The public sector union has called on Stuart Robert to apologise to its members forced to administer the unlawful robodebt scheme, ahead of a speech in which he will champion “helpful” and “respectful” service delivery.
The Community and Public Sector Union wrote to the government services minister on Friday asking for an apology to Services Australia staff, who it said raised concerns four years ago but were told to push on despite witnessing first hand the distress and anger it caused people accused of owing debts.
The intervention comes ahead of Robert’s Tuesday address to the National Press Club promising faster and more accurate calculation of payments through replacement of 30-year-old systems with a new “entitlement calculation engine” and development of a new whole-of-government platform.
Robert will also announce the government is considering designation of “sovereign data sets” which would require that only Australian providers and networks can access them.
Since 2016 the Coalition has scaled up use of income-averaging to calculate welfare debts, despite warnings it was not lawful to do so.
After a successful federal court case and an ongoing class action, Scott Morrison apologised for “any hurt or harm” caused by the so-called robodebt program which levied 470,000 unlawful debts against welfare recipients and is set to cost the commonwealth more than $1bn.
But the CPSU national president, Alistair Waters, wrote to Robert that it was not good enough just to apologise to customers with “no mention of the effects implementing the scheme has had on Services Australia staff”.
Staff in contact with the public had to “assist distressed, angry or upset community members, including people talking about self harm and suicide”, he said, while workers who expressed concerns or participated in union activities were “threatened for exercising their workplace rights”.
Waters shared personal accounts from staff including that they had been “reprimanded by team leaders and the assistant directors … that we are ‘being negative’ when we have continually expressed our opinion that averaging earning is incorrect – over almost four years since this started”.
Another said they had “felt sick” and lost sleep thinking about conversations with customers about robodebts including “some [who] have talked about suicide on the call”.
In excerpts of his speech, seen by Guardian Australia, Robert says taxpayers will be saved “enormous amounts of money” by a new “entitlement calculation engine” powered by Pega software and Infosys systems.
The system will increase “speed of implementation and removing friction for customers across government”, he says.
Robert – who has previously claimed only a “small cohort” of people were owed robodebt refunds and incorrectly blamed MyGov failures on a denial of service attack at the start of the coronavirus recession – also expounds on the virtue of “transparency” in service delivery.
“Imagine having a personalised dashboard so Australians can see their claims, their payments, if they have debts and how they were raised and other services or payments and assistance available to them,” he says.
“Then on top of that, transparency in how their government agency is monitoring and addressing their concerns.”
After being implemented by Services Australia, the entitlements engine can be scaled up for use by other departments and functions including veterans income support and aged care, he says.
Robert argues that if the government is to spend “hundreds of millions on certain platforms or technologies, these platforms should be scalable or repeatable across government so we can achieve that vision of simple and helpful government services”.
Robert also says the government has launched a new version of MyGov, which he says has become “a modern platform capable of scaling up to include digital identity and become a fully-fledged all of government customer experience”.
The new version is available in 110 languages, he says, suggesting the government should also offer a personalised user experience in the same way that Facebook and Netflix suggest content most relevant to them.
Robert says governments must respond to community expectations and “be transparent about how we manage the information that Australians are concerned about sharing with us”.
He says sovereign requirements applied to some data sets held by the government will “ensure that Australians can trust that government will appropriately manage the information that they provide to us – whether it is for a [contact] tracing app or for the census”.
“Through the data availability and transparency legislation the government will seek to introduce in the period ahead, we will ensure services are designed so we don’t have to ask Australians to provide the same information repeatedly.
“This will enable us to streamline the processes of applying for a service, benefit, permission or permit, while providing visibility and transparency of that process.”
