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Luke Henriques-Gomes

Sep 18, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X

Quite a development in the #robodebt saga: The government lost 76 cases where the AAT said the debts weren't legally enforceable, Gordon Legal says.

It never appealed – and the decisions weren't made public. theguardian.com/australia-news… #auspol

Most of these decisions were made in 2017. We'd previously only known about five or six. By not appealing, the government ensured that a higher level of the tribunal which publishes its decisions didn't rule against it.

Alan Tudge is also named in the statement as claim. For example, he is said to have received a brief on 1 March that stated “33% of Robodebt-raised debts ‘were changed to $0 on review/reassessment’”.

On this, I think the government will say that the way the system was supposed to work and didn't know it was unlawful

Anyway here is Alan Tudge at the time saying everything was working great and attacking Acoss abc.net.au/radionational/…

Also - data released to a Senate inquiry this week showed that the total value of all unlawful #robodebts exceeded $1bn. We foreshadowed this back in June theguardian.com/australia-news…

It was, however, lower than the $1.5bn estimate from earlier in the year that was the basis for that story

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Luke Henriques-Gomes

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Luke Henriques-Gomes

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Expecting a big day at the #robodebtrc today. The first witness is Renee Leon, who succeeded Kathryn Campbell as secretary of the Department of Human Services. Leon was in the top job when robodebt faced the ultimately successful landmark federal court challenge.

We revealed recently how Leon wrote to the ombudsman telling it to remove recommendations questioning robodebt's legality from its 2019 report into the scheme. Those comments were cut from the public report after Leon's letter. theguardian.com/australia-news…

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We're expecting the #robodebtrc to today focus on the crucial period 2017 when the robodebt scheme exploded into public view. This was widely acknowledged by previous witnesses as a "crisis" for the program.

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Straight into it. It's Jan 2017, most key people in the department are on leave. Gladman gets a request for a paper on the department's practice of income averaging

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