New laws forcing agencies to cooperate with the Commonwealth Ombudsman and surrender documents have passed parliament, in the latest part of the government’s response to the Robodebt royal commission.
The scathing 2023 inquiry found officials at the Department of Human Services and Department of Social Services concealed information and misled the Ombudsman’s during three years of inquiries that failed to expose the illegal scheme.
The royal commission recommended a new statutory duty to assist the Ombudsman be placed on departmental secretaries and agency chief executive officers, and new information gathering powers, including remote access to records.
In 2023, he Albanese government agreed to the recommendations and almost all the 56 others from the royal commission, including a framework for automated decision making and reviving a citizen watchdog.
A bill for the new duty and Ombudsman powers was introduced last October and quickly passed the lower house.
An inquiry into the bill over the summer recommended only a minor administrative change which the government agreed to. The bill passed the Senate on Wednesday without a lone Greens amendment calling on the government to go further in its Robodebt response.
The Albanese government has backed the strengthened Commonwealth Ombudsman to undertake more inquiries with $2.3 million over four years from 2023-2024 and $700,000 ongoing.
Royal Commissioner Catherine Holmes in 2023 found the Robodebt scheme was “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal” that was rushed into operation with “little interest” in its legal basis and then covered up with “dishonesty and collusion”.
In 2017, as complaints and media scrutiny of the scheme intensified, the Commonwealth Ombudsman commenced an ‘own motion’ investigation and sought the assurances the departments had on the legality of their debt-raising process.
But its inquiries were hampered by some officials that the royal commission found had stalled and “withheld key documents that fell within the scope of the requests”, including explicit advice doubting the legal basis for the entire scheme.
A statement by Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said the new legislation “recognises the important role that impartial, independent and robust oversight plays”.
The unsuccessful Greens amendment would have noted the “community outrage” about a lack of Robodebt accountability and called on the government to unseal a confidential chapter with adverse findings in the royal commission’s final report and abolish punitive welfare compliance measures.
“This is unfinished business,” Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne tweeted. “Without urgent social security reform we risk more tragedy.”
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