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	Confronting shame and accepting my disability—with Judy Heumann by Marc Climaco Ford Foundation, agencies USA   “The biggest barriers are prejudice and fear.” That’s just one of the many pieces of wisdom Judy Heumann has imparted upon me over our three years of friendship.   Being disabled, I’ve always carried a certain level of shame. Shame for being seen as disabled walking down the street everyday with one significantly shorter leg. Shame for being judged as less than. And shame for not being able to do everything a “normal” person can.   But Judy, a longtime champion of disability rights who was paralyzed from polio at 18 months old, helped me confront all of that.   We met three years ago when Judy became a Ford Senior Fellow helping the foundation shape its work on disability inclusion. At the time, President Darren Walker was called out for excluding disability in the foundation’s new mission to combat inequality. It was a big learning moment for everyone at Ford.   I admired how she would roll into meetings with such spunk, always wearing her activist hat to challenge the status quo, teach, and advocate for inclusion.   As I got to know Judy, I learned she is much more than just a disability justice leader. She is a world traveler, a teacher, an author and, to me, a mentor, a friend, and a role model. Our conversations, though work-related, were always personal.   Like the foundation, I, too, had a lot to learn. At the time, I wasn’t connected to the disability community, despite years working on human rights. Disability, especially mine, was a topic I had always felt uncomfortable addressing publicly.   Judy always said to me, “I never wished I didn’t have a disability.” But she, like many disabled people, has had to confront shame.   In our conversations about shame, she used her vibrant life experience—her personal and political struggles and victories, her journey of self-reflection and learning—to help me deconstruct and make sense of my disability. She taught me how to own my disability, to be proud of it, and to accept it as a part of life. It’s a process I’m still working on.   Now, Judy’s story and endless sagacity can touch more people, both with and without disabilities, with a new memoir published this week. In Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, she tells her story of fighting for the right to access an education, to secure a job, and to just be human.   In honor of her book and her life’s work, we sat down with Judy to ask her a few questions about her journey as an activist, the challenges still facing the disabled community and what brings her hope.   The first line in your book is something you have told me repeatedly: I never wished I didn’t have a disability. How has your disability shaped you and the work that you do?   I had polio when I was 18 months old. My life has always been as a disabled person. Like the color or my eyes or the color of my hair, it is a part of who I am.   As I got older, I began to learn that other people saw my life as a tragedy. They would say things like, “Isn’t it a shame. Look at what she could have done, what she could have been if she could walk and be more independent. It would have been so much easier for her parents.”   This type of language wasn’t initially clear to me as a child. However, over time it had a mounting impact on my life. I grew to feel confused, guilty about what my parents had to do for me and how it took time away from my brothers, and acutely aware that I was different.   I simply didn’t meet other people like myself on a daily basis. I didn’t really begin to have friends with disabilities until I went to Health Conservation 21, a special education class for people who cannot walk up the stairs, when I was nine years old. Over the years, as I became friends with other disabled people and we shared our common stories, we began to see that we had to stop feeling guilty about who we were. We needed to take back our lives, create the lives we wanted to lead, and demand that society make changes that would enable us to live our lives as we wished. We had a right to feel angry, but we needed to take this anger and work on the changes we wanted.   People saw walking, hearing, seeing, talking, and processing information in a typical way as being the most important—and, to a large extent, that’s still the case. Non-disabled people wanted us to be shaped in their image. Instead, we began to think about the world as we believed it should be. We saw—and still see—that the ways we do and want to do things strengthens society. As we gained confidence in who we were and in what we wanted and believed in, we became empowered and confident.   As I gained self-confidence in who I am and others gain their self-confidence as disabled people, we are reaching out to more people with disabilities to help them recognize that they are not the problem. What we are demanding are slowly producing changes here in the US and abroad. Barriers are not just physical; the biggest barriers are prejudice and fear.   I personally have found that I must speak what I believe and feel. Speaking about oppression and discrimination is hard to do, and many people have difficulty listening and looking at what role they play in allowing discrimination to continue. But ableism, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination will only end when we, as a society, hold ourselves accountable and no longer make excuses that condone past and current practices. On a daily basis, I try to be aware and take action to make changes in my life that advance justice and equity for all people.   How did you become a justice leader? Tell us the story of the moment when you realized you have to champion issues you care about or affect you?   There was never one specific moment when I realized I had to champion issues. There were many moments when I felt I needed to speak out on my behalf or on the behalf of others. In some cases, I spoke up. Other times, I cowered away.   For instance, the day I graduated from high school, I was to receive an award but the principal said my father was not to pull my wheelchair up on the stage to join the other award-winners. Instead, I was to sit in the front row and the principal would come to the edge of the stage and hand me my award. I was mortified, trying not to cry. My father pulled me in my wheelchair up to the steps, saying I needed to be on stage. In the end, I had to sit in the back row but I made it onto that stage.   