Five stars for documentary about one of our most shameful scandals

2 hours ago 1

The People vs Robodebt ★★★★★

However much you might think you know about the robo-debt scandal, there’s so much more to be learnt via this horrifying documentary series. In turns bewildering, infuriating, and tragic, The People vs Robodebt is a thorough first draft that dissects a shameful event in Australia’s history. A 2016 automated program that was unlawful and untested was set onto Centrelink welfare recipients by the Department of Human Services, creating incorrect debt notices and a punishing burden for about 400,000 Australians. Countless victims were irreparably damaged; some took their lives.

As Colleen Taylor, a veteran public servant who tried to alert her superiors to the grave failings of the program and was rebuffed, puts it: Centrelink became “Australia’s largest criminal organisation”. What a staggering failure. An organisation meant to help vulnerable Australians, under the direction of ministers from successive Coalition governments, vilified, defrauded and, in many instances, broke the very people they were supposed to help. After watching all three episodes I realised I had taken voluminous notes – it was my minuscule means of paying respect to the show’s subjects and makers.

Director Ben Lawrence (Ghosthunter, Stuff the British Stole) centres the story on the impact robo-debt had on individuals. There is a different version that focuses more on the bureaucratic and political processes that empowered robo-debt and the subsequent investigation by the 2023 royal commission that issued damning findings. Lawrence’s narrative has what those behind robo-debt lacked: empathy. The testimony is detailed and accumulative. Hounded constantly by the department and debt collectors, a besieged young mother describes how she almost snapped and drove her car off a bridge.

Disability care worker Sandra Bevan in the SBS documentary The People vs Robodebt.

Along with writer Jane Allen (Troppo), Lawrence gives the episodes, each just under an hour in length, the momentum of a conspiratorial thriller. The focus moves from one victim to another, sometimes using dramatic recreations that prove to be sadly necessary, while charting the reaction inside Centrelink, where unprepared staff were traumatised by the scale of angry, despairing calls they received. The rawness of the emotion displayed, despite the passing of years, is intense. The first signs of organised opposition, from activists, journalists and community lawyers, offers the barest of relief.

I could fill this page with examples of moral bankruptcy and cruelty, from the actions of one of the responsible government ministers, Alan Tudge, to the disability care worker, Sandra Bevan, who like so many others realised there was an official presumption of guilt and that, “they only wanted to accept the information that incriminated me”.

Every key element the documentary introduces is followed through the length of the scandal, culminating in the royal commission hearings. It would be easy to surrender to outrage and lose focus, but The People vs Robodebt doesn’t falter.

Television critics like to throw around the phrase “compulsory viewing”, but rarely has it been more fitting than it is here. The sheer scope of robo-debt, which was an industrial-scale attack on the almost entirely innocent and unprepared, is difficult to encompass. But from the individual to the institutional, this series is sharply drawn and illuminating. It may well leave you appalled, angry, and unsatisfied. Royal commissioner Catherine Holmes, who called robo-debt “an extraordinary saga of venality, incompetence, and cowardice”, referred six unnamed individuals for further investigation in 2023. Currently, none have been charged.

The People vs Robodebt premieres at 7.30pm on Wednesday, September 24, on SBS and SBS on Demand.

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