I think that the Morrison government may have regarded the disastrous Robodebt scheme as in some ways a success.
When John Howard gained his second term in office, I somehow knew he was going to crack down on welfare recipients, the unemployed in particular. The result was ‘breaching’ whereby people were denied payments for very minor infractions of the regulations. The scheme was promoted as revenue-related, but this was belied by the fact that 85 per cent of those struck off were reinstated and backpaid.
It was in fact a scheme of social engineering to make people frightened that their payments may not continue and to be grateful when they did. He also introduced the spurious concept of ‘mutual obligation’ which meant, in fact, that welfare recipients were required to do whatever they were ordered to do without question.
The percentage of welfare fraud has been calculated to be about 0.1 per cent of the total spent, but the Morrison government threw enormous amounts of money and resources at the scheme to ostensibly recover this tiny amount of money.
It is hard to resist the conclusion that it was just another government social engineering project.
