Screenshot of the article which reads:
There is a certain duality to Kilgour’s failure of imagination; it only fails sometimes. The former deputy secretary of the Department of Social Services Serena Wilson was found, correctly, to have engaged in serious corrupt conduct for her role in misleading the Commonwealth Ombudsman about the legality of the robodebt program in 2017, two years after it began.
In whacking Wilson, Kilgour appealed to matters of “common sense and ordinary human experience” as well as quite correct observations about the role of senior public servants.
“But it is only to be expected that Ms Wilson, as a deputy secretary, would have had systems, procedures and assistance in place to isolate more important communications from the dross, and thus to devote to the former the time and attention they deserved,” she writes.
Fair. Not so for Campbell, though.
Campbell, Kilgour says, was far too busy to be across the detail even though it was Campbell who first briefed the concepts of robodebt to Scott Morrison — not the more senior DSS secretary — and who directed that the briefs be prepared, and who was so intimately involved in the development of the policy that later became the cabinet submission.
Kilgour states as fact something that could only have come from Campbell’s testimony about the development in 2015: “Ms Campbell’s focus was elsewhere on the Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation program (WPIT)1397 which was a vast program involving the establishment of new arrangements and IT upgrades with multiple other agencies.”
Her focus was elsewhere. Says who? Campbell.
Whole chunks of Campbell's evidence are taken at pure face value. Not even in the 'I've weighed this and considered it' sense but in the 'just state it as fact in passing' sense. www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/13/n...
