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KARA:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Kara Jensen-Mackinnon. This is 7am.

You would expect that when you give your personal data to the government, that data remains safe.

But that’s not the case for some people who were sent debt notices during Robodebt – and in at least one case, that information was released after the person had died by suicide.

So who should take responsibility when private data is used to protect an unlawful system? And how do we stop that from happening again?

Today, Senior Reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton on how the Robodebt royal commission is revealing one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the Australian government.

It’s Tuesday, February 7.

Warning: this episode includes discussion of suicide.

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KARA:

Rick, you've covered so many stories where the government and institutions put people in, frankly, terrible situations. This Robodebt story is no exception. It's just one of the many stories that you have followed for years. And now you're sitting in these royal commission hearings day after day. So can you start by telling me, compared to other stories you've covered, just how disturbing is what we're hearing at this royal commission?

RICK:

Yeah, I mean, I've covered a lot of, I would say, unethical or badly designed public service programs that have hurt a lot of people. I'm going to say the National Disability Insurance Scheme rollout is one of those. But I've never covered something where the intent of the scheme was to be harmful, and where the intent of the scheme was to claw back as much money as possible. And where the public servants knew, or should have known, as clearly as they should have known that this thing was illegal. In this case, I've never seen anything like it. I think it's one of the greatest modern scandals in Australian domestic politics, and it speaks to a broader story. This is not just about welfare recipients, although we should care just for that alone. And it's not just the story that happened. If you want to stop something like this happening again, this goes to the very core of how the Australian Public Service works with its ministerial overseers, the people who bear ultimate responsibility. And those two things working in tandem have created Robodebt, and they allowed it to continue for many years. Stealing money from hundreds of thousands of people. And I do call it stealing, because the central foundation of this scheme was something that they knew was wrong, which was that they were going to use annual data from the tax office, to average income earnings from people on welfare, who already reported their earnings fortnightly. And the law says that you only get paid your Centrelink benefits based on your fortnightly earnings. Now, averaging, if you've got uneven income, or if you work more than one job, that is never going to give you an accurate result. It also wasn't allowed for in the Social Security law. And not only did they do that, they then sent letters to people saying — not telling them what they were going to do with the averaging — but just telling them that there were some discrepancies. So there was no call to action. People didn't know that they needed to respond in the clear terms that the government wanted them to. And in fact, the letters were designed deliberately to make sure people didn't respond, because it was the only way the government could make the money they said they were going to make, was if people didn't engage. This is at every level, as far as I'm concerned one of the worst deliberate catastrophes in Australian government history.

KARA:

And Rick, we've heard some even more shocking revelations this week about the Robodebt scheme. When former ministers were asked about the way they handled the scandal as it unfolded, we heard from former Human Services Minister Alan Tudge.

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“Can you tell the Commission your full name, please, Mr Tudge?”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“Alan Edward Tudge.”

KARA:

He was minister at the time when people who were getting debt notices were coming forward. So what did we learn about how Alan Tudge reacted to that?

RICK:

His whole evidence was really distressing, to be quite honest.

There are two spokes to the Robodebt story. That is, how did it begin and how did it continue? And Alan Tudge was the Minister for Human Services during a time when that question “How did it get to continue?”, given all that was emerging about it, needed to be answered.

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

Did you understand, though, from your role as a minister that the government was striving for a balanced budget?

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“Of course.”

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“And this -”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“I think the public understood that.”

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“Yes. And this measure -”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“That was a good ambition, as it always should be.”

RICK:

But certainly, in late December 2016, they've already gone to an election and won again — just, I might add — and they've got budget pressures. They need to find savings. And so he goes back to his department and says “what can we announce?” And then wants to be in cabinet — he's not currently — so he's a real media tart, according to Rachelle Miller, his former senior media adviser.

Archival tape – Rachelle Miller:

“He was known throughout the building as being very media focused. Actually, they used to call him a bit of a media tart…”

RICK:

And he wants to do all the stories and he does a lot of stuff compared to Christian Porter — who's the senior minister in social services — because Alan wants the media attention, and he gets it. He gets all of these stories. Then we go on a $4 billion welfare debt hunt. He does A Current Affair saying “we're going to track you down…”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“ …Track you down, and you’ll have to repay those debts, and you may end up in prison”

RICK:

Now, he maintains on the stand that he was answering a question about fraud, but the royal commission was like, you knew exactly what you were talking about because you knew that the case of the fraud in welfare was minuscule. In fact, it was 0.1% of all welfare transactions were fraudulent.

