Robodebt report: Scott Morrison on holiday in Italy

The Royal Commission into Robodebt will hand down what is expected to be a scathing report about the scheme on Friday, as the man who spearheaded the program holidays with his family in Europe.

After receiving more than one million documents and interviewing more than 100 witnesses over nine weeks, Canberra is bracing for the findings of former Queensland chief justice Catherine Holmes, who is anticipated to give Robodebt’s creators a lashing.

Under the microscope will be the role former Prime Minister Scott Morrison played in implementing the scheme through his role as social services minister at the time.

Mr Morrison will not be in the country as the report is handed down, as he is currently travelling in Europe with his family after appearing at a series of engagements around the AUKUS submarine deal in the UK in late June.

‘Following his formal visit to the UK, Mr Morrison will be taking some time to spend with his family, who will accompany him to the UK, on a private vacation overseas, during the parliamentary break and school holiday period,’ his office said in a statement ahead of the trip.

Last week, The Sydney Morning Herald revealed the former PM had been spotted at Ristorante dei Priori in Florence, Italy, having lunch with his family.

This year’s Euro-trip is not the first time Mr Morrison has been seen travelling overseas at an inopportune time. The former PM was found on a pre-planned holiday with his family in Hawaii as fatal bushfires ravaged parts of the country in 2019.

At the time, he said it was not his job to ‘hold the hose’ 

Robodebt was an automated method of calculating welfare recipients’ alleged debts by matching their reported pay with their supposed annual incomes, which were estimated by averaging data from the Australian Taxation Office.

Mr Morrison will not be in the country as the report is handed down, as he is currently travelling in Europe

Operating from 2015 to 2019, Robodebt was discontinued after being found to be unlawful.

But by then it had unlawfully claimed nearly $2 billion from more than 400,000 people and had been linked to several suicides.

One mother of a young man who took his own life while being pursued for over $17,000 described her heartbreak after discovering the link between his death and the debts.

Jennifer Miller told the commission that she travelled to her son’s home in Melbourne after he died by suicide at age 27 to discover he was being pursued over the debt by collection agency Dunn & Bradstreet.

She said she found five of the debt letters from Dunn & Bradstreet on her son’s fridge. Next to them was a drawing of Rhys’ face with a gun, dollar signs around it, and a caption reading ‘debt life’.

Mr Morrison appeared at the commission as a witness, where he argued he was never advised of the unlawful nature of the scheme and that he would not have launched it if he was told of any legal issues.

Justin Greggery KC, the head lawyer in charge of the commission, noted in his closing remarks that the scheme ‘gathered momentum’ when Mr Morrison took over the social services portfolio in 2014.

Mr Greggery said the proposal was pushed back against in late 2014 by members of the public service, who advised that such a scheme ‘wasn’t appropriate under current legislative provisions.’

The commission had also been told that Mr Morrison was advised at the outset that the Robodebt scheme would require changes to the law to operate legally.

During his time being questioned by the commission, Mr Morrison was shown an interview he had with Sky News in 2015 where he described himself as a ‘welfare cop’

Mr Morrison said there needed to be a ‘strong welfare cop on the beat’ and he was ‘looking to do that’ because he wanted the welfare system to help people who most needed it.