Towards the end of his book, after referring to the NACC’s initial decision not to investigate alleged misbehaviour and to the completion of the APSC’s code of conduct investigation, Rick Morton states:
‘a large group of the senior management of the Australian Public Service … would like that to be the end of things, as if robodebt was the result of a few bad actors and not the inevitable crisis that springs from a sclerotic institution.’
It is a conclusion that, sadly, I largely agree with.
This book should be compulsory reading for every Australian public servant from EL1 upwards, including state and territory public servants. The secretaries board should draw on it as it monitors the implementation of the recommendations of the royal commission that the government agreed to and pursues its APS Integrity Plan. It should ask the APS commissioner to reconsider his decision to limit the release of the APSC’s code of conduct investigation (and indeed to reassess some of that investigation’s findings).
The IPAA leadership should also reconsider its recent decision to continue to avoid any proper discussion amongst its members of robodebt and the royal commission’s findings.
The book is not an easy read, however, mainly because of poor editing by the publisher. There is no index, nor even a table of contents, and no appendix with a list of all the characters in the book and their roles; chapter headings, while clever, often do not make clear the subject matter covered.
Nor does Morton get everything right. And his stance does not pretend to be objective.
But he tells a compelling story, or series of stories, that leaves the reader profoundly disturbed.
The book’s title
Morton explains the title of the book in the penultimate chapter:
‘The mean is the type of average they deployed, but it was also the casual meanness of indifference that allowed robodebt to flourish.’
Morton’s approach
Morton’s perspective is that of a journalist — a fine one with a rare concern for detail — and someone with personal empathy towards social security clients (he grew up in a sole-parent family reliant on welfare and subject to the system’s bureaucratic rules and power). The royal commission’s legal formality did not stop the commissioner from headline conclusions (‘venality, incompetence and cowardice’ being a prime example), but Morton adds much more background and colour.
He draws heavily on the royal commission’s report and hearings (he attended every hearing with regular reports at the time in The Saturday Paper). He has subsequently interviewed a large number of the witnesses, both bureaucrats and social security clients, as well as their colleagues, family and friends.
This provides the basis for meticulous explanations of social security legislation and the series of steps taken during robodebt, together with explorations of personalities and bureaucratic cultures. These are continually grounded by painful studies of the people affected – their circumstances, experiences, personal relationships and dealings with the bureaucracy.
The 25 chapters are broadly in chronological order, but structured to allow Morton to present a series of stories such as:
- ‘Colonel Cathcart’, alias Kathryn Campbell, the Army brigadier-general DHS secretary, pleasing the new social security minister, Scott Morrison, with the robodebt idea just after Christmas 2014.
- ‘Disappearing Act’, as the scheme’s use of ‘averaging’ ATO data was omitted from the new policy proposal put to cabinet in March 2015, along with the need for legislation.
- ‘Extremely Positive’, the way what should have been seen as alarming news casting doubt about the whole project was presented by DHS compliance executives in mid-2015.
- ‘We Can’t Help You’, being Centrelink’s response to Jenny Miller, who flew to Melbourne to help her son, Rhys Cauzzo, to deal with alleged ‘debts’ in 2016 before he committed suicide.
- ‘Turn It On’, the acceleration of the scheme in late 2016 towards 20,000 cases a week (compared to pre-robodebt’s 20,000 a year) as Colleen Taylor, an experienced APS 4 compliance officer, tried to explain to management how erroneous the whole scheme was.
- ’Shitstorm’, the inevitable public and media reaction as the scheme’s rollout accelerated.
- ‘Conspiracy’, as the DHS and DSS cover-ups in 2017 turned into ‘gross deceit carried out with an odd mixture of both cunning and gormless fakery’.
- ‘Mickey and the Gang’, the amazing story of the 2017 PWC report (or ‘non-report’ as Morton calls it) that gave PWC new business and profits.
- ‘Clayton’s Legal Advice’, the ‘draft’ advice from Clayton Utz in 2018 that was never formalised.
- ‘Two Dutiful Soldiers’, the close personal association between Campbell and Stuart Robert, the government services minister, with shared religious and Army backgrounds, exemplified by the sharing of a bucket of chips in late 2019 as they contemplate the problems they could no longer avoid which the then DHS secretary, Renee Leon, finally presented to their chagrin.
