“He didn’t let me know how much pressure he was starting to feel from the debts,” Jennifer Miller told the robo-debt royal commission.
An official who ran the human services department’s internal reviews for welfare payments in 2017 agreed at the robo-debt royal commission that using the controversial practice of income averaging to calculate Centrelink debts could result in inaccurate figures.
Centrelink’s debt collectors started taking money from her pension to repay the $64,998 they said she owed even though Gay had already lodged a dispute.
The former PM said that if he had been given the information “in the way that I’ve now seen it ... then I doubt we’d be sitting here today”.
Advice stating the scheme needed legislative change had been erased from the brief presented to the Coalition’s razor gang for sign off,the royal commission heard on Tuesday.
The Canberra bubble conceived an unthinkable attack on vulnerable Australians and left the dirty work to robots,then too many of us missed the human element.
DHS executives sent an alert in 2015 to Scott Morrison as social services minister saying the government needed to change legislation surrounding debt recovery.
The Ombudsman collaborated extensively with the Department of Human Services and its investigation into the agency in 2017,the royal commission has heard.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison and Marise Payne,a former minister for human services,will appear before the robo-debt royal commission in the next fortnight.
The royal commission into the unlawful welfare debt recovery scheme has heard from a roll call of senior public servants highlighting a lack of communication,siloed work between departments and failures to pass on legal concerns.
The persistence of the unjust robo-debt scheme across five long years underlines that the rule of law arrives too late or not at all for many everyday Australians.