Knox Class Action (Facilitation) Bill 2026

Mr DREYFUS (Isaacs) (16:21): I rise to support the Knox Class Action (Facilitation) Bill 2026 introduced by the Minister for Social Services, the Hon. Tanya Plibersek. This bill is wise, principled and beneficial, but behind it lies one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Australian public administration—the Liberal and National parties' unlawful and punitive robodebt scheme.

For years, I and many of my colleagues have spoken in this parliament about the cruelty and illegality of the robodebt scheme. In 2020, I said that the financial cost of robodebt, appalling though it was—I'm quoting myself—'pales next to the toll in human suffering'. That remains true today.

Robodebt was not simply a defective administrative program. It was not some technical error buried deep inside government. The Liberal-National government under the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, conceived and implemented robodebt, and the Turnbull and Morrison coalition governments expanded and defended it until legal action forced its abandonment.

The scheme used averaged annual income data from the Australian Taxation Office to assert that social security recipients had received money they were not entitled to. It turned an estimate into an accusation and the accusation into a debt, and then turned that debt into a demand for payment. It shifted the burden onto ordinary Australians to disprove debts the Commonwealth had not lawfully established.

The Commonwealth admitted, and the Federal Court declared, that more than $1.73 billion in debts were unlawfully raised against about 433,000 people—$751 million of it already taken from 381,000 of them. Those figures are staggering, but the figures do not tell us what robodebt did to people. They do not describe the fear of receiving a letter from your own government demanding thousands of dollars you did not owe.

They do not describe the fear and anxiety of being pursued by debt collectors. They do not describe the humiliation of being treated as a cheat or a criminal when you had done nothing wrong—and that humiliation was set from the top. Australians will not forget the blustering, mean-spirited threats of the Liberal minister, Alan Tudge, in the Morrison government.

In December 2016, as robodebt notices were being sent out across the country, he went out in the media and said: We'll find you, we'll track you down, you will have to repay those debts, and you may end up in prison. People who had done nothing wrong opened letters from their own government demanding money. The minister responsible—that's Mr Tudge—told the nation they might end up in prison.

When the Albanese Labor government came to office in 2022, we were determined that what had happened could not simply be allowed to pass into history unexplained and unexamined. We moved swiftly to establish the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. At the time, I was Attorney-General, and establishing that royal commission was one of the key initiatives in my portfolio to repair the damage the former government had done to the rule of law.

The Attorney-General's Department undertook the work of establishing and supporting the royal commission, work I have described as being of the highest standard. The royal commission was formally established by letters patent issued by the Governor-General in August 2022. It was given the powers and independence necessary to determine how robodebt was conceived, who was responsible, what warnings were given and ignored, and what it did to people.

The royal commission heard of financial hardship, profound distress and lives devastated. It heard evidence from mothers whose sons had died by suicide after becoming caught up in the scheme. They were people entitled to expect that their government would obey the law and treat them with dignity.

I've said many times that acting lawfully is the bare minimum of a democratically elected government's obligation to the community. Robodebt failed even that most basic test, and that is not simply my judgement. The commissioner—Catherine Holmes AC SC, a former chief justice of Queensland—examined in forensic detail how this disaster was conceived, implemented and allowed to continue.

Commissioner Holmes' conclusions were unsparing and devastating. She described robodebt as 'a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal'. She said: In essence, people were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money.

The commission exposed a profound failure of government. It found a scheme rushed into operation without proper regard for its legality or the people it would affect and maintained despite mounting evidence of the devastation it was causing. In her closing observations, Commissioner Holmes named the causes in three words that won't be forgotten, and I'm going to quote them: venality, incompetence and cowardice.

That is a damning finding about how public power was exercised in this country. This was a government working against its own citizens. The royal commission showed what can happen when legality is treated as an obstacle, when warnings are buried and when vulnerable people become a line in a budget.

That is why the lessons of robodebt cannot be left in the past. They impose an obligation on every government that follows. The first of those obligations concerns legal advice.

It cannot be disregarded because it sits in draft, and advice must not be left in draft because its conclusions are unwelcome. Government lawyers must be free to provide frank, fearless and independent legal advice, and governments must be prepared to hear it. What makes this history still more disturbing is that the warnings came early.

As Attorney-General, in a speech to a national tribunals conference in June 2023, I asked: How can it be that members of the AAT could say—over and over and over again—that the Robodebt scheme was unlawful only for those decisions, and the obvious implications of those decisions, to be ignored and ultimately buried? The royal commission answered that question.

Commissioner Holmes found: The beginning of 2017 was the point at which Robodebt's unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty became apparent. She found that the scheme 'should then have been abandoned or revised drastically, and an enormous amount of hardship and misery would have been averted.' These are also Commissioner Holmes's words: Instead the path taken was to double down, to go on the attack in the media against those who complained and to maintain the falsehood that in fact the system had not changed at all.

When our government responded to the royal commission's report in 2023, I said: The Liberal Party's Robodebt scheme was not an innocent mistake. This was a deliberate, calculated scheme. … … … The Robodebt scheme was wrong, the Robodebt scheme was unlawful, the Robodebt scheme destroyed the lives of many innocent Australians. Nothing we do now can give back to those Australians the years taken from them.

No court order can erase the anxiety. No settlement can undo every injury. No payment can restore a life that has been lost.

But we are obliged to do what justice still permits—and that's the purpose of this bill. On 23 June this year, the Federal Court approved a settlement of the appeal from the original robodebt class action, providing a further $475 million in compensation for eligible group members. It is the largest class action settlement in Australian history.

Justice Beach, of the Federal Court, began his reasons this way. Robodebt, he said, 'was a fiasco in public administration and an abrogation of ministerial responsibility and competent oversight'. Those who authored and promoted it acted, in His Honour's words, 'in contumelious disregard of individual rights', and the suffering it produced is 'immeasurable and ongoing'.

The legislation before us makes an important and principled change. It amends the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act, the Social Security Act and the Veterans' Entitlements Act so that settlement payments are not treated as compensation and are not counted as income for determining income support. The principle is simple: people harmed by the unlawful conduct of the Commonwealth should not then have that compensation clawed back by the Commonwealth or see their income support cut because they received it.

Compensation is intended to compensate. It should reach the people for whom it is intended. The Minister for Social Services, Ms Plibersek, put the principle simply when announcing these measures: People impacted by Robodebt deserve nothing less than every single dollar of compensation they are entitled to.

She is right. This bill gives practical effect to that principle, and it is another part of the work this Labor government has undertaken to confront the legacy of robodebt. There is a larger lesson here.

The power of government is immense. The discipline of law is not an inconvenience to it; the discipline of law is what makes it legitimate. When the Commonwealth deals with a person who relies on social security, that person is not a problem to be managed or a debt to be collected; they are a citizen entitled to lawful treatment.

They have rights, they are entitled to dignity and they are entitled to expect their government to obey the law. Robodebt deliberately ignored that. This parliament must never forget it.

This bill cannot undo what was done, but it can make sure that the people harmed by an unlawful scheme keep the compensation they are owed without another arm of government taking it back. That is a modest act of justice. After robodebt, it is the very least we owe them.

I commend this bill to the House.