Officials who didn’t want to hear bad news, and ministers who wanted to manage the news, are the heart of this story, writes Laura Tingle.
The cover-up culture that created robo-debt must also go
Officials who didn’t want to hear bad news, and ministers who wanted to manage the news, are at the heart of this story.
Laura TingleColumnistIn mid-November last year, the former head of the Department of Human Services, Kathryn Campbell, was asked by senior counsel assisting the royal commission into the so-called robo-debt scheme if she would describe the system, implemented under her watch, as “a massive failure of public administration”.
“I consider it was a failure of public administration on a significant scale,” Campbell said.
Remarkably incurious: Alan Tudge, former minister for human services, appeared before the royal commission this week.
“Can you think of a bigger one?” she was asked by senior counsel assisting Justin Greggery.
“I have been involved with other significant failures and there have been other significant failures, but I don’t think that it’s useful to talk about those,” she said.
The difference between a “massive” failure and one “on a significant scale” is not entirely clear, though further evidence to the commission in the last couple of weeks about this absolutely disgraceful implementation of public policy – in our collective names – might lead most people to prefer “massive” as a description.
Campbell’s suggestion that she’s been involved in “other significant failures” is also not exactly reassuring.
For her efforts in the Human Services portfolio, she was promoted by the Morrison government to run first the Department of Social Services and then the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Although removed from that job with the change of government, she was given a new role in Defence as a “roving adviser” on the AUKUS deal, retaining her salary package of nearly $900,000 a year.
This royal commission has something for everyone who has railed about the way public administration has deteriorated in recent decades.
This royal commission has something for everyone who has railed about the way public administration has deteriorated in Australia in recent decades.
There’s been a lot of focus this week on the actions of individual ministers in the former Coalition government, with former human services minister Alan Tudge and former social services minister Christian Porter both appearing in the witness box.
And it is striking how quite a few of the names you have heard attached to various debacles and embarrassing moments in that government are embroiled at the centre of this scandal: Scott Morrison, Tudge, Porter and Stuart Robert.
At this point, the only one to emerge with any credibility is Porter, simply because this week he accepted responsibility for his part in the failed scheme and regretted he had not pushed harder with questions about its legality. (And at least there is a record that he asked about its legality.)
Concept of ministerial responsibility
By contrast, Tudge, the minister who oversaw the ramping up of the system of data-matching tax and social security records to an industrial scale, revealed a staggering lack of familiarity with the idea of ministerial responsibility.
“Do you understand the concept of ministerial responsibility?” Greggery asked him.
“I accept and understand deeply the Westminster concept of ministerial responsibility,” Tudge replied. But he said he did not accept responsibility for the choices of individuals in his department to not raise a matter. “I was responsible for the implementation of the scheme,” he added.
“Surely, that means the lawful implementation of the scheme?” Greggery responded.
But apparently not. Tudge argued that he had no reason to doubt the legality of the scheme since it had gone through cabinet. But he seemed remarkably incurious even when the media started to be flooded with questions about the scheme.
While the minister was presuming his department would raise matters, lawyers in Social Services had already told the commission that in 2018 they “feared” giving their boss, Campbell, news she would not have liked relating to legal advice about the unlawfulness of the scheme.
“After she came to the department ... there came to be a culture even at the higher levels of reticence or fear to raise issues,” one officer told the royal commission. “Colloquially, there was a commentary no one wanted to give her bad news.”
Public service debasement
Whatever the failings of ministers, the royal commission has revealed the most staggering and blatant picture of how the public service has been debased over the past 30 or 40 years into an institution driven by a “can do” culture determined to deliver whatever the government demands, to the point where it is delivering things that aren’t actually legal.
What’s more, it has revealed departments engaging in an industrial-scale cover-up of unlawful revenue raising, including a deliberate policy of not challenging adverse tribunal rulings in order to keep the robo-debt scheme out of courts where its legality might be challenged.
It is a culture where in a massive government department, a secretary and deputy secretary can insist on a process in which any statement released by the department has to be signed off at the most senior levels, yet can attend a conference where a speaker asserts that a multibillion-dollar program they are running is unlawful, and don’t bother to chase up the details.
It is a culture where government departments run huge media divisions that work hand-in-glove with ministers’ offices to deliver false information and “counter-narratives” about government programs.
The dysfunction in the public sector was assisted by the use of external consultants generating separate streams of advice for senior bureaucrats – at considerable taxpayer expense, and often keeping other senior officials in the dark.
Media management
There was damning evidence from executives from PricewaterhouseCoopers on Friday about the firm’s role in reviewing robo-debt but, like so much evidence already heard, apparently not necessarily delivering the advice that people might not want to hear.
Royal commissioner Catherine Holmes said the evidence of one PWC partner “challenges credulity”, and that a “nod and a wink” may have been given to bury the firm’s report, commissioned on a contract worth almost $1 million.
Topping off all this, however, was the evidence of Tudge’s then media adviser Rachelle Miller about the government’s media management of this story.
It was Miller’s positively clinical retelling of how she ran a strategy to run down the credibility of people who had come forward, and to use the story to try to deliver a “political hit” on Labor as being soft on welfare fraud.
She reflected how the then government divided its view of the media between “left wing” and “right wing/more friendly” in a way that is something to behold.
She recounted how the government dismissed the growing avalanche of stories about people receiving extraordinary assessments of what they owed – often tens of thousands of dollars – because they were being run in the “left-wing” media.
Tudge had “requested the file of every single person who appeared in the media … you could see the exact transactions that they’d had with Centrelink”. Tudge said this was in order to get the problems resolved. Miller recounted how the government released personal information of robo-debt “case studies” to “more friendly” tabloid media – information that Tudge personally oversaw – to deter more people from speaking out, a strategy Holmes has described as designed to “intimidate people who complained about robo-debt”.
Like the bureaucracy, it seemed Tudge and his office invested a huge amount of time in studying what the media was saying, and trying to control what information it received.
But apparently they never had the time or even the curiosity to ask whether there might be a legitimate problem.
The government involved in this dreadful episode may be gone. How you change the bureaucratic culture that allowed it to happen must be one of the biggest questions arising from the royal commission.
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