Is Australia’s anti-corruption watchdog corrupt?

Jan 15, 2025
The inscription appeared in a magnifying glass on the black background of the laptop screen.

It was mid-morning on a day in 2009. I was about to be put under for a medical procedure that required a general anaesthetic. From previous experience I recall that anaesthetists assigned to my medical procedures engaged me in light conversation.

I took it they did so to distract me while they poked things into me to administer their sleep magic. The medico preparing me for sleep in 2009 was very talkative. He was also in high dudgeon, having just come from reading Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper during morning tea. He was calling Peter Garrett, a minister in the Rudd cabinet, by a succession of unpleasant names. In the telling, it became apparent that Garrett had “killed” four young men, and the doctor was keen that I become a party to his indignation. In response, I swiftly formulated a private rule and immediately acted on it. ‘Never argue with your anaesthetist’ was the rule. Accordingly, I nodded agreement with his every sentence before he put me to sleep.

The surgery was successful and I lived another day, which gave me an opportunity to find out more about Peter Garrett the serial killer. But it wasn’t until 2014, when Prime Minister Tony Abbott conducted a royal commission into the Home Insulation Scheme, that it was officially revealed Garrett was at fault to the extent that if the scheme had been properly designed and implemented, the deaths would likely have been prevented. However, the commission also found that a better designed scheme would have prevented inexperienced workers being employed by unscrupulous employers who were not prepared to spend time or money training their workers to undertake the insulation work safely. It also became clear that the scheme was hastily put together because its purpose was to inject government funding for it into the economy quickly as an antidote to the international contagion that was rapidly drying up consumer spending during early days of the global financial crisis (GFC).

Garrett greatly regretted that four untrained workers died on his watch. That said, their fate was no more his direct responsibility than the deaths through negligence and misfortune of hundreds of patients in the healthcare systems each year, are the direct responsibility of the health minister.

That aside, the economic antidote worked and Australia was held up internationally during the GFC as one of the strongest performing economies in the world.

That fact was not reported domestically, however, because the American media tycoon Rupert Murdoch decided instead to saturate his Australian tabloid headlines with fanciful stories about Treasurer Wayne Swan’s ‘debt and deficit disaster’. Those headlines about the economy helped bring down the Gillard-Rudd Government, but they magically vanished after 2013 despite Abbott’s Treasurer Joe Hockey massively increasing the debt, accompanied by successive large deficits in 2014 and 2015. There was media silence also when Treasurers Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg continued in the same vein, so that Swan’s relatively modest $191 billion national debt following the GFC in 2011 had become a humungous $542 billion debt before the covid lockdowns in 2019.

Fast forward to July 2023. Justice Catherine Holmes, in her role as the Royal Commissioner on the Robodebt scheme, handed down her report to the government, in which she included a sealed section consisting of the names of six individuals recommended for further investigation for potential criminal culpability with respect to the Morrison Government scheme, officially known since 2015 as the Online Compliance Intervention Scheme, replacing its manual compliance predecessor.

The online scheme as it was passed through cabinet enabled the calculation of overpayment debts owed by social security recipients to be managed without human oversight using a flawed tax office averaging process. It also enabled massive generation of debt notices. In addition, it reversed the onus of proof of the debts from the department issuing them to the people receiving them, and it authorised swift follow up from debt collection agencies employed by the department.

Like the Home Insulation Scheme, Robodebt was rushed into legislation. Although national urgency did not explain the rush, the Social Services Minister at the time, Scott Morrison, could see what anyone else could see; namely, that the Treasurer at the time, Joe Hockey, had been mightily wounded by his appalling 2014 budget, and that a timely budget saving in the magnitude of $1 billion, as proposed under Morrison’s Robodebt, might amount to a brownie point for the minister responsible were the treasury position to become vacant. Serendipitously, the treasury position did become vacant when Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister, and in September 2015 Morrison was lucky enough to fill the role.

It is sometimes said of successful people that, if they have been lucky, they created their own luck. It was suggested at the Royal Commission that the luck from which Morrison was the beneficiary turned on a failure to inform him that the legislation authorising Robodebt required legal advice and legislative amendment. It was also put to the commission that the reason Morrison was not informed about that requirement, which would have stalled the Robodebt proposal at its inception, is because he imposed underhand pressure on senior public servants from the very top to ensure he was not told about the requirement.

That oversight, if it was an oversight, meant that the budget proposal approved by cabinet would inevitably prove to be illegal, as it was four years later after the damage was done. In the interim, the scheme issued more than 800,000 debt notices, with around 470,000 of them being notices of false debts. Successive ministers became aware the debts were false but acted as though they were not because they had been sanctified by cabinet endorsement. Stuart Robert said as much explicitly, insisting that cabinet solidarity required him to say publicly what he knew to be factually untrue.

