Public Eye: Amnesia outbreak hits APS, ministers at robodebt royal commission

The former Department of Human Services (now Services Australia) deputy secretary in charge of services reform Malisa Golightly died in December 2021.

It comes in several forms. One take's "she didn't raise concerns with me".

With ministers taking no hand-written notes in meetings there's nothing to confirm either way.

Commissioner Catherine Holmes quipped surprise that "nobody seems to keep a paper diary anymore".

A clue might be found in developments in application of freedom of information on ministerial diaries.

Another form is "I raised concerns with her", also in a verbal conversation, no emails, no notes, no further action.

The commissioner has rarely let witnesses get away with howlers, but on the astonishing number of "I don't recall" answers, the commissioner has kept her views to herself.

We'll have to wait for the report.

The royal commission has heard much about email workloads, such as the reasonable impracticality that Centrelink's Hank Jongen could personally respond to all messages in the Hank email address that he gives out to the public during his talkback radio chats.

On the other end of the spectrum was Alan Tudge, a former minister of the crown who complained to the commission that he couldn't possibly read the "100 to 150 emails a day just to your APH account".

That was too much so Mr Tudge relied on his media adviser Rachelle Miller to tell him about any significant stories in the daily media roundup that would have been shared to that inbox.

Ms Miller had an altogether different recollection about Mr Tudge's interest in relevant media coverage and in particular his appetite for appearing in it, describing him as a "media tart".

When the final costs of robodebt are revealed, it's going to be eye-watering.

The class action payout already eclipsed the $1 billion in the scheme's theoretical savings.

As the letters from automated data matching were sent out at scale, the Human Services department was not prepared for how many erroneous cases it would generate and the manual work each would add.

The appeals branch boss Elizabeth Bundy confirmed there were 400 public servants exclusively working on reviews and providing documents to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal before the scheme was shut down.

But even with all those authorised review officers the commission has heard of re-examinations failing to get the right result on the first or second review.

That's not something that can be blamed on a data-matching algorithm.

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It can be hard to keep up with which government bodies are in the process of banning TikTok and which are in the process of unbanning it.

The Victorian government Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action is the latest to do both within days.

Staff were directed to remove the app by January 30. That order was rescinded on January 31, without explanation.

Evidence emerged last year that ByteDance, the app's Chinese parent company, could be logging keystrokes, including passwords, and storing the data in Singapore where it can be accessed by the Chinese's government. The app denies Chinese government interference.

Many federal departments now ban employees from downloading the app to their work-issued devices, including Defence; Home Affairs; Australian Signals Directorate; Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water; Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Foreign Affairs and Trade bans it for most workers, except those in Tourism Australia, who presumably need it for all those adorable koala videos.

The Canberra Times is not shy of a little attention but it was perhaps not the right kind of attention we wanted in a recent FOI request.

Late last year, someone lodged a request seeking to determine the first document the Prime Minister's Office received from any source containing the phrase "vaccine mandate".

To our surprise, it was a humble The Canberra Times public service newsletter sent on Wednesday, November 25, 2020.

The newsletter's topic didn't actually touch on the issue at all, however - it instead called for greater transparency in the wake of the Brereton report's release.

But four links were included at the bottom of the newsletter and one of those was on Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce's decision to declare a "no jab, no fly" rule amid the resumption of domestic travel post-lockdown.

It's apparently this innocent email that cast the first stone. Or at least cast the first written mention of a "vaccine mandate" to then-prime minister Scott Morrison's office long before any freedom fighters came rapping at his door.

All publicity is good publicity, right?

When a former PwC Australia international tax lead was busted last month for sharing confidential details on upcoming tax reform with business clients, it spilled into a range of calls.

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones followed the Treasurer's lead, warning "the tax advice profession is now on notice".

A former ATO deputy commissioner Mark Konza saw it as a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity to crack down on the Big Four working against the taxpayer's interest.

Former senator Rex Patrick wanted more than just a push for the Big Four to rebuild trust after batting for two teams in the same competition. He wanted deterrence guaranteed to hurt where it matters.

"Rather than just being absolutely furious and ropeable, why don't you take real action and ban PwC Australia from government work for two years. That's what would happen in other countries," he tweeted.

It's not easy sometimes to explain how the public service works to people outside it. A Facebook page, called "Describing things in Canberra", has nevertheless given it a go in articulating the APS hierarchy that regulates the lives of public servants.

Starting with the junior levels, it describes APS1 and APS2 as "virtually non-existent, but theoretically learning how to do things". While it's the APS3 level that "does things", and APS4 that "bravely tells people when things are not working", it's really APS6 work that involves running the country, the page says. A public servant at EL1 level "spends 90 per cent of the time in shock at how many things remain to be done, bravely tells people why doing things that way will not work", while at EL2 level they deal "with everyone else's feelings, opinions and brave complaints about the doing of the things".

Accurate so far? As for the highest levels, SES2 staff have "largely forgotten how to do the actual things, except for that one thing".

As for secretaries, "it is vastly preferable to work in an area doing a thing where the secretary does not know anything about that thing".

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