In True Story 2024's specially commissioned opening address on November 16 at Coledale Community Hall, Mean Streak author Rick Morton reflected on the painful truths he learned while investigating and exposing Robodebt, and the brutal policies that ruined lives. As True Story festival director Caroline Baum predicted – it was not a litany of gloom, Rick has a wicked and irreverent sense of humour. For those who missed his blistering keynote, Rick shared the transcript below.

True Story festival opening address by Rick Morton

Saturday, 16 November 2024

Noah Webster was working on the great American dictionary of 1806 when his wife came into the study to find him with the secretary upon his lap.

‘Noah, I am surprised,’ she said. To which the lexicographer replied: ‘No, my dear, you are astonished. It is we who are surprised’.

Fast forward a few years.

In early 2011 or so I’d written for an online outlet that children were being kept behind barbed wire on Christmas Island’s. After my article went live, the noted linguists over at the then Department of Immigration and Citizenship media unit called to have my language corrected.

‘It’s razor wire,’ the spokesman told me.

And I said: ‘Excuse me what now?’

And he said: ‘We don’t use barbed wire in our facilities, it’s razor wire.’

I grew up on a cattle station in far west Queensland. I know I can get over barbed wire. And I’m telling you right now, for free, that I wouldn’t make it halfway across the top of a razor wire fence; it’s objectively a more prohibitive kind of wire.

In any case, what difference did it make if the wire was razor or barbed or if Noah Webster’s wife was surprised or astonished exactly, because we know what is meant on both occasions. We human beings, that is.

Now, you may think it odd or even troubling that a writer stands before you here — to address a festival designed by writers and readers for same — and begins his lecture with a denunciation of specificity in language.

And before we lose any poets to nervous system failure, let me assure you: we are here simply to marvel at the many uses of the English language. It can be preserved or adapted, both weapon and analgesic; a topical ointment or, as a character in the Robodebt story would have it, the suppository of all wisdom.

The words we choose, us writers know all too well, can be used to conceal or reveal. Art reveals. Power conceals. It is my contention that the language of government, bureaucracy and power was just as critical to the morbid success of the illegal debt-raising scheme Robodebt as the moral and mathematical vacuity of its overseers.

Seriously, this thing was like a Russian novel, everything had nine different names. Internally, if not publicly. It was the Pay As You Go Cleanup, the manual intervention, the OCI, the staged improvement process, the ECI, the CUPI and presumably on until the heat death of the universe or quantum computer found the last possible acronym combination. We must remember, however, that nothing about the essential features of this cash grab changed even as its nomenclature did.

So what did the powerful men and women of government do? They set out to bilk $1.2 billion from 866,000 people who were or had been on welfare by artificially populating every fortnight in the calendar year with income, even if they had not earned income in every fortnight of the year.

They did this in the most crude way possible: by taking annual lump sums reported to the tax office and dividing these by 26 fortnights. On Centrelink, people are required to report their earnings every fortnight because entitlements are calculated every fortnight. If you are broke and without means one fortnight, you deserve support. But if you find some work in the following fortnight, your entitlement reduces until it reaches zero.

Income averaging, as this fantasy was called, had the effect of conjuring debts debts where none exist or vastly inflated ones that did. The senior officials had evidence of this, by the way, long before the program actually started in July 2015. And the Department of Social Services also had legal advice that stated very clearly that, actually, this was a very illegal idea and everyone was very silly for even entertaining it.

These twin roadblocks — terminal, one would have thought — were overcome by the power of positive thinking and a little light misleading of Cabinet, according to the Royal Commission that eventually inquired into this uniquely craven period of modern Australian history.

It is worth spending a little time exploring how, exactly, this forgery was able to spring from the loins of ministerial ambition and a flank of the Australian Public Service that had been twisted and misshapen by a Command and Control leadership that infected dozens upon dozens of otherwise good bureaucrats and at leas six government departments and agencies.

To bake an apple pie you must first create the universe. But we’ll go back to Tony Abbott’s convincing 2013 election win; the debt and deficit disaster, a nation so constricted by the strictures of red tape that we needed two pagan equinox festivals each year just to sacrifice various rules around a bonfire in Parliament House and, finally, none of this mattered quite so much as the ideological scurvy of cutting the welfare state. Some men unwind by building model replicas of World War II bombers but Abbott, he lived to kick people off the dole.

His first budget was so cruel, so nakedly ruinous, that a country used to punching down on welfare recipients recoiled. Abbott proposed cutting off income support six months of every year for everyone under the age of 30. And that was the nice option! Before the budget, we now know, he wanted to end it permanently for people until they turned 30. Nothing. Zip. Nada.