Minister Alan Tudge had discovered through his own department that a mere 0.01 percent of Robodebt overpayments were the result of fraud, yet he went on record saying that his department would hunt welfare cheats down and they would end up behind bars. The comments won him national headlines as an honest cop on the welfare beat. He admitted to the commission that, given what he knew about the debtors, he should have toned down his rhetoric. But he didn’t. And when he also discovered that some recipients of the debt notices were vulnerable and seriously traumatised, instead of easing off he used confidential departmental information to discredit them in the News Corp press.

One of the letter recipients was a young man named Rys, the son of Jennifer Miller, who gave evidence at the Commission. Rys had received a debt notice from Centrelink of $17,000. He knew he didn’t owe the debt, but he also knew he couldn’t pay it, and had neither the capability nor resources to assemble the information required to prove the falsity of the debt. It didn’t stop him feeling deeply ashamed at what was a low point in his life, accentuated by hounding debt collectors at his door and public statements from a government minister that he was a welfare cheat. Rys was one of an estimated 2300 letter recipients who were reported to have deceased after receiving a letter. Rys brought his life to an end with his suicide on Australia Day, 2017.

Many other recipients were reported to have suffered life-changing trauma with the persistence of debt collectors haunting them day and night, and others discovered large sums missing from their bank accounts. Felicity de Somerville went to pay for medication for her sick daughter in 2017, only to discover Centrelink had taken $11,500 from her bank account.

Others with smaller debts simply paid and were refunded after the scheme had been declared illegal and was abolished. The son of a friend of mine was one of those. He was puzzled that he owed the money, but paid without protest or fuss, and some years later received a refund. Minister Tudge’s media adviser, Rachelle Miller, gave evidence to the commission about a young Liberal Party adviser from another minister’s office telling her about receiving a Robodebt letter and not knowing what to do about it. It made her realise that if someone of that standing was confused about the letter, how would a vulnerable person with no resources, no money or no connections cope with receiving one?

The Royal Commission was cathartic for many people and their families as they heard evidence of the public servants and politicians who made their lives miserable for no good reason, many of them knowingly doing so. In the event, $1.8 billion was refunded by a Federal Court order to Centrelink clients in 2021, but no reparations have yet been paid for pain and suffering or lost opportunities caused by the “massive failure of public administration”, as Federal Court Judge Bernard Murphy put it when he handed down his ruling.

A number of public servants were referred by Commissioner Holmes to the Australian Public Service Commission for potential breaches of the APS Code of Conduct, for which demotions were possible along with reprimands. But many had left the service and remain unscathed other than for the shame of exposure entailed in the evidence they gave publicly to the commission.

However, the six witnesses referred under seal to the newly established National Anti-Corruption Commission in July 2023 for further investigation related to potential criminal conduct, have to date escaped any form of accountability. Almost a year had passed by the time the NACC announced in June 2024 that it was not going to pursue an investigation into the conduct of those six individuals. Following the announcement a deluge of complaints forced the NACC Inspector, Gail Furness SC, to look into what happened. She reported that the decision by the NACC Chairman Paul Brereton to recuse himself because of a conflict of interest was perfunctory and that his continuing involvement on the matter amounted to “officer misconduct”.

On the face of it, after that ruling Brereton should have promptly resigned his commission or been dismissed by the Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, but for the past seven months Brereton has held his ground and the Government has not yet sacked him. It has also been revealed in a series of posts on X by researcher Jommy Tee that FOI material shows “the NACC treated the #Robodebt6 with kid gloves offering them free, independent and confidential counselling services” while providing cold comfort to Robodebt victims.

Establishing an effective anti-corruption body was a key election commitment of the Albanese government before it took office in May 2022. The NACC is the outcome of that promise but it has proven by now to be comprehensively ineffective, possibly by design. There was much argy-bargy in the latter half of 2022 about whether its deliberations would be conducted in public. Albanese decided against that option, partly on the pretext that a model in which hearings were held publicly would not be acceptable to Peter Dutton’s Coalition, who would abolish such a NACC if they got into office.

The toothless NACC model that eventuated was one of numerous Anthony Albanese decisions that have appeared to bend over backwards to please the Dutton Coalition and its public relations arm News Corp. It has earned Albanese’s Labor government a reputation for timidity at best and for complicity in bipartisan corruption at worst.

If Albanese’s cabinet ministers think being soft on LNP corruption and criminality will protect them from retribution in the future by a Coalition administration, they need only remind themselves of the 2014 Abbott royal commission into the Home Insulation Scheme as well as the vindictive commission headed by the partisan Dyson Heydon into trade union affairs, which focused on historic activities of Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten to no avail.

Despite the efforts of Teal independents and the Greens, neither the LNP’s Robodebt nor the corruption of Labor’s NACC are likely to become campaign issues leading into the 2025 federal election. That will be because neither the government nor the opposition will want the matter of corruption to be a central issue, as it was in 2022, and the media will focus reporting on the priorities of the two major parties. That said, in order to win back some of Labor’s lost supporters, Albanese would do well to show some spine and direct his Attorney General to sack the discredited NACC commissioners and promise to start again by creating an anti-corruption body that will transparently do what it’s supposed to do by restoring public confidence in public administration rather than further undermining it.

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