Mean Streak

When the robodebt Royal Commission was running in 2022-3, my husband and I became a bit obsessed with following the livestream of the proceedings. Often we didn't fully understand exactly who a particular witness was, or what part they'd played in setting up or perpetuating the scheme; sometimes we found the counsel's line of questioning hard to follow, or had trouble disentangling the self-justifications, half-lies and fudges produced by the witnesses.

We weren't directly affected by robodebt, though my sister receives Centrelink payments and my husband works for the public service (the Tax Office was tangentially involved in the saga, as the source of the data that the department of Human Services relied on to produce their 'debt' figures, and it was possible at one time that my husband's boss might be called to give evidence). I guess we had just enough skin in the game to be appalled and fascinated. During the sittings, I relied on Rick Morton's tweets to decipher what was going on and explain the broader context, and now he has produced Mean Streak, which sorts out all the confusions of the out-of-order evidence and sets out a brutally clear chronological account of how robodebt evolved, its cruel consequences, and the persistence of a few activists and lawyers that finally brought it crashing down.

Mean Streak is not an easy read, though Morton does his best to leaven the material with personal interviews, wry asides and even the odd joke. But he is furious, and exhausted, and it shows. A few individuals (given a right of reply at the end of the book) emerge as merciless architects of a scheme that targeted the most vulnerable in our society, though they all deny any wrong-doing, and I suppose most of them actually believe that they were doing the right thing -- stopping 'fraud' (though welfare fraud is actually vanishingly small), clawing back 'overpayments' from undeserving bludgers to be returned to 'honest taxpayers' (hm, I have another whole set of views about that categorisation...) But people died. And still no one has been held accountable.

Robodebt was a horrific, shameful episode of Australian public life, and I applaud Rick Morton for his tireless, unflinching examination of the story, and his faithful chronicling of it. He says working on this story has made him sick, literally, and I'm not surprised. But there are still shining moments among the dishonesty and lack of compassion -- a lowly worker who tried to draw her superior's attention to the unfairness of the scheme, an online activist drawn into protest almost against their will. There is still hope, and there still are decent people doing their best, people who care.