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[Alexender NoahParticipant]

Labor warned against ‘shirking legislative reform’ after robodebt royal commission

Economic Justice Australia has also released a statement calling for the government to implement the full robodebt royal commission report recommendations, two years since it published its final report.

CEO Kate Allingham:

While the unlawful robodebt scheme was a Liberal-era policy failure, the Labor government has now been in power for three years. Anthony Albanese has previously called the Liberal party’s failures in this regard a ‘gross betrayal’ of Australian citizens, but a full term in power failing to enact legislative reform also makes this government culpable of failing to protect its constituency.

Just in March this year, it was revealed that an estimated 10,000 people may have had their social security payments wrongly reduced or cancelled as the result of the potentially defective administration of the employment services compliance system.

Separately, a test case was heard in the federal court this year regarding a debt that was raised against a person using the unlawful practice of income apportionment, which potentially affected more than 2 million Australians.

Allingham said:

It seems to have gotten to the point where, instead of having had meaningful reform off the back of robodebt, government departments now have a process to follow whenever these failures occur. We do not need a clean-up checklist, we need reform that ensures people do not get harmed to begin with.

Continuing to shirk legislative reform, even as consecutive failures reinforce its necessity, amounts to the government treating the sizable portion of the population who receive social security payments with contempt.

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