How a long-forgotten episode involving the wrongful conviction of 15,000 Australians for unproven welfare offences prompted the creation of the Robodebt scheme

Income apportionment and the FTXB test case With lead author Dr Darren O’Donovan (senior lecturer in administrative law at La Trobe), I have authored a blog post on a significant test case recently heard by the President of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Justice Kyrou, and two senior members, called FTXB; Secretary, Department of Social Services […]

Today on Welfare Law in Australia, Darren O’ Donovan analyses an internal document released under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) just a few days ago. That document reveals the inner working of Services Australia as it continues in its efforts to remediate a multi-decade calculation blunder likely affecting more than 100,000 people. What […]

On BioEdge, Dr Patrick Foong and I quickly run through the bioethical perturbations that have come with the relatively rapid approval of Casgevy, the first-ever approved genome-editing therapy that utilises CRISPR/Cas 9. In some ways, it could be said that Casgevy is the first-ever approved genome therapy ‘full-stop’, because other categories of gene therapy have […]

This post is a brief discussion of three media contributions I have made in the last few months.

This month has been a busy month for my semi-scholarly work. At the start of the month, I wrote this piece for the Conversation about the so-called crackdown on the cosmetics procedures sector announced by AHPRA around 7 September 2023. Following the publication of that piece, I was lucky to be asked to appear on […]

On 2 August 2023, the Commonwealth Ombudsman published a terse report outlining its findings after an investigation into the lawfulness of ‘income apportioning’ — a method of debt calculation used by Australian welfare agencies DHS and DSS since at least 2003 (ie, for more than 17 years). As the Report states, this process, as it […]

The following post explores the relative egregiousness of the robodebt scandal, the Royal Commission report’s structure and contents, and the earliest stage at which the capability of creating something like robodebt arose. It also considers automated decision-making and the extent to which the Commission omits to consider the actual technical workings of robodebt.

The post goes on to consider the problem of subject matter experts, as well as the problem of the ‘proof point’ solution for robodebt, both of which are not considered in the Commission’s report. Next, the post notes the way in which the Commission’s report does not take a strict or legalistic approach to the unlawfulness of robodebts — at least not beyond anything already said in the Federal Court of Australia.

Finally, the post briefly touches on the AAT firing scandals that the Report essentially omits. Despite all this, the article concludes with some compliments for what is obviously an exceptional output from this Royal Commission — one that chronicles an unprecedented Australian governance failure and recommends 57 ways it might be redressed.