mhaze,

Call it “backtracking” if you like. I’m not embarrassed to admit fault. In fact, I was giving you credit by interpreting what you had said as a clumsily-worded good-faith test rather than a purposefully impossible bad-faith one.

You wrote, years ago:

“Once someone shows that the government were warned of impending suicides, then I'll accept that an RC is required.”
- mhaze, 18 Sept 2019

Again, taken literally, that’s not just a high bar - it’s a ludicrous one.

Mental health doesn’t operate like workplace safety. Suicides can’t be predicted with precision. There’s no “testable” threshold like there is for, say, electrocution risk from foil insulation.

If someone had warned that suicides would follow, they’d have been accused of hyperbole. And yet, that’s what happened.

So, we'll agree that your test hasn't been met. But that shouldn't make you feel better.

//In the Pink Batts fiasco, ministers were warned that people would die... and they carried on regardless. In the Robodebt fiasco, no one was warned people would die.//

That’s technically correct. But it’s also deeply misleading for the reasons I said in my last post:

- The risks in Pink Batts were immediate, physical, and visible.
- The risks in Robodebt were cumulative, psychological, and plausibly deniable.
- That’s not exonerating, it’s how negligence in mental health policy always hides in plain sight.

If you demand a warning that suicides would occur before taking them seriously, you create a test that will never be passed; a loophole carved out for plausible deniability, and a shield held up to protect those with whom you are politically aligned.

And ironically, by treating your words more charitably than you’re treating mine, I’ve shown the very good faith you now accuse me of lacking.

It's worth adding, too, that your test makes a category error by treating harm and suicide like they're on two different ladders. They’re rungs on the same one.

In fact, there’s a reason people speak of “a fate worse than death.” Because sometimes, the suffering itself is the point of failure - even if a death doesn’t result.

JD,

You're taking my Pink Batts comments completely, and I mean completely, out of context. I wasn't proposing that this was the criteria for a RC, I was pointing out why the Pink Batt fiasco was different to the Robodebt fiasco.

mhaze,

I understood that you weren’t citing some official benchmark for when a Royal Commission is warranted - but you were doing more than simply highlighting a difference.

To be precise, you were stating what you personally believed needed to be shown for a Royal Commission into Robodebt to be justified. That’s not just identifying a difference, it’s articulating a threshold.

That said, I agree there’s a difference.

Pink Batts was reckless and poorly managed. It was a case of pushing through a well-intentioned policy without sufficient oversight or care. The consequences were awful, and a Royal Commission rightly investigated them. But I don’t think anyone believes the scheme was driven by animus. It wasn’t targeted at insulation workers, nor was it used to score political points.

Robodebt was different - not just because of the nature of the harm, but because of the nature of the intent. It was rolled out deliberately, against legal advice, and aimed squarely at a politically defenceless group.

There was no urgent financial imperative, no economic stimulus rationale, just a sense that "cracking down on dole bludgers" would resonate with voters.

These distinctions matter, because how harm happens is as important as that it happens.

Robodebt wasn’t the result of haste or poor implementation, it was broken from the outset. Its flaws were not unfortunate bugs but foreseeable consequences of a wilful ignorance that is stubbornly clung to when ideology resists reality.

Accepting that poverty is largely structural would require conceding that cherished beliefs about merit, responsibility, and self-reliance are at best incomplete, and at worst, myths. Clearly Robodebt's architects found sociology, political science, economics, psychology, criminology, urban studies, and geography all a bit too confronting - so they let their politics and feelings guide them instead, and others paid the price.

The harm wasn’t accidental, it was baked into the design. It was cloaked in deterrence logic, and rationalised as "tough love."

One scheme was negligent. The other was malicious.

Robodebt was sabotage !