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SCOTT:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Scott Mitchell, filling in for Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

Scott Morrison was found, by the Royal Commission into robo-debt, to have allowed cabinet to be misled.

Commissioner Cathrine Holmes also found he provided untrue evidence to the commission and that he pressured departmental officials over the scheme.

It took a few weeks, but the former prime minister this week addressed those findings head on: denying it all.

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper and host of 7am’s special Inside robo-debt series, Rick Morton, on Scott Morrison’s return to Parliament and how much longer he’s likely to sit there.

It’s Thursday, August 3rd.

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SCOTT:

Rick. This week, Scott Morrison appeared in Parliament for the first time since the robo-debt Royal Commission's findings. What did he have to say for himself?

Archival tape -- Speaker:

“And the member for Cook.”

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker and on indulgence.”

RICK:

That's right. He's back. It's the first sitting day of Parliament since the report's release and Morrison was going to use the chamber to defend his honour. And he did. He went really, really bloody hard.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“I do, however, completely reject each of the adverse findings against me in the Commission's report as unfounded and wrong.”

RICK:

And really you could tell that his major motivating force for giving this speech was to accuse the Labor Government of, you know, a campaign of political lynching were his words, an attempt to discredit him and to discredit his words, his service to the country.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“The latest attacks on my character by the government in relation to this report is just a further attempt by the government following my departure from office to discredit me and my service to our country during one of the most difficult periods our country has faced since the Second World War.”

SCOTT:

And Rick, let's talk about some of the reasons Morrison claimed this was a political lynching. Let's start with what he said about the findings the royal commission made. He questioned the legitimacy and the legal standing of the commission.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“This campaign of political lynching has once again included the weaponization of a quasi-legal process to launder the government's political vindictiveness. They need to move on.”

SCOTT:

What exactly does he mean by that? And is it accurate?

RICK:

Well, he called the royal commission quasi-legal, which is just not true. It's fully legal, you know, there's a Royal Commissions Act in Australia. We've had a lot of them. I suspect what he meant to say was quasi-judicial, which meant that it's not quite a court, but it is overseen by one of the finest legal minds in Australia, the former chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland, Catherine Holmes. So again, not really right. And again, royal commissions are not courts quite clearly because they're about findings of fact, they're about getting to the truth of the matter and they have to make findings where there is a difference between the evidence given by certain people and documents and you know the evidence given by everyone else, and they try to marry those things up into the most accurate record available. Given that memories change, people obfuscate and documents are not always properly kept inside the royal commission. That's what it did. And still, Scott Morrison says that this process was unfair and has rejected all of the findings made about him.

So this idea that it's a political lynching, you know, it's convenient for him to sell that narrative. You know, it's kind of like when you're a you know, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you're Scott Morrison, everything looks like a political campaign because that's who he is.

SCOTT:

And Rick, maybe the most substantive criticism Morrison made of the findings were that he blamed the public servants in the Department of Social Services for a lot of what went wrong. He said it really wasn't his responsibility to know whether or not the scheme was legal.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“And as the Minister for Social Services, I was constitutionally and legally entitled to assume the officers of the department had complied with their obligations under the Public Service Act to advise their respective ministers. As a result, my obligations were fully and properly discharged.”

SCOTT:

Is that accurate?

RICK:

Yeah, in one sense, yes. In fact, the royal Commission report says that explicitly. It's entirely correct to say, as they say. You know, this scheme was born in the Department of Human Services and that it was elevated to the minister's attention when he became the minister by public servants and that the briefs were written by public servants and the information handed over by public servants. All of that is true and that is not something that the Royal Commission has ever tried to resile from. What they also said was that you cannot take any of that stuff in isolation. It only tells one part of the story. The other part of the story is that Scott Morrison is ambitious, right? He quote unquote “stopped the boats”, had a trophy about stopping the boats in his office. He becomes Social Services Minister when Tony Abbott is Prime Minister and he wants to prove himself.

Archival tape -- Graham Richardson:

“And the man who stopped the boats and is now going to stop who knows what? We'll find out. G’day Scott how are you?'

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“G’day Graham.”

RICK:

He goes out on the offensive, he does this series of radio interviews saying that “I’m the tough new welfare cop on the beat. And if you're ripping off the system, I'm going to catch you and I'm going to find you.”

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“And I think Australians generally are quite happy to have a system that helps people who are genuinely in need and deserve our support. But what they won't cop, just like they won't cop people coming on boats is they're not going to cop people who are going to rort that system. So, there does need to be a strong welfare cop on the beat, and I'll certainly be looking to do that.”

RICK:

Now, that's all well and good. If you believe that there are integrity issues in the welfare system and there are people committing fraud - the data does not bear that out at all, but that's what he was saying. But one of the first things he said was, I want to do stuff on income compliance. And then they go fishing around and they bring up this brief and the brief says, you know, we can do this $1.2 billion savings project. It's going to need legislative change according to DSS. And there is a gap now of 5 to 6 weeks between when that brief hits Scott Morrison's office and when a new policy proposal comes forward that deletes any reference to the use of income averaging, which is illegal, in which DSS had legal advice saying is illegal. And Scott Morrison should have known that and he certainly should have asked questions of his own department, which was DSS, saying, hang on a second, in this brief that I first got in February 2015, you say that legislation is going to be required. DHS now says nothing of the sort. I'm taking a $1.2 billion savings proposal to Cabinet. I want them to have the fullest information. Where is the legal advice? That is what the royal commission is saying, that he allowed Cabinet to be misled because he didn't do his job as a cabinet minister with full accountability under the Westminster system.

