Former prime minister Scott Morrison has deflected blame for the disastrous robodebt scheme he helped introduce as social services minister.
Mr Morrison told a royal commission into the scheme on Wednesday he was focused on tackling welfare fraud and not privy to departmental discussions about its legality.
During the all-day hearing, the former prime minister was on several occasions reminded to stay on topic and not interrupt questions being put to him.
Mr Morrison blamed departmental staff for omitting legal concerns from a policy proposal he presented to cabinet despite having signed an earlier briefing document in which concerns were raised.
“Had that advice come forward I sincerely believe we would not be sitting here today,” he told the commission.
Robodebt involved using individuals’ annual tax information provided by the ATO to determine average fortnightly earnings and automatically establish welfare debts, an approach ruled unlawful by the Federal Court in 2019.
The scheme wrongly recovered more than $750 million from 381,000 people and led to several people taking their lives while being pursued for false debts.
Straying well off script as the inquiry progressed, Mr Morrison brought the hearing to a standstill over concerns he may be violating parliamentary privilege.
The frustrated commissioner, Catherine Holmes SC, asked Mr Morrison at one point: “Are you listening at all?”
Former Labor leader Bill Shorten described Mr Morrison’s conduct as a witness as “triggering”, taking into account the hundreds of thousands of Australians affected by the scheme.
“Scott Morrison had an opportunity today to attend the royal commission, to personally apologise, to accept personal responsibility,” he told reporters.
“Instead, what we got was … lecturing, hectoring, not answering questions, splitting hairs on simple yes-no questions.
“It is a defensive lecture about why everyone else is wrong and he’s right.”
Mr Morrison insisted he was not privy to communications between the departments and assumed the legal concerns had been settled when the final proposal was presented to him.
“It was not uncommon that at early stages in my experience of new policy proposals that departments would flag potential issues and that’s what I simply noted that to be,” he told the commission.
“By the time of the submission going to cabinet, that view … had changed and advice was given that legislation was not required, by the department.”
Ms Holmes questioned why Mr Morrison was not interested in inquiring how the legislative issues had been resolved.
“How is it that you were content to just see ‘no legislation required’ and leave it at that?” she asked.
Mr Morrison replied, “Because commissioner, that is how the cabinet process works. I was satisfied that the department had done their job.”
He said he took on the social services portfolio with the express aim of overhauling the welfare system and reducing rorts.
As well as the legal concerns, early proposals for the scheme identified potential savings to the federal budget of $1.2 billion by more efficiently identifying welfare discrepancies.
Mr Morrison conceded the government had a strong desire to balance the budget and that it faced a hostile Senate, creating roadblocks for legislative reform.
Former human services minister Marise Payne told the royal commission on Tuesday she had no knowledge of why the legal issues flagged in earlier briefings were omitted from the final policy proposal.
When asked who held responsibility for advancing any concerns, Senator Payne said ministers were always ultimately responsible but they received advice from their departments.
© AAP 2022
