Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's books podcast, hosted by Editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of our most talented writers. In this episode, we're going to hear from our very own Rick Morton, the Saturday Paper seenior reporter, won a Walkley Award for his seven AM special series about Robodet. He covers the
scandal and its effects in his new book Meanstreak. As always, I'm joined by host Michael Williams to tell me a little bit more about the episodes.
Hi Michael, Hi Ruby.
So Michael, we've covered the robodette scheme and it's devastating consequences on seven Am extensively, including in that special series with Rick. But for anyone who might need a bit of a reminder about what happened, can you tell me about the scandal?
Yeah, Roby, it does feel a bit like explaining Rick Morton Robotette to a seven AM audience is like explaining.
Water to a fish.
But for those who missed it entirely, I'm going to give the briefest of summaries. It was back in twenty sixteen and the coalition government used an automated system that was nicknamed robodad to ostensibly recover overpaid welfare payments from people. And the program relied on this algorithm that would match data from the ATO with income reporting from welfare recipients. But the crucial bit is that it relied on income averaging. It was a process that lawyers had already flagged concerns
with and it was neither fair nor accurate. The maths was bogus, the morality behind it was bogus. The legal advice said it wouldn't work, and despite this, it became the basis of the ways in which they tried to get money back from deeply vulnerable people. It was a shit show, not to put too fine a point on it, and Rick has captured that beautifully in his book Mainstream.
And writing a book is notoriously challenging for journalists who tend to be used to daily or weekly deadlines. So what is it about mainStreet that you think really sets it apart from other books like this?
Yeah, I mean it's a really interesting question. Is are you writing a book for people who have been covering the journalism as it goes along, So the book ends up being a kind of summary and a long view reaching conclusions, or are you writing it for the people who, when it was coming in a kind of day to day newsy basis couldn't quite absorb it. Need the kind of refresher in the back to basics. And what Rick
does so well is navigate those two things. You know, this is a story that, on the one hand, is incredibly technical. It requires understanding of maths and the minutia of welfare policy. But it's also a deeply human story. It's about understanding the consequences when vulnerable people have taken advantage of when they're demonized, and when shame is weaponized against the Australian public by its own government. And Rick manages to do all those things at once while at
the same time being funny, engaging, entertaining. It's a terrific read and I was really excited to talk to.
Him about it.
Sounds like Rick Morton at his finest coming up in just a moment. Thank god for Rick Morton.
I sat down with Rick at Canberra Writers' Festival last month to discuss meanstrec I suspect I'm not alone in this room in that many times over the past few years, in any given week, I find myself uttering the words thank God for Rick Morton.
That's yeah. Let's face it.
There are so few people in public life, in the cultural and intellectual life of this country about whom we feel that kind of trust, And the conversation today is going to be no small part about trust, about failures of it, about failures of people in public life and their idea of what they owe to one another, what we all owe to one another. Mainstreak is the culmination of years of work. It's the culmination of at times
I'm sure painful work. But I wanted to kick off by asking you to reflect on our attitude towards welfare recipients in this country more generally, not just in the context of this as a society, as a culture, how do we regard those who require assistance?
Not well? Is breaking news? Not well at all?
You know. I grew up in Queensland and my mum was on the single parent pension and I noticed, particularly even within welfare groups, there is a lot of that kind of They've imbibed the cultural narrative, which is that there are dull bludges and lazy people on welfare out there, and if you're on welfare and it's not you, it must be someone else. And so there's a lot of that kind of cross finger pointing. And of course the further up you go, particularly into the middle classes, it's
all people talk about because they're paying tax. Session on robodet this week, and a guy came up to me at the end and he said how many people still owed money? And then he started talking to me about how he paid a lot of taxes as a small business owner. Even when he bought his Mercedes, he had to pay a lot of tax on it. And I felt very sorry for him and all that he's been through.
But then I woke up from my comra and I realized what an idiot he kind of embodied and embodies that kind of theory that these people can't be getting something for nothing, and we still do it with mutual obligations. You know, they must be forced to dance for their money, to look for jobs that don't always exist, to stay in jobs that might be harassing and bullying them. And it's all because we can't handle the idea, and it's
not a new idea. Bertwind Russell was writing about this a long time ago, that the poor can't have leisure, they can't do nothing, because that's what rich people do, and they spend it fighting, fucking, and feasting. So this idea that people must be forced to perform their poverty and be judged for it is not new, and it is the reason.
