Governments of Australia, consider this your debt notice
Today’s post from the Australian Unemployed Worker’s Union discusses the report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt scheme released on 7 July 2023. AUWU describes the Royal Commission as “the most significant and damning investigation into our welfare system in decades” and pledges to “stand with victims and fight to extract justice for the mass abuse and denigration inflicted on the poor.”
The most significant and damning investigation into our welfare system in decades has again exposed the rot at its very core. AUWU will stand with victims and fight to extract justice for the mass abuse and denigration inflicted on the poor
On Friday, the report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt scheme was made public. For anyone who had followed the commission hearings it came as no surprise that the commissioner, Catherine Holmes, was scathing of the scheme and those who were responsible for it. Prior to the Royal Commission there had been a highly effective campaign opposing the scheme by grassroots organisers, most notably '#NotMyDebt’ spearheaded by Asher Wolf, Lyndsey Jackson, and the pseudonymous @NotmydebtS. Together, they supported countless victims through the appeals process, and campaigned on their behalf for relief. Their stoic and unpaid public service, supported by the efforts of many right-minded peers and civil society organisations exposed the scheme and the cruel and punishing effect it had on welfare recipients.
The work done by community legal centres, which remain criminally underfunded, to bring legal challenges to the scheme was exceptional. However, these challenges would not have been possible if not for the bravery of victims in coming forward to fight for their rights and engage in litigation. As we now know from the findings of the Commission, the media machine and the Coalition government collaborated to bring crushing attacks down on complainants to discredit them. They bore more than could be asked of anyone just trying to get their life in order, yet time and again we are painfully reminded of the generosity displayed by those doing it toughest in society. In particular, we are grateful for the courage of Madeline Masterton and Deanna Amato to put themselves forward as test cases.
The Commission’s report went much further than only finding fault with the scheme or the failings within the Australian Public Service (APS), which allowed it to occur. The Commissioner had equally strong words for the political culture and resulting social attitudes toward welfare recipients the scheme reflected and operated under:
There are different mindsets one can adopt in relation to social welfare policy. One is to recognise that many citizens will at different times in their lives need income support - on a temporary basis for some as they study or look for work; longer-term for others, for reasons of age, disadvantage or disability – and to provide that support willingly, adequately and with respect. An alternative approach is to regard those in receipt of social security benefits as a drag on the national economy, an entry on the debit side of the Budget to be reduced by any means available: by casting recipients as a burden on the taxpayer, by making onerous requirements of those who are claiming or have claimed benefit, by minimising the availability of assistance from departmental staff, by clawing back benefits whether justly or not, and by generally making the condition of the social security recipient unpleasant and undesirable. The Robodebt scheme exemplifies the latter. - ‘Overview of Robodebt’, p. XXIII
This statement, while directed at the Robodebt scheme, could apply to almost any change to social welfare policy over the last few decades. It describes a stigma-inducing, bipartisan approach to the very idea of welfare which dominates this country and the lives of the people who receive it. The words echo many of the issues raised in submissions to the recent poverty inquiry and the current employment services inquiry, which, in a repeat of the early days of the Robodebt scheme, have been largely ignored by media outlets.
Of the two approaches to social welfare policy Commissioner Holmes outlines, almost every aspect of our current welfare system follows the latter—casting recipients as burdens, piling on onerous requirements, minimising assistance, and making the lives of its recipients unpleasant and undesirable. Poverty rates of welfare payments, work for the dole and the punitive mutual obligation system, qualification requirements and processes that present major barriers to accessing the disability support pension, partner and parental income and assets tests trapping people in cycles of poverty, the continued raising of welfare debts, mass shortages of public housing, the steady erosion of the public health, education, disability and care sectors—are all outputs of this calculated approach to social welfare policy. One hardly needs to wonder whether reports into those policies would have similar findings.
