Australian Social Services Scandals: Towards Dystopia? Or Equity and Justice for the Vulnerable?

Carney Public Lecture 2025

Abstract

This Lecture explores the harm and injustices experienced by vulnerable Australians due to social services program failures such as robodebt, employment services income support sanctioning, and the apportionment scandals. I also deal with concerns about proposed changes to the way National Disability Insurance Scheme ('NDIS') budgets are determined. I argue that while legal protections and remedies have been well renovated to accommodate individual social security grievances (restoring fidelity to liberal values), law reform has failed adequately to address either the systemic harms and mass grievances (a failure to guarantee socio-economic values such as distributional justice), or to develop preventive counters to structural forces that give rise to such failures. I suggest that avenues of redress for social services (such as the NDIS) provide even less by way of individual or systemic justice. I conclude that the mainly extra-legal successes of other governance measures may offer a better response to systemic injustices in social services.