Australian Bureaucrats Face Fines If They Hide Failures From Scrutiny

More accountability is the way for the Australian public service as the government moves to implement two of the recommendations of the Robodebt Royal Commission, which found more than $750 million (US$505 million) was illegally recovered from welfare recipients, calling it a “crude and cruel” scheme and a massive failure of public administration. Robodebt was known by senior public servants and ministers to be unfair and probably illegal in early 2017. Still, the Royal Commission found that dishonesty and collusion inside the public service prevented its lack of legal foundation from being exposed. The Coalition government finally halted it in 2019, by which time it had affected 381,000 people over five years, leading some to suicide....