And so she goes right to the top. And in doing so, Colleen Taylor transforms her own role in Robo-debt from disgusted onlooker to administrative action hero. You know, she wrote to the most senior person in her entire department, secretary Kathryn Campbell.

COLLEEN:

And my feeling was that she's obviously being misled because I understood that secretary level, You wouldn't understand the minutia of everything. And I thought, wow, who better to tell her than me, who's been in the old way and the new way, who was across it all, who had the customer experience? So I started typing up and then I would take it into work and I certainly ran it past my team leader. She'll be setting there office. And he said to me, Oh, Colleen, you've really got to cut it down. They're just not going to read that much. I think that's why I burst into tears for the 150th time, and said No I'm not changing a thing. And then I sent it off.

RICK:

And secretaries of departments have strict and unwavering obligations under the law. Colleen Taylor thought Campbell was being misled. It was in Campbell's best interest, she thought, to read her email very carefully and to treat it even more seriously.

COLLEEN:

So I emailed it off and that morning a phone call from Kathryn Campbell saying, We've received this and we're onto it. And she was organising. She said, there'll be two of my staff will be doing a phone hook up which was being organised for the next day. Very short conversation, just say okay I'm passing it on to these people to look at. And so I went out and said, Oh my goodness, you know, and I was like, Well, they're listening, it's all great. And you know, so then we had the phone hook up the next day and I basically went through everything that I'd gone through. And really I was pushing that. Yes, we stuck with this averaging because at that stage we didn't realise that it was illegal. We thought we're stuck with it. I was impressing, okay, if you're going to do this averaging, this is all the bad results of it. This is and then this is how the process is working and it's not working and it's causing all sorts of dreadful things. I mean, I was there, I think, several hours. And then in the end, I sort of took a deep breath and I just remembered it as clear as day. Okay. So what you're saying is the old process was very time consuming and laborious and this has got to be much quicker and whatever. And I thought, I've just wasted 2 hours of my life. And I remember going out to the team leader and he went, how did it go? and I said, I don't think she listened to a word I said.

RICK:

The question, of course, is whether they intended to listen at all. Neither Kathryn Campbell nor any of her lieutenants dispatched to deal with the ex and Colleen Taylor gave any indication they knew the importance of what she was desperately trying to tell them, whether that was a studied or a genuine ignorance, Colleen does not know. What she does know is that she understood exactly what the new income averaging policy meant. She knew what Robo-debt would do.

COLLEEN:

So you felt as if there was nothing could be achieved. But the very awful thing was I, I said to them when I came back upstairs after doing those reviews, and it was quite clear these debts were going out with duplications of employers, I came up and I remember saying to them, You cannot do this to people. People will commit suicide, you cannot do this to people. And I remember one of the other team leaders said to me, You're right, Coleen, but it's just gone too far.

RICK:

Just weeks later, Colleen Taylor read about the death of Rhys Cauzzo in The Saturday Paper. He was a 28 year old florist, musician and beloved son and brother.

COLLEEN:

And then when….

RICK:

Sorry.

COLLEEN:

…When it came out in the paper about Rhys, I remember that, his beautiful face, committing suicide. I stormed into the manager and I said, Look, it's starting to happen. And it was just so awful.

RICK:

He was being hounded by private debt collectors on behalf of Centrelink. The Royal Commission proved years later that his debt belonged to the very first iteration of Robo-debt. He was being hunted via statutory fiction. He killed himself for a debt he did not owe.

COLLEEN:

And anyway, that was why I left. I went on leave in, I think May of 2017 and took aged retirement in July 2017.

RICK:

After Colleen Taylor retired, she received a letter from the department. Now, remember, she's been working there since 1984. She'd been promoted. She's diligent. She trains other people. But the letter wasn't to thank her for her service. It was to remind her that she faced two years in prison if she ever spoke about anything she learned throughout her career in the public servant. There was no other correspondence. In short, it was so long and shut up.

We'll be back after this.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

RICK:

Years passed for Colleen, sitting in retirement – scared that if she ever spoke up about what she’d seen and heard she would be punished. Australia does not have a comfortable relationship with whistleblowers after all. She feared losing her own pension or worse. But 5 years after leaving the department she saw an opportunity to tell part of the story: the Royal Commission into Robo-debt was launched.

Archival Tape – Anthony Albanese:

"The Royal Commission will examine the establishment of the scheme, who was responsible for it and why it was necessary. How concerns were handled, how the scheme affected individuals and financial costs to the government and measures to prevent this ever happening again."

RICK:

So Colleen worked up the courage to make an anonymous submission.

COLLEEN:

Well what happened was I knew that it was important because of the detail and I thought they're not going to understand how this worked in practice.

