Mean Streak: A Moral Vacuum, a Dodgy Debt Generator and a Multi-billion Dollar Government Shake Down, by Rick Morton

How an illegal government program slowly unravelled.​

Robodebt was a harebrained scheme hatched by a group of public servants hoping to make happy their political masters. Welfare recipients have never been popular with the electorate, easily demonised, and so here was some low hanging fruit. The scheme, as imagined, would reap a whirlwind of budget savings by recouping badly guesstimated debts from those unlucky enough to receive a letter. The problem was it was illegal from the get-go, and blind Freddy could have told you so. Debts were worked out with a fundamentally incorrect model, by trying to squeeze the square of tax office data into the circle of the fortnightly centrelink payment system. 

Rick Morton tells the sorry story of senior public servants watering down or hiding legal advice and their political masters who didn’t want to ask too many questions, preferring to pursue a tough on welfare cheats rhetoric. Mean Streak provides a valuable document of how disastrous public policy is made, with a jaw dropping cast of bunglers, sycophants, careerists and cowards. It was only for the heroic acts of a few who took the Commonwealth to court that the system collapsed. A cautionary tale of government overreach.

Mean Streak: A Moral Vacuum, a Dodgy Debt Generator and a Multi-billion Dollar Government Shake Down, by Rick Morton. Published by Fourth Estate. $35.99

JAN 25