Royal commissioner Catherine Holmes
The use of third party debt collectors under Centrelink’s ‘Robodebt’ debt collections schemes form part of the Terms of Reference for a royal commission into this scandal.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, yesterday announced a Royal Commission
into the Robodebt Scheme, in keeping with an election pledge by the Labor Party.
Former chief justice of the Queensland Supreme Court Catherine Holmes has been appointed the royal commissioner. Holmes also led the 2011 inquiry into the Queensland and Brisbane floods.
In June 2021, the Federal Court found the Commonwealth liable for the practices of the Robodebt system.
In the course of a class action proceeding, the Commonwealth “admitted that it did not have a proper legal basis to raise, demand or recover asserted debts which were based on income averaging from Australian Taxation Office data,” Justice Bernard Murphy found at the time.
“The evidence shows that the Commonwealth unlawfully asserted such debts, totalling at least A$1.763 billion against approximately 433,000 Australians.
“Then, including through private debt collection agencies, the Commonwealth pursued people to repay these wrongly asserted debts, and recovered approximately $751 million from about 381,000 of them,” Murphy wrote.
Centrelink’s debt assessment and recovery schemes known as Robodebt (including associated pilot programs) operated from early 2015 to September 2018
The Australian Government has previously announced that more than 400,000 debts raised under the Robodebt scheme would be zeroed or repaid.