These are not policies that have just happened to catch vulnerable people by accident. The vulnerable have been sought out as easy targets, trading their lives for budget dollars and outsourced profits, made possible by poisonous rhetoric from governments of the day and baked into the public psyche through an eager media. There has been a conscious decision to not only strip away the most vulnerable members of society’s means of survival but their power as well.
As part of this report, Commissioner Holmes made a list of 57 recommendations but prefaced them with just two points about what is needed to ensure the recommendations are effective; the second of which says:
… politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments. The evidence before the Commission was that fraud in the welfare system was miniscule, but that is not the impression one would get from what ministers responsible for social security payments have said over the years. Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism, useful for campaign purposes. It is not recent, nor is it confined to one side of politics, as some of the quoted material in this report demonstrates. It may be that the evidence in this Royal Commission has gone some way to changing public perceptions. But largely, those attitudes are set by politicians, who need to abandon for good (in every sense) the narrative of taxpayer versus welfare recipient. - ‘Preface’, p. III
What began as an investigation into the illegality of one particularly egregious and disgraceful scheme, and the invalidity of debts it raised, ended with the Commission finding just one legitimate debt—the debt the government owes welfare recipients. Not just for Robodebt, but for the myriad of other policy decisions and attacks that have impoverished, vilified, gaslit, burdened, and cruelled welfare recipients. It is a debt that dates back decades and includes complex and uncountable losses for those that it is owed.
Commissioner Holmes recognises the existence of this debt and contemplates the practicality of providing compensation for those affected by the Robodebt scheme:
That brings me to a question I have given long and careful consideration to: whether there is any practical way of setting up some sort of compensation scheme. My reluctant conclusion is that there is not. Hundreds of thousands of people were affected by the Scheme. It is impossible to devise any set of criteria that will apply across the board, because people were affected in such varying ways. - ‘Closing observations’, p. 659
However, the Commissioner suggests one way the government could pay back some of its debt:
The point is that people suffered from the effects of the Scheme in a multiplicity of ways, so there is no common starting point. The administration costs of a scheme which addressed all the different ways in which people were harmed by the Scheme and examined their circumstances to establish what compensation was appropriate in each case would be astronomic, given the numbers involved. A better use of the money would be to lift the rate at which social security benefits are paid, to help recipients achieve some semblance of the “security” element of that term; because with financial security comes the dignity to which social security recipients are entitled and to which the Scheme was so damaging. - ‘Closing observations’, p. 659
If the federal government is truly unable to account and directly compensate for all the impacts of its long standing and bipartisan approach to weaponising social welfare policy, the very least it can do is stop the harm it is currently inflicting. Not just by raising the rate of welfare payments as recommended by Commissioner Holmes but by overhauling the welfare system to remove the punishment, arbitrary means testing, unavailability, and stigma that scaffolds its edifice.
After decades of underpayments and damages, the time has come for welfare politics to move on from the framing of costs and savings. We all must acknowledge the debt owed to those who have suffered from policies designed to inflict poverty and suffering. Governments of Australia, consider this your debt notice.
Beginning immediately, in addition to adopting all 57 recommendations of the Robodebt Royal Commission, governments must:
stop collecting and issuing debts against welfare recipients;
raise welfare payments above the poverty line;
abolish all mutual obligation requirements;
further amend the eligibility criteria and application process to make the disability support pension accessible to all who need it;
remove waiting periods and parental and partner income and asset tests for all welfare payments;
provide public housing for everyone currently on waiting lists, remove all health-related out of pocket expenses, and
rebuild education and care systems as publicly owned, fully serviced, and free to access.
Governments must accompany these concrete actions of atonement with a genuine and heartfelt official apology—not just to the victims of the Robodebt scheme but to every person subjected to the stigmatising, punishing, poverty-inducing, and, in some cases, murderous social welfare policies that have dominated Australian politics.
While it may not ever be able to pay down the net debt owed to welfare recipients, a new federal government, currently making hay over the recent $19b surplus extracted from the country’s budget, can certainly balance the welfare deficit compounding poverty and misery in people’s lives.
Content moderator: Sue Olney