Extract from The Saturday Paper article by Rick Morton: "The centrepiece of the federal government’s “Living with Covid” program is a call centre outsourced to former robo-debt collectors and staffed by workers on casual contracts with no medical experience. A cache of documents and testimony obtained by The Saturday Paper reveals the inner workings of the National Coronavirus Helpline, which is being run by private-equity owned Probe Group and its subsidiaries, on contracts worth more than $270 million."
Morton's article discloses that the national helpline - listed as the first point of contact by multiple government departments - has been staffed by Probe with a small, badly-paid band of random recruits, who're tasked with triaging, despite often having only 2 hours training and no background in health care. Morton reports that the highly-stressed workers are overwhelmed by the volume, complexity and variety of calls - and that when problems arise they're told to phone "team leaders", but not to write anything down (to ensure a "quick response"). In fact, those leaders appear to have offered either no assistance at all, or a basic 2-page cheat sheet. Callers to the line are said to have frequently been given incorrect isolation advice. Probe and its subsidiary, Steller Asia Pacific, have scored over half a billion dollars in government contracts in the last 5 years.
Probe says its mission is to "deliver exceptional customer experiences that will in turn have a positive impact on your organisation's reputation, objectives, stakeholders & bottom line".
It also forbids its employees from talking to the media.
Let's flash-back to Robodebt for a quick refresher - that "debt recovery" programme took money that was not owed from over 443 000 Australians. In 2020, legal action against the government resulted in $721 million repaid, then a further $398 million in debt-claims abandoned, plus $112 million paid in compensation. In 2021 the Federal Court put the total package of refunds and comp at $1.76 billion.
The automated income-averaging debting programme began in 2016, and its implementation and operation directly involved Ministers Marise Payne, Alan Tudge, Christian Porter, Stuart Robert, and yes, Scott Morrison. Court documents have shown that the government was warned fully 76 times by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal that the Robodebts were not legally enforceable. The government ignored every warning, and knowingly operated a scheme that stole money from the lowest income-earners. Thousands of people didn't even receive the initial advisory letter, requiring they disprove the false debts - the first they knew of it was when private debt-collection agencies, like Probe, began pursuing them. Centrelink's notorious phone system tied people up for hour after hour on hold, and routinely led to dead-ends. Centrelink also thoughtfully added a 10% penalty to the imaginary debts. As Treasurer in 2018 - entirely aware of the disaster - Scott Morrison budgeted to extend the scheme for another 3 years. When a woman from Victoria, Madelaine Masterson, had Legal Aid file for judicial review of her alleged $3725.04 owing, Centrelink first reduced her debt to $602.87, and then, after removing the automated (and regularly wrong) income-averaging, to nothing. This happened in case after case. The scam continued, right out in the open. Robodebt imposed itself so unrelentingly on people already living in poverty that a number of suicides resulted.
No ministers lost their job as a result of the illegal debting. All but one of them is still in cabinet. (The one who exited was Christian Porter, and his departure to the backbench was not due to Robodebt or even the rape allegation, but because of his use of a secret donor to pay his legal bills.)
The lack of rolling heads is very likely to have been because any such consequences would have needed to equally apply to the deeply-involved now-Prime-Minister. For comparison, in 2021, a similar programme in the Netherlands (involving false claims of child-care payment debts) resulted in the resignation of the entire administration. That programme affected less than one tenth the number of citizens targeted by the Australian government.
After 8 years of shonkery - 2 of those sunk in Covid19 - the Covid Helpline fiasco is more of the same old lazy, cynical "market-solutions" autopiloting, from a government that simply will not learn lessons. Not if it gets in the way of the matey marketeer dogma.
Not even if it kills you.
I didn't realise Gringott's Bank was so central to this program.
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