ACOSS is demanding the urgent removal of the whole Targeted Compliance Framework due to shocking revelations of massive Government failure and potential illegality in the administration of income support payments affecting tens of thousands of people.
The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has today revealed it has paused several additional penalty measures under the TCF due to serious legal and operational failures impacting over 10,000 people. This follows previous decisions by the DEWR Secretary to pause a number of other penalty measures. The new administrative failures identified affect over ten times as many people as previously known and call into sharp question the legality of the entire system.
The Targeted Compliance Framework, introduced in 2018, sets out the penalty system for people who do not meet their mutual obligations, including payment suspensions and cancellations.
The Minister has admitted that this system, established under the Coalition in 2018, is punitive and has stated that he wants to overhaul it. Yet, when faced with widespread and growing issues with legality dating back to 2018 and affecting tens of thousands of people on low incomes, he is choosing to continue operating the broader system and risks harming yet more people.
“This is a massive and fundamental failure of government, overseen by multiple Ministers from both Coalition and Labor Governments over the last seven years,” ACOSS Executive Director of Policy and Research, Jacqueline Phillips said.
“Now we know that at least 10,000 people may have been subjected to unlawful or invalid financial penalties or payment cancellations.
“The department has effectively admitted the Targeted Compliance Framework may have been operating outside the law in some areas for years, causing significant harm to people living on poverty payments.
“People on the lowest incomes in our society have had their vital income support payments removed for a month or more without due legal process, with no recourse or compensation. It is very disturbing that in the aftermath of Robodebt, governments continue to make unlawful social security decisions on such a scale affecting people with little means or power.
“The government must immediately remove the entire Targeted Compliance Framework, including payment suspensions, provide full back-pay and compensation to every person affected, and conduct a fully independent legal and human rights review.
“ACOSS has consistently opposed the Targeted Compliance Framework since its introduction in 2018 under the Coalition and has issued warning after warning about the serious harm it causes.”
ACOSS made a complaint about the Federal Government’s administration of the framework to the Ombudsman in December 2024, who is currently investigating whether payment cancellations under the TCF are lawful, fair and reasonable.
See also: ACOSS demands action after 10 income support recipients died
Dear reader, we need your support
Independent sites such as The AIMN provide a platform for public interest journalists. From its humble beginning in January 2013, The AIMN has grown into one of the most trusted and popular independent media organisations.
One of the reasons we have succeeded has been due to the support we receive from our readers through their financial contributions.
With increasing costs to maintain The AIMN, we need this continued support.
Your donation – large or small – to help with the running costs of this site will be greatly appreciated.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
My dealings with Centrelink has given me the distinct impression that there is a rather nasty computer program running in the background that staff are not able to over-ride, instead having to work around it.
The reliance on a computer program to over ride, or replace human, is a malicious set up that enabled robodebt.
Robodebt is not gone, as fragments of it continue, like a malware implemented by a malicious government determined to punish the poor and vulnerable.
I am on an Age Pension and in palliative care at home. I am very unwell and my daughter and her family enable me to live at home.
Recently my energy provider alerted me that my pension had been affected. I am unable to manage the My Gov two stage identification so I cannot access it. My daughter was doing a 4 week prac and could not go to my bank to get what Centrelink wanted. My pension was suspended for 40 days. I complained to the Minister and Australian Services – advising them they needed to mail me their requests because I could not access My Gov. I also told them that their action to suspend my pension breached the Human Rights Act because they assumed I had received their request and I had not and my daughter (nominee) was unable to assist because of her obligations.
Because I am terminal I went to a solicitor to finalise my affairs and was advised to move my super into a joint bank account. This was not alot of money. But apparently Centrelink needed to have the details. It has been a difficult time for my family and myself. Suspension made it more difficult. Finally it was restored just before Cyclone Alfred and five days later I receive a huge form to apply for an overseas pension! I emigrated in my early 20’s after graduating from uni. The only jobs I had were casual. I never paid into any pension fund. I am now dying and they want me to fill out paperwork that is beyond my ability. This is a separate part of Centrelink and the service centres cannot assist. So again my daughter has to go to an office and is connected to International Centrelink. If she had not contacted them they would have suspended my pension again.
The administrative procedures appear to be sacrosanct. Never mind how nonsensical they area. In addition to this the Centrelink system does not record all the uploaded information. Somehow it just disappears. Different staff give different instructions and some of the written instructions are incomprehensible.
Centrelink should invest in new technology and evaluate the legality of suspending payments when clients are not notified In my case it felt like I was being targeted because their expectations made no sense. They had all my records showing when I arrived and spent all my adult working life in Australia.
I am positive that many others are put in difficult situations because Centrelink fails to treat us as people with legal rights to things like natural justice.
The Ombudsman considers their function to be educative and this means they do not intervene. Remember Robodebt? People’s rights were just ignored. ACOSS is an advocacy organisation with little resourcing and millions of potential clients. How can they possibly advocate successfully for us all? Centrelink needs to be brought to account for unnecessarily causing hardship and distress.
The simple fact of the matter is that this is a known cognative bias whoever is in Government!
