The principle of ministerial responsibility means a minister must answer for the policies and advice presented to cabinet – including the flawed Robodebt scheme.

Ministerial responsibility is a fundamental principle underpinning parliamentary systems of government. It establishes that ministers are accountable to the parliament and ultimately to citizens for the conduct and actions of their departments.

Ministerial responsibility is therefore a cornerstone of democratic governance, ensuring that ministers are held accountable for their actions and decisions. This principle fosters public trust and maintains a system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.

The biggest and most widely recognised policy failure in recent years was the Robodebt scheme introduced by Scott Morrison when he was the responsible minister.

The purpose of this scheme was to identify and recover any overpayments of social security income support payments to those income support recipients. But the scheme was fundamentally flawed.

The scheme assumed that each recipient’s income in any fortnight could be determined by taking data held by the Tax Office of the recipient’s total annual income and then taking the fortnightly average of that annual income. This estimated fortnightly average income was then used to determine whether and by how much that presumed ’true’ income exceeded the income the recipient had reported to the department administrator for that fortnight.

The obvious problem with this Robodebt scheme is that the fortnightly employment income of many social security income support beneficiaries varies significantly from fortnight to fortnight. The number of hours that they are able to work changes constantly, especially for those who are unemployed, and estimating their earned income in any particular fortnight by........

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