RICK:

And soon after Guardian Australia reporter Luke Henriques-Gomes tracked her down.

COLLEEN:

And he sent me an email back saying, I think you better ring me because I've got some news for you. And so I rang him and he said, Your name is already out there. It's your emails are part of the exhibits and it's in there on their website. And I went, Holy….

RICK:

She thought she was going to jail.

COLLEEN:

The next thing, royal commission's wanting to get in contact with you. So we went through the whole song and dance again. So we went in there and talked to them and. And stupid me, I'm thinking, this is lady there. It was excellent. They were all wonderful. She's typing away furiously on a laptop and No, no, I can't. John mentioned. So you've got a bit of background, but I really, you know. Come on. Anyway, so the next thing was, if we'd like you to appear as a witness.. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I couldn't do that. And then. Well, okay. And so I did a few sample questions and so I said, I'm much better at writing things down because I just write something down. And then it's like, Well, I'll do a statement. Oh, okay, I'll do a statement. And of course, but I haven't realised this person who's been tapping away furiously is basically the statement writing my set. But I mean, we went through it, we spent a whole day always going through and changing it so that, you know, I was happy with the statement and what have you, and then it was, okay, well then you're going to be as a witness. And so, oh, and I really thought that I would either freeze or I'd burst into tears.

Archival Tape – Counsel Assisting:

"Commissioner I call Colleen Taylor."

Archival Tape – Commissioner:

"Now, Ms.. Taylor, before you sit down, can I ask, would you prefer to take an oath or an affirmation?"

COLLEEN:

So I was there sitting in the antechamber or whatever it was. I waited so long that I'd just lost all my nerves, what have you. And the other thing I did is I took off my glasses so I couldn't actually see people in the distance. And that helped. And I said to Mr. Scott, I'm just going to focus on you.

Archival Tape – Counsel Assisting:

"You were formerly an employee of the Australian Public Service. Yes. And would this be right? You started your employment in the Australian Public Service on or about the year 1984."

RICK:

And this is a big deal for Colleen because she's not like the senior public servants who are called to give evidence that Senate estimates or other parliamentary inquiries or, God forbid, a robo-debt royal commission where they're compelled to give testimony. Colleen is a normal person. And what makes her evidence so critical is that she never suffered the curious lapses of memory that seem to affect her superiors. She remembered the details that other people just apparently didn't. She remembered how the system used to work all its parts and procedures and protocols. And, critically, she knew what had changed and could explain how those changes happened.

Archival Tape – Counsel Assisting:

"And then these are your words. Please allow me, as a loyal employee of many years standing, as only ever raise concerns in house to respond to you directly as your statement tells me that you are being misled and I want to ensure my words reach you. We cannot find a solution if the problem is not correctly identified. It is possible we are not even looking in the right direction for a solution. And then the words in bold. There has been a very dramatic change within the last 18 months to the way in which compliance assesses income and calculates and recovers debt. See that?"

Archival Tape – Colleen:

"Yes."

Archival Tape – Counsel Assisting:

"And was that your belief that they had, in fact, been a dramatic change?"

Archival Tape – Colleen:

"Oh, absolutely."

RICK:

This wasn't an iteration in debt recovery. This was a brand new money grab. Colleen remembered all of this. And when the royal commission came knocking, she told them.

COLLEEN:

I feel really blessed that I had the opportunity to be at the royal commission because I think people must have had days and days and days and weeks of people going, I don't remember. I don't recall. I wasn't there. I didn't get that email or what have you. And it must have been a breath of fresh air, someone to come along and say it was wrong and be specific about why it was wrong and that they knew.

Archival Tape – Counsel Assisting:

"When did you finish your employment?"

Archival Tape – Colleen:

"I retired. I retired in July 2017. Yeah."

Archival Tape – Counsel Assisting:

"Can you tell us what the reason was for retiring?"

Archival Tape – Colleen:

"I just. I just was spent. I think… I just it was just the, I guess, callous indifference that you just thought. It's just what people do to each other. And it was just so sad. And it was. And you just thought, nothing's going to change."

COLLEEN:

For me, it's hard to believe I am a shy person, but I am. I just didn't want to be front and centre. I just thought, Oh, this is. I hope I can just fade away because I didn't want it to be about me because so many other people had suffered and what have you. And I know that lots of friends and relatives were saying to me after I appeared, Oh, you know, you're trending on Twitter and all this sort of stuff, I'm thinking, Oh, okay. And people were saying just all these wonderful things and I thought it could really turn your head. And then there was an email from Jenny Miller saying, I wished my son had been able to speak to Colleen Taylor so that he would still be with me. And I thought that puts everything into perspective.