We are dealing with people who believe that they a better than us, have more rights than us and can be protected from their actions by law that is meant to be applicable to all, irrespective of race, color, religion or creed.
Its enshrined under Article’s 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 of the Universal Declaration of Rights, which is breached everyday with this continual denial and abuse.
If you are not familiar with it, please do so now https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
I experienced Robodebt, went and made a submission in Melbourne which was submitted and held under Parliamentary privilege as it was so damming as I had worked in Financial Services and knew how to keep records.
Took part in the Class Action and had that risible error removed, however as far as I know the compensation that was awarded has never seen the light of day.
Be in no doubt about the machavellian motives of Government.
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2025/03/22/exclusive-leaked-report-shows-warnings-over-black-robodebt
I have no complaints with centerlink.
Each fortnight I get a sum of money in my bank and it allows me to live a little.
I must be one of the lucky ones.
Why are people under the impression that Centrelink have been sending out LESS debt notices since the RobodDebt scandal and subsequent Royal Commission? More like the opposite.
And that would be because, nobody has actually been held accountable to date. Until they are it’s ‘as you were.’
I mean, after the Comissioner of the NACC having been found by an inspector to have meddled in the investigation, and also sending a letter to the A-G lying in writing that he recused himself due to conflict of interest, which he didn’t…he still has a job.
Nobody’s asked him to leave, and he hasn’t stepped down.That fact that there is no outcome whatsoever and it continues to be shuffled aroundfrom desk to desk until it ‘goes away’ just beggars belief.
Recently we had Robodebt refreshed in our memory, and how after 4 years of Labor no one has been brought to account. There’s a very good article from Amy Remeikis on Australia Institute on the TCF, under which 10 people died.
The TCF is the “mutual obligation” the Coalition built into the Job Provider system they also introduced. She writes of how under the Coalition, they ‘gave private job agencies the power to punish “non-compliant” job-seeker behaviour without the checks and balances of government’ through the TCF.
She tells of how alarm bells were raised about this framework as early as 2020, and how ‘in 2023, those bugs were re-discovered and 10 people were found to have died before they received their backpay/restitutions.’
This framework still exists.
Only those who have known what it is like to go through this framework while living in poverty truly know its evil (shamelessly adapted from Noel Pearson’s masterpiece on racism.)
In her piece Amy gives a small sliver of what it is like. The Labor MPs seem to know nothing of what it is like, they care nothing about it.
She goes on to write “This is well after the issues with Robodebt had been revealed, and it became crystal clear that automated decisions that led to cancelled payments or debt notices were not only having devastating impact on those on the recipient end, but that the government had a duty of care to stop it.”
We now know Labor has left millions of Australians in poverty for well over 3 years.
https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/shame-and-harm-at-every-jobseeker-turn-and-now-with-added-ai-slop/
At the last election there was an option to stop this. The Greens and Socialist Alliance ran on a platform of abolishing for-profit job providers, restoring the CES, and ending the TCF.
It sh-tted me, how the government reappointed Kathryn Campbell to the public service on the same salary as before. Wong was apparently involved in this.
Likewise Paul, that stank to high heavens.
Kathryn Campbell was deputy secretary of the Budget and Financial Management Groups in the Department of Finance and Deregulation, from 2010 to 2011, and Wong was appointed as Minister for Finance and Deregulation in 2010.
Can you point me to where you saw suggestion of her involvement, I haven’t seen that before? From Michael West Media I could find that Albanese made the announcement of her shift to Defence on a salary over $17000 a week, while the people who suffered under Robodebt were likely on $350 a week.
I won’t have internet connection for a few weeks from tomorrow, but I’d be very interested in knowing of her involvement.
I saw a report that during his town hall grilling before the election, to find out if he was sufficiently supportive of the terrorist state of Israel, Josh Burns claimed that funding for UNRWA had been quietly removed again. Wong was faster than lightning to remove funding after Israel used confessions obtained under torture, a practice that is well known to happen in Israeli prisons, to smear UNRWA, but later Wong announced that that funding would be restored. If what Burns said was true, we can’t find out because Labor hides everything, then did Wong secretly undermine the organization feeding the Palestinians in Gaza?
Josh Burns…what a number!
Ok, I haven’t properly cited the Campbell issue, but remember it in a newspaper just after the government was elected. My Jaw dropped and I could not figure, for the life of me, why some one like Sen Wong would be involved in such a despicable move and how provocative of the government.
The issue involved one of these defence/secrecy bodies, on the same salary she was receiving when running Robodebt.
No worries Paul, thanks for the headsup, I’ll keep my eyes open for it.
Don’t you hate it when that happens, when you know you’ve seen a report on something that you desparately want to use in a discussion and you can’t find it. Like if I were to look for the article reporting Josh Burns belling the cat that UNRWA funding had been cut, I doubt if I could find again. I only saw it in one report, likely The Guardian, which I can’t access at present anyway. So I wouldn’t go quoting it in an argument.
While I’m on The Guardian, last I was on their comments section they’d changed their search facility limiting severely what could be chased up. I was sure one of their writers went all ‘Israel can do whatever it likes now’ after Oct 7th, I think it was Jonathon Freeland, but couldn’t search what he’d written at the time.