The Chaser Report - ROBODEBT: Incompetent, or Evil?

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

The Royal Commission into Robodebt has been released, so Charles and Dom pry through it;s 800 pages to find all the juiciest bits of information. Unfortunately they don't have access to the sealed section because they haven't turned themselves in yet, but all in due course. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Hello, Charles. Now, Dom, I am all for paying our public servants well. Yes, sure. I am completely on board with the idea that just because the private sector makes gazillions of dollars doesn't mean that the public sector should suffer.

No, high-quality advice to run the country for the common good. that's what the public service provides, usually. But maybe there's one caveat that I want to put on. One caveat about the public service. Is it possible that, you know, they're so demonised the public service by the right? Yes.

But is it possible that on occasion they aren't perfect the public service that occasionally they get things wrong? Well, perhaps. Perhaps. What we sort of need is maybe an 800-page Royal Commission report that goes into some of the detail

on whether that is true or not. Today's episode is about Robo Debt. You've probably gathered a $1.8 billion outrageous mistake. More in a moment. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore.

FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.C. So, yeah, the Royal Commission report has come down. I saw the footage of the Royal Commissioner handing it over to the Governor-General, who I'm sure we'll read it because he's, you know, such an action man,

so involved in the nation's debates. One person I can say with absolute certainty who didn't read it before releasing a statement is Scott Morrison. Did you see, within minutes. Why would he read it? Within minutes of handing down an 800-page report, which nobody had seen, like he hadn't got a sneak peek, he released a statement

unequivocally rejecting every single finding of the Royal Commissioner. Well, he knew he'd done nothing wrong. He knew he'd done nothing. He didn't need to read an independent report. They didn't need to read a report. Maybe what he should have done is generated some computer algorithm to work out whether he'd done right or wrong.

But Charles, you're... And asked that algorithm that they generated for Obo did. Oh, I see what you're getting at. Said that everyone, everyone did wrong. money. Yes. Well, Charles, you seem to be mistaking something there. You saw the photo of the Royal Commissioner handing over, the report.

Yes. Are you sure that there was not another Royal Commissioner, one S Morrison, also in the job of running the robot area? You never know what he's appointed to. He might have been running that too. Well, that might explain the sealed section. They're a little bit embarrassed about the fact that the other Royal Commission going on. Because there's an 800-baged report.

A whole lot of it is this sealed section that no one's allowed to see. even ministers who might be working with public servants named in the Royal Commission are allowed to then read the sealed section, right? So there will be public servants going around now, knowing that they're probably going to face prosecution, they're certainly going to face the National Commission against corruption. Yeah, and it's civil and criminal prosecutions right in the sealed section. So some of the people who are probably working with public service and drawing a pretty high

salary are going to face potentially criminal charges and they're still in the job. Is that what you're saying? And their boss, the minister, is not allowed to know unless they self-disclosed. Now, you think that these people, these people who literally drove people to their death in order to sort of run a scheme and make life easy for themselves, are the type of people with the integrity to self-disclose? Do you think that that's the sort of mindset that these people have? I'm sure if a computer program popped up

and said that they had to self-disclosed because what they were doing, the important thing to note is that what they were getting paid so much money for was not doing their job, was outsourcing their job in effect, right? They were getting paid for the computer to do their jobs so that no human needed to process

all these supposed debts to social security. And this is the thing that's so extraordinary about this is that, yes, okay, there are probably some people who overpaid, maybe there were some people who were wrought in the system. But not only did they quite cruelly outsource it to a computer, The computer got it so massively wrong. Let's drill down a bit on this because what the Royal Commission found,

one of the most chillingly hilarious and terrible tragic details in the whole report for me is the detail that... So before they introduced robo debt as a sort of scheme that just would automatically, you know, charge people... mop up all the debtors and create new ones. On this... Using a mechanism called income averaging, right? So that it was like, okay, we'll come up with now.

algorithm which shows that on average what would this person have received and then compare it against what they've received and then we'll just charge them the difference right as though they'd received that as though they'd been overpaid right so they ran some trials of this income kind of averaging system and consistently the algorithm the robo thing is before they implement the system consistently overestimated the amount that was owed by 56 to 65%. Like just consistently... More than half. Overcharged by over 50% on most people, right?

