Penny Wong has given a qualified defence of a decision to appoint a public servant who held the top jobs at the two departments responsible for robodebt to a plum role as an adviser on Aukus.
The foreign minister told Senate estimates that the decision had been made before the royal commission began and evidence that has since come out went “beyond what [she] would’ve anticipated”.
Kathryn Campbell was given the $900,000-a-year job in June 2022, leaving her role as the head of the foreign affairs department.
She was in charge of the human services department from March 2011 to September 2017, then social services until July 2021, two departments which were central to the robodebt program, and in December 2022 was questioned at the robodebt royal commission.
At a Senate estimates hearing on Monday, the Greens senator Barbara Pocock questioned why the appointment had been made at a time the government already had findings of the federal court that robodebt was unlawful and had issued letters patent to set up a royal commission.
Wong, representing Anthony Albanese at the hearing, replied that while the court may have found the program was unlawful it would not “be fair to say there had been an interrogation of how that illegality came about”.
“The royal commission was intended to elicit that information,” she said.
“Some of the evidence has been beyond what we might have envisaged … It’s been quite substantial. But we would say – I don’t want to, obviously, speculate on potential findings of the commission.”
Pocock then asked why the government hadn’t simply ended Campbell’s employment, who she described as the “captain of the ship” during robodebt.
Wong replied that describing Campbell in such terms “assumes the knowledge of what has subsequently occurred in the commission”.
“I think the illegality was found, but how that came about… was precisely why the royal commission was established,” she said.
Wong added that the evidence before the commission went “certainly beyond what I would’ve anticipated”.
The commission is due to report back on 7 July after a one-week extension was granted by the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus.
David Williamson, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s deputy secretary of governance, said Campbell had “indicated an interest in a further role” in the commonwealth public service in mid-June 2022.
The defence department secretary then “took the decision to make that appointment”, he said, before an announcement by Albanese on 22 June.
Williamson said the royal commission is “yet to report” and officials would be “reluctant to make any comment about what it may or may not find in relation to individuals”.
Last year Campbell told the commission she accepted the scheme had been a “significant” failure of public administration.
Campbell said she had assumed the scheme was lawful despite earlier advice raising serious questions about the legality of the scheme, and conceded external legal advice should have been sought. “In hindsight it was a big assumption to make,” she said.
In April the government services minister, Bill Shorten, warned that public servants adversely named by the robodebt royal commission could face disciplinary action.
