It was 2016 and in the days before Christmas, a time when the news cycle slows down. Guardian Australia reporter Chris Knaus was deep in conversation with a whistleblower.
The compliance officer from the Centrelink debt recovery team told him that a majority of the debts being pursued under the Turnbull government’s new welfare crackdown were not legitimate.
They were “grossly unfair”, the officer said, and the automated system used to generate them was deeply flawed.
On 23 December, in an exclusive article not even Knaus entirely realised the significance of, he reported: “The system relies on an automated data-matching process to detect discrepancies between fortnightly income reported to Centrelink and annual pay information held by the tax office.”
This process became known as “income averaging” – a key part of the scheme later dubbed robodebt – and was ruled unlawful in a landmark federal court case. The entire scheme would later become the subject of a royal commission.
In early 2017 Knaus reported the first clear evidence of how income averaging was being used by Centrelink to raise millions in inaccurate debts. His story on one welfare recipient, Michael Griffin, laid out the faults in the income averaging process in stark simplicity.
“Surely my situation is the default,” Griffin told Knaus. “How many people is this happening to?”
It soon became clear that Griffin’s case was no anomaly.
“We laid it out in black and white,” Knaus says, reflecting on the scandal today. “It was at that point that it dawned on us how huge it was … it was so galling that [we] couldn’t quite believe how [the government was] justifying it.”
In the early days, covering robodebt was like “bashing your head against a wall”, he says, adding: “We could see the injustice of it. But it was really hard to envision a situation in which something like a royal commission would come off because we were, for so long after the initial media frenzy, one of the only news outlets covering it.”
By 2018 public interest had flatlined. There were key advocates outside the media who continued to raise awareness – among them Asher Wolf, Not My Debt, Legal Aid Victoria and the Social Security Rights Network.
The Greens senator Rachel Siewert was a lone voice in Senate estimates unwilling to let up. But otherwise, Knaus says, there was little political interest.
“There was a sense of frustration. Nothing was changing … We’d been reporting for two and a half years and the steam had run out.
“It needed someone to come in with fresh energy, fresh eyes and a fresh approach to the reporting, which focused on personal impact. That’s where Luke came in.”
Luke Henriques-Gomes arrived at Guardian Australia in 2018. Victorian Legal Aid announced it would launch a challenge to the legality of robodebt in the federal court and Henriques-Gomes set about telling the stories of people impacted by the scheme. A separate class action was launched by Gordon Legal.
In March 2020 Henriques-Gomes obtained confidential documents that revealed the government expected to lose the class action and would be forced to refund more than 400,000 debts issued under the botched scheme. Another document leak revealed that the government intended to target thousands of pensioners and other “sensitive” welfare recipients under a proposed expansion of the scheme.
“Those leaks showed that people with knowledge of what was happening knew it was wrong and were determined to ensure the public knew too,” he says.
He came to know Jennifer Miller and Kathleen Madgwick, who had first spoken to the Saturday Paper and Nine News about losing their sons to suicide after they received robodebts. “People in situations like that being brave enough to tell their stories was one of the most important parts of how change happened on this issue,” he says.
Henriques-Gomes foregrounded the voices of welfare recipients, who are so often disempowered by the media.
The approach was pivotal, Knaus says. “Prior to robodebt breaking, one of the big failures of the media was around the general treatment of welfare recipients. [They] were reported on as undeserving, as people who were to be distrusted, who were trying to game the system. That laid a pretty fertile ground for a program like this to be rolled out.”
The legal action was a turning point: at the end of 2019 the government conceded the scheme was not lawful. It eventually settled the class action for $1.8bn.
Subsequent royal commission hearings exposed a frightening disregard within the government for the scheme’s illegality, Henriques-Gomes says.
For five weeks he sat in on the hearings that made direct reference to Guardian Australia’s reporting and the impact it had had within Centrelink and as high up as the office of the then minister of human services.
“The commissioner said that coverage of the hearings in the mainstream media had been patchy,” he says. “I think that’s a fair comment.” Catherine Holmes SC singled out reporters from Guardian Australia and the Saturday Paper, and citizen Twitter journalists for their “committed” coverage of the evidence.
The Coalition’s media strategy to plant positive media stories about the scheme and deflect blame was exposed. “It really has laid bare how shocking it was, and how, rather than focusing on whatever issues there were with the scheme, [the government] was more concerned about attacking critics.”
When Henriques-Gomes reflects on the impact of robodebt, he thinks of Nathan Kearney, a horticulturist and musician who received his first debt notice in 2016.
“He said, ‘I’m five or 10 years behind where I would otherwise be in my life because of this period in time.’ He has robodebt-related trauma and he speaks to a psychologist about that.
“I just found myself thinking: there are thousands of people who had that kind of impact on their life from this program.
“The government took away some of [their] best years.”
This story was amended on 4 May 2023 to clarify that the robodebt scheme began under the Turnbull government.
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