Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Robo from the Rich

According to the recent Royal Commission, nearly half a million Australians received false Robodebt notices. Welfare recipients – people living in poverty, were criminalised by an automated debt-recovery system that left people to dispute a debt they never had. The system used to calculate the debt was wrong. It caused enormous harm to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people. For some, the pressure was so great, they took their own life. Others may have got their money back but have had no acknowledgement of the personal harm that Robodebt caused them at the time, and possibly may cause in the future when they might want to buy a home or need a line of credit. 

Jenny Miller lost her 27-year-old son to suicide when Centrelink told him he owed $28, 000. He was bombarded with daily calls and letters from Centrelink and debt collectors, and his mother believes this pushed him over the edge. I find this impossible to get my head around; right now, one in three big corporations pay no tax. More than half of the mining, energy and water companies paid no income tax in 2020–21. In a story about tax avoidance in The Guardian from eight months ago, those companies included Adani Mining Pty Ltd, one AGL entity, Alcoa Australian Holdings, Ampol, Anglo American Australia, ExxonMobil Australia, two Glencore entities, a Peabody Australia holding company, Santos, two Shell energy entities, Whitehaven coal, Woodside Petroleum and Yancoal Australia.

Chevron, one of the world’s leading integrated energy companies, with headquarters in the US has been present in Australia for almost 70 years. They paid a total of $30 income tax for 2020–21, despite having a total income of $9.1 billion and a taxable income of $113 million. 

How can a coal and gas giant pay $30 in tax and get away with it, while a single person on Centrelink was issued fines of $28K? How can vulnerable people living in poverty be told they owe more than a gas company? How can they end up killing themselves while corporations make a killing?

Introduced in 2016 by then Minister for Social Services, Christian Porter, this automated debt recovery scheme was capable of issuing debt notices at 20, 000 a week. From 2016 to 2019 the Robodebt scheme issued more than half a million inaccurate Centrelink debt-recovery notices through ‘income averaging’. This has since been ruled unlawful. Those who disputed the debts imposed on them were then asked to prove they didn’t owe it. Scott Morrison, former PM and then leader of the government that endorsed this scheme, has rejected adverse findings made against him. In a 990 page report Commissioner Holmes says the scheme was plagued by collusion and dishonesty in concealing its unlawfulness. 

It’s the most blatant example of a government weaponising the welfare system. It makes me wonder if the sudden enthusiasm for upping everyone’s support payments during covid wasn’t some sort of economic contrition? 

People have been paid back, but it’s not enough. The people who took their lives are gone. There will be class actions to come. The cruelty at the heart of Robodebt can’t be restituted by money alone. It goes deep to the heart of our sense of fairness and our need to call out a system that criminalises the poor.

So I have a suggestion. Let’s apply the same brutal debt recovery software to corporations and the super wealthy. Let’s garnish substantial sums of money from their bank accounts. Let’s force them to sit on the phone for accumulated months, pushing buttons, while they wait for an operator who has the authority to allocate an appeal number. Let’s calculate and recover the real debt owed to this country. Let’s call it: Robo from the Rich.

And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of that annoying liability called Scott Morrison. Maybe it’s time to go home, Scott, and ask Jenny what to say to a mum who lost her son to a government lie.