We have robot at really, so rather than have compassion for other people who are struggling, rather than recognizing their own struggle and looking to government to have a role in it. Instead, there is this kind of embedded attitude that says there's something shameful about needing help. The shame is the kind of beating heart of the way we regard welfare recipients.
Shame is an important evolutionary function in the human psyche. It's just that most of the people who should feel shame don't, and it's always just everyone.
Else that feels it.
It's like I look at a lot of people at the top and I'm like, you could do with a little bit more shame. And you see that kind of that, you know, this idea that we vote against our own interests.
It goes all the way up to the top.
When you eventually see the people making decisions and they still vote against what is right or in all of our interests because they think that, you know, for example, just to use the National Anti Coruption Commission or you know, an accountability body where they will legislate something that doesn't actually do anything because they might be the ones that are in power one day, or might be the ones
doing something that is found to be corup. So we don't want all these checks and balances, and so you know, the whole system is rife with it, I think, and we're poorer for it.
I mean, I remember you wrote a piece for me in the Monthly during the period of the Royal Commission, and when we're going back and forth talking about it, part of your kind of summation of the point you wanted to make is this is the utterly shameless weaponizing shame against others, that that's the dynamic.
Yeah.
I was happy with that piece because it had I was thinking about this idea for a long time anyway, because you know, we saw some of the very most senior people who came up with this idea and who perpetuated this idea, which is just.
A reminder for those who don't know.
I'm sure you do an algorithm that falsely attributed debts to people, or falsely inflated the value of debts to people that weren't there, or told them they owed more than they actually did, based on a mathematical fiction that many people knew was illegal from the very beginning. And so you know, in propagating this, you look at them and you see them trying to explain their behavior on the stand. It's very hard to explain human foibles when they're yours, but also when you're not willing to be
self reflective about it. And there was no one apart from maybe Serena Wilson who got close as the Deputy Secretary of DSS, close not fully there, who actually seemed to be overly perturbed about what they did, as opposed to the fact that they were now being called to account for it. That's what injured a lot of people, not so much they felt bad.
Well.
In fact, some of them wrote in after the Royal Commission as their final statement saying, you know, we still think Roba was a good idea which I think was implemented badly, which is just insane to me.
Whereas the truth of it is it's a monstrous idea implemented badly.
They were wrong twice.
The idea was faulty in every concept givable way, and they implemented it in possibly the worst possible way by not testing the computer properly, by ramping up to targets, and literally by the time they turn the computer, you know, automated part of Robodet's a bit of a misnomer by the time they turn that on in September twenty sixteen, because they wanted to get to these targets faster, you know,
half a billion dollars and then a billion dollars. This computer was all you could almost see it just spinning out of control and flinging off bits of fucking metal and code into the ceiling fan. And they're all going, oh, don't know what happened. What happened was you didn't do your homework because people were just whipping you and telling you to produce this thing. And it's like it was
implemented badly. But the idea was horrendous. And when you get those two things in concert, and people still look back and go, I don't know where it all went so wrong. I do just have to read some.
Of the evidence.
I mean, the question with forever asked when things are monstrous or fraught in public life is do we assume conspiracy or do we assume incompetence? And I have to confess that I would habitually assuming competence over conspiracy. That my impulse is someone's bad at their job, Sun's asleep at the wheel. But part of what's so horrifying reading your reporting laid out in book form, this whole story from Go to Woe, is that it's better understood as
conspiracy than it is as incompetence. It's better understood at least as not necessarily an individual failure, but a broader failure of compassion, of the empathy, of focus rather than execution.
I think you're right.
I mean I always assuming competence based on personal experience, if nothing else. You know, we are incredibly flawed individuals. Robinet was a conspiracy, certainly according to the Royal Commission at the beginning, it was born in conspiratorial kind of you know, it was covered up. The new policy proposal was changed to remove any reference to this new legal advice they had you can't do this and DSS saying
you can't do this. It needs legislation, and so they just decided to take out the words, which is like taking off the dietary in takeing information on a meat pie and pretending you can still lose weight like it just they didn't change the policy or still a meat pie.
So there's that.
But then you get that conspiracy relied on weaponizing laziness and incompetence elsewhere, and so they worked in concert. And then again you get a second kind of round of this in twenty seventeen when the DSS people who realize they might have made a few errors in allowing this thing to get as far as it did. They didn't come up with the idea, but they probably didn't fly it hard enough or do their own checks and balances.
There's another conspiracy where they then seek to actively mislead they come with with ombudsman by disappearing legal advice.
