QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms PLIBERSEK (Sydney—Minister for Social Services) (14:30): I want to thank the member for Griffith for her question. I know she has an enormous amount of compassion for the constituents in her seat that were impacted by the illegal and immoral robodebt scheme, created by those opposite, which caused pain and trauma for more than 400,000 people across Australia.
It was a shocking and deliberate case of maladministration perpetrated knowingly by ministers. None of us can forget when former minister Tudge said: We will find you, we will track you down, you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison. One problem—a lot of people didn't owe those debts.
Those opposite claimed they were going to save taxpayers $4.7 billion through this scheme. Instead, it has cost taxpayers $2 billion. The Albanese government established a royal commission as one of our first priorities when we came to government.
Sadly, that royal commission heard countless tragic stories of people being hounded by their own government to repay debts that they did not even owe. The royal commission found: Robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals … It was a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms.
When the scheme's 'unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty' became apparent at the beginning of 2017, the royal commission found that the path taken by those opposite was to double-down. They started leaking stories about victims of this in the media. We agreed, of course—or agreed in principle—to all 56 of the royal commission's recommendations.
Fifty-two of those 56 recommendations have now been fully implemented, and implementation of the remaining four recommendations is ongoing. The bill being debated in this House this week is our next step to ensuring justice for robodebt victims. The government settled the Knox robodebt class action in 2025.
Around 168,000 people are covered, with $475 million available in compensation for people who were harmed. Under normal circumstances, compensation payments like this may be subject to things like tax or social security income-testing arrangements. Of course, this bill means that the payments won't be subject to that or to benefits like social security, veterans payments, NDIS supports or aged-care contributions being impacted.
The bill will make sure that compensation paid to robodebt victims under the Knox settlement is received in full, and I certainly urge all members to support that legislation.