Few public servants appearing at the royal commission into the robodebt scheme have appeared to speak off the cuff. Some bureaucrats have been legally represented and others have been actual lawyers. Words have been chosen carefully.
Memories have also faltered at key moments crucial to explaining how the federal government could unleash an unlawful program against hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients, ending in a $1.8bn settlement and the prospect of a public service “conspiracy”.
And so observers of the high-profile inquiry were likely struck by the evidence of Jeannie-Marie Blake this week.
Speaking in plain English and with a striking clarity, Blake was overcome by emotion as she told of the anguish the robodebt scheme had caused welfare recipients and the staff who were forced to carry out the program.
“We were speaking about the incorrectness from the start until the end,” Blake, a Centrelink employee since 2000, told the inquiry.
Speaking generally, she added: “And all the management – all the higher levels … I’ve listened to through this, who can’t remember, can’t recall, can’t recollect, couldn’t put your mind to it, I can’t forget.”
As the inquiry nears its conclusion, the commissioner, Catherine Holmes SC, has raised the prospect the Coalition scheme was put in place in 2015 against legal advice due to “collusion” between public servants across two departments. Another possibility, Holmes said, was that officials from the Department of Human Services “deceived” their counterparts at Social Services.
Either way, the inquiry has heard the Abbott government’s cabinet was likely “misled” when they signed off on the robodebt proposal championed by the then social services minister, Scott Morrison, in 2015. The scheme ran until November 2019, when another minister, Stuart Robert, suggested it had only affected a “small cohort”.
“It’s been a bit triggering, really, and frustrating,” Blake tells Guardian Australia of watching the commission. “Like I said in my statement, we were sending stuff to those people all the time … and just getting shut down.”
The result of the decision by senior public servants in Canberra to dismiss complaints from Blake and her colleagues – including, notably, another Centrelink worker, Colleen Taylor, who took her concerns all the way to the top – was laid bare this week.
Jennifer Miller, whose son Rhys Cauzzo took his own life aged 27 in 2017 after he was continually contacted by Centrelink and private collection agencies over $17,000 in debts, told the commission she had fought for answers over several years but was stonewalled by the government.
A response from the then human services minister, Alan Tudge, ignored her most crucial questions, her freedom of information requests were blocked and it was only through the royal commission that Miller learned the demands the government sent her son were unlawful.
“Once I saw all the information … it was both heartbreaking, but also vindicating that we’ve been able to get the truth,” Miller said.
Between Miller and Blake, the commission heard from key officials involved in setting up and overseeing the program and from government lawyers responsible for defending the legal challenges that eventually stopped it.
Serena Wilson, the deputy secretary of the Department of Social Services, maintained she didn’t know the robodebt program would use the “income averaging” debt calculation method her department had told her would be unlawful. Underquestioning, Wilson denied “reconstructing events” to protect her interests.
Another official on the DHS side, Mark Withnell, was shown evidence contradicting his claims he too did not know “income averaging” was being used. He maintained he did not know.
Scott Britton and Jason Ryman worked under Withnell and were closely involved in designing the plan. Both said they knew it would use “income averaging” but disputed they were aware their DSS counterparts had said this would be unlawful.
Shown a document sent to him by Britton in February 2015 outlining DSS’s concerns, Ryman said: “I look at the advice – ‘may not be derived consistently with the legislative framework’. So it doesn’t say specifically this is unlawful.” Ryman also suggested he may not have read the document.
Examining the government’s response to Victoria Legal Aid’s ultimately successful court challenge in 2019, the commission heard Paul Menzies-McVey, a top lawyer at DHS, was by then aware of three legal opinions warning of legal problems.
The scheme continued while the government sought further advice from the solicitor general throughout 2019 – a decision that saw a further 50,000 unlawful debts raised. Senior counsel assisting the commission, Justin Greggery KC, said the decision to continue the scheme while more advice was sought had “very significant consequences” for welfare recipients.
“I’m not sure my mind turned to that,” Menzies-McVey replied, adding his focus was that the “matter was going to be finally determined” by the solicitor general or the courts.
Under the program, Centrelink would use annualised data from the tax office to accuse welfare recipients of misreporting their fortnightly income up to six years earlier.
While neither said they knew it was unlawful, frontline compliance workers Blake and Taylor both said it was obvious the calculations would be inaccurate and, thus, unethical.
Menzies-McVey explained how welfare recipients were “always engaged” about debts they received and suggested “customers would very generally have … bank statements or whatever that would show their actual earnings in particular periods”.
It echoed comments from Morrison when he was asked if he appreciated the irony of having to recall events from years earlier while on the stand. “The difference between that and what you’re referring to is if I needed to know what my bank statement said seven years ago, I would be in a position to go and look it up,” Morrison said.
Miller and Blake told a different story. The commission was shown a Facebook post from Cauzzo, who wrote: “Got a huge debt notice from Centrelink which I believe is incorrect, but not too sure how to go against it since my proof (pay documents, etcetera) are long gone from five-plus years ago. Help.”
After he took his life, Miller discovered a hand-drawn picture on Cauzzo’s fridge that made reference to suicide and debts, alongside several letters from Centrelink and a private collection agency. Cauzzo had serious existing mental health conditions, but his death came as a shock to Miller and those who knew him.
In Blake’s statement to the commission, she recalled a phone call where she had to tell a person with stage four cancer that “he would need to provide his payslips or else we would raise a robodebt against him”.
“After that call I felt dreadful and ashamed to be working for Services Australia. I remember him saying that he was living week to week and didn’t have the money to get bank statements,” she wrote.
Blake and her colleagues understood the “reverse onus” on welfare recipients to provide payslips or bank statements going back six years to disprove a debt based on opaque, spurious calculations was too much for many.
“We knew what we were asking was unrealistic,” Blake tells Guardian Australia.
For Blake, who is now a Community and Public Sector Union delegate, carrying out the robodebt program was the “saddest part of my career”. She contrasted it against other parts of her work, such as helping people get income support during the pandemic and during natural disasters.
Blake raised “ethical” concerns about the scheme with her managers in 2016 – a key moment when staff learned the robodebt scheme would be launched at scale. She is a single mother of three children and was “going through a very bad family breakdown” as she dealt with rightly irate welfare recipients on a daily basis. She says both customers and staff felt they were going “crazy”.
“I didn’t have a chance in just leaving, my family were relying on my income,” Blake tells Guardian Australia. “We kept speaking, at every chance, as often we could. I had to believe that, at some point, they will be held accountable.”
The royal commission continues.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