First they try to hide the twenty fourteen advice.
Then when they realized that DHS is given the executive minute over that says there was probably advice kicking around, and the ombudsman comes back and says, I think you've
been withholding stuff DSS. Then concox twenty seventeen advice that says something slightly different but also defensible, and gives that to the ombardsman, but without the contextual information that was asked to the lawyers, which would have given the ombardsmen the exact information that they were asking the same question both times and suddenly got to different answers.
How is that possible?
So you know, this thing was so bad that not even the class action judge they didn't get all the documents they needed, And even in his judgment he said, you know, I'm inclined. When there's a toss up between conspiracy or fuck up, you go with stuff up.
And we would never have got.
These answers were it not for the Royal Commission.
I'm glad you mentioned the twenty fourteen statements because I think maybe for our discussion today, it's worth going back to that period and back to in particular the budget that year and what it tells us about the political environment at that time.
It feels like a fever dream to remember back to twenty fourteen, doesn't it. And in many respects I will take Tony Abbit over Scott Morrison any day of the week.
If I had to choose, I would choose Tony Abbot.
What about it in a bike race.
Well, definitely, Scott Morrison.
I brought that up because Tony Abbott, you knew what you were getting with Tony Abbit, except for the part where he lied explicitly throughout his election campaign where he said no cuts to this, no cuts to that, and then once he got into government cut everything. And that twenty fourteen budget was horrendous, and I write about it
in the book. I was in that budget lock up and I remember one of my colleagues turned to my editor and said, having looked at the policy where they want to kick young people off the doll for six months every year, and she turned to the editor she said, Clive, this is horrendous.
People are going to die.
And she was right, but just not about that policy, because that policy was so bad that it couldn't even get through the Senate.
That was the nice option. They had actually privately.
Been trying to come up with ideas to kick people off the dole permanently until they turned thirty, so like no income support at all, and it was so bad that Ericabets and Kevin Andrews killed it. Like they were the ones who were like, They're like, Tony Abbot, have a heart.
Let's take a moment to pay our respects to those great humanitarians.
It would never cease to amaze me that they were the ones who were like, you've gone too far, mister rabbit. And so they killed it off behind the scenes, and of course the Abbot government was embarrassed it got stuck in the Senate. And then he also, you'll remember, ran on a regulatory agenda and they had those stupid, stupid red tape repeal reduction days, just like, oh, everyone burn a rule, everyone burn a rule. It's like a pagan
equinox festival. The least Catholic thing about him was this idea that you could have a spiritual experience around cutting rules and regulations. And because of those two things, there was a new budget process rules that said you can't have new spending without a saving, and a saving doesn't count if it's likely to get stuck in the Senate
or if it needs legislation. So that is a reason why when it does become obvious that Robodet needs legislation, and there is legal advice in December twenty fourteen that says that the new budgets underway already, if someone had briefed that to Scott Morrison and didn't realize that at the time, and then had to turn around and go back to Scott Morrison and say, actually, that thing I said that was going to save one point two billion dollars needs legislation. I don't want to be that person.
And the secondly, the people, the boffins that came up with it in the compliance unit, literally piggybacked on the back of the deregulatory agenda and they said, here is a way that we can do something cool for us in compliance, which is we've got to need to spend some money to update our computer systems, but here's all this amazing whiz bang stuff we can do as long as we tell Tony Abbot that we're reducing rent tape.
And to do that, they were basically saying, we're going to stop relying on small businesses to revite payslips when we coercively ask them using our vast powers of government, and we're just going to tell people to tell us instead to go back and get their pay slips, and if the business doesn't want to give it to them, it's not our problem. And so you've got these twin kind of horrors merging to create the perfect storm for Robodette, and Robotette is born.
When we return, Rick explains how bureaucratic ineptitude revealed Robotette to be the scandal the government was trying to hide.
We'll be right back.
The book opens with two particularly acute epigrams. The first is from Australian saist writer Robert Skinner and says, imagine having to prove for insurance purposes that your wife is not a dolphin, and no matter how many photos of her doing chin ups and playing video games with their thumbs you provide, the insurance company keeps saying yes, But
why then did you visit SeaWorld. I'm keen to mention that at this point because I don't know about any of you, but the collective trauma of having to think about these kind of failures in our name, of our political system is pretty acute, and I know that for
Rick at this point it's profound. And the book is against the odds Funny, it has to be said, because the book does have an eye on the kind of absurdity of self justification that is required to keep this engine turning over at absolutely heartbreaking gut wrenching cost, but the thing at the center of it, the bureaucratic self justification. You almost have to laugh because there's no other possible response.
