There’s one gesture that might restore broad public faith in the Liberal Party, according to a member of the Libs’ “family”.

“I cannot take them seriously as a political party until they expel Scott Morrison and Alan Tudge over robo-debt,” he told me.

These were not the words of a casual disenchanted Liberal. They came from Rob Carlton, now a writer and actor, whose father Jim was a Fraser government minister, party general secretary and 17-year federal MP. Jim Carlton was not from a silver-spoon background; he was an Australian for whom Liberal values represented opportunity and fairness. Rob is not party political but he believes strongly that a functioning democracy needs a functioning opposition.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

For true Liberals as much as anyone else, whose hearts respond to Robert Menzies’ words at the first meeting of a party “of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security, for national power and national progress, and for the full development of the individual citizen”, robo-debt is the grossest betrayal. It was an illegal offence against its 400,000 direct victims, and an act of self-mutilation by the party.

The scheme, by which the Department of Human Services used “income averaging” obtained from Australian Taxation Office data to automate, impose and garnishee fictitious debts from welfare recipients between 2016 and 2020, is back in the news thanks to the SBS documentary The People vs Robodebt. Journalist Rick Morton’s book Mean Streak: A moral vacuum, a dodgy debt generator and a multi-billion-dollar government shakedown is also on the shortlist for this week’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

The harrowing evidence attempts to address what Michael Cordell, the producer of the documentary, described as a failure of the scandal to fully capture the public imagination. “Perhaps there’s an........

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