Scott Morrison faces a grilling over his role in creating the robodebt scheme

Scott Morrison will be quizzed today over his role in creating the unlawful robodebt scheme that wrongfully claimed nearly $2 billion in payments from hundreds of thousands of people. 

The former prime minister’s appearance before the royal commission into the scheme comes a day after another former Coalition minister, Senator Marise Payne, gave evidence. 

Payne failed to recall much about how robodebt came to be created and could not explain why advice from the Human Services Department that legal changes might be necessary was later left off a cabinet subcommittee submission. 

Handwritten notes taken by Payne and shown to the commission showed she was personally involved in crafting the scheme, including pondering during a 2015 meeting about the government’s “cracking down — what can we do w/o having to legislate”. 

Robodebt used annual Tax Office income data averaged over 26 fortnights to falsely claim many recipients had received too much Centrelink money and put the onus on the individuals to prove the authorities wrong. Payne suggested that because she was a junior human service minister at the time, she wasn’t high enough up the food chain to be responsible. 

“The senior minister in the portfolio is the minister charged with taking matters to the [expenditure review committee],” she said on Tuesday. 

That senior minister was Morrison.

The commission heard that Morrison, as social services minister, told staff in his department to pursue the concept that became known as robodebt in order to protect the “integrity” of the welfare system. 

“Compliance and integrity were the core business of the department … to ensure that the right people were being paid the right amount, [and to make sure] people were not able to defraud the Commonwealth if they set out to do so,” Payne said. 

Towards the end of her evidence, Payne was taken to task by commissioner Catherine Holmes over several media releases issued by her office that linked the proposed robodebt scheme to criminal fraudsters who had been caught stealing money from the government. 

“Is this putting the measure in a context which would suggest to the public at large that this is really the pursuit of criminals?” she asked. 

Payne explained that a press release was not a “broad and expansive thesis” but a “brief and concise way of sending a clear message”.

“Fraud within the payments system, which I saw up close for a period of time, is certainly a very legitimate area for government to pursue,” she said. “I think the briefs we’ve discussed at length today go to the [breadth] of the response to Mr Morrison’s request for a range of initiatives in this area, which certainly include fraud.”

She added that “most people who receive welfare payments are honest and do the right thing”.

Holmes pressed her again: “This kind of use of the media was really designed to give the impression that the people who were subject to the budget measure deserved no sympathy at all, because they were really criminals.”

“That was not my intention, not my thinking, not my approach,” Payne said.