Scott Morrison should resign
The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme has identified appalling dishonesty and lapses in government processes that had serious consequences for the innocent, and their families, who were hounded for non-payment of fictitious “debts”. The final report clearly documented the poor performance of several government ministers and senior public servants, who quite frankly should have known better than to embrace what the Federal Court concluded to be an “illegal” and “shameful” scheme to the detriment of nearly 500,000 Australians, leading to tragedy with the loss of at least two lives.
A combination of key elements made this scandal possible. The first is a Coalition culture, an ideology almost, that leads them to so easily assert that welfare recipients “cheat”, and that unemployment benefit recipients are “dole bludgers”. The Human Services minister at the time, Alan Tudge, was saying exactly this when he appeared on A Current Affair in 2016 with a message to anyone who owed Centrelink money: “We’ll find you, we’ll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison.” This general attitude reflects a complete lack of understanding of and empathy for low-income earners, the disadvantaged and those in need. It is perceptible in the Coalition’s strategy to oppose the Voice – a most derogatory view of First Australians.
Second, a group of public servants lost sight of their basic job, namely to give full, frank and fearless advice, to assist ministers in delivering their policy platforms and good government. Some have argued that, in the end, they must do as instructed by government. But there is an important qualifier here: only if what they are asked to do is legal. This poses the obvious question as to why all players were not focused on legality right from the outset.
Third, there was an unwillingness on the part of Scott Morrison and his government to meet with experts, or to heed their advice on important challenges. We saw the same attitude with respect to the various bushfire chiefs Morrison just wouldn’t listen to, and again in relation to the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, and yet again with the former prime minister’s refusal to meet some university vice-chancellors to discuss financial assistance during the pandemic.
And fourth, a generally uninterested media failed to scrutinise and investigate the emerging scandal.
It seems only reasonable for voters to expect consequences to flow from the royal commission, and from all other inquiries of public processes where fault and misconduct are clearly established. Perpetrators of misconduct must be penalised and steps taken to reduce the risk of a repeat. This is all about aggressively fighting for the public interest, which seems to have been so easily neglected and compromised in recent years in favour of various vested interests, donors, mates or some short-term political objective.
Ensuring consequences for wrongdoing is fundamental to sustaining trust in government – the last election reinforced the importance to the electorate of integrity and accountability in government.
It is a national disgrace that some very important royal commissions are yet to see a full and effective response from government. The most notable failures are in relation to the 1991 report into Aboriginal deaths in custody and the 2017 report into institutional responses to child sexual abuse.
More recently, there is still particular electoral interest in the likely consequences of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry that reported in 2019, and the Brereton report on war crimes in Afghanistan released the following year. And there’s the important ongoing parliamentary inquiry led by Senator Andrew Bragg focusing on the failure of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to perform its role as an effective corporate watchdog, having failed to investigate and then prosecute most of those reported as responsible for corporate misconduct. Accountability must be examined in terms of all stakeholders in a decision. Politicians, public servants and others, including in business and civil society.
The weak explanations and defences offered by Morrison and his ministers have raised the general expectation that they should be pursued further. Morrison should hang his head in shame and do the right thing by resigning from parliament.
Former High Court justice Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission into the banking sector documented many examples of financial misconduct driven by what it identified as a culture of greed where banks and other financial institutions sought to “clip the ticket” as many times as they could in executing a particular transaction. This allowed them to claim multiple fees – even, in the worst example, from dead people – but perhaps the most conspicuous strategy was to grant a mortgage and then seek to provide various insurances as crucial to the transaction, such as insurance on the mortgage itself, on the property and its contents, personally on the borrowers themselves, and so on.
