The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) has released its much-anticipated investigation into the six people referred by the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.

The report reveals the identity of the referred people, which was previously not public knowledge: five bureaucrats and former prime minister Scott Morrison, who was social services minister at the time.

NACC found that two of the six individuals (Mark Withnell and Serena Wilson) had committed serious corrupt conduct. Notably, Morrison had no findings of corruption made against him.

Why did NACC decide to investigate?

On July 6 2024, the Robodebt royal commission referred six people involved in the Robodebt scheme to the NACC.

Initially the NACC declined to investigate, stating that the issues had been fully ventilated by the royal commission.

Following hundreds of complaints from the public about this decision, the inspector of NACC conducted an investigation into NACC’s decision not to investigate. She found it was flawed due to the NACC’s commissioner’s conflict of interest with one of the referred persons.

Former High Court judge Geoffrey Nettle was then appointed in December 2024 to reconsider whether and how the NACC should deal with the referrals. Nettle determined each referral raised a corruption issue under the NACC act, and it was in the public interest for the NACC to conduct a corruption investigation.

This finally prompted the NACC to decide to investigate the matter. This investigation was conducted by a deputy commissioner, Kylie Kilgour, to avoid a conflict of interest.

NACC held private hearings for this investigation, where the six referred people and 33 witnesses were called to give evidence. There were no public hearings.

What were the main findings?

The investigation found that two of the six referred people had committed serious corrupt conduct.

The commission found that Mark Withnell (previously general manager of business integrity at the Department of Human Services) engaged in corrupt conduct by intentionally misleading officers of the Department of Social Services in 2015 in preparing a submission to the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet of the Robodebt scheme proposal.

It also found that Serena Wilson (previously secretary at the Department of Social Services) engaged in corrupt conduct by intentionally misleading the ombudsman in 2017 during the ombudsman’s own investigation into the Robodebt Scheme. Wilson had concealed from the ombudsman legal advice that the Robodebt scheme was unlawful, and made misleading statements about the scheme.

However, NACC also concluded there was insufficient admissible evidence to establish the alleged offences against either Withnell or Wilson beyond reasonable doubt. It was therefore not appropriate to refer them to the director of public prosecutions.

NACC found Scott Morrison did not engage in serious corrupt conduct. This was because he was entitled to rely on departmental advice. The report lays the responsibility for misleading Cabinet on the public servants.

Is this adequate?

Key admissions and statements made during NACC investigations are not admissible in criminal proceedings.

This is because anti-corruption commissions often have extraordinary powers to abrogate fundamental privileges that normally apply to legal proceedings. These include legal professional privilege, public interest immunity and the privilege against self-incrimination. These privileges are necessary in order to allow anti-corruption commissions to uncover acts of corruption without impediment.

However, the abrogation of privileges is always twinned with “use immunity”. This prevents the compelled evidence from being used against the individual in a criminal prosecution, ensuring it is used for investigation rather than for the punishment of that person.

On the one hand, we now have a full ventilation of the truth of the matter and the role of each person in this sorry saga, both through the Royal Commission and the NACC investigation. And we have findings these two public servants have engaged in serious corrupt conduct.

However, as the public servants are not likely to be criminally prosecuted, it is unclear what other repercussions there will be beyond reputational damage.

More tellingly, the Robodebt scheme has exposed fundamental failings in our system of public administration. Public servants have lost power over the decades, with the rise of ministerial advisers and senior bureaucrats being in fixed-term contracts and in constant fear of losing their jobs. As a result, it is more difficult for public servants to provide “frank and fearless advice” – they are instead often focused on pleasing the minister. In the case of Robodebt, the public servants manoeuvred to put together this unlawful scheme that has caused significant harm to hundreds of thousands of Australians.

The Robodebt royal commission lambasted the scheme as an “extraordinary saga” of “venality, incompetence and cowardice”.

We also have a situation where ministers are able to evade responsibility for these policy choices. This is because they have plausible deniability. They can simply use the phrase: “I was not advised”. As long as they are careful enough, they can simply blame their advisers when things go horribly wrong. Here, the minister who orchestrated the whole scheme is not fully held accountable.

The Robodebt scheme shows the rise of automation in government may lead to significant harm. Therefore, stronger safeguards are needed before we deploy such technologies.

The NACC’s investigation has provided us with detailed examination of the conduct of the six people who were primarily responsible for the Robodebt scheme. It has shown some of these actions have amounted to serious corrupt conduct.

But there are broader issues at stake here. If we want to avoid another Robodebt, the government needs to look at broader reform on automated government decision-making and measures to strengthen the public service.

Yee-Fui Ng, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On November 18 1909, greengrocer Claude Nam Shing was woken up by shouts of “fire”. He found his store, on the corner of Elizabeth and Melville Streets in central Hobart, ablaze.

