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Centrelink debt recovery shambles makes small change of Ley's claims

John Birmingham

At least we know the Turnbull government's pursuit of millions of dollars in Centrelink debt from thousands of punters who don't actually owe them a brass razoo isn't just a grotesque indulgence. Turns out the government needs that money to prop up Queensland's real estate industry and apartment construction sector.

After all, the money Christian Porter is chasing from former welfare recipients he still insists have been overpaid, is the same money that Sussan Ley spent catching flights and riding around in government limos when she accidentally bought her Gold Coast apartment. It's public money.

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Health Minister stands aside pending investigation

Health Minister Sussan Ley steps down from the frontbench while she is investigated over her taxpayer-funded travel.

Your money, in other words.

This is the really sickening aspect of this business; the egregious hypocrisy. Here is a government that launched a ham-fisted assault on thousands of innocent people, a government that unleashed debt collectors and standover merchants on the sick, the mentally ill, the poor and disadvantaged, wrongly in many cases, and with reckless indifference to the consequences.

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A government that until yesterday was perfectly happy with Ms Ley's demand that the taxpayer fund her travel to Queensland because although she did use the trip to buy that apartment down the beach, she didn't really intend to buy the apartment, it was just one of those spur-of-the-moment things, and anyway she spoke to some "stakeholders" so that's all right then.

Given the onerous burden of proof Turnbull and Porter have imposed on the victims of their Centrelink shakedown racket, you have to wonder what sort of process Ley will be subject to.

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Will she be forced to do battle with the impenetrable and implacably user-hostile MyGov website to process her documentation? Will debt collectors be calling her at home of an evening?

Because she's incorrectly claimed for at least one trip, shouldn't we assume that she was hitting us up for dodgy trips all the way through the year?

After all, that's how it works with Centrelink now. As Christian Porter points out, if we let people get away with these things, you could be kissing goodbye to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yes, minister, you could.

Of course, as difficult as it's been for Turnbull to have to cut Ley from his front bench, at least temporarily, it has done him the favour of dislodging Porter and the mysterious, missing Alan Tudge from the centre of the news cycle.

But last time I checked that pair of bozos were still pursuing tens of thousands of people for tens of millions of dollars they didn't actually owe.

That remains the biggest scandal of the new year and unlike the piddling stakes involved in Ley's spot of bother, it directly and painfully affects huge numbers of people. So let's just remind ourselves of what is happening.

The government changed the way it matches data from the ATO and Centrelink.

It wrote a bunch of bullshit assumptions into the code to run that data-matching program.

It removed human oversight from the process.

And then, having magicked up an imaginary stash of gold, it sent debt collectors after thousands of innocent citizens to make it all real.

It is still doing so. Every day.

That's the real scandal and it remains unaddressed, unresolved and utterly indefensible.

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