That idea, floated in Cabinet, was so odious that Kevin Andrews and Eric Abetz were like whoa, hang on a second. Kevin Andrews and Eric Abetz! That’s like being rescued from floodwaters by Harold Holt.

Abbott’s first big bang budget got jammed in the senate and his money men changed the budget rules for the following year, 2015: no spending without the equivalent saving, and savings did not count if they required legislation that was likely to get stuck in the senate.

Robodebt was born in this moment of time. Where Abbott had tried to kick the front door down, the next attempt was to sneak through the plumbing system. Robodebt had to be sneaky and, with Kevin Andrews out and Scott Morrison in, it found the perfect chaperone.

Morrison is a master of saying many words while saying absolutely nothing. His verbiage is to scrutiny what military aircraft chaff is to radar; confounding, often impenetrable. But know this: nothing he wanted to do could be done without the proactive obfuscation of senior public servants and the negligence or laziness of many, many more.

And so, a New Policy of government went to Cabinet in 2015 and we were initially never told anything about it. In fact, it was just one measure in a bundle of four or so included in the budget papers under the banner measure Strengthening the Integrity of Welfare Payments.

Here is the sum total of what we were told in that very same budget:

‘The Government will achieve savings of $1.7 billion over five years by enhancing the Department of Human Services (DHS) fraud prevention and debt recovery capability, and improving assessment processes.

From 1 July 2015 DHS will implement an integrated package of compliance and process improvement initiatives including improved automation and targeted strategies for fraud prevention in areas of high risk.’

[Snore noises]

Before we knew it as Robodebt, the brand new policy shimmered like a poltergeist; breaking stuff and throwing debts at people that were plucked from the ether via a collective bureaucratic hallucination. It was a vast misery and it was invisible.

Miserable.

The term Robodebt was coined by reporter Ben Eltham just to give this thing a God damned name that endured and was capable of entering the public consciousness. Almost two years passed before anyone even knew what was happening. What a secret business is the language of power. Once, in 2020, the then Department of Social Services secretary Kathryn Campbell who ushered this thing in when she was the DHS boss under Scott Morrison said: “I’m sorry, I don’t know what Robodebt means.”

She was laughing about it in a keynote speech at a public admin conference two years before that, but before the inquisitorial onslaught of parliamentary scrutiny she invoked ignorance.

When the European Space Agency launched its Rosetta craft and sent it flying for a decade across more than 6 billion kilometres of space to land on a 3.5km wide comet, itself travelling at 100,000 kilometres an hour — the most complex space mission since putting a man on the moon — it was still a shade easier to hit than Robodebt was to grasp.

All of which is to say, I was in that budget lockup. I remember sneering at the suggestion, as we always did when governments tried to magick budget savings through the deus ex machina of yet more ‘compliance’, that this was anything more than cheap parlour game. I’d reported on compliance measures that went nowhere, and would again in the silent two years before this Robodebt measure emerged from its chrysalis.

By then it had been extended in the mid-year forecasts of 2015, and extended again in the July 2016 double dissolution election to render Robodebt a $2 billion golden goose. Its origins in that May 2015 budget, obscured so easily, were long since forgotten.

And even then, in the Summer of 2016-17 when good journalists like Christopher Knaus and great activists like Asher Wolf  were exposing the key features of this debt swindle in the public arena I dismissed it. Centrelink had always been prone to bastardry, I thought, what was new?

Well, what was new was plain to see for anybody who bothered to look. So few of us bothered to look.

I was raised Catholic, which is why I am standing before you today almost a decade later attempting to attend; to my sins, but in the literal sense of paying attention to what has happened; to what continues to happen. This is what is required of all of us, especially in a world where the cloaking systems deployed over government policy are so crude and yet so effective that the Attorney-General can be handed a report of the Robodebt Royal Commissioner Catherine Holmes making 57 recommendations and decide that, actually, there are only 56 and then challenge her to a public debate if she disagrees with his assessment of the report she wrote.

That last recommendation, effectively disappeared across government, was to end the arbitrary secrecy provisions of the Freedom of Information Act which was abused fulsomely throughout the history of Robodebt by labelling any document that threatened to reveal information about government policy — not deliberations of Cabinet but the actual policy details of things being done to Australians — as a Cabinet document even if it had never so much as seen the inside of a Cabinet meeting.

This administrative fakery abounds, then and now. Of course, calling a document a Cabinet document when it served no such purpose should no more make it one than standing in a garage can make you a car but this is government; this is power. As Hannah Arendt wrote on Franz Kafka, the government has the privilege of making the ultimate decision. And so you are a car. And a ministerial brief is a Cabinet document. Up is down, left is right, today is already tomorrow.

