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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

There are people inside government departments who want to use insights into human behaviour to influence us.

At its best, it can help design systems to get the best outcomes for people. But at its worst, it can ‘nudge’ people into accepting bad outcomes; from not appealing decisions and not getting the services they’re entitled to.

Today, senior reporter at The Saturday Paper Rick Morton, on the job ad for someone to look into human behaviour and its strange links to the origins of the robo-debt disaster.

It’s Thursday, December 1.

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RUBY:

Rick, good morning. How are you?

RICK:

I'm good, Ruby. How are you?

RUBY:

Yeah I’m good. So, Rick, we’re here to talk about the way that decisions that are made within government agencies can have huge impacts on people’s lives. And I think it’s interesting, because a lot of journalism out there is about the politicians. But often in your stories, you’re looking at the web of bureaucracy and the kind of crushing effect that that can have on people.

RICK:

Yeah, it's an easy one to overlook, isn't it? Because we think about government as in the politicians making all the decisions, but it's the people in the departments and the agencies who actually enact all of that stuff and they often decide on the fly within the bounds of the legislation they've got how those things are going to apply to you.

And, you know, it's not just people on welfare, which is how a lot of people conceptualise government support, but things like the National Disability Insurance Scheme, or the Age Pension, or any kind of disaster payments and things like that. So this stuff is actually really important and has a huge effect on the way people actually get to live their life and whether it's with more stress or less.

RUBY:

Absolutely - and this week you've been looking into the NDIS, the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And the incoming minister, Bill Shorten has flagged a review into the scheme and that’s around concerns of the rising costs associated with it. So can you tell me about the state the NDIS is in at the moment and what we know so far about what changes are underway?

RICK:

So the NDIS has been around for a long time now actually, it's turning ten next year. It began with trials in mid 2013 under the Gillard Government and it was designed to essentially completely replace, dismantle and replace the entire state based, fragmented disability service system. It was also replacing the architecture of how funding used to be delivered, not just increasing the funding. And so there's been this whole new central agency, which is the National Disability Insurance Agency. There's been a complete change in philosophy, which is that if it is reasonable and necessary, then you will get whatever you need to help you live a life if you've got a disability.

And so. That's great, except they were kind of figuring out how to do this on the run. And so there's been attempts now for many years to cut costs or rein in costs.

Now, in the latest financial sustainability report released this month, there was a line in there saying that there's significant pressures on the financial sustainability of this scheme, the NDIS remain, and have become, more significant. So really that's just a natural progression. And just recently on November 14, a little birdie of mine spied an assistant director of Behavioural Insights Job advertisement posted on Seek and on the agency's website. Now that's very interesting to me because I've been covering a few things recently that involve behavioural insights, and this job ad noted that this was a position that would work exclusively on projects that I'm quoting here, “address potential and actual non-compliance by participants and providers”.

RUBY:

Right and is that a big problem for the NDIA? People not complying with the rules they are supposed to around their support?

RICK:

Yeah, so I would say no, especially when it comes to participants. Participants are getting what the legislation allows them to get in terms of support, which is reasonable and necessary. The agency doesn't like that because it's more than was bargained for back in the days when this scheme was being legislated back in 2012 and 2013. And so their estimates in their forecast are more than what they thought they would be. Now, that's the problem for government. That's not a problem for disabled people, and it shouldn't be their problem. There is fraud in the NDIA. It's not in any huge numbers in terms of actual criminal fraud. But there have been people gone to jail and they've almost exclusively been providers, people who have come in and either registered or been unregistered as a provider of disability support services.

So this is where it all gets to, right. When they say compliance, they say, well, how do we stop people spending money or getting money in their plans? And we do know those cases where people have been denied funding support only to have, you know, when it gets to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal or that court, for them to say the agency was wrong to deny this of you, how it ever got here is beyond us. Which means their decisions were wrong.

