Rick Morton
$35.99
Fourth Estate

This book is a commanding and deeply unsettling account of the infamous Robodebt scheme, which was the automated debt-recovery program that pursued hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Australians for debts they often didn’t owe.

Robodebt was nurtured under the Prime Ministership of Scott Morrison, aided by Social Security Minister Stuart Robert (both pictured above).

Morton is an award-winning journalist known for his social-policy reporting on what he calls a “moral vacuum”.

Public Sector workers will relate to the way Mr Morton combines detailed policy-machinery explanation with human stories of harm. The book anchors itself in the findings of the Royal Commission into Robodebt, which described the scheme as a “massive failure of public administration” driven by “venality, incompetence and cowardice”.

He doesn’t shy away from the breadth of the failure: politicians, senior public servants, private sector contractors, and recipients of false debt notices all appear in Morton’s pages. For example, case studies include young Australians driven into crisis by relentless letters and calls for what turned out to be bogus debts.

The subject may be quite serious, but Mr Morton keeps things readable. While he gives us diagrams of how income-averaging operated, how public service advice was suppressed, and how Cabinet submissions passed with minimal scrutiny, he also gives us the voice of people affected. 

Mean Streak is a warning how power, bureaucracy and anti-welfare public attitudes can conspire to hurt people.

The subject matter is harrowing: bureaucratic indifference, lives upturned, structural injustice.