So they knew going into it that the algorithm was completely wrong. It was just criminally wrong. It was just completely untrue, right? And then they went, you know what? The budget papers say we need to make a billion dollars out of this. Let's just fucking do it. Let's just fucking go for it. The thing that I like about this, Charles, is that we're so often told, oh, we live in

the era of big data. This is big data. If you just crunch the numbers and get all the data sources in, that's all you need to do. It's going to be amazing. You can do incredible analytics and stuff. They didn't do that. They could have got everyone's actual data, presumably, in the database.

They could have actually reflected reality because it'd be nice to think that if someone is, you know, overpaid accidentally, but lots of money. At some point, you want to get that back. Fair enough, right? To not even do that, they're not even used the actual data. There's just something deeply shocking about that. It's almost like that was actually not the point of the scheme. The point of the scheme was to claw back, well, at times, by the end of the scheme,

it was like $1.6 billion in the budget that they had. It was almost like they'd decided, how do we find some savings in the budget? I know, let's go after the people who are least able to defend themselves and are the poorest people. and just victimise them into coughing up money that they don't actually owe us. Well, it's certainly true that they did that efficiently. If the aim was to do that, if the aim was simply to pick on people who were vulnerable, it was a huge success.

I mean, honestly, in terms of just creating misery, I remember watching this unfold in real time on Twitter. I remember Asher Wolf on Twitter, who did a lot of the investigating of this. The stories of misery, at the very moment these notices came out, we knew about it within hours of these massive claims going to people. And it's taken this long. It's taken years for this to happen. It should have been self-evident instantly that this was wrong. It was clear that these people had not been paid the money that Centrelink thought that they had.

That was the thing that was so extraordinary. And they were ringing up, ringing up, ringing up, trying to say, you did not pay me all this money that you say. I don't owe this debt. It's obviously wrong. And there was no one to talk to. Oh, they had rationalised the phone bank as well. So, Charles, what did the report say about Scott Morrison? Because he was the minister who kind of brought this in to begin with, right?

Well, this is the thing. And this is, I think, why Scott Morrison's. has rejected all the findings, because it's quite critical of Scott Morrison. Oh, that couldn't be right. When in actual fact, what he'd run is a very successful scheme under the sort of psychopathic sadism framework that you've just outlined, essentially what it pointed out, which I think we all knew, but it was, it's really nice to sort of read it there in black and white. And this is the unsealed part of the report, by the way.

He was the architect of the scheme. He's the one who basically went, you know what, let's just create this myth, essentially, that the welfare system is being completely rorted. And I'm sure at some level he believed that, right? Like, there was no evidence for it, but he sort of just knew gutterily because he always, you know, shoot by the hip, whatever I reckon. Just follow what the ideology tells you and don't question any of the assumptions, such as, you know, welfare cheats are everywhere and are bad. Don't even kick the ties on that one. And one of the interesting things in the report, actually, is that not only was the actual amount of welfare cheating minuscule, quote unquote, minuscule, the other thing is there was certain amounts of people who had accidentally been overpaid for reasons. Like, it's happened to every single one of us, I'm sure, where, you know, you get paid family benefit A.

Yeah, it's incredibly complicated. And this is the thing that's so, I mean, I generally think I'm pretty good at figuring this sort of stuff out. Like, I'm generally, you know, I've got a lot of uni degrees. I'm good at this stuff in general. Centrelink are baffling. They're absolutely baffling. I cannot work out for the life of me what we are and aren't eligible for. And in the end, it just became too hard to apply.

