GOD MAY WORK in mysterious ways, but senior bureaucrats are damned near inscrutable.

Towards the end of 2024, as the managers in charge of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) used the cover of sweeping reform to accelerate efforts to ‘reassess’ the eligibility of existing participants, I was shown several letters sent by officials demanding new evidence of existing impairments. 

Anxious people supported by the scheme were told not to worry about its new laws because these were just a way of making everything clearer and fairer. Simpler, even – though not necessarily for participants.

The reassessment letters were polite yet cryptic: ‘We regularly check eligibility. It may be when we reassess your plan, and at other times too,’ they stated. ‘Based on the information we have, you may no longer meet these requirements.’

What information did the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) have? The officials weren’t telling. That critical detail was for the bureaucrats to know and their disabled targets to find out through a cruel process of trial and error: they had twenty-eight days to guess at what evidence might be required and to supply it. If a person with a disability or their family didn’t respond to the notice, or provided the wrong kind of evidence, the participant was removed from the NDIS and told to find support somewhere else in the vacuum of options left behind when the scheme was created. 

What makes this ‘reverse onus of proof’ approach – so found the new administrative review tribunal – particularly, no, creatively perverse is that the agency could have told participants what evidence was missing at any point but chose not to do so because its officers believed, mistakenly, that this would trigger a clause in the new legislation that would mandate them to give people ninety days to respond instead of twenty-eight. That wouldn’t have suited the state’s purpose, which was to save money. 

People with profound and permanent disabilities – even progressively debilitating and ultimately fatal ones – were removed from the NDIS as a result of this crude and cruel enterprise. Some were reinstated on review, but only if they had the energy to fight back. 

This process was neither clear nor simple, but the agency response was extreme from the moment I started asking questions. No crime is greater than seeking to untangle the methods of power. 

Management demanded the personal details of the people who had confided in me, even though I didn’t have their permission to share those details because they were afraid of speaking out. I cannot count the number of people I’ve personally spoken with over more than a decade who have been genuinely concerned about what the NDIA might do to them if they speak out on an issue that isn’t being resolved. I don’t think the fear is well founded in all these cases, but it’s definitely real. 

In the stand-off that followed, the agency refused to answer my broad questions about the process for eligibility reassessments, how it had decided on the timeframes and why it wouldn’t tell recipients what evidence was required unless I handed over my sources. 

When that didn’t work, they escalated. 

The acting CEO of the NDIA, Scott McNaughton, emailed my editor to complain about my conduct. It was an extraordinary epistle, the first of its kind in my twenty-year career: ‘We have concerns that the journalist in question refused to provide details regarding specific case studies, which we regularly receive from journalists with consent, to understand the specific circumstances and ensure accurate reporting,’ McNaughton wrote. He continued:

By not providing this information it can result in journalists running a specific line of reporting that goes unchecked for accuracy – which is unprofessional. Further the journalist has accused us of deliberating [sic] withholding our response and not meeting a deadline when we have repeatedly clarified that we are happy to respond to the request but required more information so we can ensure an accurate response.

Using the excuse of withholding information on the basis of ‘concerns about consequences’ for participants is offensive.

It’s incredible language for someone in his position – how telling that he thought basic ethics were an ‘excuse’. In any case, the agency had access to every single letter. Did it not know what was being sent?

When it became clear I was not going to be dissuaded, the agency relented and sent a response. The only part that answered my question was labelled – without my agreement – ‘background’, which meant I couldn’t attribute it to the agency but they wanted me to use it. It’s a form of information laundering and can be useful in some circumstances, but only where there’s agreement between the reporter and the entity. 

I disagreed and reported it anyway. Why would a government agency not want to tell people what was going on?

The NDIA’s general manager of media then emailed my editor twice to get him to pull the story. The then NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, attempted the same. To my editor’s credit, he did not relent. 

Over text message, the media manager said I was being ‘unfair and unjust’ to the government bureaucracy by honouring the anonymity requests of the individuals who had entrusted me with their concerns. But I had learnt through this ‘background’ information that, according to the agency, there was no timeframe mentioned anywhere in the old or new legislation that applied specifically to eligibility reassessments. If the agency’s power to specify that timeframe was discretionary, as they claimed, it meant they could choose to exercise it rather than being required to by law.

‘So, why not make it ninety days and, again, tell people what you are after? That is indeed unfair and unjust,’ I said. 

After this message, the media manager stopped talking to me for three months until, strangely and miraculously, the agency announced it was changing its policy and would now be giving people ninety days to respond to evidence requests.

The substantive agency CEO, Rebecca Falkingham, later told a senate estimates hearing that they would also be ‘really explicit about what we do need rather than having to try and work out what they need to provide us’.

All that fury and noise, the grasping effort, the pleading for me to have compassion for the compassionless machine. 

