“The road to Robodebt was long and winding. The roots of Robodebt are deep and pervasive.
The market privileging ideology that drives robodebt goes all the way back to the establishment of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1949 and the conservative economists and philosophers who set out to destroy the idea of government developing to reduce inequality and injustices and to support individuals, communities and society positively.
The eventual global triumph of this conservative and reactionary ideology was crystalised in 1987 when then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that there is no such thing as society.
The influence of the market privileging ideology then extended way beyond the explicitly conservative political parties to shift and permeate the thinking and policy of Labor and Social Democratic parties locally and globally. A cycle of cuts to public housing, transport, health, education, social welfare, austerity and more became normalised along with widespread privatisation and contracting out.
As a consequence and irrespective of government changes, inequality increased, and the poor became simultaneously embedded and marginalised and further stigmatised in our economy, society and culture.
It took an explicitly conservative government here in Australia to take the Mont Pelerin agenda to its logical and destructive robodebt conclusion. Thankfully, a Labor opposition now in government retained enough memory of its traditional values to join with victims and grassroots activists to eventually blow the whistle on the gross injustices and illegalities of the robodebt scheme and will now take some action to repair the damage and pursue some justice.
It will, however, require significant changes to Labor’s economic and social policies to have some prospect of ensuring that robodebt-like schemes never happen again.
It will take even bigger changes to Labor’s current centrist thinking and policies to drive the redistribution of wealth and income required to reduce the embedded inequality and poverty that afflicts and stigmatises so many of our citizens and leaves them always vulnerable to robodebt-like schemes.” – by Stewart Sweeney.
Click here to read the full report of the Royal Commission into RoboDebt.
We want to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts over the last several years of #NotMyDebt, and countless other grassroots and civil society organisations, and other advocates, who have helped expose this vicious and (we now know) illegal scheme.
Anti-Poverty Network SA 