Robodebt is a cautionary tale where the party of small government used pernicious big government power to crush the vulnerable, ride roughshod over process, and put its own interests above citizens.
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And it's a cautionary tale about a weakened public service where the higher some rose the tamer they became.
The royal commission chronicles betrayal most foul, and if this sounds Shakespearean, it should.
This is no ordinary upper echelon breach of norms and ministerial codes of conduct.
Rather, as the exhaustive inquiry of Catherine Holmes SC has laid bare, it is a constructed human tragedy, in which lives were callously destroyed, conniving ambition ran rampant, and the damage of such harms was considered acceptable in the pursuit and retention of power.
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A sealed section of the royal commissioner's 900-page report is understood to recommend that criminal and corruption proceedings be pursued against one or more ministers, and against feckless officials.
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten who has pursued the scandal relentlessly from opposition, joined Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in praising Holmes, and selected bureaucrats.
But in truth, too few of them had the professionalism, courage, and simple human decency to push back against epically unfair and unlawful policy.
The excessive power of robodebt in which the presumption of overpayment was made via an algorithm without actual evidence, is like something from 1984 - the novel, not the year.
For those targeted, the onus of proof was reversed. Recipients struggled to establish that they had not been overpaid (many could not).
Well might Peter Dutton invoke George Orwell as he did so brazenly just weeks ago, but the Opposition Leader need not have looked beyond his own frontbench to find a more plausible link to the political novelist's work.
Robodebt was a pernicious instrument of deliberately unchallengeable authority and its defences by the government and agencies, deployed Orwell's reviled concepts of newspeak and doublespeak.
Shorten described the program as a "shakedown" and the Morrison government's defences of it as "gaslighting". Correct, on both counts.
The findings against the former Coalition government and Morrison in particular are so damning that some may be tempted to see the inquiry as political revenge for royal commissions launched by the Abbott government into the Home Insulation Program (2014-15) and Trade Union Governance and Corruption (2014-15). That would be wrong. The substance here is as manifest as it is shocking.
While survivors can take heart that ministers Tudge, Porter, and Robert, are all now gone from the Parliament, Morrison, the consistent architect of policy, savings, and messaging, remains in Parliament. Defiant and insouciant.
A daily reminder of the stubborn disregard for basic accountability.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
