Reviewed by Norrie Sanders
Prior to reading Mean Streak, if anyone had told me that 500 pages about the inner workings of the public service would be riveting reading, I would have laughed. Having read this book, I am not laughing. It is a mesmerising account of one of the most iniquitous government failures in the history of this country.
Robodebt was the popular name for a debt recovery program that was not only unpopular, but manifestly illegal. The legality was doubtful from the outset, but it took five years of cover up before the bureaucrats and the politicians would admit it. Among Robodebt‘s half a million targeted welfare recipients were society’s most vulnerable and the government attacked them mercilessly. The tragic irony is that most of them – the vast majority in fact – had no debt at all. It was simply the Department’s unlawful and wildly inaccurate calculations that led them to believe that there was an enormous debt owed by a bunch of rorters.
This approach would fail an Introduction to statistics course at a technical college and be laughed out of every university in the country [p127].
As soon as a government minister (yes, that Scott Morrison) saw revenue projections like $1.7billion, his eyes lit up and the target became a holy grail. Yet the budget numbers were based on a foundational flaw in a comparison process from just 886 records, applied to almost 9,000,000 very real people. In other words, the savings figures trumpeted by the Department were completely and utterly bogus [p128].
In the end, nothing like that was ever recovered. More importantly, it could never have been recovered because the debt was a mirage. But it took five long years for the program to cease and a change of government, leading to a Royal Commission before the truth came out. Even then, despite being sanctioned and found in breach of code, the former head of Department is still in denial The Royal Commission is not a judicial inquiry and the conclusions reached are expressions of opinion… [p449]. It must be just lucky then that some of the other 139 Royal Commissions actually had a positive impact.
For an individual faced with a large and unexplained debt, the government assumed a debt unless the welfare recipient could prove otherwise. People were disempowered and arguing with the Department was so stressful and difficult that many gave up. Some paid the fictional debt, others committed suicide. The truly scary part of Robodebt was that when a number of determined and unscrupulous actors set about hiding the truth, all of the usual checks and balances failed completely. The Ombudsman, the Federal Court, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Freedom of Information laws and the media were each subverted in one way or another.
Rick Morton has written an extraordinary book that makes sense of the reams of information and disinformation that must have taken years to sift through. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how we are governed and how readily good governance can die at the hands of a few determined individuals. Despite the forensic detail required to explain this saga, Mean Streak is a compelling read. Let us hope that this book helps to ensure that these dishonest individuals, never again hold power over Australian people.
Rick Morton is the author of four non-fiction books, including the critically acclaimed bestseller One Hundred Years of Dirt which was long listed for the Walkley Book of the Year 2018 and shortlisted for the National Biography Award (NBA) 2019. He has since been a three-time judge of the NBA. Rick is the senior reporter with The Saturday Paper and 2 x Walkley Award winner for his coverage of the Robodebt Royal Commission. He documented this saga in his latest work Mean Streak, a book about the illegal and fake debt trap set by the Australian government, bureaucratic harm and the fight to put people back into policy. He lives in Queensland.
(October 2024)
by Rick Morton
HarperCollins
ISBN: 978 1 4607 6580 7
$35.99 (Paperback); 512pp