It's a very literary book at sites Borges and Hella and Kafka and Elma Fad, you know, all these kind of great figures of aptitude. Are there single moments for you when you were kind of putting it together as a book where you just stopped in your tracks at the sheer audacity of the stupidity.
I mean, there are so many, but the things that ended Robotat is the funniest example of bureaucratic inaptitude, I think. Because they've got federal court cases and I don't want to skip ahead, but I'll do it. It's been going for four and a half years, and the lawyers finally find a perfect victim in Madeline Masterton, who's a young
woman who had a debt raised against her. She didn't owe a single cent of it, and they needed a perfect victim who didn't have some like you know, rough edges or you know, owed a little bit of money. So she was perfect, and they took it to the federal court and the Department of Human Services is like, ah, fuck, what are we going to do? The thing that's been running for four and a half years, we're pretty sure
is suspect. What we'll do is we'll get some for the first time ever in the history of Robota in March twenty nineteen. It started in twenty fifteen. For the first time ever, they get actual external legal advice that they don't leave in draft form from the Australian Government solicitor that says, Medline Masterton's case and they've only had a brief look at it is not hopeless, so we need to find a way to get rid of the case from court. And the way they go about doing
that is the funniest thing ever. They go to Madeline Masterton and they say, pretty please, can you give us your pacelets? And her lawyer says, are you for real? You have raised four and a half thousand dollars against my client and you are now saying through court could we please have the evidence for it? You are insane? And the department says, ah, damn, all right, we'll get rid of that. So they move on to option two.
Option two is to devise a new policy for the first time ever, the very first time, this policy has ever been used. Is to go back through the lawyer's affidavits for Maline Masterton and where the lawyer says, not Madalin masters And the lawyer says, I have seen Madeline Masterton has been updating sendaling about her income over the years, and this is what Madeline Masterton tells.
Me she earned.
And the department says, they're fair enough, We'll accept it. We believe that now they had this information, but now we believe it zero the debt got rid of it. Hilarious. It wouldn't be funny if it succeeded forever, but it's hilarious because a few months later, Diana Romato comes along and she's exactly the same as Madeline Marterton. They try
and get rid of her debt, and they do. They zero it by using pretty much the same circumstances, except that Marto's debt was raised after twenty eighteen, when the government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to expand the general interest charge to social security debts. And according to commwealth law or prison I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, a government can get rid of the debt if they
want to. They can wave a debt, but they can't waive an interest charge, and they still required Diana Romato to pay one hundred dollars in interest, and they couldn't get that out of the federal court. And that is the case that ended robodet their own greed. It wasn't enough to raise a debt. They had to get the money back.
I love that story and I wanted that in there because I think part of what has characterized your reporting on this right through has been an awareness of the human costs. You started by talking about being raised by a single mum, knowing what it is to be in a Sentra Link office, and it struck me right through your reporting that that understanding of the reality of being a welfare recipient is missing largely from our journalists classes.
Is that a fair well, I mean, yeah, I think it's missing. It used to probably be more prevalent because journalism used to be a trade like anything else, but it's now just if you've got money, you do journalism because you can afford to fail. No, I mean journalism has a problem ful stop because we know we like to tell people how it is, and I'm sure there are many things that I talk about vociferously that I'm wrong on or you know, people disagree with me on.
The one thing I hope that I'm consistent on is my values and principles and so the.
One thing I know and you know, I know. And there's been a little bit.
Of a closing of the ranks post Royal Commission report about from very senior people going well, you just don't understand how hard it is to be a public servant. And it's like, I don't and I know that it is in the same way that it's hard to be a good journalist in a system where our editors want certain types of stories. And you know, I used to work with the Australian I trust me, I know, so
I get that. But at the same time, you know, some things ought to be inalienable, and one of them is that you treat people, I think, with basic human dignity and respect, and I think we saw it through the Royal Commission. The hardest thing for some people seems to have been to understand that it actually did hurt physically and psychologically people to be told that they might own money.
Tell us about some of the heroes who made it better understood, better known, who kind of broke the back of the collective willingness to go along with us.
I mean there are so many like you know, we're talking about digital activists like Asha Wolf, who actually spotted this thing in the wild, which is very hard to do.
I don't.
She got a tip off about a government gazette notice with some data matching stuff, which you know always grabs her attention, and then she saw Reddit forums talking about these debts and you know, you have to see a pattern there when you know so many people didn't and Asher did, and then she starts whipping up this online campaign.