RUBY:

Right. Which would be a gruelling thing to go through. So Rick if people are being denied funding arrangements that eventually this independent arbiter says that they're absolutely entitled to. Why does something like that happen? What is the thinking behind the original decisions that are being made at the NDIA?

RICK:

Look, we can't say absolutely for sure, but I have my suspicions about why this is the case. But there's also a pretty concerning link to a scandal that has been in the headlines recently, and that's the robo-debt royal commission.
Two people who were around at the time of the robo-debt scheme who in fact developed the very first conceptualisation of the robo-debt scheme, are now working in very senior positions at the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and their testimony gives us an insight into something that these bureaucrats call behavioural nudging or behavioural influencing, and it's insight into the very thing that they were asking for in that job ad and we were just talking about.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rick, you said you’ve discovered this interesting between how the National Disability Insurance Agency is looking at compliance in the disability sector and the robo-debt Royal Commission. And, this all has to do with behavioural nudging. So what is that, what is behavioural nudging and why is it significant?

RICK:

So you can control human beings right. That's a story as old as humankind itself because the brain is a really tricky thing and we recognise patterns and we are actually less in control of our own behaviour than we think we are. And advertisers and marketers know all this stuff and these two very senior public servants who were involved in the development of robo-debt were very open with the Royal Commission just a couple of weeks ago.

Archival Tape -- Speaker 1:

“Commissioner, I call Jason Ryman”.

RICK:

One of the men involved in this process, Jason Ryman, who was the director in the DHS at the time, he wrote the initial brief that went to his then boss, Scott Britton, that outlined the entire genesis of robo-debt. And there was a really interesting moment during Jason Ryman's testimony to the robo-debt Royal Commission about the use of behavioural insights and nudging in the development of this kind of debt programme.

Archival Tape -- Jason Ryman:

“We're thinking of numerous ways. Looking at the use of SMS to remind customers at different times as to their obligations. We were trialling or looking at different letters that we could use incorporating behavioural insights to influence compliance behaviour.”

RICK:

What ended up happening was essentially they created a series of gates through which you could shepherd welfare recipients to get an outcome that you wanted, not one that was necessarily good for them. And so they didn't even put a phone number on these letters that went to the vast majority of people.

Archival Tape -- Speaker 1:

“Can you tell us why a phone number wasn't included?”

Archival Tape -- Jason Ryman:

“I recall the phone number wasn’t included because we were really seeking customers to go online.”

RICK:

As the commissioner, Catherine Holmes pointed out quite directly.

Archival Tape -- Catherine Holmes:

“To minimise human involvement effectively. Two phone numbers in order to minimise compliance officer engagement.”

Archival Tape -- Ryman:

“I think. Probably the intent was at the time really trying to move customers into an online environment as an agency.”

Archival Tape -- Catherine Holmes:

“Okay. You didn't want them ringing up. Is that right or not?”

RICK:

Because if someone rang up, they'd have to deal with the compliance officer, which would negate the automatic nature of the entire system, which would then negate the $1.2 billion in savings that you could actually get. Now, Scott Britton, who I mentioned, was the national manager at the time, he's now one of Jason Ryman's colleagues at the National Disability Insurance Agency, and he told the enquiry that they were really involved in influencing users behaviour. So welfare recipients behaviours in responding to robo-debt. Now influencing is really the generous term for what they were doing I think.

RUBY:

So, do we know Rick if these same ideas are being used at the NDIA? If there are attempts to use “behavioural insights” to influence people who access those services?

RICK:

We know that Jason Ryman, who wrote the brief that was signed by Scott Britton, we know that both of those men are now at the National Disability Insurance Agency. And, you know, Jason Ryman, when he gave evidence at the royal commission, mentioned that his current job is as branch manager of the compliance programme at the National Disability Insurance Agency. And that job ad that we were talking about before, that's asking to hire or seeking to hire an assistant director. Behavioural insights for the National Disability Insurance Scheme reports directly to an EL2 position that reports directly to Jason Ryman.

