Raising Hell: Issue 88: 'Expressing Concern About How Those Customers Would Feel'
"I will simply not do penance." - Text handwritten by Adolf Eichmann in 1956, as quoted in Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth (2015).
I initially planned to spend this fortnight’s newsletter looking back over a couple of different fossil fuel industry campaigns that have been starting up at various points of the compass. The first was over in Victoria involving claims — by industry — that the state government had “backed down” on a plan to phase out gas cooktops. As I reported for last week’s edition of the Saturday Paper, that was false and the ruckus the gas industry tried to stir up relied heavily on misinformation about what had actually happened. The other incident — if we can call it that for a moment — took place out west, with Australian Energy Producers (formerly, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association whose activities I cover in Slick) dropping a report based on questionable assumptions in effort to scaremonger about gas shortages. The document was picked up by the West Australian which, as you might expect, reported the whole thing with deft nuance and diligent gumshoe reporting:
Those stories do need to be interrogated, especially for the way in which a global plan to phase out the use of oil, gas and coal is being falsely cast as a “radical” thought bubble by “the Greens political party” — as Labor MPs have been trying to emphasise of late. But then, something else happened last week.
Something else always seems to happen lately — this particular something else, of course, concerned that great triumph of public policy, robodebt, and the seemingly enduring desire from elements within the public service to die on that particular hill long after the battle has been fought and lost.
It began a little over a week ago, on a Friday, when the Australian Public Service Commission named former Department of Human Resources secretary Renee Leon as one of two former departmental secretaries to have breached their duties while overseeing the robodebt program. The other was Kathryn Campbell.
As the public service generally prefers to keep its dirty laundry behind closed doors — lest anyone makes the mistake of thinking the public service leadership is capable of making a mistake — the decision to name Leon and Campbell appears to have come as something of a shock. On LinkedIn, serving members of the public service rallied to Leon’s defence, as did the Australian which described calls Leon be sacked from her new position at Charles Sturt University as a “witch hunt”. Meanwhile, the Saturday Paper ran an editorial by a personal friend of Leon who sought to rehabilitate the former departmental secretaries image, casting the former Leon as the victim of politics.
I’m not linking to it here, mostly because it was self-serving nonsense that is misleading about what actually transpired with the robodebt royal commission. If you’re the kind of person that wants the blow-by-blow, Rick Morton, who has a book coming out on the subject in October, went through Leon’s response to the ASPC’s findings line-by-line to break down what the robodebt royal commission actually found. He has also been scathing in his response to that editorial.
I, like Rick, have strong views about this. That being said, there is, as others have pointed out, something darkly funny about those seeking to re-litigate Leon’s role in robodebt given the finding’s of the royal commission. Doing so gives us ample room to go back and re-examine the public record to make an assessment about Leon’s performance. For instance, some have already run the numbers only to find that there were 400,000 debts still raised after Leon was appointed secretary. I also went back through my files on a story that I broke in the Saturday Paper about the “zombie robodebts” that went out under Leon’s leadership. Here is an excerpt from Hansard which confirmed the basis for that story and, at one point, devolved into this exchange between Leon and the late senator Kimberley Kitching on the legality of robodebt:
The suggestion that Renee Leon did nothing wrong in her time at the helm of the department is nonsense that should be laughed out of the room, but there is something deeper to her story that I think is worth pulling out. As I said in my own social media thread on the subject, for me, Leon’s story is a morality tale of a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. She was no unthinking drone, or slavish sycophant. As her colleagues have been at pains to point out, they thought she was one of “the good ones”. She was a highly competent, highly professional moderate who, by her own account at the royal commission, set out to manage and repair a disaster as it was in motion — and that was where she ran into trouble.
In my personal view, Leon’s story is different to that other senior figures like Campbell. Hers, I believe, is a tale about complicity. At this point it goes without saying, but it is worth repeating one more time: robodebt was not just another badly administered government policy. From the beginning, the issue with the scheme was not the execution or the way it was sold to the public, but the entire concept. Robodebt sought to balance the books of the Australian government on the backs of the country’s poorest citizens. It was a highly ritualised form of theft, it was unaccountable and it was punitive. The power dynamics it relied upon, the inherent injustice and the logic used to rationalise it were profoundly cruel — it being illegal was really just a bonus.
As the departmental secretary, Leon had the power and the opportunity to do something to end this scheme from the moment she stepped into the role overseeing it. She did not. Instead, Leon chose a path familiar to the country’s public service: she sought to manage disaster. To do this meant she not only had to accept the basic assumptions, reasoning, positions and framing of the broken institution that had created this scheme, but she sought to defend them — as we can see from the transcript above and the following video:
In the eyes of senior officials with the public service, Leon was just doing her job. The objection that she was just “following orders” and “fulfilling her duty” as a public servant goes some way to explain why the general objection to any accountability for her actions in that role: to think otherwise might mean they would have to confront the idea that good people can do bad things.
