Indigenous

With a flagged $4 billion to be recovered over four years, Centrelink’s demand letters over alleged debts could be just the start.

The Turnbull government’s mass invoices – constructed from data matching to claim discrepancies exist with Centrelink’s casual, disabled and vulnerable income earners – are expected to be used across the entire pensioner and social security sector. New discrepancies can be created over a recipient’s claimed asset values to substantiate invoices for ‘over-payments’.

The ‘debt’ letters are distressing many recipients, as the public outcry shows. Photo: AAP

Data matching and garnishee was originally implemented by Labor in government, but it was the Turnbull government that devised the more aggressive, presumptive and system-wide invoicing strategy.

While a responsible government has every right on behalf of taxpayers to eliminate fraud and ensure financial control in a country under deficit distress, the anecdotal hypocrisy of MPs who are extended travel allowance indulgences under lax rules adds fuel to what is becoming an explosive backlash across Australian postcodes.

A crowd funded court challenge to the legality of the alleged debt invoices is now expected.

Often stereotyped by tabloid media as dole bludgers exploiting a sense of entitlement, this time many articulate Centrelink recipients are fighting back.

Using the Not My Debt website they are sharing their stories of having been coerced by the Department of Human Services to agree to fortnightly repayments even though many dispute any debt exists.

They have taken their income statements and their Centrelink letters to A Current Affair, other TV shows and Facebook to give public evidence of unfairness.

Distressed and agitated when they have received what appears to be a letter of demand, they have hit the phones to (when they can get through) dispute the claimed amount of Centrelink ‘overpayment’.

The automated matching of their Centrelink-declared casual or irregular incomes, when averaged over 12 months with the amount declared on their Australian Tax Office income tax returns, has created what appears to be a discrepancy or ‘overpayment’.

The onus of proof is immediately placed on the recipient, many of whom have to scramble to find pay slips from employers from five or more years ago, or pay their banks to recover archived bank statements showing the date and amount of income received.

Off to Dun and Bradstreet you go!

A series of Centrelink letters have initiated what looks like a ‘Catch-22’: a bureaucratic entrapment made famous by Joseph Heller’s wartime novel where a paradoxical situation is created from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules.

The recipients of the Centrelink letters seem to be damned no matter what they do – much like the fictional World War II pilots in Catch-22 who were deemed to be sane if they voiced any concern for their own sanity. Photo: AAP

The first letter logged on a recipient’s MyGov account politely asks recipients to check online that their income details are correct.

Many recipients do not regularly access their MyGov accounts. If or when no response is logged a second Centrelink/ATO data matching letter quantifying the ‘overpayment’ is dispatched. Distress quickly ensues, as the quantum of the ‘debt’, in many cases thousands of dollars, is boldly displayed in what looks like an invoice, with credit card and Biller payments options listed at the bottom.

But instead of resolving the factual accuracy of the data matched quantum, the Centrelink call centre staffer says that unless the recipient immediately agrees to at least a minimum repayment (say $15 a fortnight for three months) of the disputed amount, under DHS policy the staffer has no alternative but to send the ‘debt’ for collection to outsourced collectors Dun and Bradstreet or Probe Group. Hence, ‘Catch-22’.

These debt collectors are on multi-million-dollar contracts with DHS. It remains commercial-in-confidence whether or not these companies receive a percentage of the money successfully collected. Opposition spokesperson Linda Burney has asked for the outsourcers’ incentive details to be released.

The strategy has enabled DHS’s Hank Jongen to claim, in an ABC interview, that debt recovery is working and had “identified” up to $300 million in overpayments since 169,000 letters were dispatched.

Mr Jongen claimed eight out of 10 “customers” had thus acknowledged the “overpayment”.

This official claim from DHS will be tested in coming weeks and months. The Australian National Audit Office, which coincidentally is due to report next month on DHS, has been asked to conduct a performance audit of Centrelink’s methodology.

‘This is cruelty’

In the current clawback, Centrelink has repeated its customer risk protocol by referring any distressed recipients to Lifeline for psychological support. More petrol on the fire.

centrelink debt crisis — Centrelink’s response to one of the widespread complaints from distressed welfare recipients. *Photo: Twitter*

One Centrelink senior staffer, who asked not to be named, told The New Daily the anger and rage generated by the data matching strategy had placed counter staff under confronting pressure.

“They just want to spit on us,” he said.

He asked why DHS had not quarantined vulnerable recipients, many of whom were intellectually disabled, from the more able casual income earners.

If DHS had a genuine “customer focus” the entire casual income reporting process would be “bulletproof” for recipients so they could neither calculatedly defraud nor inadvertently fall into error. A department wanting to engender trust with Australians striving to earn sustaining incomes in a now highly casualised economy would act protectively towards them.

“One intellectually disabled bloke screamed, ‘I’ve had a go mate … I did some work’.”

Our informant said the Centrelink data matching strategy would soon be exposed as counter-productive, with recipients now likely to desist in seeking any paid work for fear of losing any of their welfare payments.

