Podger unleashed to clean out robodebt rot
Andrew Podger called for a robodebt royal commission and railed against the so-called secretary's club.
The Albanese government could soon have the evidentiary trigger it needs to dissolve what was the persistently scandal-plagued Department of Human Services and its most recently bogged-up, re-sprayed and re-launched Services Australia.
The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme has heard Andrew Podger, the outspoken former head of the Australian Public Service Commission, has been called in to conduct an expert forensic probe into how the administrative elements of the unlawful shakedown gained a roadworthy certificate.
Outwardly, Podger’s report is intended to inform and address specific questions around the operation, behaviour and culture of the bureaucracy with regard to its handling of robodebt as they arise from the royal commission’s terms of reference, which they will do.
But it will flow into the royal commission’s wider findings and recommendations that could yet unleash a root-and-branch overhaul of obligations and responsibilities that go far beyond what successive Australian Public Service reviews have managed to achieve.
Probe within a probe
Specifically, the administrative autopsy will clinically analyse where the bureaucratic breakdowns and shortcomings occurred, but more importantly how relationships and responsibilities between secretaries and ministers operated, as well as those of the senior executive service and executive level bureaucrats.
It’s pretty much free-rein.
Podger's new role was announced immediately before the most harrowing evidence yet, given by the mother of a robodebt victim who killed himself, leaving behind a graphic drawing of his fatal last thoughts.
This will be especially important in relation to duties and obligations under key laws, including the Public Service Act, Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act and whistle-blower provisions under the Public Interest Disclosure Act.
Perhaps most ominously, counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme Justin Greggery revealed that Podger will also get to dig into the actual structure of the Social Services portfolio and its deliberately bifurcated design, which sees policy separated from service delivery.
This is where the rubber hits the road because Podger’s observations -- he previously called for a royal commission and pointed to the role of the bureaucracy as much as ministers -- will get down to brass tacks on who is to blame, why, what they did wrong and what the remedies may be.
Given Podger’s previous criticism of the Institute of Public Administration Australia as being “too close” to departmental secretaries when he was calling for the royal commission, it should be a fun read.
Strong medicine required
The remedies outlined could be far stronger, and more potent, than ones recommended in a succession of APS reviews -- such as the most recent one completed by David Thodey, the response to which blanked key recommendations like creating a specific classification for technologists.
To be clear, robodebt was not ever a technological initiative gone wrong. Rather, it was a fundamentally human failure of flawed assumptions and dud process design that tried to use technology as a bonsai-sized fig leaf for its failings.
At its best, robodebt was simply a grotesque piece of innovation theatre.
The Howard-era construct of Human Services was intended to improve service delivery and integrity by putting space between those doing ‘Big P’ policy work opposed to those running the customer service mechanics.
Part of that architecture was to return a number of statutory agencies back to ministerial control to make them more responsive to policy change and modernisations intended to allow transactions and data to flow more easily between agencies and customers, especially as electronic and online transactions became the norm.
Labor has not previously sought to restructure those machinery of government arrangements; indeed, it’s arguable the Coalition tinkered more through the name change from Human Services to Services Australia, which was a straight lift and shift rebrand from Service NSW without the underlying reforms.
Probe into welfare tech, automated decision-making
For the public service as a whole, perhaps the most illuminating dot point for Podger to delve into will be a specific dig into the use of technology in the administration of social security payments, with particular reference to data-matching and automated decision-making.
What has become clear through the royal commission is that once a savings number was arrived at and bowled up by the expenditure review committee, there was simply no reverse gear or capacity to re-imagine the project beyond the frame of a budgetary lens.
Notably, there is now a completely separate probe by Dr Ian Watt into elements of technology procurement at Services Australia, and whether there was appropriate governance and disclosures around lobbying.
Last week, senate estimates heard this could potentially feed into the National Anti-Corruption Commission.
Documents shown to the royal commission on Monday appeared to indicate the massive $1 billion Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation project was not able to deliver the technical aspects of robodebt because it was forward-looking, not retrospective.
Thanks a billion
In the early days of the Abbott government, treasurer Joe Hockey, who was Australia’s first Human Services minister, publicly referenced that overhauling core systems at Tax and Centrelink would cost around a billion dollars per agency – including unavoidable engine rebuilds needed every 20 years or so.
But the massive Centrelink rebuild would not start yielding benefits, primarily through automation, until it went live – well after robodebt was unleashed.
One of the big benefits of a massive core system rebuild is that processes and transactions can be automated (for example, by robotic process automation) to provide intuitive customer service with support aided by chatbots, often characterised by avatars mimicking staff.
Ironically, Centrelink’s massive core system overhaul was built using broadly similar products to the Commonwealth Bank’s globally lauded, namely SAP and Pega software.
Robodebt used none of this. There was not really even an ‘algorithm’ as such – just a series of mathematically defective assumptions using data clearly deficient and unfit for the purpose it was used, as evidence from the Australian Taxation Office revealed.
Disarming the culture wars
One of the risks of bifurcating agencies in a portfolio is the emergence of competing cultures. In the case of the cultures of Human Services and DSS, it’s clear that the tail wagged the dog when it came to the junior agency bowling a new policy proposal directly up to the senior portfolio minister.
Podger has a specific reference to dig into the culture of Services Australia and DSS, the levels of communication between the two agencies, and how they balanced the cultures of enforcement crackdowns and compliance with what they could or could not do legally.
There’s also the small matter of the huge amount of information that might perhaps ordinarily have been in records and emails that were never uncovered in discovery or perhaps never made it into writing so that it physically existed.
Podger has been tasked to look at and report on the quality of APS record-keeping as it relates to robodebt, and whether there are systemic issues more generally.
It will not be a pretty report.
READ MORE:
Robodebt royal commission is a parade of confused responsibilities
Podger unleashed to clean out robodebt rot
Public Sector Informant: It's time for a royal commission into robodebt
Robodebt: can you recall a greater failure of public administration?