They did this when dreaming up Robodebt. Some senior bureaucrats, themselves unelected officials with code of conduct obligations who nevertheless exhibited a preternatural enthusiasm for deception of self and others, simply decided to call the tax office data ‘trusted’ which had the happy effect, they thought, of allowing them to do whatever they wanted with it.

And here’s the thing about that definitional sleight of hand: it’s not alchemy. Choosing to trust ATO data didn’t render it trustworthy in every form. Those same public servants would never have done the same with, say, a lion at the zoo and then sprung into the enclosure hoping for anything other than a thorough mauling. That’s not how the world works.

But that is how power works.

What does it even mean to be accountable when accountability still tries to hide behind the monuments to opacity that count as features of the public service? I am not only asking the officials to examine their role in this. Yes, even the good ones. But the media, too. Yes, even the good ones.

Yes, even me.

I failed. You could see, in the exhibits, how nervously some of the most highly paid public servants in Kathryn Campbell and the now deceased deputy Malisa Golightly trawled their twice daily media monitoring reports to check if the litany of horrors they’d unleashed had been picked up widely or not. You can almost hear the sighs of relief when they see that it was only the Guardian Australia or New Matilda and occasionally the ABC covering these things. When Peter Martin in the SMH hit the nail on the head with his “weapon of maths destruction” column it sparked a crisis response within the Department of Human Services.

The Human Services Minister in 2017, Alan Tudge, used the conservative press and favoured journalists like The Australian’s Simon Benson — we called him Hansard — to uncritically run the government narrative and weaponise the private Centrelink data of people who had complained in the other, non-friendly media. Imagine being, quite literally, a tool.

It wasn’t just the government narrative, though. It was Tudge’s. He handwrote much of the material that went to Benson and Benson ran it as is; not just the quotes but the rest of the information, too.

The day his story came out was 26 January 2017. It was the same day that Rhys Cauzzo, hit with a fake $10,000 debt and hounded by corporate debt collectors sooled on to him by Centrelink, killed himself.

Where was I? Shrinking from my journalistic duty to at least try and counteract this perverse influence. Sure, I was writing about government attempts to kick people off the National Disability Insurance Scheme — deja vu, I’m getting now — and choosing my battles because I didn’t know how else to bend the corporate will of the newspaper to empathy on Centrelink debt recovery.

This kind of self-reflection is supposed to be uncomfortable, and I do not enjoy the self-flagellation and exposure it brings. But I do try and at least model the behaviour I’d like to see from our public officials, they who have delivered incredible harms at the heel of an illegal and mathematically obtuse scheme before skulking away and claiming it was all just an unfortunate oversight.

Kathryn Campbell, who was found by the Royal Commission to have misled Cabinet at the birth of Robodebt, says in her own defence that she wishes she had sought legal advice over the scheme. The senior policy department had, of course, which showed it was illegal. And that was communicated to Campbell’s department and its effect included in all of the briefs to Scott Morrison until the language suddenly… disappeared from the New Policy Proposal.

Nothing else about this brand new idea had changed between the briefs and the Cabinet documents. It was still supposed to save $1.2 billion over four years and it was still going to target 866,000 with the exact same ‘success’ rate as before, but suddenly there was no mention of income averaging or the need for legislation in the proposal. The words had been removed but the dimensions remained exactly the same.

What Morrison knew or should have known, because he kept the part of the brief that explained this in rigorous detail, was that there was no way for those numbers to hold up and remain true if the income averaging underpinning the measure disappeared. Hence, the Royal Commission found he allowed Cabinet to be misled.

Between these two incredibly powerful public servants — Campbell herself was paid about $800,000 a year, Morrison was on the fast-track to become Prime Minister — a program that defied the laws of physics was delivered. They swapped the microchips of two different dog breeds, scanned the labrador through Cabinet and smuggled the pit bull into full service at the dove release program.

From that moment and every year since, the government and its minions — not all motivated in quite the same way, but dozens and dozens who nevertheless acted improperly or scandalously — agreed to construct a new reality that diverged from the one inhabited by its citizens. Debts that didn’t exist were now real, legal advice that did exist was hidden from the independent ombudsman and otherwise disappeared, and strange afflictions that rendered officials speechless or incapable of writing an email swept through the ranks.

Later, on the witness stand at the Robodebt Royal Commission, so many of these same people developed advanced memory loss that cannot be explained by medical science.

Accountability went to the same place from which the debts emerged: f•••ing nowhere.

It is less surprising, perhaps, that these various maladies and paranormal happenings struck far more heavily at the middle and upper ranks of the public service. The more one earned, the less likely it was that they would lift a single QWERTY keyboard finger to put a concern in writing, if they even bothered to have any. But at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, among the plebeians who were not trusted with policy development, there was no such cluster of cowardice or catastrophic memory failures.

