back in 2022. Perhaps you’ll recall the build up to this moment: how the Morrison government had promised one – widely criticised as toothless – then failed to deliver it, leaving the door open for Labor to outbid it on the issue of integrity.
We can’t know who these officials are because the details are contained in a confidential chapter of the commission’s report. But we know the horrors of robo-debt all too well: how it drove people to suicide, how it was in the commission’s words “crude and cruel … neither fair nor legal”, and “made people feel like criminals” even if they had done nothing wrong.
Quite apart from wasting resources, at some point these repeated processes become a form of oppression in themselves. Not as oppressive as robo-debt itself, you might say, but oppressive nonetheless.“There’s no pathway to justice,” were the words of one. No doubt I would feel the same way, but accountability certainly remains possible.
Corruption is a hefty finding on its own terms, whether any punishments flow directly from it or not. It’s hard to imagine a minister, for example, could wear that lightly as a matter of scant consequence even if they wanted to. Or future ministers that wouldn’t consider themselves warned.