And the thing is there was a woman involved. She took over as.
A national general manager of the robodette program after it had begun, Karen Harfield. She's a former London cop and you know, didn't cover herself in glory. But the one funny thing she said at the Royal Commission was.
That because we had refused to.
Put a phone number on these letters and so that people would go online to contact us, they also went online to complain and again they shot themselves in the foot. And so there was this Twitter storm. And Twitter was actually good then because it wasn't owned by a fucking moron and Ashall was whipping up the storm. Good journalists,
not me. Good journalists got involved. A Christopher Norse at the Guard in Australia managed to get a whistleblower to write the first real details of the fact that they were using this weird mismatch and the debts were wrong twenty percent of the time, which is a number that the department was furious at because in their mind they were saying, no, the debts weren't wrong twenty percent of the time. In twenty percent of the cases when we heard back from people, they were able to tell us
they didn't owe anything. So that's perfect, and it's like, what is wrong with you? But that was so they hated that figure because it wasn't a debt outcome and it's like, none of this stuff matters. You were splitting hairs And this is where I think it matters to you have a practical understanding of how policy works in the street.
Not that I think they didn't. That just didn't really care.
And then of course you've got people like Colleen Taylor, who's my favorite person in the world, a public servant and the very best public servant.
The Runov applause for Collin Taylor, who.
I personally think should be not just given a Public Service Medal, but should be given Katherine Campbell's Public Service Medal.
Directly.
And oh yeah, and then at least nine hundred thousand dollars. You know, Collein is such a stickler that even after she read the book and she's like, oh my god, this incredible. And then she gets towards the end and I used the line where I said she was sneaking into send link files, and she's like, oh my god, no, I wasn't sneaking. I was in there for legitimate purposes and I would never break a rule. I'm like, of course, I'm like, was legitimately very sorry because the last thing
she's like, I'm not a hero. She's like, all I was doing was asking my department to follow its own procedures and listen to its own advice. And she was the one that wrote to Katherine Campbell that's seventeen pages of incredibly detailed technical information. When Campbell wrote to employees in an all staff email and said, nothing has changed in the way that we raised assessing come and raised debts.
Nothing has changed, and Colein Taylor blessed her thought that someone was misleading Campbell and.
Wrote to her to help her.
The first thing Campbell did was ford the email to some other senior colleagues and said this is probably already with the union, like just so dismissive and cause Colleen Taylor then to say I've got your email, and Colin Taylor thinks things are going to change, And of course the lackeys are dispatched to talk to Colin for two hours, and after Colin tells them everything, and she in her letter to Campbell and she's right about this and has been right at every detail down to the last comma.
She worked in the old system and she worked on the new one checking, so she knew exactly what had changed. And she told them all this in a two hour meeting, and at the end of it they said, say, what you're saying is that the old system was very slow.
And I was just like, oh my fucking go.
But they had to dispatch someone to talk to Colleen Taylor, and they had to pretend that they'd listened, and they had to send her a letter on letterhead saying thank you for raising these concerns, but they didn't do anything with it. And yeah, so Colleen is an absolute, absolute hero, and I just adore her.
If justice is anywhere between elusive and impossible? Do you have an idea of what repair might look like? At least.
I don't.
I mean, I think, you know, I'm obsessed with this idea that you know, Robot. It's a mosaic of failure, and then success is also a mosaic, and so little bits of things that are happening, like I think there's a new requirement to keep records. There's some new code of conducty type things about you know, maybe don't mislead the ombudsman again. Nice, nice to codify it a bit more possibly, and so one of those little things. You know,
they will add up eventually. But at the same time, we've got a government that just doesn't seem to have a whomph about their stated terms for accountability or transparency. Not only is there no but there's a certain love of the opacity of it all, because that's the thing that protects power, and everyone who has some access to power knows that the first rule of keeping that is to not let other people in on the secret.
Presumably the first counterpoint to that in the mosaic that is repair is a tile very like Meanstreak. Please join me in saying thank God for Rick More, Thank you, Michael, You're very nice. Rick Martin's incredibly powerful account of the Robotdeat scandal is called Meanstreak, and it's available at all good bookstores now. And can I just say, as a fan of puns in all their form, it took me embarrassingly long to see the pun in the title Meanstreak.
But if you're talking averages, what better way to describe?
Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with John Safran, Claire Wright, and more. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than sixty episodes in the archive for you to enjoy.