A scathing report from the Commonwealth Ombudsman has found that nearly 1000 jobseeker recipients have had their payments unlawfully cancelled over a two-year period, in what welfare advocates have dubbed “Robodebt 2.0”.
Iain Anderson found that the 964 cancellations happened automatically, between April 2022 and July 2024, due to an IT “error” with the Targeted Compliance Framework (TCF), a system set up under the Coalition government.
The TCF monitors jobseekers and ensures “mutual obligations” — attending job provider appointments and actively searching for work — are met. If they are not, it can penalise jobseekers via reduced, suspended or cancelled payments.
Following the robodebt scandal in 2022 new laws were introduced to ensure that jobseekers would not again be subjected to harsh, automated payment changes, or cancellations, without human oversight to understand a jobseeker’s circumstances.
The ombudsman found that this did not happen in the 964 cases and that the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) and Services Australia “failed to take adequate steps to ensure the TCF was implemented in accordance with the 2022 amendment”. It said this likely had a “catastrophic impact” on vulnerable jobseekers.
“Imagine that if you were already living under the poverty line, so you can’t necessarily afford to pay rent, to feed yourself, to clothe yourself, but imagine then that that income is cut off for four weeks or more,” said Anderson. “What are you supposed to do? That’s the type of catastrophe that we are talking about.”
DEWR paused the cancellation of payments in September last year, informing the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) of the IT errors and cancellations that November.
ACOSS demanded the payments be resumed immediately and referred the matter to the ombudsman to investigate why the amended laws were not implemented for three years after they were handed down.
Anderson’s report said that the cancellations happened “without consideration of the jobseeker’s circumstances” and noted a fifth IT error that caused a further 45 automatic payment cancellations since DEWR paused cancellations last September.
Anderson also questioned the “apparent lack of urgency” regarding the 2022 amendments.
“We do not consider a delay of over three years, coupled with an indefinite commitment to future action, as reasonable … in our view, if parliament imposes an obligation on an agency head without specifying a time frame (as was the case here), the agency head should aim for implementation as soon as reasonably practicable.”
The report included a warning to all government agencies to ensure that all “automated decision-making is aligned with law and policy and is subject to ongoing testing and assurance” as a way to restore public confidence “that automated decisions are being made responsibly”.
ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie likened these systematic automated errors to the Robodebt scandal and pointed to ACOSS’s repeated warnings about the TCF system, which had been ignored.
“We made that in writing repeatedly to the government, to the successive ministers who come into this portfolio,” Goldie said. “We made very clear that on their watch, another example of a Robodebt-like catastrophe, was unfolding in front of them.
“This set of circumstances is off the back of the lessons we should have learned from Robodebt.”
Anderson made seven recommendations, including that DEWR not resume cancellations until the IT errors have been corrected and systems are in place to ensure the TCF complies with the law.
DEWR and Services Australia accepted all the recommendations, while acknowledging that the 2022 law was not adequately adopted.
Antipoverty Centre spokesperson Kristin O’Connell said it was “not enough … to implement the ombudsman’s recommendations and move on.”
“Welfare recipients have been documenting the extreme harm caused by compulsory activities for years, and consistently pushed for the government to stop harm by abolishing the cruel and infantilising rules they call ‘mutual’ obligations,” she said. “It has never been more obvious that this must happen.”
Greens spokesperson for social services Penny Altman-Payne is also lobbying for the “not only cruel, but completely dysfunctional” system to be scrapped. “This must be a wake-up call for change: Stop cancelling payments right now, abolish the mess that is the Targeted Compliance Framework, and work toward an end to mutual obligations.”
A second Ombudsman’s report, to be released later this year, will investigate whether the decision-making processes that leads to cancellations is fair. It will also look into the role of privately-run employment agencies.