NACC, Kafka and Orwell: Robodebt book on public service foul play a dance with the truth
Rick Morton’s Mean Streak reveals the rot behind Robodebt
Rick Morton exposes the human rights nightmare behind Robodebt in his new book, Mean Streak
It was a scam. Not Nigerian or Russian, but Australian.
Rick Morton is a journalist. A good one. He has an armful of awards and a brain full of energy for the underprivileged, the aged, and issues many readers find kinda boring, the type of journalist who makes the rest of us blush with embarrassment. He is also an author with a powerful command of dialect. He knows his gift and uses it, but he also understands the diabolical ability of language – especially bad language – to change minds.
This is a book about that. Ostensibly, it’s a book about Robodebt, the outrageous government policy designed to scare the underprivileged into believing they owed the government money. It was wrong, not just morally, but factually. Less than 5 per cent of the targets were found to have been guilty of anything.
The 3000 public servants employed who launched the assault earned greater collective salaries than the government deserved from the action. Still, the government enjoyed a windfall, because people were so scared, too innocently ignorant, too bereft of legal assistance, they caved and paid. Some committed suicide. Others lost their families, their tiny businesses. It was a small-scale humanitarian disaster in the world scheme, but it broke hearts and lives, unnecessarily. And, despite a ruthlessly critical royal commission and a High Court case, nobody responsible was demoted, sacked or sent to jail. Some deserved all three.
But Mean Streak is also a book about bureaucratic doubletalk – not authored by geniuses of the English language, but morons who at least knew how to use a thesaurus – and its ability to confound the best of us.
In an extraordinary admission early in the book, Morton confesses to being unknowingly part of the problem.
“What has unsettled me the most in the years I have covered this story,” he writes, “is that my own well-tended journalistic cynicism was entirely deficient in analysing this scheme.”
What an astonishing thing for a proud journalist to admit. And he acknowledges it not because he was weak or incompetent, but because the army of cretins he faced was stronger than him, their “radioactive blast of stupidity” too overwhelming for his talents, their ability to galvanise against those who wanted to hold them to account superior to us all – the journalists, the royal commission, the highest court in the land.
Put simply, Robodebt was, at its very beginning, an error in economics so basic that “a seventh-grader could have seen the problem”. If a person on Centrelink gets a job, they stop having to report to Centrelink, so Centrelink stops paying them.
There is no requirement for the person receiving benefits to alert the government they no longer need welfare any more than a reformed alcoholic needs to report to the pub that he won’t be needing any more beer. It was, and is, a tight, two-week reporting program. If a person on welfare gets a job – say, for six months – they do not report and thus lose their benefit. When they become unemployed again, they apply. Easy.
What the hooligans in government decided to do was check the Australian Taxation Office data against the Centrelink data. What they found excited them greatly, either because they were too dumb or too evil – there are no other explanations that make sense. A person who had earned, say, $20,000 when employed, dropped out of the system, and then earned the meagre amount of welfare while not, the government averaged out their earnings over the year and decided they’d been defrauded and were owed money. It would be rather like an insurance company saying: “Well, yes, your $500,000 house burned down, but we see you spent $30,000 on renovations, so you owe us $30,000.” It was that foolish. But it was probably something worse.
“Let’s clear up a common misconception right from the outset,” Morton writes. “Robodebt was not a mistake. It was not the unhappy consequence of underperforming mandarins. This was their coup de grace: a budget proposal from the most costly portfolio in all of government that would actually save billions of dollars.”
It was a scam. Not Nigerian or Russian, but Australian. It was a wretched scheme, set in motion by a government that coined the phrase “job snobs” to describe a class of people who, unlike well-paid politicians and public servants rewarded excessively for doing nothing more than holding insipid meetings about nothing in particular, would rather not stand to their necks in excrement, particularly when only paid $20 an hour.
“Here is a real conspiracy,” Morton writes. “It was perpetrated by a rogue Australian government providing a convenient enemy to millions of ordinary people egged on by a disturbing uptick in post-truth demagoguery around the world. For anybody inclined to a loathsome distrust of people receiving government support, Robodebt offered the proof they were right.”
Though Morton’s work is scholarly and precise (he sat through the royal commission and the High Court case), his rage is unmistakeable, seething from every page. There are two reasons for Morton’s fury.
He and his mother, and his two siblings, were targets of the embryo of Robodebt. His much-lauded memoir, 100 Years of Dirt (2018), described the poverty and terror he endured as a young boy watching his single mother crying on the phone to Centrelink (or whatever it was called back then), arguing about amounts like $7, which made the difference between he and his family having a meal for the night. For Morton, this story is personal.
But his temper is not altogether selfish. What he tells us in Mean Streak is that this can happen to us all. It doesn’t matter on which side of the political fence you squat, an Australian government can do what it likes with impunity, and that’s a shock. Not a royal commission or a High Court decision achieved anything. In fact, Morton’s book concludes with rebuttals from those responsible – the politicians, public servants, the people who knew, at least in the end, that what they did was wrong. Not a single one admits to their crimes. Instead, they argue that the royal commission and the High Court were guilty of a grave injustice, yet they all keep on chugging on with their all-important careers.
Hanna Arendt, in her legendary essay on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, spoke of the “banality of evil”. Perhaps she’s been misunderstood – what she really meant was the evil of banality. “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement,” she wrote of Eichmann, “he had no motives at all … He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing … It was sheer thoughtlessness … such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man.”
Mean Streak belongs on the shelf next to Arendt and William Shirer, as a warning about what happens when career becomes more important than compassion, mediocrity becomes more valued than critical thinking, when the words “human” and “services”, when used together, mean the exact opposite of what was intended, and when a picture of Kanye West’s girl getting her bum out becomes more interesting to the nation than stories about its own government eating it alive from the bottom up.
Jack Marx is a writer based in Broken Hill