It’s possible I’ve been ruined by my coverage of robodebt, but I don’t think I’ll ever get over this particular episode. What I wanted to write back to all these people – highly paid system functionaries to the last – during this crazy-making dispute was a question that kept ringing in my head: What the hell is wrong with you?

MAX WEBER FORESAW the iron cage of rationalisation coming for us all: that industry and its social institutions would become so technically efficient that a worker would become a ‘specialist without spirit’ and a consumer a ‘sensualist without heart’. People could have everything they’d ever wanted, in theory, but the cost would be their humanity. 

Weber conceived of this as a prison of capital when workers were in factories and those factories increasingly required employees to take on smaller and more specialised roles. This stretched into the bureaucratic sinew of large businesses and corporations, naturally, and into the administration of states, municipalities and even sufficiently large Zonta clubs. 

If capitalism, systematised in this way, really was the product of a Protestant ethic, it ushered in a ‘change of moral standards which converted a natural frailty into an ornament of the spirit, and canonised as the economic virtues habit which in earlier ages had been denounced as vices’, as RH Tawney argued in his foreword to Weber’s work. Still costlier spiritual transformations have occurred since.

One of these upheavals, I think, is the administrative reclassification of public officials – especially the most senior ones – into the modern priestly class: careful hoarders of an arcane knowledge that makes them indispensable to rulers and godlike to everyone else. 

Who else has the power to remake what counts as reality? 

Like Weber’s recasting of vice into virtue, a convenient religious conversion that in his telling allowed capitalism to piggyback on the strict moralism of the Calvinists, the natural complexity of bureaucracy has responded to exactly the wrong stimuli over decades past. Bureaucracy was the best form of governing, Weber argued, because it could eliminate the old systems of fealty, family and favour through the necessary instrumentalisation of sheer process. 

Still, he warned that even this would slowly become corrupted and the breathtaking intricacy of its quality control repurposed. Thus senior public officials are now pressed by political masters into treating any foreign interference as a threat. My encounter with the NDIA is an extreme but not lonely example. 

Monuments built by this class are practical and based on formulations of the labyrinth that have popped up in human civilisation all around the world for thousands of years. In some of these ancient cultures it was thought that evil spirits could only travel in straight lines. The labyrinthine path, drawn or chiselled at the entrance to homes, was a means of refusing these wicked spirits access.

Literally: get bent. 

And so the iron cage of modernity emerges from the sprawling bureaucratic institutions that have rationalised themselves so far beyond rationality that they are coming back around again – hairpin bends in the apparatus of state that can only be navigated by the knowing few. Here the specialist without spirit is as dedicated to performing her specific functions as her colleagues are to protecting the organism of state from all injury. 

The best such functionaries are impersonal, if not impartial, and have been drilled to the point of automatism. Their tasks are at least notionally allied to the goals of everyone else – that is, you and me. But the great realisation of my professional life has been how little this counts. While there are many public servants who do actually serve the public, any mandarin who wishes to rise to the top must gouge this human instinct out of themselves.

WE SAW THIS play out during the royal commission into robodebt, that hideous plot to steal billions of dollars from welfare recipients using dodgy mathematics: by dividing those welfare recipients’ annual ATO data by twenty-six fortnights when they didn’t earn income in all those fortnights, the
government created debts out of thin air. And the further up the hierarchy the bureaucrats involved in this scheme were, the less human they became. 

On her last day of testimony, former Department of Human Services Secretary Kathryn Campbell – later found by the inquiry to have misled Cabinet and engaged in a cover-up of robodebt’s legal flaws from 2015 – entered an excruciating period of moral torpor. 

She claimed to Senior Counsel Assisting Justin Greggery QC, as he was then, that she ‘did not turn’ her mind to the idea that robodebt could recover debts that were never owed from people because she believed the scheme to be lawful. The policy department, Social Services, had concocted sham legal advice to deceive the Commonwealth Ombudsman when it investigated the program, and Campbell adopted an ever-more monotone delivery to state, over and over again, some version of ‘I placed weight on the DSS advice’.

‘And my question,’ Justice Greggery asked, ‘is how did you reconcile that legal advice that it was lawful to average [the income of those receiving social security payments] with what you knew to be the case in a practical sense that averaging had the potential to raise debts which were not, in fact, owed?’

This back and forth between Greggery and Campbell as he asked for her ethical consideration, distinct from whether she thought she was ‘allowed’ to implement the scheme or not, lasted for more than nine minutes. I remember watching this while covering the inquiry and wondering if I had gone insane. Every path that looked like a way out led us right back to Campbell’s incantation: ‘I relied on the legal advice that I was provided.’ She asked for Greggery’s questions to be ‘broken down’ so she could understand them, glanced around the room for her barrister, pinched her face together as she struggled with the concepts. 

All counsel was trying to determine was whether she cared. 