Now in the initial brief that Jason Ryman put together for Scott Britton during the development of robo-debt, this was very much an emerging practice at the time. But what has become really popular is using behavioural insights and behavioural influencing in compliance, which is what Jason Ryman has done for pretty much the entirety of his career. He's a compliance guy and he's now in charge of the compliance branch at the insurance game. Now the advertisement states that the roles will lead and manage research to ensure the delivery of innovative and effective behavioural interventions that align. And this is key that aligned to the strategic priorities of the agency. It will draw on your understanding of human behaviour and behavioural economics to understand how people make decisions and behave and apply this to inform service delivery programmes and policies.

I should be upfront here and say that the agency rejects completely any link between its compliance work, which they say actively works to protect the funding of NDIS participants to the focus of the robo-debt Royal Commission. They say it's wrong to make that link and they say that the agency compliance activities are ethical and consistent with our commitment to the focus on the welfare of participants at all times.

RUBY:

And what about your sources inside the NDIA Rick. What are they saying about all this?

RICK:

Yeah. So I was talking to one source who's quite familiar with the work of the compliance programme, and this person was saying that what we are ultimately talking about here is using psychological tricks to discourage certain behaviours. Now that's good. If you want to discourage someone from crossing a road without looking, that's a good thing to discourage. But this person says, what I want to know is whether we are discouraging people from claiming support to which they are entitled, and there is good reason to be concerned by that, given the history of, ironically, the behaviour of the National Disability Insurance Agency. What influences are they trying to use to stop people claiming support to which they would be entitled under the legislation that governs the National Disability Insurance Scheme?

RUBY:

Ok so is there a cause here for government departments to tread really carefully when it comes to the way that behavioural nudging is used – because you have a Royal Commission asking very pointed questions about how these strategies have been used in the past. But the public service seems like they’re still very interested in using these tools to target compliance?

RICK:

Yeah. The reason they're happy to do all of that is because I don't think they think it's a problem. Like I think they just think, well, this is what we do. This is business as usual.

RUBY:

It’s a way to meet ends.

RICK:

It's a way to meet ends. And compliance is I don't want to be misinterpreted on this. Compliance is really important. Like you don't want people committing fraud, but compliance is more than fraud. Fraud is the really tip of the iceberg. Right? And so this data analytics driven, behavioural insights driven organisation, it's woven into the DNA of what it does. You know, the job ad advertises or seeking someone to do all of this stuff in conjunction with the strategic priorities of the agency. And one of the strategic priorities of the agency is to bring down costs. And the easiest way for them to do that, not the right way necessarily, but the easiest way for them to do that, is to bring down the cost of every single person's plan.

And this is the problem we have with really big schemes. The situations are very similar. We've got 530,000 people or more now in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. There were 900,000 potential discrepancies under robo-debt and they wanted to cut corners.

But in doing that, you catch innocent people. And robo-debt sent debt letters and people paid debts that never existed. And under the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We know people are targeted. I've written so many stories over my career that I cannot even begin to count the amount of people who just objectively, clearly needed the funding for their disabilities, that was cut by the agency. And it's because it's easier to cut at scale than it is to make a surgeons incision. And so we get these shortcuts. But the shortcuts help the bureaucracy. They don't help the people.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The National Anti-Corruption Commission Bill unanimously passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon, and the decision was met with applause in the chamber.

Introducing a federal Integrity commission to tackle corruption was a core promise of the Labor Government at the election earlier this year. Albanese has said in a statement, "This is a historic day for our parliament, and the nation."

And

Scott Morrison has become the first former Prime Minister to be censured by Parliament, for his failure to disclose his extra ministerial appointments.

The motion was moved by MP Tony Burke, who said that Morrison “did not just fall below the standards” of the house, “he undermined them, attacked them, and abused them”.

In response, Morrison told the lower house it was “false” to equate his decision to administer colleagues’ departments with appointments as minister, and claimed if he had been asked he “would have responded truthfully about the arrangements”.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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