Few government failures have left scars as deep as Robodebt.

An automated debt‐raising system, rolled out with breathtaking confidence and almost no safeguards, wrongly accused hundreds of thousands of Australians of owing money to the Commonwealth.

People lost their savings, their wellbeing and, in some cases, their lives.

We told ourselves that this could never happen again, but we have not put anything in place to prevent the same mistakes being repeated.

New automated decision-making tools are being rolled out by the Government in aged care, the NDIS and beyond.

Aged care support packages are now calculated by an automated program. A human assesses the participant and feeds the data into the program, but they cannot override or change the program’s decision.

The NDIA is also looking to roll out a similar system to calculate support packages, without the ability for human decision-makers to override the automated decision.

In fact, even if you seek a review of your decision within the department or at the Administrative Review Tribunal, the reviewer can only instruct that another assessment take place and that the system make the decision again. A human does not make the final decision.

Experts are already warning that these programs are producing problematic and inaccurate outcomes, which is deeply concerning when these automated systems are........

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