While Robodebt has possibly been well overdone, here it is reported with a slightly different perspective from the UK. By that I mean with a lot more honesty as they differentiate where the blame lies; something our government refuses to do. Cheers bear
FROM THE UK
The human cost of Australia's illegal 'robo' hunt for welfare cheats
At the beginning of Australia's winter last year, Kath Madgwick read the last message she'd received from her only child.
"I love you mum," her son Jarrad, 22, had texted.
Her son had made her extremely proud, wrote Ms Madgwick in a letter later read out to a parliamentary inquiry. A former school captain, and state-ranked swimmer, Jarrad had been a respectful young man, kind and helpful to others.
But in the year before his death, he had fallen on hard times. There had been a relationship break-up and bullying at work. Newly unemployed and struggling with his mental health, he moved back in with his mum.
He applied to join the army around the same time he applied for unemployment benefit.
When his claim was rejected, he was devastated. On the day of his suicide, he rang up Australia's welfare office to ask why.
"Um hello. I'm like in a pretty desperate situation here," he told the Centrelink officer.
"I've waited a month and I've jumped through all the hoops and I'm just wondering why I haven't even had an explanation? We can't afford rent and I'm thinking about stealing food… like, we need this money," he said.
After that call, Ms Madgwick says, Jarrad checked his welfare account. That was when he learnt that he owed A$2,000 (£1,100; $1,500) to the government. The debt was an apparent overpayment of a previous student benefit he had received - and this had barred his new claim.
"From then on, he was just distressed and inconsolable. But he was still desperately trying for jobs right up until the moment he left the house," Ms Madgwick told the BBC.
Image captionKath Madgwick with her son Jarrad
Later, it would emerge that Jarrad was one of more than half a million Australians caught up in the nation's so-called "Robodebt" scandal, which ran from 2016 to 2019.
This welfare policy, later ruled to be illegal, forced some of the county's poorest to pay off debts, many of which never existed in the first place. The government sent letters, often repeatedly, to citizens demanding they refund the "overpayments".
For those that could afford it, they withdrew savings or started repayment plans to pay off what was often thousands of dollars. For others, the financial shock came at the worst point in their lives.
Jarrad's mother contends that his debt was one of those that were miscalculated, but he did not live long enough to find this out. He died on 30 May 2019, taking his life in what his mother says was an impulsive act.
Ms Madgwick holds the government partly responsible for Jarrad's suicide.
"He just got himself worked up in those two hours over this proposed debt thinking that he wasn't going to get any Centrelink. He was desperate," she said.
'Vilifying the poor'
Robodebt, officially known as the Online Compliance Intervention scheme, was introduced in 2015 by the conservative government, with the aim of saving A$1.7bn.
At the time, Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge said people were cheating the welfare system. "We'll find you, we'll track you down, you will have to pay those debts and you may end up in prison," he said.
But critics said the system was "a kind of criminalisation of those on welfare", part of a wider attempt by Australia's conservative government, prior to the pandemic, to slash the welfare net. The government was also criticised for upping requirements making it harder to receive a payment, controlling how recipients spend their money , and for proposals such as mandatory drug-testing of jobseekers.
Robodebt was just another policy vilifying the poor and vulnerable, this time through the use of technology, said social policy professor Ruth Phillips from the University of Sydney.
She notes it was part of a global trend of governments using tech to tighten their welfare systems. In India, the poor have to scan their fingerprints for food stamps. In the US, some states use a similar computer which trawls through decades of data to reclaim payments.
"It's all about the idea that we're surveilling you, and making sure you don't get overpaid your due," she told the BBC. "It's a terrible contradiction to the purpose of the welfare state [in Australia], which is actually to ensure that people have sufficient resources to survive in what is really a very wealthy country."
'I knew I was innocent'
Robodebt replaced a previous system where bureaucrats had hand-checked records before contacting recipients. In Australia's means-based welfare system, people who receive a benefit typically have to report their income every two weeks. Robodebt matched those submissions with tax office data to find discrepancies.
Within the first year of its use, it found 10 times more instances of "cheating".
However, the vast majority of these cases were people who had done nothing wrong. Rather, the algorithm had relied on flawed maths: averaging the fortnightly income of a recipient.
But this simply did not work for people whose pay slips differed from week to week, like students working irregular shifts.
It was these people who were now accused of owing debt - and the onus was on them to prove that they had done nothing wrong.
