Bottomless well of self-pity: Morrison blasted for playing robodebt victim
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks during a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Monday, January 10, 2022. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)
During Question Time on Tuesday, government services minister Bill Shorten led the charge against the former prime minister, who earlier this week had rejected the commission’s findings as “disproportionate, wrong and unsubstantiated”.
The commission found Mr Morrison had “allowed cabinet to be misled” on the legality of the scheme when he was social services minister.
But Mr Morrison told parliament on Monday the findings were contradicted by the evidence presented to the commission and accused the Labor government of character assassination in the wake of the report.
Mr Shorten described Mr Morrison, who represents the NSW electorate of Cook, as a “bottomless well of self-pity with not a drop of mercy for all the real victims of robodebt”.
He listed the real victims of the scheme who received false debt notices and were required to prove they did not owe money to the government.
“The real victims are all those Australians who lost trust in government because of this unlawful scheme,” Mr Shorten said.
“Satire is truly dead in this country when the Member for Cook complains about the reversal of onus of proof on him but not the 434,000 people who did have the reverse onus.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the commission had exposed a “shocking abuse” of trust.
“It was an illegal program that was used to crush vulnerable people, an illegal program used to attack the defenceless, this was not business as usual,” he said.
He also attacked Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for backing Mr Morrison.
“(Mr Dutton) called the royal commission a witch hunt – nothing to say about vulnerable people hounded for money they didn’t owe (or) the fact that some of them were driven to their deaths,” Mr Albanese said.
“His only sympathy for Liberal MPs who created this scheme and doubled down on it, even when the alarm bells were going off.”
The scheme issued debt notices to people identified through a process called income averaging, which compared reported incomes with tax office data.
It wrongfully recovered more than $750 million and victims told the commission of their trauma and fear after they received notices and were hounded by debt collectors.