With a Newstart allowance at $34 a day and city rents now at extortionate levels, many vulnerable people had little money left with which to clothe and feed themselves.

“We are dealing with the most impoverished and vulnerable sectors of the community. This is cruelty.”

Source: Quentin Dempster is a Walkley Award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster with decades of experience. He is a veteran of the ABC newsroom and has worked with a number of print titles including the Sydney Morning Herald. He was awarded an Order of Australia in 1992 for services to journalism.

Daily Telegraph Uncovers Academic ‘Invasion’ Plot… 20 Years Too Late

cook

Settlement or Invasion?

Australia’s least trusted newspaper may have just broken the record for ‘world’s oldest scoop’.

Yesterday’s (30/03/2016) Daily Telegraph’s scoop – that the University of NSW is “controversially” instructing teachers to refer to the “settlement” of Australia as an “invasion” – is based on a teaching resource produced two decades ago which was published under the auspices of the Howard government.

Entitled, Teaching the Teachers: Indigenous Australian Studies for Primary Pre-Service Teacher Education, the teaching guide was the culmination of more than two years consultation and research, and produced by UNSW in cooperation with the federally-funded Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

It was released in 1996 by UNSW and CAR as a guide to appropriate terminology when discussing First Nations issues. Ironically, the Prime Minister at the time, John Howard – went on to spark the ‘history wars’, after abolishing the CAR.

The guide was inspired by Aboriginal poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonucal (Kath Walker) and distributed widely throughout schools and universities around the country, in particular NSW primary schools.

Since then, it has been used widely as the basis for university guides on appropriate terminology when teaching about issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

Australian universities, including Flinders in South Australia, UNSW and Queensland University of Technology have all produced guides based on the document.

An entire section of the teaching guide – page 13 – is devoted to dealing with the issue of invasion. After noting the term ‘settlement’ is “less appropriate”, and the term ‘invasion’ “more appropriate”, the guide notes:

“Australia was not settled peacefully, it was invaded. Describing the arrival of the Europeans as a ‘settlement’ attempts to view Australian history from the shores of England rather than the shores of Australia.

“The use of the word ‘settlement’ ignores the reality of Indigenous Australian peoples’ lands being stolen from them….

“The fact that most settlers did not see themselves as invading the country, and that convicts were transported against their will is beside the point. The effects were the same for Indigenous peoples.”

New Matilda reader Serena O’Meley – a community and union activist – located the original resource at the State of Library of Victoria early this morning.

She told New Matilda: “This particular curriculum resource is highly auspiced, and it’s been around for 20 years. It was a seminal text involving substantial consultation,” Ms O’Meley said.

“It’s just sensationalist reporting by the Daily Telegraph, and it has to stop.

“Invasion is a fact, it’s not a political position. Once again they’re playing into the hands of racists and people who want to change history to suit themselves.”

Notwithstanding the motivations of the Telegraph, Ms O’Meley said some good would likely come from the debate.

“I think it’s been useful in the sense that it’s opened up a discussion, because younger people born during the history wars haven’t been properly educated about these issues,” she said.

“I’m personally a product of poor history teaching, and I know many of my peers have been as well. It’s taken me many years to understand the real basis of Australia’s true history.

“I cannot imagine what young people know and understand about these issues, so a curriculum resource like this is immensely valuable.”

New Matilda has sought to interview the Daily Telegraph reporter responsible for the story, Clarissa Bye, but at the time of press no reply was forthcoming.

A spokesperson for the University of NSW told New Matilda that the teaching resource at the centre of the Telegraph’s coverage had actually been in place since 2012. The spokesperson also noted that the resource does not mandate language from teacher’s rather it suggests ‘less and more appropriate’ terminology.

According to dictionary.com, one definition of the term ‘invasion’ is “entrance as if to take possession or overrun”.

It’s use to describe the gradual arrival of people, against the will of an existing population – as opposed to an immediate military force – is uncontroversial. The Daily Telegraph has used the term itself to describe the gradual arrival over time of asylum seekers to Australian shores.

Source: Chris Graham on March 31, 2016

Comment/Thoughts

In the mindset of the initial European arrivals to Australia’s eastern shores, the British government of the time would have seen this as settlement rather than invasion given information supplied by James Cook. It is not possible, nearly 250 years later, to reassess the mindset of that time, when acting under the official instruction of the government of the day.
At the time Australia was considered to be ‘Terra Nullius‘. However, this is clearly clearly incorrect as instead of admitting that it was “possessing” land that belonged to Aboriginal people, Britain always acted as it were settling an empty land.
If James Cook said that Australia was “Terra Nullius“, who in England was a position to dispute this assertion?
It could be argued that the original settlers were in fact, not settlers at all! As convicts coming to a penal colony, they were hardly coming of their own free will. Once their sentence had been completed, they were hardly in a position to take themselves home! They became settlers, rather than invaders, by no choice of their own.
Academia and academics often have outspoken and controversial views which are not held by the mainstream population and government.
This story does remain an example of poor reporting on the part of the Daily Telegraph.