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 our welfare law substack Welfare Law in Australia, Dr Darren O’Donovan writes about the saddening fact that some one million Centrelink claims are at the moment awaiting assessment and determination. O’Donovan analyses the causes of this unsustainable backlog and the way it might be solved.

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 […]