What is interesting is that he used that 15 minute speech to speak very little about the victims of robo-debt. And, you know, he talked about the unintended consequences of the scheme, again, removing himself from the very conception of this program, which was always intended to have those consequences. You know, the department relied on the fact that people would not respond to these errant calculations. They relied on the fact that people would be ground into dust by the bureaucratic machine. And so they weren't unintended consequences. They were fully intended, fully contemplated by the designs of this program. And, you know, as Bill Shorten said in his response to Morrison's speech when he spoke in Parliament on Tuesday, Scott Morrison is not the victim of robo-debt.

Archival tape -- Bill Shorten:

“The real victims were those who suffered the effects of unfair accusations. The real victims were those who suffered trauma, anxiety, distress. The real victims were those who took their own lives.”

RICK:

You know, there were 434,000 Australians who were the subject of lawbreaking by coalition governments, successive. And Scott Morrison thinks it's all about him. You know, it's not.

Archival tape -- Bill Shorten:

“Well one person who is not a real victim is the member for Cook. Yesterday, the member for Cook claimed that the adverse findings against him were disproportionate, wrong…”

RICK:

The Royal Commission didn't believe his evidence and he gave it under oath. You know, I think when we see Morrison getting up in parliament, making a speech like that, I think what we're seeing is Scott Morrison is a little bit rattled.

SCOTT:

Coming up – the consequences for the major players in the robo-debt scheme.

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SCOTT:

Rick, when Commissioner Catherine Holmes handed down the report into robo-debt, there was a sealed section containing the names of those who were being referred to various authorities for further investigation. Now, we don't know who is named in that section, but do we know anything about what is happening, what the consequences could be for those who are named?

RICK:

This is the most consequential element of the report, of course, and people were a little bit annoyed that it was confidential. I'm not so annoyed because Commissioner Holmes, again, is so above the fray and she's kept the section confidential because there are referrals to law enforcement agencies, to the Australian Federal Police, to the National Anti-Corruption Commission, to workplace professional bodies. And the commissioner didn't want the fact that these referrals had been made to interfere with the perception of that process. What we do know, of course, is to watch for the movement elsewhere. Who's leaving, who's going, who's no longer in their jobs? And that’s providing a far more interesting picture, I think, of, I guess, to use the royal commission instead of knowledge that people have about their own involvement in robo-debt.

SCOTT:

And Rick, we've now seen Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert both leave Parliament. Katherine Campbell, the Secretary of the Department of Human Services at the time of all of this, has resigned from her current job. That leaves Scott Morrison as really one of the last high profile figures in the robo-debt scandal to still be in his position. Do we have any idea when or if Morrison is going to leave Parliament?

RICK:

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know that he does, to be quite honest. I suspect, I mean, there's lots of speculation that Scott Morrison wants to line up a good job before he quits. He’s spoken on four things in Parliament I think now, since he stopped being Prime Minister, and I think two of them were to defend his honour.

So we know that he was approved as with anyone who was in an official capacity at the time to respond to the royal commission, their expenses were approved by the attorney-general to have legal representation and that was $2.5 million just for the former ministers collectively, $500,000 of which was for Scott Morrison. But separate to that, to respond to any adverse findings or referrals in the sealed section, that has to be a separate request made to the attorney-general and we do know that Scott Morrison has been approved to respond to the findings of the report, and so he will be going through whatever process he has to go through with the support of government paid lawyers.

SCOTT:

And finally, Rick, Scott Morrison's speech, it's perhaps a clue as to how the findings of the royal commission are being taken by the people who were in government at the time this happened. And I wanted to ask, what does it tell you about how they've taken these findings and whether they've really grappled with the magnitude of what went wrong while they were in office?

RICK:

Yeah, this is really bothering me.

It was mathematically wrong. It was morally wrong. It was legally wrong. And the argument that we get from people like Scott Morrison and certain public servants is that, well, only the legally wrong part matters and that is not true. And nothing he said in his speech grappled with any of these things. And look, I didn't expect him to because the moral grappling is not something we saw from Scott Morrison ever in his position as Social Services Minister, certainly not Immigration Minister, not as Treasurer, not as Prime Minister, except where it was politically convenient for him to make overtures about the fact that he's considered that. If you think back to, you know, I spoke to Jenny and Jenny said actually the way women are treated is terrible. So now I care about the way women are treated. Those are the moments only when he was under significant political pressure did he even make - pay lip service to these notions. And here we have one of the most significant resonant reports from a royal commission about how we built a system that led people to their own harm. And it was allowed to go for as long as it did. It was allowed to begin at all because we poisoned ourselves into thinking that the people deserved it. And nowhere, nowhere has anyone ever actually sat down and reflected on their own role in that. And I think that is, I mean, that is a great shame. I didn't expect any better of Scott Morrison, I must admit. But if ever there was a time to start kind of working on that self-reflection, it's probably now, when there are still consequences coming down the pike.

SCOTT:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

RICK:

Scott, thanks for having me.

SCOTT:

You can listen to Rick Morton’s special series on the robo-debt scandal by searching ‘Inside robo hyphen debt’ on your podcast app.

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SCOTT:

Also in the news today…

An Indigenous art centre, the APY Art Centre Collective, did not have white staff interfere with the work of Indigenous artists, according to an independent investigation by the National Gallery of Australia.

The Australian newspaper had previously reported that white assistants had interfered with the artists intent, but the investigation found that, quote: “Without exception, the artists to whom we spoke, unequivocally told us the works under review in each case were made by them and expressly denied there had been any improper interference in the making of their work.”

And…

The US lost its prized credit rating, which determines how expensive it is for the government to borrow, over increased political gridlock in congress. In the past it’s threatened to prevent the US government from borrowing money it needs to sustain its budget.

I’m Scott Mitchell, this is 7am, Ange McCormack will be back tomorrow.

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