Mr SHORTEN (Maribyrnong) (15:15): There's a young man sitting in the Speaker's gallery who's attended question time for the last few days. I see him sitting up there right now. He's in the second row, in the blue jacket. His name's Tim Cahalan. He's from Adelaide. He's a Crows supporter. He's interested in politics. Tim was born with Crouzon syndrome. At the age of three, Tim was diagnosed with hydrocephalus. At 22, he developed epilepsy. He lives at home with his fantastic parents. He went to primary school and secondary school despite the impairment. He was unemployed for a little bit after that, and then he worked for seven years at Bedford, a great disability enterprise in Adelaide. He then did something that doesn't often happen for people in supported employment—he managed to break through into open employment. He took up a traineeship with the South Australian state government. He's worked in the offices of the department for corrections and now the department of community services and social inclusion. He's 31. Tim also receives disability payments. But in August last year he was hit with a Centrelink claim—just a letter—saying that he owed the government of Australia $3,000. There was no explanation about how this number was arrived at, just that he owed it. His mum, Penny, helped him. Tim got his paperwork together, went to the bank and looked at the work payments and the government payments. He went down to Centrelink at Marion, and the good staff there told him he actually owed nothing. It was a stressful time for Tim but the comments from the people at Centrelink reassured him, and he had gone through great personal effort to prove that the government's allegation that he had to pay them money was wrong. In fact, his mother rang Centrelink and they said 'no debt'. So that was a bit of a burden off him, even though it was an unfair process to have to go through. But in June 2019, Tim, who's sitting up there—interested in the nature of government and politics—got a new letter saying, 'You still owe us $3,000.' Tim has made it clear that he would have just paid the amount of money that the government asserted he owed if his parents hadn't helped him. He's a young man for whom the dice of life haven't always landed the right way up, but he's made every post a winner. He's made the best of his situation. This is how the Morrison government thanks him. Tim's debt is not an isolated instance. He is a victim, along with hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens, of what the government, in its Orwellian language, calls the online compliance intervention and what Australians call robo-debt. The robo-debt scheme shows that the government is using crude digital accounting techniques to match annual ATO data against Human Services data of fortnightly payments. It's a system that regularly generates inaccurate comments. Labor has no objection to claiming back money incorrectly paid to people—like Clive Palmer—but what we see here is that this isn't what's happening. You get a letter from the government, and it has an amount of money that it says you owe. That's it. There's no explanation. Labor moved this matter of public importance because we think that this government is engaging in an abuse of executive power to single out citizens—to assert a debt with no evidence and then reverse the onus of proof. Today we say not only should this program not be extended to new cohorts of Australian citizens; it should go back to the drawing board. We've heard the horror stories. MPs' offices right across the spectrum hear it from the hounded grandparents, the stressed-out students and the grieving parents chased for the alleged debts of their deceased children. We've heard from mourning parents—bereaved parents who say that their children took their own life after receiving these debts. We know the scheme is unreliable. No less a figure than the artful member for Fadden confirmed in a question, 'Yes, 20 per cent of the claims were totally wrong.' One hundred and sixty thousand people. But that answer didn't even include the people who might have had their amounts revised down. Indeed, what this government says is that a good scheme is one where a person just pays up even if they shouldn't have paid up. This is a malfunctioning robo-debt scheme. We all know people can make mistakes—what do you use $40,000 on the internet for? It's a mistake! I get that mistakes happen, but what you do is go back and don't assume that this is the natural order of things. We say today that robo-debt is both unlawful and unethical in the way that it seeks to recover debts from people, by requiring supposed debtors to disprove a data-matched debt. It should be Centrelink who makes the case. Leaving aside all the humour of having the member for Fadden as the minister, there's a serious issue here. How is it the case that in 2019 individual Australians can receive a letter of demand from the government and, immediately upon receipt of the letter of demand, it is the recipient of the letter, the Australian citizen, who then has to argue with the might of the Australian government to say the debt is not correct? We put very clearly here today that the onus of proof for these debts lies with the government, that the sheer process of an algorithm data-matching annual ATO data with fortnightly payments paid by the Department of Human Services does not discharge the obligation of the government to a satisfactory level. It is not enough to rely on a robotic letter of demand, with no proof and no supporting material, and simply reverse the onus of proof on Australian citizens. It is not the job of the government of Australia to oppress individual citizens. That is not the role of the state. The onus rests with the government. When there is a serious allegation saying that you owe the government money, I would put that the burden is even greater than just the data-matching process, because consequences flow from saying to a citizen that they owe the government money. You get the private debt collectors onto you. If you have a finding of debt, you can't get finance. If you're a law student with a debt finding, you can't be admitted as a lawyer. There are consequences from the government's assertion that the individual owes a debt with no supporting evidence. There are consequences of that which make it more grave and more severe. And because of the severity of the consequences of a finding of debt it increases the obligation upon the government to prove the system. There is no lawful basis for the government to just assert debt on the part of citizens with a cursory algorithm and data matching and then say it's up to the citizen. But this is not just a question of whether or not it is lawful; it is also immoral. Robo-debt causes hardship. It causes stress. This flawed, inaccurate data, where people are required to pay a debt when it is not clear how the debt is constituted, leaves individuals stranded. The process for appealing these debts is inadequate. In closing, not only is the system unlawful, not only is it immoral, along with the consequences and the stresses it has, but we are seeing a calculated strategy of cover-up by the government. Two hundred cases have gone to the first tier of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and when the government knows it has a problem, rather than argue the lawful nature of what it's done, it just settles. What it means is that, if you fight the government, you will get a non-transparent settlement which no-one else gets to hear about, and the law is never tested. This government cooked up robo-debt before a budget to pump up flagging budget numbers and then it has tried to retrofit the design of the system, exceeding its powers as a government of Australia, oppressing hundreds of thousands of its citizens unfairly and, whenever there is a test of the legality of the system, it folds and runs. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Hogan ): The member will resume his seat. I call the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and Minister for Government Services.