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Webinar: How to avoid Robodebt 2.0

Australia’s flawed debt recovery scheme Robodebt was the biggest scandal of the Australian Public Service, exposing deep cultural and systemic issues with regards to ethics and integrity.

During Social Sciences Week next month Australian Catholic University (ACU) and the Institute of Public Administration of Australia (IPAA) will host a free webinar on what leaders must learn from Robodebt.

Supported by a Social Sciences Week Spark Grant from the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the webinar will feature public policy experts Dr Daniel Casey from ACU’s National School of Arts and Humanities and UQ’s Dr Sarah Ball – both former public servants – as well as the Australian Statistician Dr David Gruen AO for a robust discussion on the lessons of public administration failures like Robodebt.

The 11 September lunchtime webinar will be moderated by Kate Driver, chief executive officer of the Institute of Public Administration of Australia.

The webinar follows a recent paper by Dr Casey published in the Journal of European Public Policy in June that revealed more than a quarter of the Australian Public Service did not receive direct communications from their agency executives about Robodebt in the six months after the Royal Commission handed down its damning report.

Dr Casey, alongside fellow researcher Dr Maria Maley from the Australian National University, used Freedom of Information requests to obtain internal communications sent to APS staff about Robodebt in the six months after the Royal Commission’s report on 7 July, 2023.

Of 113 APS agencies, the research found 50 made no communication about the Robodebt crisis to their staff in the immediate aftermath. This included the Department of Defence, the Department of Home Affairs, and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts and represented 45,000 public services, or more than a quarter of the public service.

Dr Casey said the lack of communication by leaders about Robodebt to APS staff suggested serious “policy inaction” and refusal to acknowledge the lessons of Robodebt.

“If leaders don’t even talk about the failures, ignore the failures, it implies that there was no crisis for us, it was not relevant for us, and therefore there are no lessons to be learnt,” Dr Casey said.

Dr Casey said leaders at all levels, not just the public service, must learn from the failures of Robodebt.

“To avoid future failures, we need all organisations to have an open, ethical culture that openly discusses and grapples with both their own failures, but also failures elsewhere in the sector. Only then will we truly learn from the grave failure of Robodebt,” Dr Casey said.

July 2025 marked two years since the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme handed down its final report, exposing the scandalous failures and illegal conduct by Australian Services.

Register here for After Robodebt – How leaders can embed a robust culture of integrity & ethics, part of Social Sciences Week, 8-14 September 2025.