Author and journalist Rick Morton will be talking about his book Mean Streak at the Canberra Writers Festival. Photo: Supplied.
In all cases, what seemed a simple government mistake slowly revealed itself to be a sick game invented by a cash-strapped government department and callous, greedy ministers.
The game we now call Robodebt.
By the time anyone realised they were in this labyrinth, it was too late. They were already being hunted.
So closes the prologue to Rick Morton’s gripping account of the appalling Robodebt saga and his forensic reportage of it.
Mean Streak, his just-released book, is a powerful read.
It puts a human face (many human faces) to the tragedy and doesn’t hold back on the illegality of what the government and public service of the day did over a number of years.
Morton describes Robodebt as a government and bureaucratic attack on Australia’s most vulnerable people – but not an aberration.
It was, he says, a “logical endpoint” of big data surveillance and an “ideological war” on the poor.
Morton has won two Walkley Awards for his coverage of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.
Ahead of his feature appearance this weekend at the Canberra Writers Festival (with its apt theme of Power Politics Passion), Morton spoke with Region about his book, the Royal Commission and the public service.
“I love Canberra. I don’t know if it comes across in the book but I really do. And I love public servants as well,” he says.
“I really do, which might be hard to believe considering I’m quite mean to them in the book. But I’m always mean to things I love because I want them to be good and great.”
Were there any surprises for him from the Royal Commission’s proceedings?
“Honestly, it felt too much like a conspiracy. You know how you try to talk yourself out of it, saying ‘surely they were not that mean-spirited’,” he says.
“I thought they knew that what they were doing was all a bit dodgy, but I don’t think many of us knew they had legal advice going back to 2014 … it was like ‘holy f***ing shit’.
“I genuinely think the Royal Commissioner and the commission were astonishing to do what they did in the time restraints and roadblocks they had.”
As for the sealed section of Royal Commissioner Catherine Holmes’ report, Morton thinks it is inevitable that it will be made public. It’s just a matter of when.
“Remember, she [Royal Commissioner] is a conservative jurist in her own right, and I totally get why she had a sealed section,” he says.
“But it will be released one day … At this point, I’m struggling to see anyone who is going to be held accountable for this. If I gave you my real thoughts, I might get sued.
“The ministers have escaped more accountability than some of them should have – two in particular – but equally, I focus a lot on the public service in this book for two reasons.
“One, because the vast majority of decisions that are made every day never get put to a minister’s office, so the public service has a lot of power.
“And also because it’s an unchecked power really, because even in things like Senate Estimates there are relatively few ways to reach individual decision makers within the department.
“What we’ve seen with this is that there were many bad actors within the public service at various points.
“One example is when Christian Porter — and I’m the last person who would want to defend him — was trying to get talking points while he was covering for [Alan] Tudge, and they gave him outright lies.
“This thing could not have continued without the incompetence and laziness or the outright proactive engagement of dozens of public servants who looked the other way or participated in a cover-up.
“I don’t let them get off because I find it particularly galling that – and we’ve seen this post the Royal Commission – there’s a closing of the ranks.
“You can’t explain any one bit of Robodebt without looking at the entire mosaic.”
Morton says he never intended to write a book about it all, but once he saw the reactions of people who were named in the report for either knowingly doing the wrong thing or making significant mistakes, he wanted to be an annoying person not allowing them to forget about it.
He spent four months rereading every bit of evidence from the Royal Commission, then began writing 2000 words a day for six weeks.
“I don’t really remember writing it to be quite honest,” he says.
“It was quite an awful experience; it was just hard work. So if I get sued, I’m going for a blackout defence.”
Rick Morton will be discussing Mean Streak in the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House at 2 pm on Sunday, 27 October, as part of the Canberra Writers Festival. Also, as part of the festival, he will join a panel discussion on Status Anxiety at 3:30 pm on Saturday, 26 October. Tickets to each event can be purchased at the Canberra Writers Festival.
Mean Streak is published by Harper Collins.
Original Article published by Chris Johnson on Riotact.
