Raising Hell: Issue 76: Revisiting That Time I Busted DHS In A Cover Up
"One day he'd take, the next day he'd give. At the end of the month, I was always ahead of the game, getting more than my salary," - Abu Ali, Saddam Hussein's cook, 28 May 2020.
Call me petty but I think it’s important to celebrate small wins, especially when it comes to the gaping maw of transparency that is Services Australia (formerly Department of Human Services), and even if it comes three years too late to do anything about. So buckle in: consider Issue 76 a victory lap.
This story starts way back in 2019 when I first started dabbling with Freedom of Information (FOI) as an investigative tool and I had a tip about a legitimate, bona-fide cover -up within Services Australia. The facts of the situation were fairly straight forward: thousands of debts had “come off pause” and been issued by mistake; a memo had gone around within the agency obliquely telling compliance officers of said screw up; compliance teams were also told that if anyone phoned in with debts issued between certain dates, they should hand them off to a special team to deal with.
As my source put it: “it’s all very secret squirrel.”
The first step in the process had been verifying that the information I had been given was correct so I applied under FOI for the memo, which came back a rejection. I had expected this but was not prepared for the silly pantomime that played out during the process. Clearly, I knew the document existed, what it said and exactly what to ask for. The FOI Officer on the decision knew that I knew but pretended like I didn’t already have the key information. Because I was refused access, I then applied for an internal review. For those unfamiliar with the process, you get two goes at accessing documents: the second stage, called “internal review”, is where someone else within the agency takes a look at the original decision and either backs it in or substitutes it for a new one.
With the media-conscious Coalition in power, the standard practice among FOI officers at certain, embattled, institutions seemed to be to refuse every application knowing that it would be appealed externally to the Office of the Australian Information Commission (OAIC). Because the OAIC was under-resourced, they did so knowing it would take years to look at the request. Without documents, a minister or departmental secretary could simply wave away any critical reporting as “activist journalism”.
It was an effective tactic, so it was not surprising that the agency refused to give me the documents at internal review. About a month after putting in the request, I had a letter back from “authorised FOI decision maker” Thomas — no last name give — explaining:
My favourite bit was where Thomas bolded the words “refuse access”. For what it’s worth, s47E(d) holds that “a document is conditionally exempt if its disclosure under this Act would, or could reasonably be expected to […] have a substantial adverse effect on the proper and efficient conduct of the operations of an agency.” In a longer explanation for his decision, Thomas explained how he thought releasing the documents might help people “circumvent” the department’s debt collection activities:
In other words: the agency wanted to keep people dumb so it could use this knowledge asymmetry against them. If people knew there was a pause, they might not contact the department about their debts. Even if they couldn’t process this one, it meant they had an opportunity to check out the caller’s history for any other debts. It was all part of a deliberate strategy by the agency to keep people in the dark and then weaponise their ignorance against them. It was a tortured institutional logic which failed to consider an alternative possibility: a better-informed public may actually make the process of debt recovery smoother. Regardless, Thomas was saying that any public benefit involved with exposing a clear failure in public administration was outweighed by the fiscal benefit that comes from strong-arming poor people into paying up. Then Thomas — in so many words — told me to go fuck myself:
And he did so not just once, but twice:
Of course, all this is to be expected in Centrelink-land where up is down and down is somewhere over East-ish but what stayed with me was the smug self-superiority. Whatever issues I may have with the reasoning of a fine legal mind like Thomas, it was clear from a distance the agency was reaching for something — anything — it could use to avoid another public embarrassment. Though, that said, with the benefit of hindsight offered by the Robodebt Royal Commission, I now respectfully ask: how’d all that go, Thomas? Seems like it went well.
Spite aside, what matters is that I pushed them to commit to putting all this in writing. Having worked through the process, I had everything I needed to stack up my reporting. I fired off an email to my editor with the subject line: “Do you want to break a story?” She answered in the affirmative, setting in train events that I still rank as one of the highlights of my career to date.
Context is important to understand the significance of this moment. Around this time Services Australia and associated entities were deep into cover-up mode. My story landed just months before the bombshell Amato decision was handed down, declaring the entire Robodebt scheme illegal. It would also foreshadow some of the evidence later heard at the Robodebt Royal Commission (which delivers its report this week). Internally, the department understood it was fighting a losing battle but was doing everything it could to keep a brave face in public. Its entire machinery had been geared towards maintaining face — in hindsight, I should have FOI’d copies of any marketing or strategic documents outlining how the agency was supposed to talk about the scheme and its legality in the media. Prior to my story going live, activists involved in providing direct support to people on social security were noticing vintage Robodebt notices popping up out in the wild. The agency had previously sworn up and down that it had put the program “on pause” and that it was not reissuing new Robodebts or starting up again. All of which raised the question: where did these zombie debts come from?