So it was this kind of ecosystem of shame, guilt, and fear.

And, in September 2016, that's when Robodebt really hit its straps. It was fully turned on, It was fully automatic. Thousands of people were getting notices, that looked like debt letters, every week. And over the December 2016 and January 2017 period, Alan Tudge was on holiday. And he seems very upset about this because this became such a crisis in the media that Malcolm Turnbull ordered Alan Tudge to come home from that holiday, cut it short, get back to Canberra, and fix this.

KARA:

And it’s at that time, Rick, that some very disturbing stories emerged about people dying by suicide after receiving debt notices. Can you tell me how Tudge’s office dealt with those reports?

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“I turn to the question of suicides related to the scheme.”

RICK:

He seemed almost cavalier, I would say.

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“What tab is this, sorry?”

RICK:

And in fact that accords with the documentary evidence we've got in this inquiry. And just one story in particular I really want to mention is that of Rhys Cauzzo, which was reported in The Saturday Paper, in 2017 by Mark McKenzie Murray.

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“I do recall - I don't recall the details of this case, umm…”

RICK:

And the day that story ran. One of his staffers, Rachelle Miller, the media adviser, sends it around to the minister's office and says “you know, Rhys was doing the wrong thing.” And this is a 28 year old musician who killed himself after getting debt letters from Centrelink. Sends the story around and says, “oh, you know, what a nice start to the weekend” because they had to deal with the media.

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

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

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“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 - this was tragic case - I broadly remember this case - as tragic as any suicide is...”

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“Nonetheless, it seems that your media adviser was comfortable expressing herself in this way directly to you?”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“The - well, the email is there.”

RICK:

Now they asserted then and for years that the story was wrong, and that Rhys was not a Robodebt victim and that his debt was not even a Robodebt. And it was. And that was put to Alan Tudge on the stand, and Alan had to accept that. Now, what the minister's office did in response to that story was, I just think personally, I think it's disgusting.

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“And your Chief of Staff strongly advised you - well, advised you -”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“Yes”.

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“That it might be a bad look to provide some details about this person in the media in response.”

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“Yes.”

RICK:

What they did was they released the private Centrelink… protected private Centrelink records of Rhys — a dead man — to journalists to try and, quote unquote, correct the story.

Archival tape – Alan Tudge:

“Yes, I do - from memory, I do recall asking there be an investigation into Mr Cauzzo.”

KARA:

Okay, so sorry. Within hours of seeing this story about Rhys’ suicide and that it might be connected to this scheme, the Minister is already getting legal advice about whether he can release his personal details.

RICK:

Exactly. And I know that sounds horrific. And this was a Saturday, by the way, so a Saturday the chief counsel of the Department of Human Services gets this advice back to the minister that same day. And the reason it happened so quickly was because Alan Tudge had already done this before. He'd already created a new reality where every time he felt aggrieved he was getting the chief counsel, Annette Musolino to sign off on his release of, at this stage, de-identified personal details from Centrelink records. He had a copy of the Centrelink record of every person who had ever complained about a Centrelink debt at this point. And so this was his media strategy to quote unquote, fight back, you know, the entire power of the Commonwealth versus, in this case, a dead man.

KARA:

And so, Rick, why is it that a minister like Alan Tudge, when he hears about these stories, like the stories you've mentioned, why doesn't he ask questions about the legality of the scheme, or even whether what was going on was wrong?

RICK:

Well, they thought they were all debt whingers, basically. Rachelle Miller gave evidence that they just thought that these were, you know, sob stories, hard luck stories, that were being run by the sympathetic, bleeding heart left wing media, and that this had always played well, you know, doing the welfare compliance stuff. And in fact, Alan Tudge himself said that typically, you know, in his view, most Australians were okay with doing welfare compliant because they wanted to protect the integrity of the system, and the fact that Robodebt was a vast departure, and an illegal departure, mind you, from everything that had previously been done seemed not to factor into any of this decision making, because Alan Tudge maintains that he had every reason to believe that it was legal because it had gone to cabinet. And he's not completely wrong, I might add, because it did go to cabinet, and when a policy goes to cabinet, it has to have the legal sign off from the department that has carriage of it, which at that point with the Department of Social Services. It also has to have the legal sign off from the Attorney General's department, which it did. And the broader question, of course, is how it came to be given that sign-off.

