Morrison was the social services minister who brought the proposal for the debt raising and recovery scheme to cabinet ahead of its implementation in 2015.
He was prime minister when the scheme was declared unlawful in 2019 and he apologised over it in June 2020.
There is no suggestion Morrison is among the undisclosed persons the royal commission referred for civil or criminal legal action in a sealed section of the report.
One of the central issues of the report is the use of income averaging without additional evidence, as the measure by which debts were raised and pursued.
The commission found Morrison, as a minister, received contradictory advice regarding the method of debt assessment.
The report found he “took the proposal to cabinet, knowing that it involved income averaging and that his own department had indicated that it would require legislative change, but on the basis of the contrary indication in the NPP checklist, proceeded without enquiring as to how the change had come about”.
“Mr Morrison allowed cabinet to be misled because he did not make that obvious inquiry,” the report read.
“He knew that the proposal still involved income averaging; only a few weeks previously he had been told of that caveat; nothing had changed in the proposal; and he had done nothing to ascertain why the caveat no longer no longer applied.
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“He 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.”
Among the commission’s findings was a scathing indictment of the evidence Morrison gave regarding his knowledge of the use of income averaging.
“The commission rejects as untrue Mr Morrison’s evidence that he was told that income averaging as contemplated in the Executive Minute was an established practice and a ‘foundational way’ in which DHS (the Department of Human Services, now Services Australia) worked,” the report read.
The commission said the DHS officers who developed the proposal, were unlikely to have described income averaging to Morrison as “foundational”.
He was also critiqued for his stance as a self-declared “welfare cop” as social services minister, and for using language and communicating priorities that the commission argued helped enable a favourable reception of the plan for robodebt.
Today, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was up to Morrison whether to resign or not from parliament.
“I think that these findings I’ve read out in the public domain make it clear Scott Morrison’s defence of this scheme and of the government’s actions over such a long period of time were, to quote the report, ‘based upon a falsehood’,” he said.
“That is a damning finding. People will make their own judgements about this.”
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