It became too hard. And so we missed out on, I think, whatever it was, childcare payments or something because it was just too difficult. You've got to keep reapplying for childcare because what happens if you suddenly, you know, your children suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke. Oh. The onus is on you every year. It's not as though. It's not as if, you know, when you're a parent,

you have to fucking look after your child year after year after year. And if they died, you would tell, you'd tell the government, wouldn't you? If they died, it would be something, you'd have to notify them. To be fair, look, I will just as a sidebar. I mean, imagine, imagine, is the scenario that Scott Morrison's mind went to, what if people are having kids to get on the family benefit, A? They get an extra, like, I think it's like $21 a week. That's the best way to make a buck in Australia, 233, have kids.

Then they throw out their kids, get rid of them, and still have the 21 bucks flowing into. That's why the birth rate soaring massively, sidebar on this. They have just now, I think on the 7th of July, dramatically increased childcare. It's terrible for people like you, whose children have just made it to high school. People like me, though, has got a one-year-old and a five-year-old, it's a big difference. If you earn, as a couple, less than, I think, like, $530,000 a year, which is almost everybody, there's a lot more money, and it's hard to get, but thank God. Well, can I tell you, one person who wouldn't be eligible for that new scheme,

who does earn more than $530,000 a year, is the fucking senior public servant who was running the Robo Debt scheme. So Catherine Campbell, she's on a $900,000 a year job, and she's still in the public service she hasn't resolved there's this speculation that she's currently on leave oh we couldn't possibly comment also whether she might be in the sealed section yeah you couldn't possibly comment but charles you don't understand if you want to save a billion dollars you've got to pay public servants a million dollars to make it happen you can possibly get them cheaper you need to pay them twice as much as the prime minister gets in order to get those sorts of savings as a sidebar um I would note that katherine Campbell um who's clear must be in the sealed seat I mean we can't possibly comment but

She must be. Like, I don't think She must be. You wouldn't want to defame her. You wouldn't want to injure her reputation by making people think she was an incompetent public service simply because she presided over Robeda. Well, is she incompetent or too competent?

You know, like it depends what she thought she was doing. But she's now in judge of Orcas. That amazing. I mean, she's on leave, to be fair. She went on leave last week. She's on leave at the moment. Not clear whether she'll return. But look, she seems perfect for Orcas.

Yes. Because you've got to save a billion dollars on social security. to give $368 billion to submarines. That's the priorities of the Morrison government. So just to look at what was said about Scott Morrison. Among the findings, there was crude and cruel. It was neither fair nor legal. Morrison, and I'm quoting from the report here,

had failed to describe his prime ministership or to describe robot data. I think it's on his CV. He'd failed to meet his ministerial responsibility to ensure that cabinet was properly informed about what the proposal actually entailed and to ensure that it was lawful. Like point one, I would think, would be, tell Cabinet, is your big new proposal actually lawful?

He'd failed to meet that responsibility. He allowed Cabinet to be misled. He didn't make an obvious inquiry about the Department changing its view. This is the key thing about whether the legislation was required. So the scheme was illegal. The Department suddenly back flipped and said, oh, we don't need laws for this, when they did. When they did. So for 900 grand, you get wrong advice, is what this says.

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The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. After Scott Morrison, there was then a series of other ministers who had to take this piece of shit and run. I mean, what a series. What a series of ministers. You know, it's sort of like the cruisers, you know, in Royco. Yes, that's right. It really was.

And it says Tudge, Stuart Robert. There's one other one. I believe his name is Christian Porter. Remember that guy? Christian Porter, yeah. Oh, what a surprise. Anyway, all of them are there anymore. All of them have, I mean, and I wouldn't say this about any of them,

but have enough shame to have left, right? Like, to just get out of the building. Robert only just left. And look, let's just say, I don't know who's been referred to the NACC, but there are some interesting reports in recent weeks about Stuart Roberts' other dealings and various incentive schemes and refer. Well, that's possible. I don't know.