So this is the really critical question, right, because there is a serious and ultimately tragic lack of curiosity from both ministers, but particularly Alan Tudge, based on his evidence. Had either of them begun asking serious questions… and to be fair, Christian Porter actually did begin asking these questions, but he never quite made it. And he admitted that on the stand on Thursday last week he said, “I almost got there, but I didn't, and I should have. And I regret that.”

But what we do know is that there were a number of officials in the background, in those departments, who did know what was going on and who had they been asked deliberate specific questions would have found it very difficult to continue what was at this stage a certified cover up.

At the same time that Alan Tudge should be asking questions, the Commonwealth Ombudsman starts its investigation, which triggers a panic in the Department of Social Services to go and get sympathetic legal advice, which they knew that they didn't have, because the only legal advice they had at that point was 2014 that said, you can't do this, this is illegal. And so there is literally a cover up. I know that people like to use that word a lot in politics when something goes wrong, but this is categorically, objectively, a cover up. And so there were frequent points between both ministers' testimony where we actually got evidence that the department was withholding information from their ministers.

So they just didn't tell the minister.

KARA:

We’ll be back after this

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KARA:

Rick, you've mentioned a few times that while the ministers who testified have revealed some shocking decisions that were made, the real roots of the Robodebt scheme are actually in the public service which designed it. So can you tell me about what we've learned? And whether we know more about how the unlawfulness of this program was kept hidden for so long?

RICK:

There are so many points at which this could’ve been stopped. There are so many points, and at every one of those points, or almost every one of those points, I should say, the reason it wasn't stopped was because of a positive action — as in a deliberate action — by someone in a department to stop information reaching a level that would have prevented this game from continuing.

And the clearest example I mentioned earlier is the Commonwealth Ombudsman. So they announced in January that they're doing an investigation. An own motion investigation into this scheme, whether it's lawful. Pretty much within days of that being found out by the Department of Social Services, the Department of Social Services goes in after the same lawyer that second counselled the 2014 legal adviser said this is illegal. And they go to her Anne Pulford and they say “What about if we ask this question, which is slightly narrow?” In fact, it's incredibly narrow and it's designed to get Anne Pulford to be able to give a legal opinion that says this is okay. That's exactly what they do. And then there's a lot of discussion about whether they should even tell the Commonwealth Ombudsman about the 2014 advice, because that's going to raise a lot of questions, in an independent authority that is looking at the legal basis for this scheme. And after much toing and froing, to their credit, there's not much credit to go around. The legal team managed to convince the policy team, and one of whom was Robert Hurman, that they should actually give this 2014 advice to the Ombudsman. In fact, it's quite a reluctant decision.

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“Mr Hurman, can you tell the Commission your full name, please.”

Archival tape – Robert Hurman:

“Robert Alexander Hurman.”

RICK:

And Robert Herman says, “well I need you to give me a form of words that I can pass on to the Commonwealth Ombudsman that explains why we appear to have changed our minds.”

Archival tape – Robert Hurman:

“Yes, that's my recollection, is that we then drafted something with both pieces of advice.”

RICK:

He finds out later that afternoon when he sees an email with the official advice response to the Ombudsman. With the documents that the Ombudsman was asking for. He finds out that there was a decision made above him, to not send the 2014 advice.

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“And you learned later that afternoon that, in fact, despite what you had drafted in consultation with Mr De Burgh, only the 2017 advice was sent to the Ombudsman.”

Archival tape – Robert Hurman:

“I did learn later. I wasn't sure whether it was the same day or not, but yes.”

RICK:

Which is Shocking. And one of the few people that could have authorised that, according to him, was…

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“What are you trying to say? Who changed it?”

RICK:

Serena Wilson.

Archival tape – Robert Hurman:

“Well, I understand that Serena Wilson made a decision to change it. Or the Deputy Secretary, based on another email that I think is part of my evidence.”

RICK:

The deputy secretary of the Department of Social Services.

Archival tape – Robert Hurman:

“And, yes, she sort of is higher in the chain than me within DSS.”

