The whistleblower’s message arrived just before Christmas.
It was 2016, now a distant memory.
He had spent the previous three weeks reporting on problems with Centrelink’s new automated debt recovery system, a system Australia now knows as robodebt.
The complainant was nervous.
They worked in Centrelink’s compliance team. They had been tasked with reviewing the debts generated by the crude and illegal system and discovered that only a fraction was genuine.
It contrasted sharply with the government line. Ministers and their handlers had spent the last fortnight telling anyone who would listen that our reports were wrong. There were no problems with Centrelink’s debt recovery system, the government said. The agency was using the same process as always.
But the whistleblower told us that the government was lying. Worse still, the lies were allowing this new debt recovery process to continue wreaking havoc on some of Australia’s most vulnerable groups.
Talking to me could have destroyed his career. It could have ruined his livelihood. He stretched his family. It strained his friendships.
It was a sense of justice that drove that complainant toward me.
That same desire has driven many others in the nearly ten years since.
Victims, relatives of the dead, advocates, online activists, academics, lawyers, politicians and social service groups – all have been clear about the need for justice.
At every stage of this long story, they were disappointed.
The robodebt was the great test of this nation’s accountability mechanisms. They have repeatedly failed.
Whether through the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s cover-up in 2017, which paved the way for an illegal scheme to continue, or the way the government thwarted or concealed legal challenges in the courts and administrative appeals tribunal, or the National Anti-Corruption Commission’s early and much-criticised decision not to investigate referrals made to it by the royal commission.
This week, the Nacc published its final report. It has done little to shake the perception of a black hole in accountability.
The 445-page report from the National Anti-Corruption Commission considered the involvement of five former public servants and former Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
The report found that two senior public officials engaged in corrupt conduct, but they will not be referred for charges.
The two people were former undersecretary of social services Serena Wilson and former department of human services official Mark Withnell.
Wilson was found to have engaged in serious corrupt conduct by intentionally misleading the Commonwealth Ombudsman during an investigation in 2017.
Whithnell was found to have intentionally misled Department of Social Services (DSS) officials during the preparation of a cabinet presentation on the proposed plan in 2015.
The Nacc said it could not refer them to trial due to a lack of “admissible evidence”. The agency noted that “key confessions and statements made during this investigation are not admissible in the criminal process.”
The other four, including Morrison and former DHS secretary Kathryn Campbell, were cleared of corrupt conduct, with Nacc diverging from the royal commission’s opinion on crucial criticisms of their conduct.
Campbell, Nacc concluded, did not intentionally mislead cabinet by failing to tell them about average income in a policy proposal submitted to the powerful spending review committee.
Morrison, the Nacc concluded, should not be condemned for failing to realize that income averaging required legislative changes to make it legal.
The departments were to blame for not informing him or other ministers of that fact, Nacc said.
This is not the end point that many wanted. The process has not restored the trust in government that was so fundamentally broken by robodebt.
And it has done little to reassure those like Jenny Miller, the mother of Rhys Cauzzo, who took her own life in January 2017 while facing Centrelink debts of around $17,000.
“It’s hard to describe because I feel like I’ve given up nine years of my life and gotten nothing at all,” he said after the report’s release.
“Like there’s no accountability, there’s no justice, there’s nothing.”
