Robodebt-Like Persecution Is A Daily Event

Immediately after utterances of condemnation of Morrison and company by Albanese and Shorten arising from the Robodebt Royal Commission findings, both came forward with that well thrashed cliché, “It must never be allowed to happen again.”

What a joke …… it’s happening every day; being allowed to happen again and again.

Being politicians, ignorant of the essentials of effective organizational management, they fail to appreciate no Royal Commission they create and appoint lawyers to carry out, will ever deliver that piece of wishful thinking.

Royal Commissions and lawyers, at best can identify the wrong doers, their wrong doings, the incompetent and their failings.

However, they are totally ill-equipped and invariably not commissioned to establish the ‘why’ and much of the ‘how’ of the wrong doing and/or incompetence. Establishing this is essential if it’s “never to be allowed to happen again’.

To establish the ‘why’ and much of the ‘how’ of the wrong doing and/or incompetence, requires the application the skills of system analysis, design and implementation management, which are never applied meaningfully by Royal Commissions.

It is for this reason, most of the recommendations of Royal Commissions, even if implemented in full, will not ensure it “will never happen again”.

In the case of the Robodebt disaster, and many other similarly motivated Royal Commissions, they don’t want to establish the ‘why’ and much of the ‘how’. They don’t want to because it’s an ongoing disaster being perpetuated daily by the now piranha-like Australian Tax Office – the only difference between the 2 being the variation in the rate of the abuse; over time, the numbers maimed by both will probably be of a similar order.

Shorten suggested, “governments are there to help people, not hurt people”. When there’s a dollar involved, that hasn’t been the case for decades.

Tell that suggestion to CPA’s who are continuously trying to help defend their clients from that same kind of suspicion-based attack made by the ATO on taxpayers and small business every day, that was made on the approximate 400,000 citizens overpaid in error by the government in a comparatively short period of time.

The ATO modus operandi is, without direct evidence, to make its own judgment as to whether or not the taxpayer has transgressed, demand payment, and then force the taxpayer to spend large amounts of money on accountant’s services to prove otherwise to the satisfaction of the disbelieving ATO.

If the ATO is unconvinced, as invariably they are, the taxpayer has to go to court and spend infinitely more to prove the ATO wrong to the satisfaction of an independent judge. The cost is horrendous and beyond 99% of the ATO’s victims.

Government senior bureaucrats see the citizens and taxpayers in much the same way the factory owners of the industrial revolution saw their workforce, to be exploited and used as they saw fit; albeit now with greater subtlety and finesse whenever possible, but not always as is evident in the ATO’s behavior and Robodebt disaster.

Unquestioned adherence to all edicts no matter how unreasonable, customer indifference, bullying and abuse have become the organizational culture of the ATO and increasing numbers of government departments.

The politicians themselves, while setting the broad policy objectives, being totally ignorant of strategy development, implementation and management, or even assessing the performance of their senior bureaucrats, have become little more than their PR mouthpiece.

The Westminster system of ministerial responsibility, a fundamental element of our system of government, combined with ministerial incompetence, effectively reinforces this master-slave relationship, where the minister is the bureaucrats slave; so superbly captured in the BBC TV series, “Yes Minister”.??