Don’t get me wrong, I love Katharine Murphy and Laura Tingle to bits, but reading their editorials expressing incredulity about Stuart Robert’s Robodebt testimony, and public service culture respectively, left me so slack jawed I had to use both my hands to push my mandibular facial structure back into place.
Murphy’s circuitous way of never quite saying Robert was brazenly lying about his rôle in maintaining an illegal scam, always designed to punish the poor for the crime of being poor, was engaging enough, but I just couldn’t help wondering where she’s been since 2016.
For those who relied on the news media for insightful reportage, Robodebt was implemented in June 2016. It was designed to implement an illegal scam to fraudulently allege and purse social security debts based on an automated assessment of income that wrongly matched tax office and social security records. A criminal scam announced almost six months after being implemented, in a way, you know, that might have been a dead giveaway about its nature.
What was the alleged news media response? Crickets. Nothing. Nada. For six years. Maybe a colour story here and there about this or that poor sod struggling with mental health issues and debt collectors set on them like rabid dogs by the incongruously named department of human services. But no investigation into the scam, no fearless hunting down of the facts of minister after minister happily lying to all comers, and acting without a shred of integrity or duty to the people of Australia.
If this had been the public service, not the news media, ‘pursuing’ the story, we’d rightly call that a monumental failure at every level. Like falling asleep on the job for several years.
But speaking of the public service, there was Laura Tingle’s insightful editorial about what sort of toxic culture could have led to the path of outright lies to the public about Robodebt, and what the Commonwealth public service’s rôle in pursuing a scheme it knew to be illegal might have been. Except, like Murphy, she said this six years after the fact, and without actually naming and shaming the seemingly endless procession of staggeringly well paid public servants who were in charge of persecuting the very people they were to have served. Persecution they seemed to pursue with gleeful sadism.
Not until the alleged news media was served up with an organized investigation into the scam, presented almost like a musical, film, or other such entertainment, did the people alleged to be journalists finally become aware of the scope and dimensions of the Robodebt fraud perpetrated on the Australian public.
If Tingle thinks there has been a failure in the public service, I wonder how she’d feel about the proposition that the much bigger disaster for Westminster style democracy was the media’s abject failure to have uncovered this basic truth in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and parts of 2020, until the Morrison government announced it would scrap the scam because it was facing a hugely damaging class action for defrauding the Robodebt victims; was that an irresistible clue, I wonder. Let’s ask the Canberra press gallery. If its members aren’t too busy sleeping.
In the meanwhile, not a word on the continuing human rights abuses experienced by some Australians at the tender mercies of the indentured servitude exercise called ‘work for the dole’. You know, the scam used by a few private sector providers to defraud the Commonwealth of millions of dollars every year on the pretext of giving the unemployed valuable workplace skills and training.
When will the news media suddenly discover that work for the dole was also designed solely as a punishment, has imparted zero employability skills, and mostly funded private provider profits and management bonuses instead of delivering useful, accredited training? When will any alleged journalist visit one of the op shops where work for the dole participants are learning the invaluable skill of pushing a broom for eight hours a day? When will any alleged journalist uncover other venues for indentured servitude, including the private ‘service’ providers themselves, that expose hapless social security recipients to bullying, harassment, other misconduct, and even safety hazards?
Maybe after a few more years of napping on the job.
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