School teacher Katherine Prygodicz, 43, had been at first puzzled by the night-time phone calls she began receiving in January 2019. When they asked for her bank details and personal information, she thought it was a scam.
Only months later, when her entire tax return was confiscated, did she realise she owed money to the government. Other stories have been reported of people going to the shops and discovering their bank accounts drained , as part of the debt collecting.
"I couldn't understand why I had a debt," Ms Prygodicz told the BBC. "I'm a maths and science teacher. So I couldn't understand how I could have reported the numbers wrong because that's what my thing is.
"What upset me was that they were implying that I hadn't reported my income properly - that I was committing welfare fraud. But I knew I was innocent."
She began challenging the claim, but encountered stigma around her fight. Most of her family were supportive. "But some thought that I must have done something wrong, or that if it was a government misunderstanding, it could be easily cleared up."
'Exonerated'
Ms Prygodicz faced a battle that has been shared by thousands of other Australians.
In late 2016, people began reporting complaints to their local MPs and media, leading to wider scrutiny. There have been ombudsman reports, legal analysis, court challenges and two parliamentary inquiries which heard from families who said Robodebt was a factor in their loved ones' deaths.
Throughout it all, the government staunchly defended the programme's legality. Bureaucrats expressed sympathy for families like the Madgwicks, but refused to say whether they accepted that Robodebt had been a suicidal pressure.
Then in November last year, a few months after Jarrad Madgwick died, the Federal Court of Australia ruled it was illegal.
Six months later, affected recipients were told by the government they were part of a court case suing the state - believed to be the largest class action in Australia.
Days later the government abolished Robodebt, and announced it would refund more than A$721m of paid debts to everyone who had paid up.
The class action was settled on Monday, with the government agreeing to pay A$1.2bn. This sum includes A$112m in compensation, and dropping A$379m in fake debts challenged by people like Ms Prygodciz.
"I feel exonerated, even though I didn't do anything wrong," she told the BBC.
But the government has refused to admitted liability as part of case's settlement. And many are still calling for proper accountability. The government imposed a system - that was not only illegal - but targeted the most vulnerable and poor, and caused widescale suffering and hardship.
"You're dealing with people that are down on their luck and already not feeling good because they've got to go to the government to get help. It's not right to be using an automated system to go after them," said Ms Madgwick.
Australia's Labor and Greens political opposition are leading calls for a royal commission - the top form of public inquiry - to determine who was responsible for what they described as a "government scam", arguing they knew about the system's problems before it was ruled illegal.
Ms Madgwick also wants someone held accountable. In June, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he "would apologise for any hurt or harm" caused by the scheme. But Ms Madgwick says this isn't a true apology, and notes no government figures have lost their jobs.
"Why didn't the government treat people like they're people?" she asked the BBC. "He hasn't acknowledged the damage that this system has caused to so many Australians, not just myself.
"There was no empathy in this scheme, this was just about the dollar for them."
www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54970253'Robodebt-related trauma': the victims still paying for Australia's unlawful welfare crackdown
Underwhelmed by or left out of this week’s class action settlement, many are still angry that the scandal never made it to court
Nathan Kearney says he lost two and half years of his life to robodebt. He’s still seeing a counsellor about it.
Four years ago he was living in Brisbane, seeing and playing gigs, working several different casual jobs and generally enjoying his 20s.
Then the debts came, first for about $2,000, and a year later for $4,500. It was the same story: you have underreported your income, you owe us this much money, please provide us your old payslips. He couldn’t.
Overwhelmed by the idea he now owed the government more than $6,000, Kearney moved back in with his parents in East Gippsland.
I wanted to know why those ministers felt that it was appropriate to use this illegal system and to target the most vulnerable
Nathan Kearney
He was 27, dreams on hold, while he worked 50 hours a week in a country town he didn’t like just to regain a sense of financial stability.
“I feel like I got put back a couple of years in life because of this,” Kearney says. “And I would be closer to where I want to be at 31 years old if it hadn’t been for robodebt.”
On Monday the government reached a settlement with Gordon Legal, a law firm running a class action on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people caught up in the Coalition’s government welfare debt recovery program.
The settlement was for an eye-watering $1.2bn but almost all of the money came from the government’s May announcement to repay and wipe debts raised using the unlawful “income-averaging” of ATO pay data.
In fact, the only new figure was $111m in compensation that will be shared between about 430,000 victims.
The sums will vary significantly, depending on how much debt people had paid and how long they’d been without their money. Legal costs, which will be deducted from the compensation, are yet to be determined.