The thing is, by February 2017, Campbell had every reason to know exactly what was wrong with the bogus compliance scheme that had been operating precisely as it was designed since 2015. That month, she received an email from one of her frontline compliance officers, a woman called Colleen Taylor, listing everything that was happening under the scheme that disturbed her. 

The email, which Campbell ordered be investigated, was accurate. As in my NDIA episode, the reverse onus of proof was placed on robodebt victims who were told they owed money but not how or why. To dispute this required them to perform the investigative work previously done by the entire apparatus of government but without the benefit of its compulsory information-gathering powers. Taylor also noted in her email that the Commonwealth was stealing from people on welfare: in cases where people couldn’t be contacted or hadn’t responded to the initial department letters advising of ‘discrepancies’ between what they had reported to Centrelink and their annual ATO income figures, inaccurate income averaging was automatically applied to calculate debts. Worse, officers were directed not to look at the information already available on the customer record – that is, payslips or, crucially, employment-separation certificates featuring end employment dates that would have limited, or eliminated, the woeful inaccuracy of those income calculations. 

Just four months later, in June 2017, the department sent an ‘initiation letter’ to a woman known as Miss A, advising her of a discrepancy between the ATO’s income data and what she had reported to Centrelink. A debt would be raised if she could not explain it. 

A reminder letter was then sent – it was dated 20 June but didn’t arrive until days later. Miss A killed herself on 25 June and her sister contacted the department to advise she believed the suicide was related to the threat of debt collection. 

It is worth being crystal clear here: Miss A didn’t owe a cent. There was an employment certificate demonstrating this on her customer record, just as Colleen Taylor had warned Kathryn Campbell in February – but because it was government policy not to check these records, nobody did. 

One of Campbell’s lieutenants, Craig Storen, was dispatched by the hierarchy to ‘investigate’. His first instinct was to blame Miss A: ‘It could have been resolved very quickly by the individual if she pointed out her employment ceased before the social welfare period,’ he wrote in an email. While he also noted that they could have checked her certificate on the record, this thought – freighted with the attendant duty and obligations of a powerful department – is swiftly dismissed as a solution: ‘Unfortunately, the employment-­separation certificate is not structured data, so I can’t see how we can include it in any automation.’ 

And that was that. 

MANY WERE THE things to which these servants did not turn their minds. A mind that turns to nothing, in the end, can be nothing. Some of them didn’t even have memories anymore, the substrate through which consciousness moves. No memory, no consciousness, no humanity. So what were they? 

It feels convenient to say they were monsters. None had fangs or claws. Some of the most senior bureaucrats were well dressed, polite and civil, even while carrying out heinous policies that were known to be causing irreparable harm among a group of people specifically prevented from properly fighting back. Those who weren’t polite – the bullies and screamers – terrified their colleagues, certainly, but when has history or literature ever given us a mythical monster whose stock and only trade is humiliation? Withering put-downs did not guard the gates of hell. 

Yet any reticence to describe these government ministers and officials as monstrous, as corruptions of nature, strikes me as a failure of imagination. That they look like us is neither here nor there; they are agents of a system that, when abused, doesn’t just harm people incidentally but on purpose. 

Each cog in this Weberian machine is morally self-reinforcing. A failure here allows a failure there, and these collectively permit yet more adjacent ethical lapses until the whole thing becomes a web of abrogation and finger-pointing where everyone is involved but nobody is responsible. As Paul Henman argues in the Australian Journal of Social Issues: ‘Robodebt was a deliberate unlawful scheme enabled by institutional practices of strategic wilful ignorance constituted by subterfuge and sophistry by useful idiots among government and APS leaders.’

The useful idiots schema is a systematic ignorance built into large systems so meaning and knowledge can be moved off books in a sort of institutional peristalsis. Henman notes that such ‘manufacturing ignorance occurred via well-honed conduct’ that was not only encouraged but required as one rose in seniority in the public service. It’s as if these bureaucratic structures have their own autonomic nervous system. Certainly, I’ve witnessed the reflexivity and instinct of such processes in many government departments, including the NDIA and Centrelink’s Department of Human Services (DHS), as it was called during robodebt.

None of this means that institutions or senior management are actually ignorant. They know more than anyone. Much of the busywork of this executive strata involves rendering their knowledge physically untraceable.

How else to explain the existence of the robodebt scheme for almost five years while it tore apart the lives of ordinary Australians? 

THE LABYRINTHS OF antiquity were first drawn as confounding objects that, though complicated, contained a single path with no wrong turns eventually leading to the centre of the thing itself. 

Only later did we add the dead ends and ‘fateful detours’, as Carl Jung called them when he compared the longissima via of life itself to a path whose ‘labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors’. Only later did we add the monsters at the centre. 

