However, the real shocker of the inquiry so far has been the craven and morally bankrupt role of the highly-paid elite public servants who developed and ran the scheme.
The evidence suggests that they largely failed in their obligation to provide independent, quality advice on the most basic issue of whether the scheme was legal.
It is not clear yet whether Morrison was warned adequately that issuing notices to pay and docking people’s benefits without adequate proof of the debt was illegal. Evidence last week suggested that his department advised him that the scheme could be used as a “last resort”.
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But the senior public servants advising Morrison and others knew the scheme was illegal and allowed it to go ahead anyway.
For five years they watered down or suppressed completely the repeated warnings coming from their own legal experts that the scheme had no legislative backing.
Their methods for suppressing the truth were sometimes laughable. For example, confronted by a growing wave of legal challenges and media reports, the public servants commissioned external advice on the scheme from law firm Clayton Utz in August 2018. When the lawyers sent “draft advice” saying the scheme was illegal, the public servants paid the full bill but then buried it in the files without ever receiving a final draft. This was apparently common practice among public servants when legal advice was uncomfortable.
Many of the mandarins who dealt with robo-debt seem to have put the interests of the government above their obligation under the public service code of conduct to act with integrity and honesty.
They knew the government had announced a target of raising $3.9 billion for the budget using robo-debt and in the bubble world of Canberra that was all that counted. It was unthinkable that the program could be scrapped.
To be fair, some public servants did try to raise the alarm, albeit in muted form, and others have since expressed contrition. Former deputy secretary of the Department of Social Services Serena Wilson, who had seen clear legal advice warning against the scheme, said on Wednesday that she “lacked courage” to express her concerns.
The role of the public service in robo-debt is arguably as important as the failures by politicians. They are, of course, obliged to carry out the orders of the political masters, but they are also bound to uphold the law.
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