Bureaucratic culture and failings
The civil service’s bureaucratic norms are intended to ensure the efficient, consistent, impartial administration of government programs. The most commonly known downside risks of these Weberian attributes are slowness of decision-making (think of Charles Dickens’ department of circumlocution) and the avoidance of risk.
Morton, however, with much justification, highlights the far more dangerous downside risks of a rampant bureaucracy: its capacity for religiously applying ridiculous rules (drawing on Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, and hence the repeated references to Colonel Cathcart) and, even more seriously, its capacity for evil (drawing on Kafka’s The Trial). There are many other references in the book to the dangers of bureaucracy, such as Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borge, Rousseau and Alexai Yurchak.
Some of Morton’s observations may seem extreme to APS leaders imbued with the belief that the APS values are generally upheld, and with confidence in the emphasis on ‘leadership’ over recent decades. Until you consider the damage robodebt caused to thousands of Australians, people reliant on welfare and many like Rhys Cauzzo being highly vulnerable. And until you see the lengths so many senior public servants went to design, implement and defend this shameful and unlawful scheme, or merely to fail to take responsibility when they knew or had reason to suspect it was unlawful.
Let me highlight a few of the points Morton makes about the bureaucratic culture that facilitated robodebt.
Brigadier Campbell’s command and control approach “was terrifying to those below”. Performance reports that she ‘could do more to think about how you treat people’ were evidently ignored with no consequences as she ‘delivered at all costs’. When promoted to DSS, she literally had an out-of-favour deputy secretary moved to an office in the basement. Her army allegiance clearly outweighed any appreciation of the culture needed in a civilian department whose mission is to help people in need.
This culture was reinforced by Campbell’s ‘consiglieri’ in DHS, Malisa Golightly, who wreaked even more terror on her underlings as well as her counterparts in other departments.
The ambitious nature not only of Campbell but of so many other senior executives greatly exceeded their responsibility for care and public service. Campbell’s ‘ravenous ambition’ took the ill-considered idea as a gift for her fortuitous meeting with Morrison at Christmas time in 2014. Scott Britton, the senior executive who provided this gift, wrote on the subsequent risk assessment that “this risk is an opportunity”. Morton paints an SES culture of hierarchy and ambition, with SES Band 1s being the ‘sharks’ who want to be Band 2s.
Ambition and rivalry also contributed to the constrained communications between DHS and DSS despite the importance of connecting policy to administration.
The sheer incompetence of senior executives in DHS is breathtaking, along with their arrogance. “We know boats” was the maxim used by Mark Withnell, the SES Band 2 in charge of compliance, to dismiss any DSS advice and to limit inter-agency communications. But he and his executives had no idea about the social security legislation they were administering, nor the procedures competent APS 4’s like Colleen Taylor followed; in Morton’s assessment, they would also have failed a first-year statistics course in the way they prepared estimates of savings.
One has to wonder whether SES leadership criteria have totally omitted any substantial knowledge and skills.
At the same time, collegiality discouraged others from calling anything out. Even after it was all over, when giving evidence to the royal commission, former DSS deputy Serena Wilson was reluctant to point the finger at Campbell or Golightly, or her own secretary, Finn Pratt, whom she had so effectively protected through the whole saga. Despite Golightly’s appalling behaviour, Wilson was concerned about relations between DSS and DHS and the need for collegiality.
Morton calls this the “snare trap”. It reminds me of the discussions we had in the early 2000s as we pushed back NPM’s focus on devolving management authority to each agency to instead give more weight to whole-of-government collaboration. The ground-breaking MAC report, Connected Government, included a foreword by Peter Shergold which Roger Beale and I drafted that included a paragraph cautioning that collaboration must not be at the expense of ‘group think’, but should always involve careful consideration of different perspectives and areas of expertise. Robodebt is by no means the only case in recent years when different perspectives have been held back in order to protect ‘collegiality’.
Morton is clearly perturbed by Campbell’s focus on pleasing her ministers, the lack of any clear boundary between herself and those ministers, and the importance she saw of close proximity to Parliament House (her $100 million, 15-year lease of DHS’s ‘swanky’ digs next to Parliament House contrasting with the offices 25 minutes away in Tuggeranong which she had to go back to in late 2017). He is also rightly concerned by the power exercised by some of the ministerial advisers and the excessive responsiveness of SES officers including lawyers to demands such as those for personal details of social security clients making complaints.
