The NACC is still considering investigating those deemed most responsible for Robodebt, and whether to make the hearing – any hearing – public. Paul Begley with an update.
Speaking at a Melbourne conference last year, Deputy Commissioner of Australia’s National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), Kylie Kilgour, said she was mindful that the Commission was only recently established and that every time it did something it was for the first time, and so “you don’t want to muck it up”.
On the question of public hearings, Ms Kilgour told the same conference: “Absolutely, we will do a public hearing, we just don’t have the right matter.” She added that none of the hearings the NACC is doing “meet the mark as of today”, without saying what the mark might look like.
Since November 2025, the Deputy Commissioner has been leading a review of the high-profile Robodebt case, with which the NACC was charged after a referral in the first week of its life in July 2023.
The Robodebt referral was made under seal by former Queensland Chief Justice Catherine Holmes, who had conducted the Royal Commission into the shameful Robodebt Scheme. Her sealed referral contained the names of six witnesses who had given evidence during the hearings.
Five of the individuals were public servants, and one was a politician. All six were referred with recommendations for civil and criminal prosecution.
Scott Morrison
Of the politicians who gave evidence, Stuart Robert and Alan Tudge publicly stated that they had been informed their names were not included in Commissioner Holmes’ sealed section. By a process of elimination, the sixth individual was likely Scott Morrison, the instigator of the Robodebt scheme when he was the Minister for Social Services in 2015.
For his part, Mr Morrison claimed the adverse findings the Royal Commissioner made against him were “based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of how government operates.”
The ABC reported that he “reject(ed) completely each of the findings which are critical of my involvement in authorising the scheme and are adverse to me.”
Morrison made no statement on whether or not he was informed about his name being among the six individuals referred.
And the biggest compo payout for Robodebt victims is … Scott Morrison!
How NACC mucked up
After sitting in silence on the Robodebt referral for 11 months after its 2023 inception, the NACC issued a one-page press release on 6 June 2024 stating it would not be pursuing the individuals named in the document.
The press release was issued by an unnamed deputy commissioner ostensibly because the NACC Commissioner, Paul Brereton, had recused himself from the decision over a conflict of interest matter.
A public outcry and a deluge of complaints to the NACC Inspector, Gail Furness, led to a finding by senior counsel Alan Robertson that the NACC Commissioner had not recused himself in any real sense, but rather had involved himself in deliberations on the matter “before, during and after” the meeting at which the decision on the Robodebt referral was made.
The Robertson finding revealed that the integrity body misled the Australian people in stating that the NACC Commissioner had recused himself; in addition, it revealed that his fellow deputy commissioners and other senior NACC officials were either misled themselves or were culpably entangled in the commissioner’s false avowal of recusal.
It also became apparent that one of the public servants likely to have been named in the referral, Kathryn Campbell, was well known to the NACC Commissioner as a fellow army reservist at a very senior level. That is to say, the Commissioner had a likely motive for remaining involved in a decision that offered protection to a close associate.
On a number of counts, the NACC has mucked up its most high-profile case.
Having fallen at the first hurdle, it has not since managed to regain its footing. Public confidence in the body is about as low as it gets, especially given it has nothing of any moment to show as an achievement that might offset the lingering self-inflicted stains on its reputation and standing that followed the Robodebt decision of June 2024.
Deafening silence at flawed process. NACC and the Robodebt investigation.
Meeting the mark for a public hearing
Deputy Commissioner Kilgour appears to be relying on the presumption that hearings of the NACC are to be held in private unless the NACC decides that exceptional circumstances in the public interest call for public hearings to be held.
If an exceptional circumstance is reliant on the discretion of a NACC official who has a compelling but secret reason to see a contentious matter as unexceptional, such as the Robodebt referral, the threshold will never be met for a matter to be heard publicly.
That is how the NACC is able to operate, and seemingly how it was intended to operate.
Ms Kilgour has been conducting the reinvestigation of the Robodebt decision since November last year, and to date, any witnesses called have been heard in private. Having assured her audience in Melbourne last October that public hearings will take place as long as they ‘meet the mark’, it is not unreasonable to wonder what would meet the deputy commissioner’s mark if the reinvestigation of the deeply flawed Robodebt decision fails to do so.
The lives of more than 400,000 Australian citizens were plunged into turmoil during the extended period when Robodebt operated in 2015 and before it was declared unlawful in 2019. A great many lives of vulnerable people were upended, and a number of them suicided as a result of the trauma they experienced during Robodebt’s prolonged operation. Many have not recovered.
The Royal Commission found that the fault resided with politicians and senior public servants who contributed to a massive failure of public administration,
some through moral weakness and others through culpable failure to perform their duties.
Put simply, the case for the NACC to forgo secrecy in the revisiting of the Robodebt referral case is a no-brainer. Highly reputable bodies such as the Centre of Public Integrity have been critical of the damage that is being done through the NACC’s penchant for secrecy.
More than any other matter that has come before the NACC, the Robodebt case has been its greatest test, and it has been found wanting. If it cannot recover its ground with a second chance, the core political promise by Prime Minister Albanese in 2022 to deliver an effective anti-corruption body in Australia is a lost cause.
One of the questions that would remain if Deputy Commissioner Kilgour’s investigation fails to meet a transparency threshold that prevails over a predilection for secrecy is the extent to which the Albanese government wants it that way.
Could it be that Prime Minister Albanese is somehow beholden to his Liberal Party predecessor because he believes the latter has the ear of US President Donald Trump?
The Albanese Government has given Morrison considerable latitude in the US. They even accorded him the generous hospitality of the Australian embassy when he launched his evangelical book, and at strategic moments, he spoke glowingly about AUKUS. Is the latitude extended by Albanese protecting Morrison from accountability for corruption or crimes he may have committed in Australia during his period in power?
RoboDebt Royal Commission: Kathryn Campbell must be first to go
Paul Begley worked in public affairs roles for three decades, most recently as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.