Advice stating the scheme needed legislative change had been erased from the brief presented to the Coalition’s razor gang for sign off, the royal commission heard on Tuesday.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison faces an interrogation over his role in approving the illegal robo-debt scheme after a royal commission heard the advice the welfare recovery scheme needed legislative change had been inexplicably erased from the brief presented to the Coalition’s razor gang.
The scheme used Tax Office annual income data and averaged it over 26 fortnights, presuming income was the same across each, and put the onus on welfare recipients to prove they didn’t owe the government money. “How did the identification of the problem in the lead-up to the final executive minute drop off the radar by the time it seems the expenditure review committee considered the proposal?” Greggery asked.Payne replied: “I don’t know the answer to that question, and I say that in all transparency”.He put two possible explanations to Payne: that either the advice had changed, or someone had simply removed it. Payne said she didn’t know.
Payne told the commission that note reflected the Senate numbers, which involved a powerful crossbench “and the legislative environment at that time”. Colleen Taylor wrote to DHS secretary Kathryn Campbell in January 2017 following an all-staff email assuring workers there was no change to the way the department was calculating debts. Taylor told Campbell there had been a “dramatic change” between the previous manual assessment of payment and income discrepancies, and the new system that relied heavily on income averaging.
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