That's what I find intolerable about this whole thing, is they lied about ‘Oh people commit suicide for all sorts of reasons and really had nothing to do with robo-debt’. There was definitely a connection.

RICK:

For Colleen, getting a letter from the mother of the young man she had read about in the paper meant the world... but she isn't being imprecise when she talks about senior bureaucrats saying you couldn't link suicide and Robo-debt and that it would be unfair to do so because we don't know what goes on inside people's lives. But what Colleen knows is that there are cases like Rhys’, like another case mentioned in the same breath at the Royal commission of a woman who killed herself after receiving debt reminder notices in May 2017. There are cases that are inexplicably linked to Robo-debt.

COLLEEN:

And to then go on about, you know, oh, well, you don't know what's happening in people's lives, you know. Well, yes, you do know that people are vulnerable. People are on benefits generally, these sorts of things happening in their life. These are not the people to treat as criminals. These are not the people to send out debt collectors to. These are not the people to make it as difficult as possible for them to navigate the system. You know.

RICK:

If you don't know that, you shouldn't be in charge.

COLLEEN:

No. No. No.

RICK:

No, you shouldn't be making policy.

COLLEEN:

And that's what I hope from the commission, that they identify the people who should never again be in a managerial position where they are looking after things that involve the public. You know, because there was like a that all had lobotomies. There was the empathy gene that had just gone completely, you know, whether that was a prerequisite to to get into management, I don't know. But it's just you know, it's just I don't know.

RICK:

I guess it's easy now to look back and ask these types of questions. Why wasn't it stopped? Why didn't anyone seem to care? And because of this royal commission, we know at least some of the answers.

COLLEEN:

It pained me that the only thing that stopped it in the end was that it was illegal. And you think and thank God those people doggedly pursued it all those years. But why wasn't it stopped? Because it was unjust, it was unfair, it was cruel. All these things, none of it seemed to make any difference. Who was looking at that?

RICK:

And while Colleen continues to struggle with whether she did enough, whether she could have sent emails to more people or yelled more loudly, we know, Robo-debt continued, because there were many more people who didn't even try. They saw injustice. And they chose silence.

COLLEEN:

The big thing that disappoints me is they didn't deserve my loyalty. It still upsets me to this day. But there was that overwhelming thing of ‘there's nothing you can do’. You can just be a part of this horrible thing of what you're doing to people knowing that, yes, you would think. Stay there. Fight. You know. You know what? And I still to this day think, what could I have done differently?

RICK:

Well, you leave there with your head held much higher than almost everyone else.

COLLEEN:

Yes, I am. I'm happy for what Indid. And I'm so glad that it's on the historical record and that it's come up in the royal commission. And I stand by every single word I say. And I'm very, very grateful to yourself. And Luke, the commission giving me this opportunity and please, let me go back into the woodwork.

RICK:

I think you can get back in the woodwork. And hopefully a generation of public servants will ask themselves, what would Colleen Taylor do?

COLLEEN:

Yes, exactly.

RICK:

That would be the right framework.

COLLEEN:

Yes, that's right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

RICK:

The royal commission found that Kathryn Campbell had ignored warnings about Robo-debt repeatedly – You’ll remember that’s the Kathryn Campbell, who Colleen explicitly emailed about her concerns. She was involved intimately in the preparation of the new policy proposal which removed all references to income averaging and had the effect of misleading the cabinet. She was also found to have personally ordered her own officials to call off the request for legal advice from the Australian government solicitor because to do so would prove embarrassing to her.

Kathryn Campbell is currently on leave from her 900k a year job as a supervisor for the AUKUS nuclear submarine project.
As for Colleen Taylor…

Archival Tape – Bill Shorten:

"Colleen Taylor - I'm sure she'll probably kill me first, saying her evidence was exemplary. And Commissioner Holmes, as I said, did focus on restoring faith. I'd love to see Colleen Taylor, one of the front line people in the public service get a PSM. That's just a personal opinion."

RICK:

Bill Shorten said Colleen should receive a public service medal – for being one of the few public servants to step forward and expose what happened.

Archival Tape – Bill Shorten:

"…because some of the real heroes here weren't the people who should have been. The real leadership came from the rank and file of the organisation who spoke up even at risk of their own job security and promotion."

RICK:

Colleen will still be making her cups of tea and her cups of coffee, and I think there’s a certain calm that comes with the knowledge that you did the right thing.

Tomorrow you’ll hear about how Robo-debt made it out of the lab, when it never should have – from one of the only people I trust to tell that story.

An outsider, who helped put together our first picture of what Robo-debt really was.

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