The classic Cretan myth of the minotaur at the centre of a diabolical maze designed specifically to hide a king’s shame is well known. A creature, half-man and half-bull, sometimes named Asterion, is trapped there for the term of his natural life until the hero, Theseus, dares to enter and slay him to end the ritual slaughter of his people: each year, fourteen young Athenian men and women are sent into the labyrinth to be devoured by Asterion.  

What few appreciate is that the minotaur and Theseus are possibly bastard brothers who owe their existence to the divine spark of Poseidon. Theseus, then, unwittingly volunteers to murder a version of himself. In Classical symbolism, the minotaur is the uncivilised part of us – the monster that represents chaos and disorder – and Theseus the man who must do battle to restore it and then escape with the help of Ariadne’s golden clew. 

A labyrinth also contains these competing tensions: between the clean, angular or circular lines of its construction – the logic of its design – and the simultaneous barbarism that emerges in the torture of becoming lost in it.

Life is messy, it seems to say, and Jung tends to agree.

But if the labyrinth is supposed to represent ultimate meaning and the balance of order and disorder, if not the triumph of the former from chaos, how is it that the modern form of it, the bureaucracy, has come to mean, to say, nothing at all? 

I view the testimony of Campbell – and the casual, unthinking asides of senior officers such as Storen, even about the suicide of a woman – as analogous to the monster that dwells at the centre of the misery-box; the mirror part of ourselves installed to guard the fractal machinery of our own dominion. They really do look like us, our brothers and sisters inside the maze, but they have ceased to respond to the ordinary prompts of the living. Like us, but no longer fully human. The most senior have become inured to the pathology of their environment. Alienated, per Marx and Weber. 

Here, the increasing paranoia of the bureaucratic executive reflects the descent into paralysing anxiety and madness that plagues the badger-like creature in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ as it seeks to create the most impregnable system of tunnels and chambers to live free from outside incursion. This creature, which has become eternally preoccupied with the mental and physical labour of fortification against even the gaze of the outside world, is a Weberian tragedy: rationalisation delivers this human-like, yet literally inhuman, mongrel to the threshold of horror. As it hides above ground to spy on the moss-covered hidden door to its underground labyrinth to be absolutely sure it cannot be discovered, we glean a sense of how it views us, those who live on the outside: 

Here enemies are numerous and their allies and accomplices still more numerous, but they fight one another, and while thus employed rush past my burrow without noticing it. In all my time I have never seen anyone investigating the actual door of my house, which is fortunate both for me and for him, for I would certainly have launched myself at his throat, forgetting everything else in my anxiety for the burrow.

Throughout the life of robodebt, in particular – though this is true of even mildly controversial and legal, if not ethical, programs across governments – we have been provided a similarly intimate window into the vast resources expended to reject scrutiny. Human Services Deputy Secretary Malisa Golightly ranged aggressively across her burrow on behalf of her boss, Kathryn Campbell. The most senior executives at DHS checked for leaks, ordered investigations and monitored media reporting twice daily to check for even the slightest hint of an external threat. Golightly, perpetually scared, prevaricated over whether to get external legal advice on the illegal scheme because she didn’t want to ‘scare the horses’. She yelled and screamed, smashed her keyboard or threw her phone. 

The same flavour of panicked, determined bureaucratic self-preservation is evident in the external pressure the NDIA applied to my reporting.

Each potential avenue for attack on the bureaucracy – a demand for transparency or accountability – feels personal to those inside, as it did for Kafka’s creature, who often spoke of his burrow as if it were a living, breathing thing. Any wound to it, he said, ‘hurts me as if I myself were hit’.

It’s the structure wot made them do it. The senior executives of government compact earth with their foreheads until blood drips from their brow, the better to protect the thing that protects them. The architecture of government thus absorbs those who reinforce it and ejects those who do not or cannot conform, perpetuating itself and selecting for the most useful idiots. 

In writing my 2024 book about the robodebt saga, Mean Streak, I was lobbied by some of the most senior former public servants in Australia, who each spoke as if connected to some invisible, unknowable hive mind. Commissioner Catherine Holmes AC SC, they argued, simply didn’t understand what it took to be a public servant and therefore she erred in her more systemic findings. Unless you are in the burrow and its walls have accepted you, judge not, they seemed to say.

In German, Kafka’s story is called Der Bau,which can mean burrow but usually means building or structure or even office. In slang, bau is sometimes used to describe a prison – and in the Cretan myth, we are meant to understand the minotaur’s labyrinth as his gaol and King Minos as his gaoler. Really, though, it functions as an arm of his government and an instrument of his violent rule – just ask the Athenians forced to send their young men and women into the maze to be devoured or lost for the satisfaction of a warring Cretan king. 

This great construction was deployed as a weapon of government to conceal a central corruption of the natural order.

We face it still.

_{Image courtesy of Mattias Wewering from Pixabay}