In releasing its official response to the royal commission into the unlawful debt collection scheme, the government said it had accepted “all 56 recommendations” made in the report that was tabled in July.
However, the report actually made 57, with the final one – a closing observation that the Freedom of Information Act be amended to reduce the secrecy surrounding cabinet documents – not adopted by the government.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said it was a “closing comment” and not an official recommendation.
“We will not be amending the Freedom of Information Act,” he said.
In announcing its response, the government said it had already begun to introduce some of the measures recommended by the report into the unlawful debt collection scheme.
“Robodebt was a cruel and crude mechanism,” Government Services Minister Bill Shorten said.
“It was neither fair nor legal. It treated everyday Australians as criminals, guilty ’til proven innocent…
“The government’s already begun to move on a lot of these recommendations. In my portfolio, there are 26 recommendations.
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“Even in the last week, we’ve announced 3,000 extra staff to make sure that we can process payments in a timely and accurate fashion.
“We’ve stopped using external debt collectors, which was a feature of the previous scheme under robodebt.”
Dreyfus said the recommendations would ensure a repeat of the scheme would never happen again.
“The Australian people – and especially the hundreds of thousands of victims of the robodebt scheme – deserve so much better,” he said.
“The robodebt scheme was wrong. The robodebt scheme was unlawful. The robodebt scheme destroyed the lives of many innocent Australians.
“We said we’d act to ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again, and today we take the next step toward delivering on that commitment.”
Key details of the robodebt royal commission
- A royal commission report into the robodebt scheme was tabled in parliament in July.
- The report by royal commissioner Catherine Holmes, SC, makes 57 recommendations, including the referral of individuals for civil and criminal prosecution.
- Robodebt was “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals”, the report found.
- It was also “a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms”.
- Robodebt was an unlawful method of debt assessment used by Services Australia under the Coalition federal government from 2016-2020
