The old saying in politics goes that you should never hold an inquiry unless you know what its outcomes will be. In which case it has to be asked: is Anthony Albanese just stupid, overconfident or staggeringly cynical?
Because, unless the reins are kept very tight on his forthcoming royal commission into the unlamented Robodebt scheme, it’s going to throw as much mud on Labor as the Coalition.
Robodebt was an automated welfare-debt recovery program that ran between July 2015 and November 2019. It used data-matching algorithms in an attempt to identify the overpayment of social security benefits. But, as computer programs will, it went haywire and wrongly accused thousands of people. Many of them were hit with demands for massive debts. Some committed suicide.
The royal commission is expected to examine who was responsible for the scheme, what advice informed its design, how complaints were handled, what problems were known about its legality, the total cost to taxpayers and the harm caused to victims […]
Last year, the Federal Court approved a $1.8 billion settlement between victims and the federal government.
The court was told the Commonwealth had raised $1.73 billion in debts against more than 400,000 people.
In total, $751 million was wrongly recovered from 381,000 people […]
Labor and the Greens have repeatedly declared a royal commission is necessary. In opposition, Anthony Albanese said robodebt was a “human tragedy”.
ABC Australia
He’s not wrong – but that’s where it could get nasty for some of Albo’s closest lieutenants.
While Robodebt was actually rolled out – and ultimately cancelled – by the Coalition, it wasn’t actually their idea.
Labor’s leadership team of Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek pioneered the “robo-debt” data-matching system Centrelink is using to target current and former welfare recipients for apparently not declaring their income properly […]
The automated system of matching income data from the tax office and income as reported to Centrelink to identify discrepancies was announced in a joint release by the then minister for human services, Ms Plibersek, and the then assistant treasurer, now Opposition Leader, in June 2011, adding an extra $71 million to the budget. The release said the “tax garnishee process had been carried out manually once a year for the past 15 years and involved a significant amount of time on the part of departmental officers”.
“The automation of this process will free up resources and result in more people being referred to the tax garnishee process, retrieving more outstanding debt on behalf of taxpayers,” Mr Shorten said at the time.
The Australian
Yet, here’s Shifty Shorten, pontificating about the evils of the very scheme he cooked up.
Last month, the Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten, told Parliament the royal commission would most likely start in the last quarter of this year, and hopefully be concluded by the middle of 2023 […]
“It’s the very least that we owe to the nearly half a million of our fellow Australians who were illegally attacked by their own government.”
ABC Australia
The hypocrisy of these people is beyond belief.