RICK:

Now, Justin Gregory, KC, put it to him. He said, I suggest to you that there was a common understanding within DSS from the time the Ombudsman investigation was received to go on the front foot and defend the scheme as being both lawful and accurate in raising debts. He said there was a pattern of behaviour…

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“ …pattern of behaviour from the start, in January 2017, by people within DSS of which you were a part. And it was designed to establish the lawfulness in the Scheme in the representations that it made to the Ombudsman. Irrespective of the true position.”

RICK:

And Herman — and this is not a great quote for him — said…

Archival tape – Robert Herman:

“We tried to put it in a positive light, I guess…”

RICK:

And Greggery was like “how could you possibly put it in a positive light?”

Archival tape – Justin Greggery:

“It’s a bit hard to put a positive light on something that you understood was being conducted unlawfully.”

RICK:

And you know what? The Commonwealth Ombudsman fell for it. The department officials were successful because the final report came out, said that the Ombudsman was happy, satisfied that Robodebt, as we now know it, was operating within legislative requirements. It just wasn't true.

KARA:

And Rick, when you think about the Ombudsman looking into the scheme back in 2017, if they had been given all the information they required at the time and there was this transparency, there's a chance the scheme would have ended much quicker than it did. So what does it say to you that some public servants appear to have acted in the interests of, as you say, trying to show it in a positive light rather than being forthcoming?

RICK:

This is the stuff that I still can't quite get my head around because at this point, I mean, public servants are subject to their own code of conduct. There are serious consequences, in some cases, depending on the type of behaviour for doing the wrong thing. And so at this point you've got new ministers essentially, in both portfolios. There is serious media criticism, there's an Ombudsman investigation. This is the perfect opportunity, in fact, if you want to say we got it wrong, or in the course of this investigation we have sought external legal advice and we've now come to the view that this thing does not have a legal basis, we're going to stop it. This was the perfect opportunity to do that, and they didn't do it. And what we don't know and may never know, is why they did it.

KARA:

And Rick, there's still more hearings to go in the coming weeks. But what's been exposed already at this royal commission seems truly shocking. So do you think these hearings and the recommendations that will eventually come out will really be enough to right the wrongs that have been exposed here?

RICK:

I know that almost every public service in the country is watching this.

And people sometimes get frustrated that I talk about the public servants a lot and not the ministers. And as far as I can work out, at this point, and I'm not the royal commission, and we're not at the end. As far as I can work out, the ministers bear ultimate responsibility for this and their errors. And there were many errors, errors of inaction. But the errors of the public servants — particularly the ones who were intimately involved in this — were errors of obfuscation, cover up, and subterfuge.

The Ombudsman looks terrible in all of this because even though they were misled, they were also happy to work hand-in-glove with these departments, to massage some of this stuff. And so at every level, we've got serious ramifications. And I think something will change.

But honestly, the most important one is that it never happens again. And I think Commissioner Catherine Holmes, I wouldn't presume to know what's in her mind, but certainly just judging by her statements, she sees through bureaucratic B.S. pretty quickly. And she does it with striking efficiency. And I just cannot imagine a final report from this royal commission that has her imprimatur. That doesn't name every single person that she believes failed. And there are a lot of them.

KARA:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks for having me.

KARA:

And if you're looking for advice and support around depression and suicide, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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KARA:

Also in the news…

Archival tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“This country has a strong grassroots black sovereign movement.”

KARA:

Senator Lidia Thorpe has announced she is quitting The Greens, but will remain in the crossbench - where she has been elected to serve until 2028.

Archival tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“and I want to represent that movement fully in this Parliament.”

KARA:

In a short statement to the media, Thorpe said that now she will be able to ‘speak freely’ on issues of the Voice to Parliament and Indigenous sovereignty.

Archival tape – Adam Bandt:

“She’s obviously decided to adopt a different course.”

KARA:

The Greens are yet to announce their stance on the Voice, but leader Adam Bandt said he understood Thorpe’s decision, and thanked her for pledging to continue to vote with the Greens on climate issues.

And,

“Jobs for the boys” - that’s how a parliamentary inquiry has described former New South Wales Deputy Premier John Barilaro’s appointment to a New York trade role.

The job - which came with a five hundred thousand dollar a year salary - caused controversy last year when it was revealed the role had initially been given to bureaucrat, Jenny West, who was the preferred candidate.

Thanks so much for listening! Ruby Jones will be back tomorrow.

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