Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: robodebt

Duplicity

Post author By G
Post date Jan 14, 2026
No Comments on Duplicity

What is striking is not simply how difficult it is for people with genuine insight, intellectual range, and openness to rise through status hierarchies, but that those hierarchies stabilise themselves by filtering out precisely the signals that would correct them. This is not accidental. Systems that persist must dampen information that threatens coherence, even when […]

Tags abuse of power, accountability mechanisms, administrative injustice, administrative law breach, administrative violence, algorithmic governance failure, audit failure, authority without accountability, automation in government, blame diffusion, bureaucratic cruelty, bureaucratic harm, corruption by process, crisis mismanagement, culture of compliance, delayed accountability, democratic accountability, erosion of public trust, ethical erosion, ethics versus efficiency, executive accountability, executive overreach, failure of oversight, governance, governance breakdown, governance ethics, governance opacity, governance reform, harm minimisation rhetoric, institutional corruption, institutional defensiveness, institutional integrity, institutional lying, institutional self-protection, integrity systems failure, lawful authority misuse, leadership integrity, legal advice ignored, moral hazard in bureaucracy, moral injury, moral responsibility in government, normalisation of wrongdoing, obedience to process, organisational denial, organisational misconduct, policy failure, policy-induced harm, power without responsibility, procedural corruption, procedural obfuscation, public administration critique, public governance failure, public sector ethics, public sector malpractice, regulatory capture, regulatory collapse, reputational risk management, responsibility deferral, responsibility in leadership, robodebt, robodebt royal commission, Robodebt scandal, rule of law failure, rule-following pathology, social security administration, state power and harm, strategic silence, structural incompetence, systemic accountability, systemic failure, systemic harm amplification, technocratic governance, unlawful policy implementation, welfare compliance systems, whistleblower suppression

cybernetics

Productive Misanthropy

Service delivery systems must model the environments they act within. This is unavoidable. Eligibility rules, risk categories, performance metrics, and compliance frameworks are all abstractions that allow action under constraint. The model is not the world. It is an interface that reduces complexity to something administrable. Over time, however, the interface acquires weight. The abstraction […]

Tags accountability regimes, activation policy, ADM oversight, administrative burden, administrative error, administrative exhaustion, administrative violence, adverse outcomes reproduction, algorithmic governance, appeals system, APS governance, ashby law, audit and assurance, audit culture, audit logs, australian public administration, automated decision making, backlog dynamics, benefits navigation, bureaucratic drift, campbell law, carceral throughput, care coordination failure, case load pressure, case processing, centrelink processes, churn management, commonwealth integrity, comparative public policy, complex adaptive systems, complexity informed governance, compliance complexity, compliance theatre, consultancy dependence, control systems, cost shifting, cybernetics in policy, debt recovery algorithms, digital by default services, digital identity, dignity in service delivery, disability services, documentation requirements, downstream harm, eligibility criteria, entropy displacement, epistemic closure, explainability, feedback loops, frontline discretion, general systems theory, goodhart law, governance-failure, government accountability australia, health system navigation, high dimensional systems, human centred design, identity verification burden, incentive design, income averaging, inequality reproduction, information asymmetry, institutional complexity, institutional self maintenance, integrated services, jobseeker compliance, justice system churn, knowledge hierarchies, KPI gaming, legibility politics, marginalisation dynamics, metric fixation, model provisionality, model reality mismatch, mutual obligation, mygov access, NDIS administration, non take up, operational efficiency traps, organisational learning, organisational legitimacy, payment suspension, performance reporting, performance targets, policy compliance burden, policy framework inertia, policy humility, policy implementation gap, policy modelling, poverty administration, procedural churn, procedural denial, procedural friction, procedural justice, procedural opacity, procurement incentives, productive misanthropy, provisional metrics, public accountability, public sector ethics, public sector reform, public value, queue management, rationing by process, recidivism cycle, recipient experience, regulation lived experience, regulatory systems, representational assumptions, requisite variety, review tribunals, risk management culture, risk scoring, ritualised validation, robodebt, robodebt royal commission, sanctions regime, sensemaking organisations, service delivery systems, service design, service recipient entropy, services australia, services australia call centre, social determinants of health, social protection systems, social welfare policy, state simplification, statistical governance, street level bureaucracy, system stability versus success, systems dynamics, systems thinking, target culture, transparency, trauma informed services, triage systems, trust in institutions, unemployment services, welfare administration, welfare conditionality, workforce australia

Philosophy

Robodebt

Post author By G
Post date Aug 26, 2025
1 Comment on 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 […]

Tags accountability, Australia, governance, responsibility, robodebt, social services, support, transparency