There are myriad other examples that I and millions of others like me could—and should—tell to allow people to understand the pain we have faced.   For me, the accumulation of these experiences came to a crescendo when I was denied my teaching license in the 1970s. I knew for many years that if I pursued a career as a public school teacher, it was likely to be a battle.   I took the courses I needed and, although I had no formal teacher training in the classroom, I sought opportunities to teach children in after-school programs and through tutoring. Yet when I was finally denied my license because of “paralysis of both lower extremities because of poliomyelitis,” I was a bit frozen.   I thought, “What do I do?” Should I take action or just speak about the denial? Should I give up or fight, not knowing what that would like? I spoke to family and friends to give me courage and gained the inner strength I needed to take action. But we had no NAACPs or other organizations to support people in the disability arena. We had no organizations with lawyers who could represent us.   I suppose it was fate, plus family and disabled friends, who made me recognize that pursuing my teaching license was bigger than me and bigger than being a teacher.   A serendipitous phone call I received from Roy Lucas, an attorney writing a book on civil rights who had questions about my situation,made my lawsuit a reality when he and one of my father’s customers, Mr. Schwartzbard, agreed to take my case. Justice Constance Baker Motley, the first African American woman appointed to the Federal District Court, made it possible for me to finally get my teaching license and become the first wheelchair rider to ever teach in a New York City school. I will always be thankful that my family and circle of disability rights colleagues gave me the courage to fight.   From your role in the Section 504 sit-in in 1977, as hilariously covered by Drunk History, to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, what were the biggest lessons you learned about how change happens?   Change doesn't happen overnight. It necessitates the ability to articulate the problems and the solutions you believe should be implemented. It requires the ability to articulate the impact of the discrimination, and the effect of your proposed changes.   During the fight for the ADA, the disability community learned that, while specific remedies might be different depending upon an individual’s disability, unity across disability groups was paramount. We had to be able to come together and jump across the silos represented by our different types of disability. There are thousands of different disabilities, and they impact people in different ways and at different times in people’s lives. As a community though, we had to be unified and agree that we would throw no one under the bus.   We also needed people who understood the legislative process. The community across had to articulate their personal stories to their Congressional representatives and hold those representatives accountable. We needed to work with the broader civil rights communities, labor unions, religious communities, the women’s movement, mayors, state and local representatives.   The passage and implementation of Section 504 and the ADA took 18 years. These laws would have a sweeping impact across the US, but not overnight. Getting the laws and regulations passed was, of course, only the beginning. Even today, we must persist in ensuring that people continue to learn about the laws, use the laws, and fight for effective implementation.   This year marks the 30th anniversary of the ADA. That was a groundbreaking law made possible by the work of thousands of activists over the course of decades, really, centuries. Where do we go from here when it comes to disability rights and inclusion? What gives you hope today?   What gives me hope today is the fact that more people are recognizing that disability is a normal part of life. We should not feel ashamed.   However, we must continue our fight to end marginalization and exclusion from education, employment, and our society more broadly. We need to remain active to ensure that the laws we have fought so hard for are implemented, including through strengthening of funding at the federal, state, and local levels of government.   Media in all its forms, while slowly improving, has yet to adequately reflect disabled people and our lived experiences. Knowledge of how disability impacts the news stories being told is limited. Television, streaming, documentaries, and advertising still do not reflect disability in an authentic way.   Disabled people are still usually played by nondisabled people, and most of those roles are of white disabled people. This failure continues to perpetuate the old views of who we are, what we experience, and what our dreams and aspirations are. As a community, we continue to be largely out of sight and out of mind. Society must take responsibility to work with us, and ensure that the media more accurately represents us.   The private philanthropic community must play a more active role. We need to empower people of all ages to be able to receive support and services to help them remain in their homes. We need to continue to be a part of the national movement to guarantee that all people have access to health care, and that those who need various forms of assistive technology—hearing aids, wheelchairs, glasses, etc.—can get it easily and affordably.   We need to continue to organize. We need to ensure that the diversity of our movement —be that in terms of disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin, etc.—is truly represented and that all people across our communities benefit.   You were pivotal in shaping the Ford Foundation’s work on disability inclusion as a Senior Fellow. What were the biggest takeaways from this experience? And what are the opportunities philanthropy and other funders can embrace to advance disability inclusion?   The foundation has committed itself to inclusion of disability in its work. It has recognized the importance of understanding how and why disability was not previously included and is working with the disability community to learn what it needs to do. Of great importance to me is that this is an organization that values learning, and now disability is part of that learning. Senior leadership and staff are learning why the inclusion of disability is important for Ford to achieve its mission and acting accordingly.   The Ford Foundation’s motto—we believe in the inherent dignity of all people—is finally becoming a reality.   