At nearly 500 pages, Rick Morton’s Mean Streak provides a detailed account of the development and collapse of the robodebt scheme, which started in 2014 and is, in some ways, not yet finished.

The book’s primary source is the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, which conducted hearings between October 2022 and March 2023. The printed report, published in July 2023, is nearly 1,000 pages long. There are also four analytical reports and 770 submissions within the commission’s terms of reference.

The final 50 pages of Mean Streak are statements from a number of public servants and politicians mentioned in the book who dispute the findings of the Royal Commission.

Morton is to be congratulated for bringing the complex evidence and arguments from the Royal Commission into a more accessible format for the public – and policy makers – to understand.

Review: Mean Streak – Rick Morton (Fourth Estate)

In addition to reading the published evidence and watching the hearings, Morton has spoken to or corresponded with a number of people affected by events. These include Colleen Taylor, who worked in the compliance area of Centrelink and attempted, early on, to have robodebt stopped within the Department of Human Services, and Glyn Fiveash, a former lawyer with the department, who pointed out the unlawfulness of income averaging in 2017.

Other sources include Darren O’Donovan, a legal academic from La Trobe University who has written extensively on robodebt, and Asher Wolf, a journalist and digital rights activist, who started investigating robodebt in August 2016.

Mean Streak also includes case studies of anonymous and named individuals who received false debt notices. Morton has spoken to Jennifer Miller, mother of Rhys Cauzzo, a young man who committed suicide on Australia Day 2017. Cauzzo had received 12 letters and five phone calls from Centrelink between May and October 2016, then six letters, two text messages and 13 phone calls from Dun and Bradstreet, a private debt collection agency, between October 2016 and January 2017. It was claimed he had a debt of almost $18,000.

Many aspects of robodebt were well known before the Royal Commission, as the result of federal court cases, media attention and community activism. The media and public attention effectively started from 2016, when the first stages of the compliance program commenced and large numbers of people came to be affected. Despite the public and political attention, what was actually happening was deliberately obscured until 2019.

The strength ofMean Streak is its detailed account, drawn from the Royal Commission’s report, of the lead up before 2016, when robodebt could have been stopped before it started.

The story begins in May 2014 with the first budget of the Abbott government, which among........

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