We’ll never know just how effective efforts by the public service to ‘throw the book’ at four people who remain employed by the government and found to have breached the APS code of conduct for their involvement in the robodebt scandal are. But there is one major thing the boss of the bureaucracy wants everyone to keep in mind.

Last week, APS commissioner Gordon de Brouwer released a video and public statement informing the community that a 14-month workplace investigation found a total of 12 people had broken the code of conduct 97 times between them


Rebuilding public service from politicisation and externalisation

Restoring trust and integrity in the Australian Public Service requires tackling the corrosive effects of past politicisation (secretary contracts) and externalisation (professional consultants) that have undermined capacity and independence, as highlighted by the Royal Commission on Robodebt fiasco, and parliamentary committee revelations around the extensive engagement of major consulting firms. 

By Michael Lester and Andrew Podger Sep 23, 2024


Chris Wallace The rot in the public service

Canberra is a small city. Forget six degrees of separation. If you’re not actually living across the road from the prime minister, you could well be next door to his chief of staff, married to his press sec, playing golf with his departmental head, sitting next to his driver at the footy, passing him and his partner walking up and down Red Hill at the weekend.

It’s not just a matter of living closely but also of living together for a long time. Many members of Canberra’s public service and political networks first arrive in their late teens to go to university, or in their early 20s to take up jobs as graduate trainees in the Australian Public Service (APS), or to be junior staffers in politicians’ offices.

They spend the next 50 years watching each other’s careers, sometimes close-up, sometimes from a distance, rotating and colliding in patterns like slow-moving petals on a pond. Some rise, some don’t. Some succeed, some fail. Some get stuck for a while and diligently wait for the opportunity to get moving again.

Through all the policy wrangles and budget negotiations, departmental retreats and Christmas parties, marriages and break-ups, school drop-offs and sporting engagements, everyone sizes up everyone else pretty accurately.

So it is that some of Canberra has been agog with the findings of the Centralised Code of Conduct Inquiry Taskforce into 16 current and former APS officials and their handling of robodebt.

It tarred the widely admired former secretary of the Department of Human Services, Renée Leon, who shut down robodebt when the Morrison government minister, Stuart Robert, would not. She was fired a fortnight later.

The same brush tarred her predecessor and robodebt architect Kathryn Campbell. The latter says she was made a scapegoat. Current minister Bill Shorten called her “one of the key central actors in the tragedy” and said she had “failed to show empathy to the victims”.

The taskforce report found Campbell failed in her oversight of robodebt, failed to seek legal advice and continued with it despite knowing, or having ought to have known, that the debts raised were inaccurate.

It found Leon misled the Commonwealth Ombudsman about the legal status of the scheme and took too long to brief the Solicitor-General about it. This claim rests on an assumption concerning an email to Leon from one of her staff, which raised no concern but which had an attachment that glancingly mentioned a legal challenge was “not hopeless”...


Meryl Streep, Chris Rock, Ben Stiller Join Oprah Winfrey in Live Event Uniting Zooms for Kamala Harris Groups The Hollywood Reporter


Sirius irony: The elites who have bought into the landmark former public housing block

As a couple of mining moguls, the son of billionaire Lang Walker and a venture capitalist trophy homeowner from Mosman take the keys to their flash new apartments in the Sirius building, the irony of the whole development is as obvious to many Sydneysiders as the brutalist landmark itself.
After all, the Tao Gofers-designed block is arguably the most famous public housing complex in the country, even after the state government sold it in 2019 for $150 million to developer JDH Capital to be refashioned into 75 luxury apartments. Think gentrification on steroids.
Among the high-profile buyers - undeterred by gawking drivers passing by on the Harbour Bridge - is mining industry boss Mark Lochtenberg who has purchased an apartment for $7.8 million in a company name.
Centennial Coal founder Bob Cameron and his wife Paula are also buyers, but for a more subdued $3.65 million in a company name.
The Whale Beach-based Mark Lochtenberg has bought a city pad in the Sirius building.
The Whale Beach-based Mark Lochtenberg has bought a city pad in the Sirius building.CREDIT: JESSICA HROMAS
Venture capitalist Brendan McAssey has also shown up, care of his corporate interests, as a $6 million buyer with his wife Elizabeth Ong. Maybe a city pad away from their Balmoral residence?
Chad Walker, the son of the late billionaire real estate developer Lang Walker, was another early buyer at $3.85 million off-the-plan. But no sooner did he settle on the two-bedder than it was put up for sale with a $4.5 million guide through PPD’s Jason Pantzer.
For the building’s top sale price look to Jean-Dominique Huynh, who heads up JDH Capital, and who claimed the penthouse as an in-house purchase for $35 million. It’s now on offer for $50 million…

Sydney businessman Nahi Gazal charged with 95 fraud offences after $44m ATO debt

Businessman Nahi Gazal has been charged with 95 offences after allegedly making false claims to gain a financial advantage from the ATO


The founder of the Taiwanese company Gold Appolo Hsu Ching-Kuang told journalists that his company did not produce this particular batch of pagers. Gold Apollo intends to file a billion-dollar lawsuit against the Israeli government after it admitted that Mossad activated explosives in the devices. This mix-up is getting intense. The Taiwanese CEO has started shaking, which is understandable - with such a business incident, the company might as well close immediately. He must at all costs steer everything towards "The Jews made these devices themselves, mimicking ours". As they write, steering won't work out, as it's really a genuine batch from production, with serial numbers and everything. Consequently, he's complicit in a terrorist act, mass injuries of civilians (out of nearly five thousand detonated devices, only nine killed someone, and all of those someones were civilians, not a single militant, it's a monstrous failure), so many lawsuits can be filed against him + the company management + production workers right now - well, you produced the exploding devices, you stuffed dynamite into a civilian pager, it turns out - that the courts will be smoking from the volume of work. Mainland Chinese manufacturers of household appliances, any kind essentially, can now pour baths of champagne - jokes about "oh, a Taiwanese electric kettle - wonder how much dynamite is in there?" are already widespread. And the States have a new headache - Taiwan and Israel have clashed. If supporting Taiwan, then it's necessary to admit that Israeli special services faked a batch of Taiwanese products and indiscriminately blew up several thousand civilians. This is state terrorism, no options. If supporting Israel, then it's necessary to switch to the mode of "Taiwanese are lying, they stuffed explosives themselves, and it suddenly exploded on its own" - after which the Taiwanese will en masse say "Go f@ck yourselves, with friends like these, who needs enemies at all, where do I sign up for the Communist Party, I'm done with such situations". If Taiwan declares war on Israel and, for example, expels all US citizens from its territory, then really no one will cry.