For the Turnbull government these days, ineptitude comes in many forms, success in few. One of the latest examples where its performance has baffled the dwindling number of its supporters and brought smiles to the faces of its opponents is the decision to let Centrelink's computers loose on Australia's least wealthy and most vulnerable citizens in the weeks before Christmas.
By trawling through the files of Centrelink clients, and matching their records with income reported to the Australian Taxation Office, the computers found - or thought they had found - thousands of instances of overpayment.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is among government ministers digging in to defend the new Centrelink computer system.Credit: Bradley Kanaris
This is a complicated process. For someone relying on Centrelink but also occasionally finding part-time or casual work, income will vary widely from week to week. One fortnight's income, extrapolated out to an annual figure, may look substantial; but the Centrelink client may earn nothing for the next six weeks or more.
Previously the data was matched by human beings, who would check with beneficiaries and their employers to verify what had happened. By taking better account of all the possible circumstances, they were more accurate. But of course they were slower and, being human, expensive.
The new system was introduced in July and since then, with the relentlessness and absence of tact which computers achieve without effort, has been sending letters of demand. According to the government, up to 20,000 letters are now sent each week, where previously 20,000 were sent in a year. Cue cries of genuine distress, against a background of carols, tinsel and fake snow, from dismayed welfare recipients.
We do not question the need for governments to keep their spending under control, to ensure scarce resources are spent only where they are needed, and that welfare recipients receive only the payments to which the rules entitle them. Without a doubt, some of those who received the letters of demand will have been paid too much and will quite rightly be expected to repay it.
But by no means all the recipients of the letters are in that position. Credible reports suggest very few are. An agile government might realise this, and act quickly to –– if not rectify the situation, at least mitigate the damage the computer's obvious mistakes are doing to its reputation for competence. Malcolm Turnbull's ministers, however, are not known for their agility.
They have ploughed on regardless. Christian Porter, the Social Security Minister, who with the Treasurer, Scott Morrison, announced the system in July, has said the government will stick by the computer, even if the process does upset a minority of people. The Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, told the ABC he made no apology for "making sure that those who didn't need it, who got it, pay the money back".
But for the government that is precisely the problem: it cannot make sure that those who didn't need the money pay it back, because it does not know who needed it and who did not. The computer's assessments are not accurate enough to tell it. The opposition, meanwhile, believes it does know, and has been gleefully wheeling out victim after victim of the government's holiday-season callousness.
This is not the Government's only blunder with computers. This year's census was compromised by hackers. The ATO's own computer system crashed last month. That is bad enough – but computers are like that: large systems used by private firms are not immune to failure.
Far worse for this government is the look of the thing: the politics are just terrible. Mr Turnbull has made heavy weather of explaining why big business needs the substantial tax cut foreshadowed in the last budget. Complaining about a lack of revenue while cutting business taxes is difficult to sell. Even the former treasurer, Peter Costello, has come out against the idea. The failure to ensure that some very big businesses pay tax at all undermines the government's argument further. From a different perspective, the Centrelink debacle –– squeezing single mothers, students and the poor – undermines it further still. Unfairness is combined with incoherence.
This confused and confusing performance will suggest to many that Mr Turnbull has no credible program which the public is likely to support. And his robotic cabinet appear to have been taught all they know about politics by a computer - possibly the same one which is still busy calculating poor people's Centrelink debts.