‘Lack of curiosity’ over robodebt legality
Former department head Kathryn Campbell was found to have breached her code of conduct over the scheme. Photo: AAP
A senior public servant has admitted to a “lack of curiosity” over legislative changes needed to allow the coalition government’s controversial robodebt scheme to be introduced.
In evidence to the royal commission into the failed program, former Department of Human Services secretary Kathryn Campbell said she didn’t ask for details of the legal advice available in the months ahead of robodebt’s start in 2015.
Ms Campbell said at that point the proposal for automated debt recovery was in its early stages.
She said her department was not responsible for providing advice on legislative changes even though such changes would impact its operations.
“In hindsight, it looks like a lack of curiosity,” she told the commission on Friday.
“But I note at that time we were relying on the policy departments to provide the legislative advice.
“At this point in time we were asking for agreement to pursue these issues.
“This was a pretty preliminary piece of advice. I had envisaged that the Department of Social Services would work through those legislative changes.”
Ultimately, no legislation was revised to support the scheme which sought to recover $1.2 billion over four years from more than 860,000 welfare recipients but ended up falsely accusing many of owning money.
Hundreds of thousands of Australians were sent debt notices which recovered more than $750 million before robodebt was halted in 2020.
The program changed the system of determining a person’s entitlements by relying primarily on information obtained directly from the Australian Taxation Office rather than from the client or other sources to automatically calculate a potential debt.
The change allowed for a huge jump in the number of cases that could be examined from something like 20,000 a year to 20,000 a week.
Recipients could provide information to dispute or verify the debt notice determined by the scheme and Ms Campbell said it was always envisaged that clients would engage with the system.
However, she conceded that didn’t always occur.
The hearing was continuing.
– AAP
