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I’ve always found prequels strange.
I presumed the main story began and ended where it did for a reason: that it captured the interesting bit. But the prequel asks us to believe that all the stuff before that – the very things that were originally deemed to be of insufficient consequence or fascination to form part of the story proper – was actually very interesting after all. Hence, the obvious objection: if it was so interesting, why leave it out in the first place?
Illustration: Andrew Dyson
But years of experience with endless prequels has now revealed their use. Having been inducted into a universe – and only after having been so inducted – we crave to know how that universe was formed. So it is that this week we discovered Centrelink is pausing debts currently being paid by 86,000 people. The reason is that those debts were calculated using a method called “income apportionment”, in a way that we now know was unlawful.
More on that shortly, but you’ll immediately hear the echo of robo-debt in all this, which used “income averaging” to determine whether people had been overpaid unemployment benefits, then used computers to generate debt notices automatically.
The trouble is that income averaging – which takes everything someone has earned over a year and presumes it was earned evenly across the year – is very often inaccurate. That’s especially true for people in casual work with irregular shifts, who might have lots of work in one month, then very little the next.
If you simply average this out over the year, the leaner months become invisible to you, and you begin to assume people received greater JobSeeker payments than they were entitled to. And when you use machines to chase them for money they didn’t actually owe, and couldn’t afford to pay, you can destroy their lives. The result was a string of broken lives, including suicides.
“Income apportionment” is a similar folly with a similar problem.
The basic idea was to take the income you earned in a payslip, and simply assume you earned the same amount every day over that period – to apportion it evenly. That’s fine if your payslip happens to cover the same fortnight Centrelink uses to calculate your JobSeeker payment. But if your payslip is out of sync with Centrelink’s fortnightly periods, problems arise.
Say your fortnightly payslip begins halfway through a Centrelink fortnight. In that case, one week will fall in the first Centrelink period, and the second week will fall in the next one. And say you worked more shifts in one week than the other. By rights, you’re entitled to more JobSeeker in one Centrelink fortnight than another. But when Centrelink assumes every day of your payslip was the same it will likely conclude you’ve been overpaid, when you haven’t.
This went on for nearly two decades: from 2003-2020. The 86,000 debts now paused are only the active ones we know about. Other debts would have been paid unnecessarily and in full. People were prosecuted over debts we now know they probably didn’t owe. We don’t yet know the financial and human damage of this.
To be clear, this isn’t as callous as robo-debt. These newly paused debts were done manually, not by machines. Income apportionment was a tool used when someone couldn’t show evidence of which days they had actually worked, and it’s clear that the people using it thought they were acting within the law.
Robo-debt, by contrast, was a government program specifically aimed at rooting out welfare cheats, done against legal advice and without the legislation the relevant agencies knew was required to make it lawful. That makes it altogether more aggressive and contemptuous. Robo-debt is therefore the main story – the original saga. But these paused debts are the prequel. They give us a robo-debt origin story, revealing how it was the culmination of things, rather than an isolated malfeasance.
Because ultimately, the difference is more one of degree than essence.
People might have thought using income apportionment in this way was legal, but the legislation at the time was reasonably clear that it wasn’t. It is frankly extraordinary that for 17 years, no one noticed or checked this. Presumably, no one questioned it – least of all welfare recipients who are hardly in the habit of wondering if there’s really a sound legal basis for what they’re being asked to repay. They’re too stretched trying to outrun the hounds to get a guard dog of their own.
The common thread is this sense that governments are largely unaccountable for how they treat people on welfare. And that’s because the disposition of our politics towards them is ultimately one of suspicion, perhaps even scorn.
You could never simply take the word of someone who told you which shifts they worked to earn the amount on a given payslip. That sort of trust is reserved for tax returns, subject only to the occasional audit.
Instead, the starting point seems to be that welfare claimants are quite likely to be cheats. And that in turn stems from an assumption that a great many of them are there by choice, feeding parasitically off the hard work of the rest of us.
Hence the enduring popularity of welfare “crackdowns” – and robo-debt was one of them – in our politics. Hence the preparedness to reach for sloppy means of raising debts, because in the end that’ll do. Hence the difficulty anyone would have in challenging any such debt, either because a machine can’t hear you, or because there is no one to take your call even after-hours on hold, or because you’ve already called Centrelink that day and the system remembers your number and cuts you off.
Do we really win from this approach? The inevitable result is a system of endlessly complicated rules which require all manner of elaborate compliance, and which in turn means lots of very costly measures to police that compliance. Then comes the need for shortcuts to make that policing workable.
Meanwhile, it’s far from clear that this saves the government much money, especially when the policing goes horribly wrong, as inevitably it does. In this respect, robo-debt was a blockbuster, costing the federal government $1.8 billion in the courts. But clearly it doesn’t stop there. Because as yet, we can only guess at the budget for this prequel.
Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.
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