Despite the outrageousness of the behaviour, few charges were laid or penalties imposed. Indeed, just a handful of senior officials in the Big Four banks stepped down, when it seemed that many prosecutions were possible, reaching to the top of their management hierarchies. Moreover, even though the poor performance of ASIC was singled out for its practice of seeking to negotiate financial settlements with those it concluded were guilty of bad corporate behaviour, rather than pursue legal charges and penalties, it wasn’t until the parliamentary inquiry was established that it seemed ASIC management might finally be held to account. Disturbingly, suggestions have arisen during the hearings of attempts by ASIC to influence the nature of the inquiry and, even more disturbingly, I have been told the government is already showing waning support for this inquiry.
The Brereton inquiry into war crimes allegedly committed by the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan generated considerable public interest but is also without a formal and detailed government response. The report found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by or under the instruction of SAS members, and that 25 ADF personnel were involved in the killings, which were subsequently covered up.
Although the ADF and the Defence Department had claimed to have established procedures for reviewing the Brereton evidence, leading to possible charges being laid, no detail has emerged. The situation was compounded by the conclusions of the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case initiated by him against three newspapers. The judge’s determination that he was a liar, a war criminal, a murderer and a bully pushed the issue beyond just the Brereton findings. (Roberts-Smith has filed a notice of appeal against the decision.) The proceedings of this case aired many of the issues raised in the Brereton report, which would have been assisted if there had been a formal government response with the guilty identified and charges laid. I can understand the desire to avoid naming people, which may actually hinder later prosecutions. But inaction leaves many in limbo, from those who may be charged to the general public and the victims’ families desperate to know what really happened and to have the satisfaction, if crimes were committed, of knowing the guilty parties would face consequences.
I recognise it can be difficult for some governments to effectively respond to the findings of such reviews, but in most cases it comes down to ensuring these findings and recommendations are actually referred to the relevant regulatory and legal authorities. This process should be beyond short-term political pointscoring: those in government need to recognise the possibility that there but for the grace of God, they go too. The separation of the judiciary from the government is fundamentally important to our democracy, certainly not to be fiddled with for perceived political gain.
As for the robo-debt inquiry, by sealing the names of those who might be charged and of the referrals made in the final report, the commissioner, Catherine Holmes, has clearly acted to avoid prejudicing subsequent legal and other processes. The direction of her thinking was otherwise quite clear in the report, having focused in the evidence on the roles played by certain public servants and ministers. Steps should also be taken to include the debt collectors, who were also important to the scandal, and who were reportedly paid some $11 million.
The report has certainly underwritten considerable speculation and judgement in the subsequent media.
Ironically, former prime minister Morrison set a benchmark for judgements about the performance of himself and others with his statement in response to outcry over his trip to Hawaii during the 2019 bushfires, namely: “I don’t hold a hose, mate.” The report clearly identified where, as one responsible for the management of the issue, from his time as Social Services minister, through to treasurer to prime minister, Morrison clearly was holding a hose. He took the robo-debt proposal to cabinet without necessary information as to what it actually involved and without informing them of the legislative and policy changes required to permit the use of the proposed averaging system.
Beyond Morrison, there are important questions as to the role of former department secretary Kathryn Campbell and certain other public servants in the preparation of that cabinet briefing, and as to whether the department and its processes had become “soulless”.
Morrison has denied the assessment of his performance by the commission and, true to form, has sought to blame his public servants. He has claimed the commission simply didn’t understand how he did government, even though it seems that he failed to ask the right questions of his public service advisers. He has separately praised Campbell.
The weak explanations and defences offered by Morrison and his ministers have raised the general expectation that they should be pursued further. Morrison should hang his head in shame and do the right thing by resigning from parliament. Surely there must be other possibilities for penalties in the civil and criminal cases that may be brought, or the potential to withhold some or all of their superannuation benefits, in light of the damage done to the standing of public administration.
To be clear, it would be an inadequate response if Morrison were the only one to be penalised. Stopping robo-debt was clearly the responsibility of cabinet, supported by their key bureaucrats. It is annoying, but not surprising, that Liberal Leader Peter Dutton seems to have chosen this route, to throw Morrison under the bus, hoping to wash the Coalition’s hands of the issue – nothing else to see here – and to simply move past it.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 15, 2023 as “A robo-debt to society”.
