Robodebt report: Scott Morrison on holiday in Italy

The Royal Commission into Robodebt is expected to issue a damning report on the plan on Friday, as the man who ran the program’s family vacations in Europe.

After receiving more than a million documents and interviewing more than 100 witnesses over nine weeks, Canberra is bracing for the findings of former Queensland Chief Justice Catherine Holmes, who are expected to thrash the creators of Robodebt .

Scrutinized will be the role former Prime Minister Scott Morrison played in the implementation of the scheme through his role as social services minister at the time.

Mr Morrison will not be in the country when the report is handed over as he is currently traveling around Europe with his family after appearing at a series of appointments surrounding the UK’s AUKUS submarine deal at the end of June.

“Following his formal visit to the UK, Mr Morrison will take some time off to spend with his family, who will accompany him to the UK, on ​​a private holiday abroad, during parliamentary recess and school holidays,” he said. his office in a statement. a statement prior to the trip.

Last week, The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that the former prime minister was spotted at Ristorante dei Priori in Florence, Italy, having lunch with his family.

This year’s Euro trip isn’t the first time Mr Morrison has traveled abroad at an inopportune time. The former prime minister was found on a pre-planned vacation with his family in Hawaii as deadly wildfires ravaged parts of the country in 2019.

At the time, he said it wasn’t his job to ‘hold the snake’

Robodebt was an automated method of calculating welfare recipients’ alleged debts by matching their reported wages to their assumed annual income, which was estimated by averaging data from the Australian Revenue Service.

Robodibt was active from 2015 to 2019 and was shut down after it was found to be illegal.

But by then it had unlawfully claimed nearly $2 billion from more than 400,000 people and had been linked to several suicides.

A mother of a young man who committed suicide while being pursued for more than $17,000 described her heartbreak after discovering the connection between his death and debt.

Jennifer Miller told the committee she traveled to her son’s home in Melbourne after he committed suicide aged 27 only to discover he was being sued for the debt by collection agency Dunn & Bradstreet.

She said she found five of Dunn & Bradstreet’s debt notes on her son’s refrigerator. Next to them was a drawing of Rhys’s face with a gun, dollar signs around it, and a caption reading “debt life.”

Mr Morrison appeared as a witness at the committee, where he argued that he was never informed of the illegal nature of the scheme and that he would not have launched it if he had been made aware of legal issues.

Justin Greggery KC, the lead attorney responsible for the commission, noted in his closing remarks that the scheme “gained momentum” when Mr Morrison took over the social services portfolio in 2014.

Mr Greggery said the proposal was rejected in late 2014 by members of the public service, who advised that such an arrangement was ‘not appropriate under the current legal provisions’.

The committee had also been told that Mr Morrison had been informed from the outset that the Robodebt scheme would require legislative changes to operate legally.

During his questioning by the commission, Mr Morrison was shown an interview he had with Sky News in 2015 in which he described himself as a ‘welfare agent’

Mr Morrison said there needed to be a ‘strong welfare agent on the job’ and that he was ‘looking to do that’ because he wanted the social security system to help people who needed it most.