We’ve seen banks charge the dead – and the living – for services no one’s getting. We’ve seen telcos knowingly sell to those who can’t afford the services, can’t even understand what they are buying. But nothing beats successive governments for the predacious behaviour known in this country as robo-debt. This week, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) referred the federal government to the Commonwealth Ombudsman following new revelations that, once again, income support payments may have been illegally cancelled, affecting more than 1000 people between April 2022 (not long before the Albanese government was elected) and July this year. Robo-debt was conceived and then hand-reared by the Coalition.
ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie says the government must understand the system affects hundreds of thousands of people who are at risk of deprivation, suicide, and poverty.
“Someone receiving JobSeeker is 14 times more likely to go without a substantial meal at least once a day, and suicide rates among people receiving these payments are 4.5 times higher than that of the broader population.”
In this country, our most deprived – our most demeaned and degraded – are more likely to kill themselves, not their violators.
Ben Spies-Butcher, associate professor of economy and society at Macquarie University, promises me that the US situation, where money is extorted from those in very precarious situations under the guise of insurance, is much more extreme than what we experience in Australia.
“It’s not yet at the scale of US inequality,” he says. But that predacious mindset is evident in successive governments’ conduct of robo-debt. There is, he says, “the importance of vigilance to make sure we don’t get to that point”.
But even Spies-Butcher was surprised by the response to Thompson’s murder: “It suggests a very deep divide and a lot of anger.”
Loading
This was not just the kind of joy you might find in the deep recesses of the dark web where some share multiple derangements – but on the streets where some claim Thompson deserved it, on TikTok where one poster claimed US health problems could be solved by unregulated gun laws, on Reddit where posters were unsurprised these kinds of attacks weren’t more common, and even in that most banal capitalist portfolio LinkedIn.
How did these companies respond in the wake of the murder? Not with the kind of reflective behaviour you might expect. Instead, most stripped their websites of any information about their leadership and called for more services from security firms.
The New York Times reported that Stephan Meier, chair of the management division at Columbia Business School, said the attack could send shock waves through the broader health insurance industry.
“The insurance industry is not the most loved, to put it mildly,” Meier said. “If you’re a C-suite executive of another insurance company, I would be thinking, ‘What’s this mean for me? Am I next?’”
It’s clear we need kinder and more civilised capitalism in this country – in all countries – and we need leadership from the very top down. We must all remember Banking Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne, who underscored for all of us that companies needed a social license to operate. Companies – and governments – need to do more than make a profit. And we, together, must hold them all to account. Murder doesn’t do that.
How should companies respond? I asked Macquarie’s Spies-Butcher. “By ensuring ethical practice and doing as much as they can to ensure that those in precarious situations are helped,” he said. “That’s an obligation for everyone.”
Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.