TURNBULL WANTS THOUSANDS OF AUSTRALIANS TO DISPROVE CENTRELINK DEBTS

Have you kept your payslips from 15 years ago?

Well get ready because according to reports the Turnbull Government will be demanding 170,000 Australians disprove alleged overpayments from Centrelink from as far back as 2003.

This is from the same Government that brought us the disastrous ‘robo-debt’ program that saw tens of thousands of innocent Australians sent erroneous debt letters from Centrelink.

 

The Commonwealth Ombudsman said of the bungled ‘robo-debt’ program that it wasn’t ‘reasonable or fair’ to have people collect evidence from several years ago.

 

Well now Mr Turnbull and Minister Keenan are now expecting people to go searching for payslips as far back as 15 years ago.

 

This month, former AAT judge Prof. Terry Carney said that many people were too scared to contest the Robo-debts out of fear of incurring legal costs, and ended up just paying the debts.

 

Of course people that do the wrong thing and take advantage of the system should be made to repay the money - that’s only fair.

 

But it says everything about the Turnbull Government’s priorities that in the same week we’ve seen shocking revelations of rip offs and rorts at the banking Royal Commission - they’d rather talk about another crackdown on vulnerable Australians.

 

This is a Government that is hell-bent on demonising vulnerable Australians who rely on our social security system.

 

This Government isn’t interested in finding out people who actually owe debt. They’re interested in debt recovery as a means of revenue raising.

 

This Government is interested in debt recovery as a means of making claiming income support a scary and difficult process in the hope Australians just give up.