And here I was thinking Robodebt was a movie starring Will Smith, or maybe it was Peter Weller. Whatever.
Then I find it starred Australians, all whose tactics to weed out the bad guys have been under heavy scrutiny.
There was a guy who ended up leading our country, a guy who quit and will be soon replaced, and another guy who’s still there until our justice system determines otherwise. Or not.
Like any good film, there will have been other gangster-type characters creating the sub-plot, like the pimply tech person who fronted up one day with an algorithm to expose anomalies in our welfare system.
And like any good pimply tech person, he or she will have seen an opportunity for justice, just like the superhero comics they had stashed under their desk.
So they ponder who to sell their idea to.
Problem was, there was never going to be a straight line from the guy with an idea, to the minister who puts the eventual stamp on the widget that’s going to save us all from the burden of evil.
So the pimply person finds support, probably someone on their way up the advisory chain. This person’s job is to hear out the suggestions of the more intelligent – albeit much younger – cog in the wheel.
The older, more streetwise advisor will have interpreted the musings of the whiz-kid into a form of animation that can be presented to a group of even more senior advisors who’ll talk among themselves around a boardroom table about how they can “sell” their thoughts further up the chain.
They’ll have wondered about how they could take “their” idea that was never really theirs in the first place to the top table.
“I know,” they’ll have said. “We’ll make the minister think it was his idea. And we’ll add incentives.”
Not only would the minister be able to tell the people of the fiefdom that they’d found a way to combat the underbelly of social welfare fraud, but they’d turn the country’s justice system on its wig-laden head.
No longer would people be considered innocent until the burden of proof had proven otherwise.
We’ll make them all guilty, they’d say. Because the secret sauce would be in the algorithm, which would prove that A + B equalled a very unsteady C that would have all welfare cheats screaming for mercy.
It’s true that our government technocrats could have gone out and talked to the people who’d been exposed by the algorithm, but that would have laid bare the vulnerabilities of a flawed system.
Look up the definition of technocrat and you’ll discover that this was just not going to work.
So the technocrats, in their wisdom, devise another automated process that sends “guilty as charged” letters to all the filthy wrong-doers telling them all that they’d likely go to jail if they didn’t pay back the money some of them had never been given in the first place.
Ah, but it’s a good thing that discrepancies between welfare payments and tax payments are seized upon in a bid to protect our hard-earned taxes.
That is, if the calculations created by the pimply tech person in the first place had realised that not everyone was on exactly the same income every fortnight of the year.
Or that there were people on low incomes who don’t keep overly good records of their earnings.
You see, automation has a place, usually when coupled with the use of a telephone. But that hasn’t been something our public service encourages, perhaps thinking Telstra still charges for calls by the minute.
Regardless, a princely $1.2 billion has been paid to more than 400,000 welfare recipients who got duped by a system that nearly worked.
I bet the pimply tech person didn’t see that one coming.
Hey Wanda, want to go grab a coffee so I can practice the subtle art of conversation?