I would want to sell his reputation, Stuart. You did a pretty good job with that yourself, mate. But one of the fascinating things for me is that with every passing day, with every Royal Commission released that shows Scott Morrison was an absolute fucknuckle von fucknuckle for, for years before he even became Prime Minister, you realise there is no job he can go to in the private sector. That essentially, Scott Morrison may well remain member for Cook

for the rest of his life because who else is going to employ him? Well, I would say PWC, except that we know that they already said no. Because of adverse reputation. Well, yeah, if WC rejects you, I think you're sort of stuck. there. So I think what might happen is he's the fart in the lift and then the lift breaks down and we're just going to have to

stay with this little fart in Parliament probably for decades. Now you've been very critical of Morris and I want to allow Morrison to speak for himself here, okay? Because this is his statement. He did acknowledge and express regret for the unintended consequences of the scheme, I'm quoting, and the impact

that the operations of the scheme had on individuals and their family. So he's sorry for about the misery. Sorry, Sorry, he's not sorry. He acknowledges and expresses regret. He doesn't say sorry, but he rejects all the findings, which are critical of his involvement in authorising this scheme, and adverse to me, by wrong, unsubstantiated. What?

And contradicted by... 800 pages of unsubstantiated evidence. And contradicted by clear documentary evidence presented to the commission. So if only the Royal Commissioner had read the papers that he submitted, he'd be in the clear, so... Unlike Morrison reading the Royal Commission, which he doesn't need to do. He'd acted in good faith, he says, and it's important to know. note Scott Morrison's faith in all this because

I don't know if he mentioned it when he was prime minister but he's quite Christian. Oh really? I didn't pick that up. He often goes to speak to churches and so on. If there's one thing Jesus was known for, what was Jesus' attitude to the poor again? Was he generally sympathetic and helpful? Were they the people he cared most about? Or did he shit on them from a great height and use the machinery

government to drive some of them to their death? I can't remember what the Bible says about that, Charles. Which friend was it? Look, I think that Scott Morrison was actually helping poor people because I don't know whether you remember, but in the Bible it says that you've got to be poor to end to the kingdom of heaven. That's true. And by enforcing Robo Debt on the poor, he was making them even poorer and actually hastening their debt.

Well, some of them got eternal life far faster than they should have. Yes, and then that would have guaranteed them. Like, basically, letter from Robo Debt guarantees you a place in heaven. I would think, I mean, to be absolutely honest about this, I wouldn't have thought God would turn anybody down who'd be the victim of this scheme. People who authored it, that's going to be a bit of a tough self. The other detail that sort of by the buy, like we sort of moved on, but I would like to sort of say, I hadn't quite realised that not only had they said threatening letters ride, which were really scary, because it wasn't like, we think that you've got this debt.

It was like, this is the debt that you have to repay by next Wednesday. Yeah, it was a ticking bomb. But they also, under the scheme, as you say, They outsourced everything, including the debt collection. So the government was selling this debt that was not true to private debt collectors who were then going and knocking repeatedly on people's doors, even though they didn't know the debt, they didn't have any money to repay the debt,

and they were precarious people who weren't necessarily equipped to be able to deal with that. You know what? I wouldn't normally feel sorry for private debt collectors. This is something the H.O has done for a long time. The HO, I think they've stopped doing it now, But the ATO for many years is outsourced Its various debts to third-party debt collection companies They say that they're from the ATO

But they're actually when you drill down And I've seen this It's actually some of service provider Have you been evading debts? No, no, they've seen to catch me No, well you know, small business, self-employed person occasionally they get a bit behind this kind of stuff But the bottom line is

They've, the government, from what you're saying, is defrauded the debt collectors They sold them an invisible debt A debt that didn't exist So presumably the government owes money to the debt collectors. Won't anyone think of the debt collectors in all this? Poor things.

