Robo-debt cases to be dropped for nearly 200,000 Australians
Almost 200,000 people who spent years fighting to clear welfare debts they didn’t owe will have any active Centrelink investigations wiped.
The federal government will scrap the cases of robo-debt victims still under review, with any potential debt no longer being pursued.
Nearly 200,000 robodebt cases will be wiped.Credit:Kate Geraghty
The unlawful debt recovery scheme started in 2015 and falsely accused welfare recipients of owing money to the government.
More than $750 million was wrongfully recovered from 381,000 people.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said clearing the outstanding cases would offer certainty to any Australians with reviews hanging over their heads.
Rishworth said pursuing the cases would be expensive and time-consuming, and would undermine public confidence in the welfare system.
“The robo-debt fiasco is something that should be of deep concern to all Australians. We know it had a significant human cost,” she said.
A royal commission into the robo-debt scheme will begin public hearings at the end of October.
The system, ruled unlawful in 2019, measured a person’s average income to claim hundreds of millions of dollars from 433,000 Centrelink recipients. The Coalition government settled a class action in 2020.
In August, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was vital to ensure the “human tragedy” the scheme caused never happened again.
“Robo-debt was, of course, the Coalition’s brainchild: a computer program to find out if someone owed the government money rather than involving a real person,” he said.
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