He escaped quickly. The fire brigade arrived and the fire was doused. Nam Shing’s stock suffered little damage, unlike his neighbour’s paint shop. Hobart’s newspapers cheered, as such damage to these old buildings would surely hasten their replacement. Today on this corner stand several buildings dating back to 1914.

It’s stories like Nam Shing’s that we’ve been chronicling as part of our research project, called Everyday Heritage. We’ve been investigating the lives of Chinese migrants and their descendants in Tasmania in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After mapping 105 “Chinese” addresses across the centre of Hobart, we found these businesses were scattered across the whole city. So while Tasmania’s capital has never had a Chinatown like Melbourne or Sydney, the footprint of Chinese migration remains all over the city to this day.

White-washing the past

Claude Nam Shing was an immigrant from China who arrived in Australia in the mid-1890s, making Tasmania his home for more than 40 years. In the 1911 census, he was one of 353 men in Tasmania who reported China as their birthplace – a reduction of more than 30% from the state’s peak in 1891.

After federation, the Australian government introduced the White Australia Policy, a series of discriminatory laws and policies designed to limit non-white immigration and restrict the rights of non-white residents.

Some immigrants of colour and their families chose to leave Australia, while others sought new opportunities by joining larger communities in cities like Melbourne and Sydney.

This internal migration coincided with urban renewal that saw accidental fires tear through ramshackle wooden storefronts and investment in modernised streetscapes.

In places that never had the population density for a Chinatown, early Chinese communities might seem to leave little tangible trace. But such an absence does not necessarily mean the absence of a Chinese history.

Unearthing Hobart’s history

Our growing dataset comes from diverse historical sources including birth and marriage records, naturalisation records, newspapers and gravestones. We are extracting as many names, addresses, and dates as possible, so we can restore individuals and families of Chinese heritage to Tasmania’s history.

Most of the Chinese immigrants who came to Australia before the 1950s trace their heritage to the Pearl River Delta in southern Guangdong province.

In towns and cities across Australia, Chinese migrants built communities that were often based on networks of family and kinship, hometown origins and common dialects.

Those who came to Tasmania mostly came from one of two counties: Sunwui and Toishan (today known as Xinhui and Taishan in Mandarin), where the local dialects differ from the standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

By mapping shops and businesses we found in Tasmania’s Post Office Directories, we could see those networks in action as businesses changed hands over the years, but stayed within the Chinese community.

From fruiterers to fancy goods

On one street corner, Alfred Wood’s “fruiterer” business was sold to Peter Quon Goong in 1907, then to Kwong Hing two years later. Within three years, this shop was known as the “Chinese fruiterers”, distinguishing it from at least four other fruiterers within a few doors.

Near another corner of this block, we found one of several Chinese cabinetmakers, Ah Tye. He may have chosen this property because it placed him conveniently close to the F&E Crisp timber yards.

The block could have been dominated by these yards. They filled half of it, and it’s had such longevity that the new university building we work in is called The Forest.

Instead, we see an array of industries – bootmakers, blacksmiths and boarding houses – and retailers including those run by Chinese migrants.

Along with greengrocers and fruiterers, Chinese Tasmanians operated confectionery and gift shops, and what were known as “fancy goods” stores. These sold “exotic” imports, and personal and household items.

In the 1890s on this block was the store of Vong (or John) Boosuit, who started as a hawker of fancy goods before becoming successful enough to start a bricks-and-mortar business.

Boosuit married Selina Findon, the daughter of an English convict, and today their descendants include actor Patrick Brammall.

The only time we found Chinese businesses clustered together in Hobart was when they required specific infrastructure. There were a few small groups of laundries tucked around the city, in locations we assume had a reliable water supply and enough space for drying washing.

Driving community spirit

Tasmania’s newspapers tell of the generosity of Chinese migrants towards their new home. Their shops not only served Hobart’s residents, they were also community hubs.

For nearly half a century, the fruiterers at Ah Ham & Co organised an annual fundraising drive for the main Hobart hospital, despite rarely using the hospital themselves.

Migrants and their children in a small city were comfortable moving between two of its most active cultures – British and Chinese.

Between 2011 and 2021, the population of central Hobart that speaks a language other than English at home nearly doubled, from 12.5% to 24%.

Rather than viewing this as a radical change for Australia’s island capital, it reads more as a rekindling of a history that was interrupted for more than 70 years by the White Australia Policy.

As we walk through the multicultural bustle of our inner-city university campus, we are following streets that were home to successful laundries, fancy good stores, tobacconists, fruiterers, grocers and restaurants run by immigrants well into the 20th century.

The descendants of Australia’s earliest Chinese migrants, many of whom still live in our rural and regional areas, should be proud of the central role their ancestors played in creating the towns and cities we have today. The built heritage may have gone or be hidden, but their stories linger waiting to be found in the written record.

Imogen Wegman, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania; Annaliese Claydon, Adjunct Researcher, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, and Kate Bagnall, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.