So that's a wonderful detail. Another fantastic detail. If you're Alan Tudge, imagine that. You're sleeping with Tudgy. That's all part of the wonderful family-friendly government. No worries about that Tudgy. You want to try and promote Robo Debt. You want to try and spin it.

You don't want all these negative stories about people getting imaginary debts and being miserable. You want to talk about, I think Morrison used the term a tough cop on the beat About that, you know, getting those bludges You want headlines like this, welfare debt squad hunts for $4 billion. You want talkback presenters who ask you questions like, And I quote from Chris Smith on TGB, Are all these people with their hands in the taxpayer pocket in genuine need?

And then after Tadji defends what he's doing, Smith said, keep at it, you're doing a great job. This is because they had a sense. strategy of going on what they call friendly media. Ah, right. There's 2GB, there's the Australian, there's ACA, always happy to kick a so-called dole budger. And so basically the media are being compromised. You've got the public service being compromised by essentially giving this highly politicised

advice, picking on the people who they're supposed to be helping. Like, you know, they're not meant to be the victims, poor people. They're actually supposed to be people who are helped by the welfare system. I don't know how that got forgotten in all this. but you've also got this media cabal that is completely unquestioning and like Morrison and maybe Morrison didn't ever kick the tyres

because they were so busy thinking that everyone who was broke was trying to cheat the government out of money that living in a life of total poverty and misery where occasionally you get a welfare check that lets you be able to buy toilet paper or food that that's some amazing privileged life that you would really enjoy

and the thing is so not only does the report point out that that style of routing like intentional rauding is minuscule. It's also like a fairly shitty way to commit fraud, right? Like because like, yeah, you can do it. But the schemes never spin off that much system, that much money. Because unless you're doing it in a sort of broad, systematic way

where you're making up hundreds of thousands of people to... Yes, you'd need to invent an entire university full of people to scan it, like if you scan them for three imaginary children who aren't... That's still not much. money. It's barely worth your effort into calling them. It certainly is far less than the amount of money that the Morrison government gave to its business mates during JobKeeper, during, well, all the consultancy stuff. Yes, outsourcing all the public service. I mean, to be fair, the public service is the best case study I've seen for outsourcing the public service to consultants.

But this is another example of what they did. Alan Tudge sent case studies. He dropped them with Simon Benson from the Australian. And then there was an exclusive on the front cover of the paper on fucking Australia Day, 2017, talking about the so-called victims of RoboDet and saying that Labor had gotten the detail wrong

when they were trying to critique the scheme. And then, oh, Tudge pops up on 2GB and the host goes, oh, you must be pretty happy with the article there by Simon Benson. And Tudge says, this is all from the Guardian, by the way. Tudge says, it's a very significant story

that he's written, not admitting that his office had leaked the details. It's just this. It's a circle jerk. It's a circle jerk with conservative media in these people. And it's just contemptible. The people who, even if they had actually owed this money, Charles, it still would have been callous and inhumane as a way to treat people.

But for the debts to be imaginary, it's just, it's like a parody of right-wing evil bullshit. Like, the thing is, it's not, it's callous and evil, but it's also so incompetent at the same time. It's trying to be an absolute fuck wit. And, like, fucking it up so massively that your fuckwittery is magnified by a hundred times. And then you can't, you don't even realize and tell the cabinet, oh, we've got this dastardly scheme. You know, the whole thing about, is it a conspiracy or is it incompetence? Yes. This is both.

God. So it's not good. It's not good. So, um, I, so what do we do about public service pay? Because on the one hand, there's a whole, like, you know, not a day goes by where you don't bump into a public. school teacher who goes, oh, I'm just doing some tutoring on the side because I want to

be able to pay my gas bill this week. Or, you know, like just ridiculous. Or, you know, like there was a nurse who was Ubering the other night. And you're going, why are you Ubering if you're a nurse? Like, nurses are really well paid, aren't they? Well, apparently not if you've got to also do

Ubering. Like, you know what I mean? Like, just constant sort of things where we don't pay the people who actually do the work well at all. And so, you you're going, well, hang on, the public service does need a big pay rise. Like, we actually should... If you're a vice-chancellor or something, you don't, though. Yeah.