Jeannie-Marie Blake was a Centrelink compliance worker who was so traumatised by what she and others like her were made to do, handling phone calls of people who were threatening to kill themselves over these extortion attempts. And she watched the parade of senior managers take to the stand and say I can’t recall or I didn’t turn my mind to it, or I don’t remember and deliberately and slowly told the room: I Remember.

Because what she saw was novel and horrific, it was seared into the architecture of her brain.

Colleen Taylor, too, suffered no unexplainable ailments relating to her conduct or her ability to recall what had been done. We can deduce, pending further research, that a strong moral backbone confers a kind of immunity upon the bearer, the lack of which corrodes the hippocampus of those who have no strong moral centre; like those who programmed their prejudices into Robodebt.

But Colleen Taylor, the very model of the perfect public servant, did everything she was supposed to do. She worked on the old systems and the new, saw what had changed and immediately alerted her superiors. Right up the chain of command, in order of rank — the reverse peristalsis of bureaucratic authority — as was expected. She told her managers in increasingly panicked and refreshingly direct language: we are being asked to commit fraud against our customers.

They were custodians of integrity, after all, she said. And that went both ways. Except, that was just a word that took on the property her superiors intended only when deployed against the other. Words, in this sense, were like magic pictures or Rorschach tests. One saw what needed to be seen and ignored what needed to be ignored.

Not Colleen Taylor. Eventually, the Secretary Kathryn Campbell was forced to send out an all staff email in the chaos of public anger come early 2017 as the computer spat out 20,000 debt letters a week.

‘Nothing has changed about the how income is assessed or debts raised,’ the Secretary cooed. This was the same hypnotist’s trick that was inserted into the Robodebt New Policy Proposal that went to Cabinet in 2015, that meddled with the language and left the actual program as it was. But Colleen Taylor knew better, and she, bless her, thought the Secretary was being misled.

It was such a serious mistake to be making, so she assumed bad advice. And over 17 pages of email, Taylor told the Secretary everything that had changed and all of the problems: the averaging of income where people did not work consistently, the double counting of income, the rudimentary computer system errors that failed to accept payslips provided; the fact compliance officers were told not to look at the customer record for information they had already given.

None of this mattered. Campbell dispatched her lieutenants to meet with Taylor for more than two hours where the APS4 compliance officer went through every problem afresh and at the end of it the Secretary’s delegates took what had been given to them and made origami.

‘So what you’re telling us,’ they said, ‘is that the old system was too slow and cumbersome?’

Colleen Taylor was subjected to a secret investigation internally — which found nothing, because she had acted meticulously as a faithful public servant at every step of the way — but soon the faithful like Colleen were all resigning because they could not stomach what was being asked of them.

They were replaced by labour hire drones who knew nothing about the old ways, or how far the new ones had descended into the depths.

By the end of Robodebt, the only people who knew anything about how it really worked were those who designed it. They gave nothing away because to do so was to imperil the project. Control of information, always a feature of government, was sharpened to a point.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, perhaps the first private consulting firm in history to be brought in to provide independent ‘reassurance’ of the government’s way of doing things, and who themselves were conscious of keeping their paymasters on side, couldn’t even find the room to move they needed to gloss over how bad this policy was. Their final report, the Royal Commission found, was hit with an anti-matter gun and Campbell’s hand was on the trigger.

It never made it to the department in any traceable form. Vanished, just like that. PwC were still paid the $1 million fee.

Legal advice from the private law firm Clayton Utz, another client of government that liked to soothe the troubled minds of their bursars, found no room at all to wriggle on its 2018 advice to the Department of Social Services — the first such external advice in the history of Robodebt; Campbell had killed off attempts to get some at DHS in January 2017 — which found that Robodebt was illegal.

Senior managers at DSS left the advice in draft form, just the latest in a long line of mystifying philosophical distinctions that Commissioner Catherine Holmes likened to a child putting its hands over its eyes and believing something no longer exists.

Object permanence: public service edition.

The government was playing with lives. And I do mean playing. It all seemed such a game, one that endures today with the smoke and mirrors of accountability.

We have an anti-corruption commission that is, allegedly, anti corruption. Clue’s right there in the title. And yet they took 11 months to announce what they’d decided in three; that there was nothing to see here. The media statement they released to the public to explain the inexplicable contained one misleading statement and one verifiable mistruth.

The word games have continued to the last.

You might have expected justice.

What we got is less than that.

You can almost hear the powers that be as they execute the final manoeuvre of language.

There is no justice here; we’ll just call it that.

Mean Streak by Rick Morton is published by HarperCollins and available at Collins Booksellers Thirroul.

True Story festival is a collaborative production by the South Coast Writers Centre, Caroline Baum and the Illawarra Flame.