Pop quiz: who designed and implemented Australia’s NDIS? Almost all of you would answer “Julia Gillard” — but you’d only be half right. It was certainly Gillard’s brainchild: she designed the scheme and laid the legislative groundwork for it. So naturally, and not unreasonably, most people would call the NDIS Gillard’s creation.
But Gillard, and the Labor party itself, were both out of government when it came time to fully implement the scheme.
This may seem like hair-splitting, but consider it in the light of another government program, which is now the subject of a royal commission.
Earlier in the week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fulfilled an election promise by announcing that there will be a royal commission into the former government’s unlawful debt recovery scheme known as “Robodebt”.
Hundreds of thousands of people are hoping that some light will be shed on how the scheme — labelled a “massive failure” by Federal Court Justice Bernard Murphy — came to be.
ABC Australia
Let’s make no mistake: Robodebt was awful. The automated system compared peoples’ income reported to Centrelink with income as measured by the Australian Tax Office. Based on its calculations, hundreds of thousands of people were automatically deemed to have improperly claimed benefits and sent debt notices — some, up to $24,000.
Before it was mercifully axed, it was deemed to have unlawfully claimed almost $2 billion in payments from 433,000 people. It was rightfully scrapped in late 2020.
PM Anthony Albanese has announced a royal commission into the scheme. As I wrote recently, Albanese might want to set the terms of reference very carefully, lest it ensnare some of his senior ministers. He’s done exactly that: the commission will only examine from when the scheme was actually implemented in 2015.
But, like the NDIS, its history long predates its full implementation.
Why doesn’t Albanese want anyone delving into the scheme’s very beginnings, when it was first conceived and designed?
As a Liberal National Party MP queried: I wonder why [Albanese] only decided the Robodebt Royal Commission should only go back as far as 2015… could this be a reason why?
As then Minister for Human Services in the Gillard Labor government, now Minister for the Environment and Water in the Albanese government, Tanya Plibersek, excitedly announced:
A new data matching initiative between Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office is expected to claw back millions of dollars from welfare recipients who have debts with the Australian Government.
That was an official media release on 29 June, 2011.
Leaving no doubt that this was the monster that would become Robodebt, the same media release emphasised:
Centrelink and the ATO will automatically match data on a daily basis…
Co-designer of the scheme, former Labor leader and now Minister for Government Services and Minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten, also highlighted in 2011 that it was fully automated:
“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.”
The Australian
Funny how neither Albo nor the ABC seem to want to remember all that.
Just in case you still harboured any doubt that this is a purely political witch-hunt, the commission is scheduled to announce its findings the day before the next Victorian election.
