The Liberal MP Zoe McKenzie has acknowledged that the Coalition’s robodebt scheme was “one of the poorest chapters” of public administration in Australian history and caused “avoidable human suffering”.
McKenzie joins fellow first-term MP Keith Wolahan and Bridget Archer, who voted with Labor during parliament’s apology as Liberals who have spoken up about the unlawful program.
The robodebt scheme, which ran between 2015 and November 2019, used an unlawful process of averaging welfare recipients’ income across fortnightly periods to estimate their earnings, resulting in incorrect debt notices to almost half a million Australians. In 2021 the Morrison government settled a class action, resulting in $1.8bn of alleged debts being erased.
On Monday McKenzie told the House of Representatives: “It is now apparent that the expanded compliance system … now known as robodebt, is one of the poorest chapters in Australia’s public policy history and one that sits at the feet of the Coalition in its time in government.
“The thousand-odd pages of the full report of the royal commission … paints a picture of avoidable human suffering, of bureaucratic processes and an attempt to reconcile the fast-paced nature of digital transformation together with real life.
“The scheme had tangible consequences on people and especially on vulnerable people.
“It’s important that we all, on both sides of this place, take the lessons from these errors and ensure that we do not revisit them.”
McKenzie, who was elected in 2022 representing the Victorian seat of Flinders vacated by Greg Hunt, said the Liberal party “is built on personal responsibility and has a high record for integrity in government”.
“In reading the findings of the royal commission, I find it out of sync with the Coalition governments I have known and served in the Howard and Abbott eras.”
In July a damning royal commission report labelled the scheme “neither fair nor legal” and a “costly failure of public administration”.
The former prime minister and social services minister, Scott Morrison, rejected adverse findings made about him by the royal commission, accusing the inquiry of “unfairly and retroactively” applying a consensus the debt recovery program was unlawful.
Morrison, who has expressed “deep regret” about unintended consequences of the scheme, told parliament in July that Labor was pursuing a campaign of “political lynching” against him.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has conceded that mistakes were made in the robodebt scheme but has backed Morrison to stay in parliament and leave at a time of his choosing.
But Morrison is increasingly isolated in the Coalition, with the Nationals leader, David Littleproud, Archer and Liberal senator Andrew Bragg among those who suggested Morrison should resign as the member for Cook following the royal commission report.
In August Wolahan, the member for Menzies in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, said he was struck by the “unfairness” of robodebt and “how it was not competent”.
“As someone who’s a Liberal and believes in the sanctity of the individual, due process and the presumption of innocence, it offended all of those. It was illiberal, it reversed the onus and it hurt people.”
