Was the robodebt fiasco pure ideological bastardry?

What sort of government sets out to penalise hundreds of thousands of its citizens, many already financially disadvantaged, without a single line of supporting legal advice?

The answer, as spelt out on the first day of the robodebt royal commission, is a government we no longer have.

We can only await eagerly to hear how Scott Morrison, one of the ministers involved for the scheme, and his acolyte Stuart Robert (who succeeded him) explain it away. If they can.

The commission, presided over by former Queensland chief justice Catherine Holmes, will sit through until the end of the year and report by April.

Yesterday’s hearings started with the advice, previously privileged, prepared by the solicitor-general in 2019 when it was clear the robodebt scheme was flailing.

In short, as outlined by counsel assisting Justin Greggery KC, the solicitor-general’s opinion was consistent with advice prepared internally by the departments of human services and social security that robodebt was legally fraught.

Greggery has tantalised with the promise of getting to the bottom of the political and administrative pressures to push on with the scheme despite years of advice about its risks.

At the heart of this is the decision to use algorithms to determine (but really guess) if hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients had understated their income to maximise their benefits. The basis of this was a pairing of social security data with Australian Tax Office data.

But in doing so, the department of human services in its various forms between 2014 and 2019 averaged an annual income to determine if a recipient had understated what they earned in any particular fortnight.

Over coming days and weeks we will hear how this impacted individuals — truly dreadful stories about the pressure that goes with being billed thousands and thousands of dollars with no apparent means of responding.

This promises to be a morality tale about how government operates in the era of high-tech. It may be that we find that the determination to push on with robodebt was pure ideological bastardry. 

This may also be a classic tech overreach in which the algorithms overrode basic common sense to indiscriminately make citizens liable for debts they did not owe. And that is where the lessons may lie.

Robodebt has already been expensive for the Australian taxpayer. Not only has it not raised the promised amounts, but it has also added to administrative costs and created a compensation liability for the Commonwealth.

Whatever the reasoning Holmes accepts, she will undoubtedly produce a case study that should be a roadmap for how future governments should tackle some of the difficult and divisive decisions involved in managing the budget.

She might have in mind, as governments should have in mind, the advice another royal commissioner gave the financial services industry five years ago: “obey the law”.

In the case of robodebt, it’s already clear from the advice of the solicitor-general that the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments were reckless in ignoring advice about the law. 

In this instance at least, they have set a low hurdle for the Albanese government to jump.

Does a royal commission have any chance of fixing the root causes of a problem like robodebt? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.