Efficiency isn’t enough: Robodebt and doing the right thing
The shadow of the Robodebt Royal Commission continues to loom large over the public sector in Australia and indeed, society more broadly. It highlighted how a government initiative, designed and delivered by the public sector, could cause profound harm to vulnerable people. For many of us interested in Australian social policy a central question remains: how do we ensure something like this never happens again? How do we make better policy, especially better welfare policy? In my recent paper I have tried to explore how we might do this by moving beyond just ‘doing the thing right’ – focusing on technical efficiency and compliance – and refocusing instead on how we might go about doing the right thing – by actively engaging with the ethical dimensions of policy advice and design.
As many of you will be aware, Robodebt aimed to recover alleged overpayments from welfare recipients by using automated data-matching between Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Centrelink records. One of its core problems was its reliance on income averaging, a method that was unlawful and frequently produced inaccurate debt calculations. This, combined with automated communication that placed the onus on recipients to dispute debts, led to widespread criticism and significant distress.
How could such a significant policy failure occur? While common explanations have pointed to politicisation or individual failings, I argue that Robodebt cannot be reduced to individual malign motives or solely institutional factors. Instead, I posit it was enabled by a broader cultural shift driven by decades of New Public Management (NPM) reforms.
NPM is a highly influential paradigm in public administration, fundamentally reshaping how governments approach service delivery. Its key principles include:
• Marketisation: Shifting service delivery to external providers or quasi-autonomous agencies.
• Managerialism: Promoting decentralised decision-making and empowering managers.
• Quantification: A greater reliance on measurable outcomes, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and audits to evaluate success, often leading to a prioritisation of easily quantifiable measures.
• Customer Focus: Reframing the public as customers, with an emphasis on service quality and choice.
Robodebt and administrative evil
These elements sound benign, and were originally introduced with the aim of improvement, but they have also created the conditions for what Adams and Balfour (1998) term administrative evil to occur. Administrative evil highlights how organisations can engage in harmful actions along a spectrum from masked (unintentional) to unmasked (intentional) forms, often with harm obscured by bureaucratic norms or distancing.
In the context of Robodebt, we saw several manifestations which align with Adams and Balfour’s notion of administrative evil:
The first involved Distance and Fragmentation: There was a division of responsibility between the Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Department of Social Services (DSS), which created strategic ignorance. Despite DSS flagging the unlawfulness of the proposed income averaging, this advice was filtered out, allowing DHS to proceed with a fundamentally flawed policy. As one legal team noted, responsibility for legislative change was fragmented, allowing for plausible deniability.
The second involved Masking and Moral Inversion: Harmful actions were concealed under the guise of routine administrative functions and technical jargon. The Employment Income Matching Initiative was rebranded as Strengthening the Integrity of Welfare Payments, with ministerial announcements focusing on rorting and playing on negative public perceptions of welfare recipients. This reframed a potentially harmful administrative process as an initiative upholding integrity.
The third involved Customer Focus and Responsibilisation: NPM's reframing of the public as customers contributed to the now infamous reversal of responsibility at the heart of Robodebt. Despite repeated concerns from frontline staff about recipients' challenges in navigating the system, the Department dismissed these, even arguing that the problem lay with the Australian education system for people not understanding income averaging.
The importance of doing the right thing
The Robodebt Royal Commission found that many practices observed did not meet the threshold of corrupt conduct and this is precisely why the concept of administrative evil is crucial. It shows how harm can occur within seemingly ethical frameworks where public administrators meet hierarchical expectations but abdicate personal or social responsibility for the policy's content or effects.
Solely focusing on the accountability of individual actors or institutional processes, while important, is insufficient. The challenge is a deeper cultural shift where technical-rationality has diminished the public sector's capacity to engage in normative debates about what constitutes good policy. Ethical issues are often sidelined as political matters, outside the public servant's remit. However, the Westminster system expects the public service to play an important role in shaping policy, not just implementing it. This agency is inevitable and crucial for responsible (rather than purely ‘responsive’) government.
To foster responsible policy and avoid the risk of another Robodebt it will be important to:
• Develop and make transparent the APS's discretion in policymaking, moving towards responsible rather than just responsive advice.
• Explicitly invite ethics back into policymaking. This means building the capability of the public service to make the ethical dimensions of policy explicit.
• Challenge the problem-solving framework that reduces complex social issues into technical formulas and models.
• Prioritise a value-critical approach where normative considerations are openly debated, rather than allowing personal values or technical biases to creep undetected into policy deliberations. For example, a focus on cost-efficiency is a value-laden decision not an apolitical baseline.
Ultimately, creating better welfare policy after Robodebt requires more than just improving processes or holding individuals accountable, it demands a fundamental shift back to recognising that all policy decisions entail profound ethical and moral judgements. By consciously engaging with these, making them explicit, we can move beyond simply doing the thing right and ensure we are doing the right thing for the Australian public.
Dr Sarah Ball is a lecturer in Public Policy in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.
Moderator: Jeremiah Brown