The debt letter came two weeks before Christmas.
Michael Griffin can’t remember exactly where he was when he read it, whether it was a hard copy or electronic.
It’s been almost seven years. Time has blurred the edges of his memory.
What he remembers clearly, though, is his sense of shock.
Centrelink was telling him he owed them $3,197 for three months’ worth of welfare payments four years earlier, which he wasn’t entitled to.
“It was all very confusing,” he says. “I was always very fastidious about reporting correctly, so I didn’t really know what was going on and the number was so shocking.”
Shock soon gave way to anger, then a sense of moral clarity, of purpose.
He could see something was wrong. Centrelink’s error, fortuitously in his case, was plain to see.
Griffin had worked exactly 26 weeks in 2013. Centrelink had taken those 26 weeks’ worth of income, and averaged them out across its 26 fortnightly reporting periods, wrongly assuming he had worked every fortnight of the year and rendering him ineligible for welfare.
He began taking screenshots and gathering the correspondence, and provided it to the Guardian on 30 December 2016. In the two weeks prior, Centrelink whistleblowers had spoken out and leaked documents, corroborating victims’ complaints of wildly inaccurate debts and systemic problems in debt recovery.
When published, Griffin’s story served as early, incontrovertible proof of the flawed use of income averaging – the process at the heart of robodebt’s illegality and the source of much of its injustice.
Nothing changed.
“I think what shocked me the most was that once stories like mine came out, that it didn’t immediately get fixed, that that wasn’t enough,” he says.
“My sister got a $20,000 false debt and she called me crying from the toilet at work. It felt like the end of the world. She was worried about losing the house with her kids … It all felt very real.”
About the same time, in Sydney, then 21-year-old Jack Rogerson noticed a strange voice message left on his mobile.
Centrelink, having sent its initial letters to a wrong address, determined that Rogerson was trying to evade a welfare debt and referred him to Dun & Bradstreet, a firm paid $10m to recover money from welfare recipients.
Rogerson lives with autism. He struggled to comprehend what was happening.
Confused and unable to use internet banking, he asked his mother, Nicole Rogerson, to help him pay back the $3,000 debt.
The debt was false, created as a result of income averaging.
His mother was livid.
“If he could have paid it, he would have,” she says. “It was just lucky that he didn’t know how to do it.
“It just struck me – how could Centrelink let the system go after people with intellectual disabilities to recover debt? That’s just a broken design.”
The stories of Griffin, Rogerson and countless others were made public more than six years ago.
The scheme continued to run for years, still at its heart relying on an averaging process to identify debts. Still raising debts without proper evidence. Still asking the accused to prove their innocence with up to six years’ delay and Centrelink’s stifling bureaucracy pressed against them.
Those in power ridiculed or ignored the criticisms of victims, activists and civil society, who were all convinced of its profound unfairness. Eventually, the media grew tired of the story.
Despondency took over.
‘I felt I was useless’
Many of those campaigning against the scheme struggled to see how, given the government’s intransigence, the scheme would end. Many could never have foreseen a circumstance in which it would be subjected to the rigorous examination of a royal commission.
On Friday, there was at least some vindication. The robodebt royal commission issued its damning final report, referring unnamed individuals for civil and criminal investigation.
It made scathing criticisms of those at the highest rungs of government.
The actions of Alan Tudge, the human services minister overseeing robodebt, were described as “reprehensible” and an “abuse of power”. Kathryn Campbell, the secretary of the Department of Human Services, was “responsible for a department that had established, implemented and maintained an unlawful program”.
“When exposed to information that brought to light the illegality of income averaging, she did nothing of substance,” the report says.
Scott Morrison, the social services minister during robodebt’s initial creation in 2015, “allowed cabinet to be misled” about whether the scheme required legislative reform to make it lawful.
The report laid out, in sobering detail, the harm done to the nation.
That harm included three known suicides, though the commissioner, Catherine Holmes, was “confident that these were not the only tragedies of the kind”.
Felicity de Somerville, a robodebt victim and lead plaintiff in Gordon Legal’s $1.2bn robodebt class action in 2020, is among those who were nearly killed by the scheme.
In 2017, the agency’s debt collectors took $11,500 from her account without warning.
It was the equivalent of almost six months’ wages for the then part-time worker and young mother. It left her struggling to pay for medication for her one-year-old daughter, who was fighting a bad chest infection.
“It was like I really was the most useless, worthless piece of existence,” she says. “It was like, ‘why am I here? My daughter is better off without me. My husband is better off without me’. How do I go home and tell my husband ‘hey we can’t afford rent for the next six months, I can’t afford to contribute to groceries or bills, we’re going to have to pull [their daughter] out of daycare’.”
She became suicidal and told Centrelink staff she was going to drive her car off the freeway.
The royal commission’s hearings have offered some redress for the enduring shame and worthlessness she was made to feel.
