One of the more unfortunate aspects of life in our time is the way we seem to be condemned to occupy the 24 hour News cycle. Events, scandals, disasters emerge, peak, and are gone in the space of a couple of days. We’re on to something else. It’s unfortunate because it’s not the way it feels for the people caught up by these things. Often the affects linger with them for years.
One such is Robodebt, the debt-creation system that illegally pursued half a million welfare recipients for fake debts. It is the subject of Rick Morton’s new book Mean Streak, a deeply compelling story that takes us – in the mode of a corporate thriller – into the lives of the people involved. It reveals disturbing truths about the country we have become and the government that was.
The Royal Commission described Robodebt as a ‘massive failure of public administration’ caused by ‘venality, incompetence and cowardice’. Essentially, Australians were gaslit by their own government, which doggedly and knowingly concocted a program that was both mathematically wrong and illegal, designed to shake down innocent people for money, then lied about it for years.
Rick Morton is senior reporter for the Saturday Paper. His previous book, One Hundred Years of Dirt, was a remarkable and moving memoir of life in the bush, on the outskirts of society. In Mean Streak he demonstrates once again the power of good writing to engage and inform. He tells a cautionary tale of morality in public life gone badly awry – a story that is bigger than robodebt, and far from over.
He’ll be talking to Steven Lang for OutspokenMaleny on 12 November. The evening will open with a conversation with the delightful Siang Lu about his novel Ghost Cities.
Outspoken presents Rick Morton in conversation at Maleny Community Centre on Tuesday 12 November at 6.30pm.
Tickets $27.50 and $18 for students
