Cornered. The federal government has cornered our most vulnerable people.
The cascade of harm from the Centrelink automated debt notifications debacle now includes providing too little legal help for those who need it most. And the little offered them now will disappear in July.
The mess created by the Australian Government's bid to automate the search for people who are cheating on their welfare entitlements shows no sign of disappearing, with ministers standing by the methods used.
These methods have been shown to be generating false positives by many media organisations but the government refuses to budge.
The view of many is that this is typical political behaviour: make a mistake and then refuse to own up to it.
But a different theory appears to be more logical: Malcolm Turnbull and his ministers are refusing to budge because they want a situation of this kind to exist.
After looking at where the headline $4 billion figure came from previously, we now turn our attention to another big number that’s getting bandied about the place: $1.7 billion in over-payments that the Government wants to claw back.
This number comes from the 2015-16 Federal Budget. The Hockey/Cormann budget. The “lifters and leaners”, let’s go smoke cigars within view of the cameras budget. You know the one.
Anyhoo, on page 116 of Budget Paper No. 2 [PDF] we find this statement:
