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When news broke last week that the Albanese government has increased its robo-debt compensation payout by $475 million, making the class action against the Coalition government’s unlawful welfare overpayment retrieval scheme the largest in Australian history, leading complainant Felicity Button was saddened by the reaction of her neighbour. “The first thing she said to me was, ‘Oh, are you going to move out now and move into a mansion?’”
Given the scale of the suffering, Button says, “It’s not going to be a big payday for everybody”.
Felicity Button, one of the leading complainants against the robo-debt scheme, features in the SBS documentary The People vs Robodebt.
“My neighbour’s a beautiful person … but the consensus is still, ‘These people were hard done by, by the system, but now they’re getting paid out so it makes it all better’,” says Button. “And it doesn’t. It’s not just about the money. It’s about the treatment that was inflicted on us. I had to say that to her and she went very quiet.”
Button appears in SBS’s three-part series The People vs Robodebt, alongside other victims, including Jenny Miller, whose son Rhys Cauzzo took his life, and Deanna Amato, whose court case proved the scheme was illegal.
“Every time I talk about it, it’s re-traumatising,” says Button, a palliative care nurse who was on maternity leave in 2017 when her bank account was drained. “But I spent years not talking about it because I had so much shame, and then to learn that so many other people were in my position – it made me feel connected again and less like a burden on society, and more like an advocate.”
Online campaigner Asher Wolf was nervous about appearing in The People vs Robodebt.
Producer Michael Cordell (Go Back To Where You Came From) looked to Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which dramatised the British Post Office scandal, for his approach. In The People vs Robodebt, re-enacted scenes add emotional depth to interviews with victims, journalists, whistleblowers and lawyers.
“We weren’t making a Four Corners show,” says Cordell. “The facts of the story were clear. To us [co-director Ben Lawrence and writer, Jane Allen], it was a kind of thriller, a classic three-act story … We imagined it as being like a virus that attacks society’s most vulnerable. In the first episode, these people are doing their work, minding their own business, some of them are quite fragile. They’re struck by this mysterious virus.
“In episode two, the victims discover what it is and who’s behind it. And it’s their own government. And in act three, through social media, they band together. They fight back and triumph over the machine. So it’s a fantastic, heroic story, which is yet to be fully concluded.”
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Cordell unsuccessfully sought interviews with former prime minister Scott Morrison, who was minister for social services when the scheme was introduced in 2015, and former human services minister Alan Tudge. The only government insider who appears is Tudge’s former media adviser Rachelle Miller, who publicly accused him of emotionally and physically abusing her. After initially declining on the advice of her psychologist, Miller decided to take accountability.
“I take my hat off to her because she was a loyal foot soldier doing the government’s bidding,” says Cordell. “That’s why her story is so fascinating. She’s there in the belly of the beast. And bit by bit, she realises that things are rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Also appearing is a digital activist who goes by the pseudonym of Asher Wolf. The co-founder, along with Lyndsey Jackson, of online campaign #NotMyDebt, was nervous about appearing on television.
“My skill is banging a drum on social media while sitting behind a computer screen,” says Wolf. “But I didn’t want other people to feel like there aren’t people like them. Maybe you’re a bit anxious, or not exactly polished. But you can still be heard.”
Cordell hopes the series packs the punch of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which led to the stripping of Queen’s Honours for some of those responsible. “It was only a TV show, but all of a sudden, there was a string of action and people were brought to account.”
The People vs Robodebt premieres on Wednesday, September 24, at 7.30pm on SBS.
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