Many people have flooded victims’ group Facebook pages, as well as Gordon Legal’s own page, to express frustration at the compensation figure, which they feel does not reflect the pain or suffering the four-year program caused.
Moreover, some are angry that a scandal they see as being punctuated by continual cover-up and obfuscation never made it to a courtroom.
“I wanted to know why those ministers felt that it was appropriate to use this illegal system and to target the most vulnerable people,” Kearney says. “I wanted somebody to ask them to their faces: ‘Why did you think that it was OK to take money from the poorest people without giving them a chance to argue their case?’”
Others, like Jennifer Miller, whose son Rhys Cauzzo took his life when he was 28, say they intend to object to the settlement, which will need to be approved by the court. “There has been no accountability whatsoever,” Miller says.
Cauzzo lived with depression and anxiety but Miller believes the financial pressure that came from two Centrelink debts tipped him over the edge on Australia Day 2017.
Along with Kath Madgwick, whose son also took his life after receiving a Centrelink debt, Miller has been campaigning against the robodebt scheme for three years.
Like Kearney, she is insistent the case should have gone to court. “This isn’t over,” she says.
Gordon Legal emphasised this week that the settlement – an “excellent outcome” for clients and group members – should be viewed in its full context.
“When you think about the totality of what’s been achieved since the proceedings were commenced, that really amounts to more than $1.2bn,” said a partner at the law firm, Andrew Grech.
It was the Amato case brought by Victoria Legal Aid that established the legal precedent that ruled that robodebt’s “income averaging” unlawful.
But in the months afterwards, the government simply stonewalled. It said nothing about refunds and claimed only a “small cohort” of people had been affected.
Indeed, the refund decision in May, which Guardian Australia revealed two months earlier, was prompted by the need for a strategy to respond to the Gordon Legal class action.
In the lead-up to Monday’s announcement, it was clear that a settlement was looking likely.
And the $111m figure was said, from the government’s perspective, to represent the interest owed, rather than compensation for stress or anguish.
The government services minister, Stuart Robert, later publicly confirmed the government’s view of the compensation, noting it was for “the most part, for interest payments for money held”.
The commonwealth “has not accepted or admitted any liability in the matter”, Robert noted.
Though victims longed for their day in court, the two-week trial promised to be a fairly dry affair based mostly on documentary evidence and legal arguments.
The government did not plan to call any witnesses, so there was little prospect the former human services minister, Alan Tudge, or top departmental officials would need to take the stand.
In addition, the government’s prospects advice from earlier in the year said while it was likely a court would order refunds, plus interest, Gordon Legal’s negligence claim was unlikely to succeed.
Still, for some victims, the government’s lawyers would have been there in the “virtual” courtroom, defending their case.
Gordon Legal’s statement of claim, for example, alleged Centrelink was well aware of the distress the program had caused victims.
Kearney says it was the second debt that caused his mental health to plummet (he lives with chronic depression). He also fell out with some friends, though he notes they’ve since patched things up.
Because he continued to contest his debts, Centrelink eventually sent them off to a private debt collector who would call him three times a day.
Centrelink also garnisheed nearly $3,000 from his tax return.
“Once they [the debt collectors] started calling, they … put you into a certain headspace, which is like a shame and guilt spiral,” he says. “Whether or not you deserve to feel the shame or guilt, it’s still there within me.
“Sometimes they’d call and I’d tell them, like, ‘I can’t deal with this any more. I’ve been thinking about taking my life,’ and things like that. It didn’t change anything.”
Perhaps as many as 100,000 people were also left out of the refunds because they provided payslips or bank statements after being hit with an initially unlawful debt. It was then recalculated and a debt was substantiated.
And Gordon Legal, which had initially argued these debts were “tainted”, dropped that claim in the settlement
Some of those people expressed anger and confusion at that outcome in conversations with Guardian Australia this week.
Other refund recipients, like the man who told the Guardian his debt had been a factor in his marriage breakdown, may only get the sense of justice they seek from a royal commission, as proposed by Labor and the Greens.
“I’ve been seeing somebody to actively to talk through, I guess, ‘robodebt-related trauma’ is the way that they put it, and slowly coming to terms with it,” says Kearney, who is now back in Brisbane.
He used to fear another debt might arrive at any moment.
“Now, with the settlement, it does feel like, ‘Everything’s gone back to normal, they’ve made penance … and everything goes good again,’” he says. “Whereas I think a lot of us are still dealing with the impacts of what they did years ago, even if we got our refunds.”