The Saturday Paper’s senior reporter Rick Morton has publicly condemned his editors for publishing what he says is an “unethical” and “misleading” defence of one of the robodebt bureaucrats.
Christine Wallace, a columnist with the paper, wrote that she and many public service officials believed the robodebt findings against the “widely admired former secretary of the Department of Human Services, Renée Leon were “unjust”.
“The rot created by the new public management ethos gets less attention and lies at the heart of the robodebt scandal,” writes @c_s_wallace.
“Some sections of the Australian Public Service face an uphill battle to give ‘frank and fearless’ advice.” https://t.co/BkRX11auFs
— The Saturday Paper (@SatPaper) September 23, 2024
Her piece was published a week after the report of the Australian Public Service Commission’s (APSC’s) robodebt taskforce said Leon was one of 12 public servants found to have breached the code of conduct 97 times during their involvement in the robodebt program.
“I have known Renée Leon for 40 years. I and others who have worked and lived with her in Canberra know her as an upright and ethical public servant who paid the ultimate career price for ending robodebt,” Wallace, a professor at the University of Canberra, wrote.
Morton, who has written extensively on robodebt and won two Walkley awards for his coverage, saw it differently, calling Wallace’s analysis “garbage revisionism” and its publication a “betrayal” of the Saturday Paper’s reporting. His book on robodebt, Mean Streak, will be published next month.
“The newspaper for which I work has published a comment piece by Chris Wallace defending her friend of 40 years, former DHS secretary Renée Leon,” Morton wrote on X. “I consider the piece to be garbage revisionism, unethical and a betrayal of actual reporting and told the editors as much.”
Wallace replied on X on Saturday that both she and Morton hate robodebt and offered to discuss it offline.
“But I’m concerned with the system that gave rise to it & fairness for the person who ended it too – to stop it happening again,” she said.
The editor of the Saturday Paper, Erik Jensen, has not replied to a request for comment.
On Monday, Morton revealed on Substack that his anger was, in part, driven by the fear he felt when he almost lost his dog to a tick bite on the weekend.
“So begins one of the worst weekends I’ve experienced in the past few years at least, personally and professionally,” he said.
Morton said he didn’t disagree with the article being written but he wanted disclosure and alleged it “contained deliberate untruths, selective highlighting and was misleading in the extreme”.
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The APSC’s report made four findings against Leon, who was the human services secretary from 2017 to 2020. They detailed 13 breaches of the code of conduct, including that she failed to “expeditiously” inform her minister and colleagues of the solicitor general’s advice on the lawfulness of the scheme and failed to cease the practice of income averaging under the scheme.
Now the vice-chancellor of Charles Sturt University, Leon said she was “disappointed” by the APSC’s report, noting she had been sacked as secretary for directing the scheme cease.
“When ministers delayed, I directed it be stopped. Two weeks later, my role as secretary was terminated by a government that did not welcome frank and fearless advice,” Leon said.
Guardian reporter Christopher Knaus was the first to reveal what became known as robodebt in an exclusive article in December 2016.
“The system relies on an automated data-matching process to detect discrepancies between fortnightly income reported to Centrelink and annual pay information held by the tax office,” he wrote.
In 2020 another Guardian reporter, Luke Henriques-Gomes, obtained confidential documents that revealed the government expected to lose a class action brought against the scheme and would be forced to refund more than 400,000 debts issued under the botched scheme.