But she says nothing can undo the damage wrought on her life.
“That’s what really hurts, that’s what’s really hard to get out,” she says, choking back tears. “I’ll never get over that, and that’s the thing that angers me.
“They think they can do these things and that a royal commission and a lawsuit is going to make everything somehow better and it’s going to take away the hurt and the pain that they created. They don’t realise that nothing is going to take away that, nothing is going to erase the memory, or the feeling of helplessness and betrayal and worthlessness. Nothing is going to erase that.”
Griffin has watched large chunks of the royal commission’s proceedings. He makes a simple point about what has been uncovered.
The key information about robodebt – its reliance on income averaging, its potential illegality, its blatant unfairness, and its reversal of the onus of proof on to victims – was known and made public half a decade before the royal commission began.
“So many times I’d have people say to me, watching [the royal commission] on the news, ‘can you believe, can you believe?’,” he says. “I’d say ‘where were you six years ago, when I was telling you all these things?’”
‘They were ringing up, crying, upset’
It wasn’t just victims who have long been clear-eyed about the system’s flaws.
Many frontline Centrelink staff were aghast at what they were being asked to do, and the lies deployed by those in power to defend the system.
Griffin remembers speaking to Centrelink workers who told him they knew his debt was wrong, but could do little to help.
It’s a recollection shared by workers such as Jeannie-Marie Blake, a Melbourne-based public servant and Centrelink employee since 2000.
She bravely spoke out at the royal commission, despite still being employed at Services Australia, where she is a Community and Public Sector Union delegate.
Blake spoke powerfully of her and her colleagues’ distress at what they were being asked to do.
She and other Centrelink staff were sounding the alarm constantly, she said. Their concerns were ignored.
Blake says they were warned to “shut up and do the work”, or leave without a reference.
“At that time, I was going through a family breakdown,” she says. “I couldn’t afford to leave.”
She was trapped between the obstinance of senior Centrelink management, who were ignoring what frontline staff were telling them, and the legitimate anger and despair they were hearing through the phones.
“They were ringing up, crying, upset, or really angry and swearing, you always had to de-escalate, whether it was to stop them from suicide – and there were customers like that – but the majority were at levels of anger,” Blake tells the Guardian.
“I used to tell them … you’re 100% right, this debt will not be accurate. And they’d say well how can you raise it? And you’d say ‘look, what the government has decided to do is average your income and if there’s any way you can provide me anything to change that, I’d be happy to do so’.”
The toll on staff was immense.
“It was a mental nightmare,” Blake says. “I exhausted so much of my personal leave, my long-service leave. Lots of staff, we just didn’t want to be there.
“We weren’t coping at all. We couldn’t believe the situation. Everyone had a story worse than the last person’s story.”
Colleen Taylor, also a frontline Centrelink worker, was so concerned at what she was seeing that she penned an extraordinary email to Campbell, explaining the problems with the system in forensic detail.
“Almost to a person in the team that I was working in, we were very much saying ‘this is crazy, you can’t do this’,” she tells the Guardian.
She kept her concerns internal, out of a sense of loyalty.
“What became clear to me was that they never deserved my loyalty,” she says. “There was a lot of trust broken.”
Looking back, Taylor can see how the demonisation of welfare recipients laid fertile ground for all that was happening.
“It became a mathematical exercise, rather than something that had human beings attached to it.”
The royal commission’s report recognised the harm done to Centrelink staff. Blake says there was some vindication in that finding, but she would have liked a recommendation that workers receive an apology.
Blake also says it is crucial that, after the report, departments have a formal process for seeking the advice of frontline staff about systems such as robodebt. Doing so, she says, would have stopped robodebt “in the very first week”.
She also hoped the report would recommend greater protections for those who speak out about wrongdoing.
“I don’t think there’s enough protection for whistleblowers,” she says. “If there were better protections for staff, staff would be more willing to speak out.”
Robodebt’s dark legacy will remain long after the royal commission’s findings are forgotten.
It has caused irreparable damage, suicide and financial turmoil. Faith in the public service has been badly eroded. Likewise for whatever remaining trust the public might place in politicians and the media.
On Friday afternoon, speaking after the report’s release, Griffin said he had one main takeaway.
“I would hate to think that the current government would get a gold star for doing almost nothing,” he said. “You see Albanese and Shorten talk about how this is one of the worst things that’s ever happened in this country and how terrible it is. They knew that in 2017 … they should have swung their dicks around, and they refused to.”
Griffin, like most kids, visited parliament on his school trip to Canberra.
He remembers seeing a reproduction of the Magna Carta, the foundational document for rights like the presumption of innocence, proudly on display.
The memory now serves only to underscore the extent to which the nation failed its most vulnerable.
“I was just so disappointed that no one cared,” he says. “Decades of dole-bludger narrative, or whatever it was, worked.”
