Scrutiny of the Australian Public Service is set to increase as the Albanese government seeks stronger independent oversight to prevent a repeat of the robodebt scandal.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus will introduce legislation on Thursday to strengthen the information-gathering powers and investigative capacity of the Commonwealth Ombudsman.
If passed, the bill will impose a statutory duty on agency heads and the wider public service to “assist the Ombudsman in the performance of their functions”.
It will give the Ombudsman high-tech remote access to agency records relevant to investigations and establish a new criminal offence for “withholding reasonable facilities and assistance”.
The legislation aims to implement key recommendations of the Robodebt Royal Commission, which found that some officials and agencies engaged in behaviour designed to mislead the Ombudsman and impede its investigation into the illegal scheme.
The report said it was “disheartening” that institutional checks and balances, including the Commonwealth Ombudsman, had been ineffective at stopping robodebt, which wrongly issued debts to hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients.
Mr Dreyfus said the reform would ensure that Commonwealth agencies “are subject to stronger and more rigorous scrutiny”. “Trust in government depends on this,” he said. He said the Royal Commission’s report “made it clear that strong and effective oversight is necessary to safeguard the community in their dealings with government”.
The former Coalition government’s botched robodebt scheme used annual tax office data to calculate average earnings through a flawed “income averaging” formula and issue debt notices to welfare recipients, many of whom did not actually owe any money. The program recovered more than $750 million from almost 400,000 people from 2015 to 2019. Victims of the debt recovery scheme have told of financial suffering, mental health effects and a sense of hopelessness in dealing with an opaque government system. A number of victims of the scheme died by suicide. ACT Justice and Community Safety Directorate Director-General Richard Glenn, who was Acting Commonwealth Ombudsman in 2017 when the watchdog was investigating the Human Services department, last year said his team “had doubts” about robodebt’s legality even though key documents had been withheld. “My thinking was influenced by the fact that I couldn’t make a clear determination one way or the other about legality,” Mr Glenn told the Royal Commission.
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Scrutiny of the Australian Public Service is set to increase as the Albanese government seeks stronger independent oversight to prevent a repeat of the robodebt scandal.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus will introduce legislation on Thursday to strengthen the information-gathering powers and investigative capacity of the Commonwealth Ombudsman.
If passed, the bill will impose a statutory duty on agency heads and the wider public service to “assist the Ombudsman in the performance of their functions”.
It will give the Ombudsman high-tech remote access to agency records relevant to investigations and establish a new criminal offence for “withholding reasonable facilities and assistance”.
The legislation aims to implement key recommendations of the Robodebt Royal Commission, which found that some officials and agencies engaged in behaviour designed to mislead the Ombudsman and impede its investigation into the illegal scheme.
The report said it was “disheartening” that institutional checks and balances, including the Commonwealth Ombudsman, had been ineffective at stopping robodebt, which wrongly issued debts to hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients.
Mr Dreyfus said the reform would ensure that Commonwealth agencies “are subject to stronger and more rigorous scrutiny”. “Trust in government depends on this,” he said. He said the Royal Commission’s report “made it clear that strong and effective oversight is necessary to safeguard the community in their dealings with government”.
The former Coalition government’s botched robodebt scheme used annual tax office data to calculate average earnings through a flawed “income averaging” formula and issue debt notices to welfare recipients, many of whom did not actually owe any money. The program recovered more than $750 million from almost 400,000 people from 2015 to 2019. Victims of the debt recovery scheme have told of financial suffering, mental health effects and a sense of hopelessness in dealing with an opaque government system. A number of victims of the scheme died by suicide. ACT Justice and Community Safety Directorate Director-General Richard Glenn, who was Acting Commonwealth Ombudsman in 2017 when the watchdog was investigating the Human Services department, last year said his team “had doubts” about robodebt’s legality even though key documents had been withheld. “My thinking was influenced by the fact that I couldn’t make a clear determination one way or the other about legality,” Mr Glenn told the Royal Commission.