Yeah, so how do we... But then 900... I was shocked when I found out there. There's a lot of them. There's a lot of senior bureaucrats. And the argument is always, well, they'd get that in the public sector. They'd get that in the private sector. And, yeah, they probably would.

Yeah, but hang on, hang on. Private school teachers get more than public school teachers. They do. Shouldn't we pay public school teachers to be competitive? with the private sector. By that logic, all teachers should get the same pay as the teachers who get, go to top private schools. That's to be competitive with the private sector. I've seen this argument even in the top talent people at the ABC. They're not getting as much. They're getting, I don't know, 60, 70% in return for the virtue of working for the public service and feeling good

about themselves because they bank only 400 grand instead of 800 or 700. That's what it is. So they're not getting the same as they'd get in the private sector, but they get to feel good about themselves. And work less fucking hard, too, by the way. Well, why don't we do that with teachers and nurses and doctors? Because they don't have the ability to generate something. You can leak to the Australian, Charles. Haven't you been listening? That's what life's all about.

I mean, look, let's be honest. There has just been, I think, a health services unions, fine, done a pay deal at least in New South Wales. I think it's an 8.6% pay increases like that. So there are pay increases coming through here and there. But it is perverse, isn't it? When you've got lots of people taking a massive payout. To genuinely serve the public.

Like, I'm sorry, but sitting in Canberra and dreaming up RoboDead is not an act of public service. No. Being a nurse or a teacher in a public school is absolutely. Like, these are people who, the whole thing in Britain of applauding these people, patronising it might be. Part of it comes from the right place. They are people who are selfless and doing the right thing. But, oh my God, these high-paid ones, fuck them, basically. So we need a Royal Commission into Public Service pay, probably that averages it all out.

So probably first against the war, well, would be Scott Morrison. What does the sealed section say? Will he be exonerated? I don't know. In second and third against the wall, senior public service. Charles, who's built the wall? Who's ordered the wall? He's got the high-price consultants in to work out what kind of wall to build?

We need to build a wall! You remember all those prototypes Donald Trump had in the desert? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's basically what we're looking at. So it's awful. It's all awful. It's terrible.

And, I mean... I feel like that's been the theme of this podcast last year. But what are you supposed to? do in a case like RoboDet, like the simultaneous incompetence and evil. It's hard to know which is the main story here. Is it that they were hopeless? Look, they are appalling. They were both.

They are both things at once. At least this should kill for at least, I don't know, five years or something, the notion of using AI to try and do this. Because you know someone's pitching to the government, Robo Debt, but it's good. Yeah, well, I am. But it works. Yeah. Chaser debt. That's a good, I mean, the real question is, why are we not in the public service, Charles?

Surely some government agent you can just pay us to do the same thing we're doing now, can't they? Oh, definitely, yep, let's do that. I don't know who. Who would pay us to make this podcast? Certainly not the ABC. It's certainly not the ABC and certainly not. I mean, if you want to pay us $4 a month, you can go to Apple Podcasts or ACAS. This is our public service.

It's the cheapest and appropriately priced thing you could possibly do. Anyway, it's been miserable, but I think it's a moment of misery for which we as Australians all take responsibility because that was our government. We elected them Yes And re-elected them They acted in our names So when you get upset

With the people who ran the scheme Remember you Whether you voted for them or not You were part of a collective That chose that path of action And look You're probably named in the Zills section It's entirely possible

Our Gears from Road We're part of the iconoclast network Catch you tomorrow By the way, leave us some reviews If you get this far on Apple podcast Would you jump on there And give us five stars Just out of pity

And we'd love to have you On the reviews because they've gone quiet recently and they're quite amusing to read before. Thank you. See ya. Bye. Thank you for your patience.

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