The royal commission into the flawed robodebt scheme has referred 20 personnel behind the scheme to Australian authorities for civil and criminal prosecution after the commissioner, Chief Justice Catherine Holmes, found that there was “dishonesty and collusion” behind the scheme.
The referral comes as Ms. Holmes handed down the royal commission’s 990-page report on the illegal scheme, which contained 57 recommendations, to Governor-General David Hurley on July 7. Included in that report was a sealed section that had the names of the 20 individuals the commissioner recommended for prosecution.
The commissioner, in her findings, wrote she was surprised by the lack of interest shown in ensuring that the measures were legal.
“It is remarkable how little interest there seems to have been in ensuring the scheme’s legality, how rushed its implementation was, how little thought was given to how it would affect welfare recipients and the lengths to which public servants were prepared to go to oblige ministers on a quest for savings,” she wrote.
“Truly dismaying was the revelation of dishonesty and collusion to prevent the scheme’s lack of legal foundation coming to light.”
Under the debt collection scheme—which was declared unlawful by the federal court in 2019—the government issued debt notices to people it identified through a process called income averaging. These amounts were then compared to the reported incomes with tax office data, which was illegal under Australian law.
During its existence from 2016- 2020, the federal government wrongfully recovered $750 million from 381,000 people.
Former PM Said to Have Misled Cabinet
The report, in focusing on the legality of the scheme, also said that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who had failed to make further inquiries into the legality of the scheme, misled his fellow cabinet ministers.Mr. Morrison was the Minister for Social Services in the Australian government from December 2014 to September 2015 and oversaw the implementation of the scheme.
“Mr. Morrison allowed Cabinet to be misled because he did not make that obvious inquiry,” the report said.
“He knew that the proposal still involved income averaging; only a few weeks previously, he had been told of that caveat; nothing had changed in the proposal, and he had done nothing to ascertain why the caveat no longer applied.
‘A Gross Betrayal and a Human Tragedy’: Prime Minister
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking to the media after receiving the report, said the commission had recommended that the additional chapter remain sealed and not tabled with the rest of the report “so as not to prejudice the conduct of any future civil action.”“This tragedy caused stress, anxiety, financial destitution and sadly had a very real human toll.”
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten, who was instrumental in pushing for the royal commission, said the previous government and senior public servants “gaslighted the nation” for years.
“They betrayed the trust of the nation and its citizens for four and a half years with an unlawful scheme which the Federal Court has called the worst chapter of public administration,” he said.
The former coalition government launched the scheme to “detect, investigate and deter suspected welfare fraud and non-compliance” in mid-2015 in an effort to save billions of dollars.
