Naming names: ‘Hand on heart time. Any exposure?’
In the final hearings of the robo-debt royal commission, the net is tightening around the people responsible for the illegal scheme.
It was an unseasonably warm November day in 2019 when the nation’s then chief law officer, Christian Porter, left a meeting of the expenditure review committee with a word of advice for a shell-shocked Stuart Robert. “It’s right, mate,” he said.
Robert, then minister for Government Services, had just briefed the committee on plans to completely freeze robo-debt collection “pending a review”. He told the room he was preparing to settle a test case in the federal court, known as Amato, by conceding that the debt at issue was invalid because it relied on income averaging.
Six months earlier, acting Department of Human Services chief counsel Timothy Ffrench had briefed Robert on an opinion from the solicitor-general, which said the scheme was illegal. It was a verbal briefing, by demand of the then departmental secretary Renée Leon, and Stuart Robert was unimpressed.
“Opinion,” he purportedly told Ffrench, “is just an opinion.”
It must have been small comfort to Ffrench, then, that it was he who overheard the attorney-general confirm the veracity of that opinion to an intransigent Robert on November 12, 2019, as the two men walked out of the committee.
Still, it was five years too late.
In its final weeks of public hearings, the robo-debt royal commission has begun asking for names.
Where officials are unable or unwilling to identify senior people who might have influenced their behaviour in developing or protecting the program, the inquiry’s senior counsel has left them almost nowhere to turn. Take Jason Ryman, for example.
Over several hours of, at times, excruciating testimony, the former Department of Human Services director, who led the income compliance project that became robo-debt, claimed to never have seen highly critical comments from the Department of Social Services about his concept. He also claimed to never have read a critical brief to Scott Morrison that was sent directly to him by his boss, and to be unable to explain why he sought legal advice on the program, almost a month after it had been approved by cabinet.
Ryman, who also gave evidence last year, returned to the stand on Wednesday afternoon for questioning that largely focused on a fivemonth period from December 2014 to April 2015, when the embryonic robo-debt concept was coming into being. At its heart, and from the very beginning, Ryman agreed the scheme always relied on using tax office data averaged over 26 weeks to come up with “discrepancies” that were later turned into debts.
However, after initial criticism from