Of the loads of films I saw last year, the most memorable was Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake. I go to the movies for escapist entertainment, not to give my emotions a good workout but, even so, it left a lasting impression.
It was the story of a 59-year-old carpenter in Newcastle, England, whose cardiologist told him not to go back to work for a few months after he'd had a heart attack on the job.
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Government's robo debt recovery
The machine relied on by the government to recover welfare overpayments has actually misapplied the law. The Age's Economics Editor Peter Martin explains.
What we saw was Blake's mistreatment at the job centre he went to for social security payments at the height of the Cameron government's austerity spending cuts.
It was run like an assembly line, with "clients" processed as fast as possible, with a complete lack of flexibility or consideration.
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Nothing Blake said was listened to, but at his first sign of frustration he was rebuked for his utterly unacceptable behaviour and threatened with removal by security guards. He was repeatedly threatened with the "sanction" of having his dole suspended for such crimes as being late for his appointment.
He got nowhere when he visited the centre, had to hang on for ages when he phoned, and was always being told to fill out forms online. Small problem: he didn't have a computer and didn't know how to use one.
Sorry, online forms are "mandatory".
Why would a government treat its citizens so badly? Well, reading between the lines you saw the centre had been handed over to a private business. It probably underquoted to get the contract and had turned the centre into a sausage machine in the hope of saving enough on staff to make a profit.
I thought of Daniel Blake when I read of the way the Turnbull government is using an "automated debt recovery program" to harass former users of Centrelink.
It's using a computer program to go back several years, checking Centrelink benefit payments against records from the Tax Office, to look for apparent overpayments and demand the money be repaid.
Trouble is, the exercise is hugely prone to error. Eligibility for social security benefits is assessed on a fortnightly basis, whereas tax information is annual. The machine merely divides the annual figures by 26 and often gets the wrong answer.
Where the same employer's name has been recorded differently, the machine treats them as separate businesses, sometimes calculating "debts" that are thousands of dollars out.
The machine may send its demand to an old address, even though failure to respond within 21 days is taken as acceptance that the figure named is correct, and the trigger for debt collectors to be called in, with the addition of a 10 per cent "recovery fee".
The many leaks from appalled Centrelink staff suggest they've been discouraged from correcting obvious errors before the machine-generated demands are sent out, and discouraged from helping people in person, rather than just telling them to use the website.
It's clear this is a fishing expedition. You make what you know may often be erroneous claims for repayment, shift the onus of proof onto people with few records or resources, give them a scare, then sit back and see how much you rake in.
I confess to feeling much empathy for people struggling with the many digital tentacles of the ironically named MyGov website. I'm an accountant but I still struggle with its online tax return.
Its requirement for you to supply your spouse's income sets up a Catch 22 where neither you nor your spouse can submit a return without saying something you know isn't true.
This year I'm stuck on a section of the return which, when I try to save it and move on, just says ERROR. OK, what's the error? Doesn't say. But I know what it's thinking: that's for us to know and you to find out.
So far I've spent ages searching the site for the answer, to no avail. I'm waiting for the time and courage to do battle with the Tax Office's phone system - assuming that's still permitted.
Back on the Centrelink debacle, I've been amazed by the way the Centrelink boss, the junior minister, Alan Tudge, and the senior minister, Christian Porter, have each denied there's any problem.
Really? This is the way bureaucrats and politicians get their names into the history books for contributing to their government's demise.
So far they've mainly been picking on young people on the dole, but now they're moving on to invalids and age pensioners. Really? Courageous decision, minister.
What on earth is motivating them? Partly it's that, having made so much fuss about debt and deficit while in opposition, the government is having enormous trouble getting the budget deficit down.
It lacks the courage to tackle the big sources of rent-seeking by business interests, but is confident it can get away with cracking down on the tiddlers in social security.
It's worse than that, however. Porter and Tudge are from the Liberals' hard Right. You can see from their speeches and remarks they have little sympathy for people poor enough to need social welfare, and every sympathy for their own class, groaning under the weight of a tax rate of supposedly "almost 50 per cent".
Their sacred mission is to prevent the need for higher taxes by ensuring none of their department's "clients" get away with a dollar more than they're supposed to get.
Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.
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