Now, I have never met Leon. For all I know, she was a saint who is great fun at dinner parties. The facts, however, are that she also oversaw robodebt for two years. Had Leon directed her department to abandon its legal defence early on, had she publicly refused to endorse the program, had she used the authority of her position to make critical documents public, had she quit her job rather than administer what was a plainly illegal scheme, had she advised the government to shut it down immediately, had she made public statements that this whole thing was a mess in any one of her numerous appearances before the senate — had she done anything substantial or meaningful to make a stand in the frank and fearless manner expected of an Australian public servant — the view from history might be somewhat different. Instead, under her watch, the department she oversaw more or less continued with its basic strategy: once the scale and gravity of the disaster became apparent internally, it resolved to “post through it” by hiding everything incriminating behind legal privilege, claiming public interest immunity and denying there was anything wrong at all.
Robodebt only ended through procedural force. It took an act of parliament, a judge and a royal commission to stop the Department of Human Services from continuing. It is also worth remembering that, to date, no one has faced any actual consequences for their role in creating and administering robodebt. So far the preferred response from those who run things in this country has been to put it all down to one big whoopsie from which we can draw a few lessons.
Thousands of people were accused of lying to the government, of cheating, of stealing a pittance from the public purse and some people took their own lives over these accusations. The closest anyone has come to any sort of accountability, least of all Leon and Campbell who were simply named in a report that didn’t do much else. It’s impossible to say how Leon will ever recover from this bruised ego and a fleeting challenge to what will no doubt be a long and comfortable career in the university sector.
In the meantime, as senior bureaucrats close ranks to protect Leon, the public have been treated to a concerted effort to selectively forget or rewrite history. In some ways, however, it is hard not to understand why certain elements of the public service may struggle with this concept. If Renee Leon was the best, what does that mean for everyone else? Is it possible that, just by clocking in, you may one day find yourself an instrument in administering something terrible? What if, because of expediency and inattention, you help create something awful? What if, thanks to an unexpected turn of events, you find yourself having to answer for it one day?
What if, god forbid, your decisions impact your career?
This insight might be especially unnerving if we move beyond the specific frame of robodebt onto other aspects of public administration. A good example, as the Australia Institute’s Polly Hemming has pointed out, the same rot that created robodebt is also exposing Australians to the risks posed by the existential threat of climate change. As I documented in Slick, Australia has for decades been at the hands of largely invisible public servants on climate change — in one instance, the words “greenhouse effect” were censored from the draft of a major government energy plan in 1986 by public servants who felt it was their patriotic duty to protect the coal industry against “greenie bullshit”. Those who were responsible have never been identified, and the chance they will face any real consequences are zero — but what if something changes? What if one day there is a public appetite and political will to find out who did what and hold them to account? That is a nightmare, I imagine, some would much prefer they never wake up to.
Good Reads
Because we here at Raising Hell know how much you love homework…
Michael Mazengarb’s latest newsletter lays out what is actually being proposed by a “climate trigger”, why it’s important and how it interacts with, The Safeguard Mechanism, Australia’s baroque approach to dealing with climate change.
Kevin D Williamson has eviscerated J.D. Vance’s record over his efforts to incite a racist pogrom in Springfield, Ohio with a long-read published in The Dispatch.
The Australian Unemployed Workers Union has been using FOI to dig into the opaque system run by Australian Job Providers to find material that suggests reps from the Department of Employment may have mislead a Senate Estimates hearing in June.
"Many books about climate change are worthy but dull. Slick, however, is as readable as it is shocking." - Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute, writing in The Conversation.
Events
Now the book’s live, there will be events — I hear you love events, so I got ‘em in droves. Below are a list of those which are confirmed. Check the website as I’ll be putting up the details of new events as they’re locked in.
TONIGHT: The Dirty Facts on Coal, Oil and Gas
What: I’ll be talking about how the oil and gas industry sought to wield influence in Australia in this panel hosted by Doctors for the Environment.
When: 7.30pm (AEST), Tuesday, 24 September
Where: Online
Register: https://events.humanitix.com/the-dirty-facts-on-coal-oil-and-gas-and-the-pathways-to-a-healthier-planet
Canberra: Politics in the Pub: Australia’s Toxic Relationship With Big Oil
What: The Dirty Facts on Coal, Oil and Gas with Doctors for the Environment
When: 6.30pm (AEST), Thursday, 26 September
Where: Verity Lane Market, Sydney Building 50, Northbourne Avenue, Canberra
Register: https://nb.australiainstitute.org.au/politics_in_the_pub_slick
Brunswick Heads, NSW: Highway To Hell
What: Presentation by climate scientist Joelle Gergis, followed by a panel discussion. Tickets $20.
When: 6pm (AEST), Tuesday, 23 October
Where: Brunswick Picture House, NSW
Register: https://brunswickpicturehouse.com/highway-to-hell-23-oct/Canberra: Anthropocene of the Crime
What: Michael Brissenden’s latest novel is a propulsive thriller; Royce Kurmelovs’ new book is a corporate exposé - true crime at its best. Both are also tales of the climate crisis. David Lindenmayer joins them to consider the novel ways our writers are helping us understand our planetary calamity and chart a way forward.
When: 10.30am (AEST), Sunday, 27 October
Where: Representatives Chambers, MOAB
Register: https://tickets.canberrawritersfestival.com.au/Events/Anthropocene-of-the-Crime
We’ve also got things cooking in Darwin and Melbourne, so check the website for new events.
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!