The associated culture of avoiding the creation of records of politically sensitive advice, and of constraining access under FOI to the records that were created, is also continually highlighted. And of course, the fear of presenting advice ministers did not want to hear. Surprisingly, however, Morton does not highlight secretaries’ tenure arrangements.
Another cultural concern was the use of consultancies that could be closely controlled. The story Morton tells about the PWC consultancy also reveals highly questionable procurement processes and questionable gifts of entertainment accepted by Campbell.
Lack of confidence in the response to robodebt
Part of Morton’s unease about the response of both the government and the APS leadership to robodebt and the royal commission comes, I suspect, from the appendix of reactions to the royal commission and a draft of his book from a number of those subject to adverse findings. This includes 30 pages from Campbell’s lawyers. The material has almost no acknowledgement by these people of the damage caused by robodebt even now. Some remain totally absorbed by the damage to their own reputations.
Other reasons for his unease are set out in the last two chapters of the book.
Even the ombud, in a message to staff days before the commission released its report, tried to massage the expected criticism by suggesting the failure to publicly comment on the question of lawfulness “is not a reflection on the office’s staff … they did good jobs in difficult situations. … Ultimately my predecessors made difficult discretionary decisions … in my experience it is not necessarily straightforward deciding what to say about issues and what to publish.”
A former DHS lawyer claimed he had “played a small and maybe important role in bringing this thing to an end. I now ask myself though whether there was more I could have done. I’m positive … I’m not the only one asking that question … Look, I’m tempted to say something about speaking truth to power but that’s trite … But imagine … Will you walk into your dep sec’s office like the commission suggested and say, “Listen up, there’s a problem here?’”. As Morton says, “Yes… that’s exactly what a public servant is supposed to do”.
The APS commissioner also gets a deserved shot from Morton. His speech last year to The Mandarin’s conference called for the weakening of the FOI Act, saying “It is no point just to tell everyone to change”. This is despite the royal commission’s recommendation, agreed to by the Government, that the APSC itself develop standards for recordkeeping.
Morton does not comment directly on the APSC’s code of conduct investigation but the material about Leon and Campbell, and the efforts Leon had to take to ensure the advice about unlawfulness could not continue to be avoided or disregarded, surely casts doubt on the APSC’s conclusion of equal culpability. The material on events in 2015 also surely cast doubt on Campbell and Pratt not being found to have breached the code when robodebt was first put to ministers.
And then the attorney-general, in announcing the government’s response to the royal commission, bizarrely pretended that the recommended strengthening of the FOI Act was not a recommendation at all so he could pretend the government supported every commission recommendation. All that did was undermine the sincerity of the government’s response.
Final observations
Having a royal commission into robodebt was essential. Otherwise, all this dreadful stuff would have been swept under the carpet.
The royal commission’s recommendations address many of the cultural issues highlighted by Morton and, for the most part, they have been accepted. These include many of the proposals in my report to the commission.
Consistent with my report, the commission also explicitly endorsed key Thodey report recommendations about strengthening the merit processes for secretary appointments and the role of the APS commissioner (exactly the same measures Katy Gallagher committed to in late 2023 but then drew back from last month). Unfortunately, the commission omitted these from its own recommendations, allowing the government to ignore them in its response to the commission’s report.
The commission did not have the time or capacity to recommend wholesale reform of the APS and did not pick up a number of my proposals addressing the cultural issues identified by Morton — such as the importance of senior executives’ subject matter knowledge.
Morton’s excellent book should cause deeper reflection by APS leaders on the bureaucratic culture issues that he highlights. This should go beyond the implementation of the royal commission recommendations, or consideration of the wider proposals in my own report. Senior public servants should be constantly aware of the serious downside risks of bureaucracies and the vital importance of understanding who they serve (“the government, the Parliament and the Australian public”) and appreciating their open accountability for that.
READ MORE:
Robodebt inquiry report too little, too late and not convincing
About the author
Andrew Podger AO is a professor of public policy at Australian National University. In his public service career, Andrew served as the Australian Public Service Commissioner and as departmental secretary for federal departments, including Arts and Administrative Services, Housing and Regional Development, and Health and Family Services.
