It's really not a great time to be busted in the entitlements cookie jar amidst stories of single parents, students, pensioners and people with disabilities being pursued for debts that, in many cases, they did not even owe. When even A Current Affair is sticking up for people on the dole, you're doing your scapegoat politics very badly.
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The Centrelink debt debacle has come about because the government insists there is $4 billion that can be clawed back from Centrelink overpayments.
Can we assume this $4 billion figure is accurate? Up to 20 per cent of the debt notices appear to have been raised in error. It would be an assumption best described as "heroic" to accept the remaining 80 per cent of debts are totally 100 per cent fair dinkum. Who knows how many people just paid the debt because it was too hard to challenge Centrelink? Or how many started paying debts they don't owe while they do challenge Centrelink?
The menacingly issued debt notices can be as cruel as they are erroneous. Jack Rogerson, a 21-year-old who has autism, would have paid $3000 to Centrelink for a debt before his mother stepped in to help show he didn't owe a cent. The automated system incorrectly spat out a distressing $24,000 debt notice to a single mum because she supplied the name of her employer in two different ways. Claire Etheridge from Perth received a letter from Centrelink claiming she owed $26,274 – it turned out Centrelink owed her almost $5000.
This is a system that Minister for Social Services Christian Porter described as working "incredibly well". Thank goodness he's a minister not a Qantas engineer.
Though you can see how a $26,000 error might seem trivial to a cabinet minister who earns $26,000 in a single month. Imagine the horror of opening those letters just before Christmas.
These are all problems that used to be picked up by human beings working at Centrelink, but the public service is one of the only places where the Liberal Party abhors "jobs and growth".