Terry Carney's name appears 118 times in the robodebt royal commission report.
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It isn't because Professor Carney - an emeritus law professor at the University of Sydney - is in any way culpable for the condemned debt-raising scheme. It's because he was one of its loudest critics.
"I said to somebody, it's almost like sort of reading your own obituary," Professor Carney said when asked what it was like to see the report, which is filled with subheadings referencing "Professor Carney's decision" and "the Carney article".
Professor Carney said he feels "vindicated" by the royal commission's findings, but added that "pretty much from the beginning, I knew that I was right [in thinking robodebt was wrong] and that it was a simple issue," he said.
The Carney decision
In March 2017, Mr Carney - who at the time served as a member on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal - handed down his first AAT decision ruling on robodebt, in which he concluded that the automated income averaging system used to raise debts was unlawful.
The AAT is the legal body that handles appeals from some of the most vulnerable people in the community, including welfare recipients and, in recent years, robodebt victims.
Throughout that year, Professor Carney ruled four more times that robodebt was unlawful in appeals that victims brought before him at the tribunal. The appeals were all heard in the first tier of the AAT, where hearings are private and decisions aren't made public.
But come that September, Professor Carney received an email letting him know that, after almost 40 years of service, his time at the AAT had come to an end; his position was not being renewed.
The timing of this decision has raised eyebrows and suspicions. While the royal commission heard evidence that Mr Carney and several other public servants lost jobs or were moved positions after raising concerns over robodebt, Commissioner Catherine Holmes said there wasn't enough evidence to infer that the loss of these positions "were part of an attempt to prevent scrutiny of the Scheme".
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Looking back though, Professor Carney told The Canberra Times that he was "actually pleased" that he wasn't reappointed to the AAT, adding that the decision allowed him to sooner become one of robodebt's most prominent public critics.
![Terry Carney speaking at the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme in Brisbane on January 24. Picture AAP Terry Carney speaking at the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme in Brisbane on January 24. Picture AAP](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/rJkJNFPcdBkDQKqtkgHSjA/c5d13f19-fa9a-48e7-82b4-f81b06d70a11.jpg/r0_0_2887_1620_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"If I had been reappointed, I probably wouldn't have pulled the plug and resigned in order to go public until March or April, and that would have lost quite a number of months of, you know, the ability to air the issue," Professor Carney said.
The fight continues
In 2018, Professor Carney published a journal article arguing that the income averaging system was wreaking a "legal and moral injustice". Evidence before the royal commission showed how the article raised alarm bells within the public service and caught the eye of some politicians.
The royal commission found that it was this article, along with another AAT decision that income averaging was unlawful, that spurred the Department of Social Services to obtain advice from solicitors, Clayton Utz. Draft advice presented in August 2018 indeed found that the income-averaging system was impermissible.
Commissioner Catherine Holmes said that moment should have "prompted, if not the immediate suspension of robodebt averaging, at the least the immediate obtaining of further advice from the Solicitor-General. However, it was never put into final form or acted on".
But Professor Carney, reading the report, said it was "gratifying" to see that "quite a lot of people noticed what I said or wrote about and tried to do the right thing".
"[The report showed] what I'd always assumed: that the public service at the middle level would indeed have been concerned about the sort of points I was making, and indeed they were," he said.
"It's just that the middle level and higher levels of the public service and politicians squashed the attempts to act on and properly investigate the sorts of reasoning I had put out there and rectify them."
![The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme report was released in early July. Picture by Gary Ramage The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme report was released in early July. Picture by Gary Ramage](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/rJkJNFPcdBkDQKqtkgHSjA/ff8eacc2-53e7-40ee-ba2e-579e2a28b673.jpg/r0_36_4000_2294_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
A broken system
But Professor Carney wasn't the only AAT member to rule that robodebt was unlawful. The royal commission's 900-plus page report tells a broader story of how public officials spent years ignoring the tribunal's warnings that the income averaging system was wrong.
The report found that in 431 AAT cases, harking back to 2016, the tribunal was not satisfied that the department's debt notices were accurate because they were calculated using income averaging.
While a further 114 AAT decisions accepted that income averaging was appropriate under the circumstances, the Commissioner found that, unlike Professor Carney's decision, those decisions did not consider "the relevant statutory provisions and legal principles that might impact on the lawfulness of averaging".
But the Department of Human Services did not appeal Terry Carney's 2017 decisions, or other similar decisions that followed it.
Instead, the royal commission found, "DHS felt free to reject the reasoning in those decisions, and continued its use of income averaging under the Scheme".
Had DHS or the Department of Social Services appealed the decisions to the second tier of the AAT, the cases - and whatever findings about robodebt that were made - would have become public.
But instead, "DSS was shielded from the adverse publicity which would certainly have followed a public understanding of what these decisions were saying and how many of them there were," the report found.
Out of the Royal Commission's 57 recommendations, several of them go towards ensuring that public officials cannot ignore relevant AAT decisions again.
These include creating a system for identifying and bringing department attention to AAT cases that raise significant legal and policy issues, and ensuring that the appeals tribunal has a system for publishing social security decisions that could affect policy.
Since the Albanese government came into power, the AAT was dissolved, having been stacked with former Coalition MPs, staffers, candidates and associates.
It is being replaced by a new administrative appeals body, marking not only a fresh start for the tribunal, but a chance to avoid this chapter in history from repeating.