It’s easy to forget the role of individuals who work in the great machinery of administration – both the good and the poor.
The major recent enquiries (in this country, Robodebt, and in the Old Dart the Post Office scandal) inevitably focus on the big picture of how things became so disjointed that multitudes of little Jos were whacked, but inside these investigations, the importance of personaI responsibility still lurks.
It’s now just over two years since Catherine Holmes AC SC handed down her final report on Robodebt. Among her recommendations were, of course, that six particular individuals be further investigated with a view to prosecution.
That process has stalled in the office of the National Anti-Corruption Commission, (by chance operational from the same month the Robodebt Commission finished its work, July 2023) apparently thanks to the position taken by Head Boy, Paul Brereton AM, RFD, SC.
Brereton’s unwillingness to pursue an old Army Reserve chum reinforces the general tenor of unaccountable public administration revealed in Robodebt, a syndrome that ultimately rests on the assumption that individual responsibility is of no consequence.
Commissioner Holmes, contrary to that assumption, said in her prefatory remarks to the final report:
“It is remarkable how little interest there seems to have been in ensuring the Scheme’s legality, how rushed its implementation was, how little thought was given to how it would affect welfare recipients and the lengths to which public servants were prepared to go to oblige ministers on a quest for savings. Truly dismaying was the revelation of dishonesty and collusion to prevent the Scheme’s lack of legal foundation coming to light. Equally disheartening was the ineffectiveness of what one might consider institutional checks and balances – the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office, the Office of Legal Services Coordination, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal – in presenting any hindrance to the Scheme’s continuance.
The report makes a number of recommendations. Some are directed at strengthening the public service more broadly, some to improving the processes of the Department of Social Services and Services Australia. Others are concerned with reinforcing the capability of oversight agencies. A sealed chapter contains referrals of information concerning some persons for further investigation by other bodies. That in part is intended as a means of holding individuals to account, in order to reinforce the importance of public service officers’ acting with integrity.”
As your scribe was pondering how individual responsibility might be faring in the service, given Brereton’s burying the concept in so far as it involves senior members, a splendid ART decision came to notice, illustrating a complete disconnect between any empathy or personal care by individual Commonwealth officers and the overall impact of their work on a person over whom they had total power.
On July 7, 2025 Senior Member Alison Murphy handed own the decision in CRVF and Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.
This involved a Cambodian national who arrived in Australia in 2001 as a 13-year-old, claiming refugee status. As a refugee claimant his name is anonymised.
He has since been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and placed under the care of the Victorian Public Advocate as his guardian and the State Trustees as his administrator.
Needless to say his refugee claim has not been successful, although there is an acceptance that he cannot return to Cambodia for fear of physical assault.
More recently he has been convicted for shoplifting, affray and causing injury, with an aggregate sentence of 18 months. That term matters, as it attracts the eye of the Immigration Department’s computer: any sentence 12 months or longer and a non-citizen is deemed of bad character, with statutory consequences leading to removal i.e. deportation.
Once deemed of bad character and any visa stripped, a non-citizen is required to be “detained” – held in a camp until removed from The Wide Brown Land.
CRVF, plainly not mentally well and not responsible for his actions, was duly rounded up after serving his sentence and placed in detention, but the State guardians fought for him, and in December 2024 he was finally released and granted a limited Bridging Visa R, a visa granted (with ankle bracelet and attendant conditions) where the Minister sees no realistic chance of the holder being removed from Australia in the foreseeable future.
In the process his permanent stay visa was cancelled, leaving him (through his guardian) to seek a revocation of the cancellation.
The guardian was right onto it from the moment of cancellation in December 2024, but by April 2025, a delegate of the Minister refused to revoke the cancellation, leaving CRVF to go to the ART to appeal the non-revocation decision.
The ART decision takes us into the byzantine world of attempts by the Victorian State and charitable bodies to care for this mentally disturbed individual while the Department of Immigration and friends at Border Force forged ahead with their determination to heave CRVF out, and in the meantime monitor him, the condition upon which his limited Bridging Visa rested.
So we get to para 63 of Senior Member Murphy at ART:
“When he was released from detention in December 2024 he was funded to stay in a motel for a period of 12 weeks. There is no dispute that since the funding for that motel accommodation ended he has been sleeping on a bench in a park in Sunshine, or that the ABF [Australian Border Force] attend that park bench every morning to replace the battery pack on the applicant’s ankle monitor as he has no means of charging it.”
At this point Kafka is meeting with the Marx Brothers. A Night at the Opera? Why not A Night at My Park Bench?
While the ABF grimly pursue their allotted task (monitoring movement via an ankle bracelet) attending each morning at the park bench that CRVF calls home (they found him unconscious on the morning of March 27, 2025), Life Without Barriers wrote to CRVF’s (State) guardian concerning the problems facing CRVF:
“… ongoing poor decision-making relating to his well-being including choosing homelessness and increased drug experimentation; continued expression of intent to use illicit substances despite life-threatening consequences and significant weight loss due to regular [sic] meals/inadequate nutrition coupled with deteriorating hygiene. Other issues identified include the applicant’s decision to leave a supported living arrangement within 24 hours and not wanting to consider other accommodation options despite saying he is ‘cold’ given the weather; a recent request for a large sum of money to ‘leave the galaxy’ and other delusional statements and concerns of potential financial exploitation by other parties.”
The ankle monitor comes with criminal sanctions for defiance of a curfew or other associated conditions, but CRVF’s occasional lapses (picked up by police away from “home”, said he was lost so, “laid down to look at the stars”) have not so far been punished.
But as State and Commonwealth officials beaver away on completely contrasting briefs relating to one homeless person, at least Senior Member Murphy got it (at para 124):
“It is apparent that the applicant has no capacity to comply with conditions of the BVR [Bridging Visa] and this appears to be acknowledged in the arrangements made by the ABF. It is hard to think of a more extreme example of the hardship caused by these conditions than the exposure of a person to serious criminal sanctions, when they are a person who is homeless and has no practical means of complying with the conditions and who lacks capacity, by reason of his disability, to understand the consequences of non-compliance.”
Weighing the factors for and against CRVF being allowed to stay on a long term visa the Senior Member revoked the cancellation: CRVF gets a permanent stay visa (until the inevitable appeal from the Minister succeeds).
My spies in the Victorian public service say that the NDIS is riding to the rescue with assistance in a financial planned form. At least the ART decision gets us out of the loop of BF officers trooping into the suburbs of a morning to find a park bench where they charge up a power pack on an ankle bracelet.
Leaving the question: just what did they say to their superiors each day as they returned from this task of Sisyphus?
At what point would they question orders to monitor a homeless man plainly not in charge of his own wits? Bureaucratic statis overtakes personal responsibility every time.
CRVF is with Oscar Wilde, knowing that we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.