Robodebt

The Robodebt scheme, deployed between 2015 and 2019, exemplifies how an administrative shortcut can cascade into human tragedy. By averaging annual tax data to infer fortnightly income, it raised hundreds of thousands of false debts against vulnerable Australians. The program caused profound distress, with reports linking it to suicides among those wrongly accused of owing money they did not owe. A Royal Commission later described the scheme as a “crude and cruel mechanism,” condemning the bureaucratic inertia and managerial convenience that allowed it to persist despite mounting evidence of its flaws. Convenience for staff and executives, the shorter distance between two points, outweighed both legality and compassion.

But this was not just a failure of government—it was a symptom of a broader trajectory. Systems at scale drift toward entropy, communication becomes diffusion, and shortcuts become standard practice. The dumbing down of a system, dressed up in technology, is merely the reproduction of indifference. Marketing and hype obscure the fact that so many “innovations” collapse to a median, reducing complexity into callous uniformity. What Services Australia implemented was not intelligence but its opposite: a mechanised indifference that reproduced itself at scale, eroding trust and amplifying harm. If one were serious about repair, the answer would not be more automation but a refusal of the lowest common denominator logic that produced this debacle in the first place.