My research provided an answer. As I was writing the initial story, the media rep who had taken my initial call responded with cool indifference. They even asked if I “had case studies” as part of my report. As the Royal Commission later heard, the agency had a directive to run background on anyone who appeared in the media and there was a broad consensus that critics of the scheme were part of some dastardly Labor plot to undermine the government. It took about two hours before they called me back when, having checked the details, the tone had changed dramatically. For one thing, they were trying to be nice. From memory, I had multiple calls in the space of an hour to keep me up to date and make sure that “I had everything I need.”
I did. In hindsight I could have gone harder in my reporting, but it was enough that soon after the story ran, Greens senator Rachel Siewert asked departmental officials about whether I was right during a hearing of the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee. Annette Mussolino, acting deputy secretary, integrity and information group confirmed “the incident” and unpacked what happened. The agency’s coders had essentially built themselves the software equivalent of a dead-man’s switch on a group of 10k debts which had been ring-fenced by the department, meaning they had to keep inputting a code in to stop them from going out. Either someone forgot, or the person responsible had moved on and the code never got input which mean the agency’s system let fly with the debts. Some of those who received them would have likely been living in flood-hit disaster zones at the time, despite promises from Centrelink officials that debt-recovery activities in areas where people had been stopped.
I outlined what happened in a follow-up to my report but I still wanted that internal memo, so I dutifully applied to the OAIC and my application fell to the bottom of the pile. It’s only now — following a change in government, post the Amato decision and after the Robodebt Royal Commission has wrapped — that the OAIC assigned someone to follow up my application. Services Australia had made submissions to the OAIC standing by its initial decision, but when the officer assigned to the matter followed up, Services Australia ultimately decided to give me the documents with no explanation as to why. I suspect this was because the program was no longer running and so the reasoning no longer stacked up. What’s extremely funny about this is that the agency has continued to insist on its blanket of secrecy even now, post Royal Commission. Back in August 2018, Justin Warren (a friend of Raising Hell) applied for documents relating to the robodebt program. The agency fought him all the way up until March — all the way through the Royal Commission — when a tribunal finally told Services Australia to cut the crap and just give him what he asked for like they should have done at the beginning.
In my own case, my original application to the OAIC was made in September 2019; the decision to release me documents was made in June 2023. For reference, and your amusement, I have included screenshots of the documents below and I am already in the process of filing a formal complaint with the OAIC for whatever that’s worth. In the meantime, I share this experience here as a case study in how an agency behaves when it is actively involved in a cover-up. Depending on who you are, there are several lessons we can learn from this:
If you are a bureaucrat and the agency you are working for is engaged in a cover up, don’t be like Thomas. Resign. It will be okay, you will find a new job — and you will sleep better at night.
You can also be like my source and discretely take notes/screenshots/copies of specific documents that establish the cover up and then discretely pass them to reporters (like me).
There is value in working through a process to show the faults in that process.
Even if you are fighting a losing battle, pushing the corresponding agencies to commit their reasoning to print is important — especially if you end up winning the war.
There is currently information before the Royal Commission that stronger FOI Protections are needed in order to ensure that bureaucrats actually write down the reasons for their decisions and take notes of their phone calls. This is obviously nonsense, but unfortunately the speed with which the Royal Commission was run has meant these questions over transparency were never interrogated.
All that remains now is to wait until the Robodebt Royal Commission hands down its report and put an official stamp to the raw anger those who lived through the program have been feeling for half a decade. In the meantime, here are those documents. Please enjoy the ominous faceless man clip-art in the header:
Like investigations? Love politics? Walter Marsh, friend of Raising Hell, has a new book about on the early days of Rupert Murdoch through Scribe. Walter delved into the archives to find out when the future media baron broke bad. Pre-order now.
For the Fortnight: June 20 to July 4
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
PwC appoints new Australian CEO with plans to sell off government consultancy work for $1 (Guardian AU, 25 June 2023).
Fox News labels Joe Biden a ‘wannabe dictator’ during Trump speech (Guardian AU, 14 June 2023).
I’ve also been nominated for awards in two categories at the 2023 SA Media Awards: Best Business, Economics or Finance Report and Journalist of the Year.
Note: Keen observers of Raising Hell will not that Issue 76 is once again a little different. That is because I have yet again run out of time — with my primary focus right now on building out this book, all my attention has been focused elsewhere. Which is also why I have some news: Raising Hell will be on hiatus until at least August. Putting together this newsletter represents a significant demand on my time (even if it is produced in increments over the fortnight), but due to the size and scale of the project I am undertaking, I need to focus exclusively on the book. To whit, I am setting aside a month to work on it. Research is going extremely well, and due to the significant public interest, my priority is ensuring it gets done right. I look forward to sharing it with you all when I can.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!