The foundation has reached out to others in philanthropy to challenge them to be inclusive. It is bringing attention to organizations of disabled people of color. It is slowly playing a major role in a way that should have lasting impact, not just in philanthropy but across society.   While there is much more to do and the need for continued urgency, I believe more people now understand what to do and why they cannot turn back.   What do you hope to achieve with your memoir? Why share your story in this form now?   For me, the writing of this memoir with Kristen Joiner, has been an important part of my journey in life. First, it has enabled me to put on paper what many have been asking me to do for a long time. I hope that my memoir will encourage other people,with and without disabilities, to tell stories of how prejudice and discrimination have impacted their lives. I hope it will embolden them to speak up and fight, not only for their own rights, but to work with others to obtain justice and equality for all.   I want others to tell their stories, so that we understand that the discrimination I have faced is not so unique, and that there are others who have faced and continue to face even more heinous discrimination.   I want people to dig down deep and look at which changes each one of us needs to make to improve our society.   I am proud that our community of leaders is growing and broadening. We are forcing discussions that have not happened before. We are learning that we have a responsibility not only for our lives, but for the lives of others.   We have a responsibility to participate in all aspects of society. Registering people to vote and ensuring that all people are given the opportunity to participate in all facets of political life must be a part of our agenda.   I hope that this memoir spurs others to write and to use social media to get out their stories. Of equal importance, I want the media to see that there are rich stories out there that must be told.   http://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/posts/confronting-shame-and-accepting-my-disability-with-judy-heumann/ http://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/posts/activism-across-generations/ http://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/there-is-no-justice-without-disability/ http://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/posts/unafraid-unbowed-and-unapologetic-the-life-and-legacy-of-judy-heumann/ http://www.hrw.org/news/2023/03/06/human-rights-watch-mourns-loss-judy-heumann http://judithheumann.com/ http://www.hrw.org/topic/disability-rights http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/remembering-a-fierce-champion-of-disability-rights Visit the related web page
	Automated Neglect: Algorithms threatening Human Rights by Human Rights Watch, ACOSS, agencies   Jan. 2024   The Algorithms too few People are talking About, by Amos Toh. (Human Rights Watch)   The November 2023 implosion of OpenAI—the creator of the viral artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT—has intensified debates over how AI should be governed. Just weeks before Sam Altman was fired and then quickly rehired as the company’s CEO, the White House had announced new safety standards for developers of generative AI, the technology on which ChatGPT is based. Discussions about generative AI’s risks also dominated the United Kingdom’s first high-level summit on AI safety. And disagreement about what constraints should be placed on the rapidly developing technology nearly derailed the European Union’s long-awaited regulation on AI.   This preoccupation with generative AI is overshadowing other forms of algorithmic decision-making that are already deeply embedded in society and the lessons they offer on regulating emerging technology. Some of the algorithms that attract the least attention are capable of inflicting the most harm—for example, algorithms that are woven into the fabric of government services and dictate whether people can afford food, housing, and health care.   In the U.K., where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently warned that “humanity could lose control of AI completely,” the government has ceded control of the country’s social assistance system to algorithms that often shrink people’s benefits in unpredictable ways. The system, known as Universal Credit, was rolled out in 2013 to improve administrative efficiency and save costs, primarily through automating benefits calculations and maximizing digital “self-service” by benefit claimants.   The ballooning costs of implementing Universal Credit have raised doubts about the government’s promise of cost savings. This largely automated system is also making the process of claiming benefits and appealing errors more inflexible and burdensome for people already struggling with poverty.   U.K. civil society groups as well as my organization, Human Rights Watch, have found that the system relies on a means-testing algorithm that is prone to miscalculating people’s income and underestimating how much cash support they need. Families that bear the brunt of the algorithm’s faulty design are going hungry, falling behind on rent, and becoming saddled with debt. The human toll of automation’s failures appears to be lost on Sunak, however, who has vowed that his government will not “rush to regulate” AI. Sunak has also hailed AI as the “answer” to “clamping down on benefit fraudsters,” but the experience of other European countries tells a different story.   Across the continent, governments are turning to elaborate AI systems to detect whether people are defrauding the state, motivated by calls to reduce public spending as well as politicized narratives that benefits fraud is spiraling out of control. These systems tap into vast pools of personal and sensitive data, attempting to surface signs of fraud from people’s national and ethnic origin, the languages they speak, and their family and employment histories, housing records, debt reports, and even romantic relationships.   These surveillance machines have not yielded the results governments have hoped for. Investigative leads flagged by Denmark’s fraud detection algorithm make up only 13 percent of the cases that Copenhagen authorities investigate. An algorithm that the Spanish government procured to assess whether workers are falsely claiming sick leave benefits suffers from high error rates—medical inspectors who are supposed to use it to investigate claims have questioned whether it is even needed at all.   More importantly, these technologies are excluding people from essential support and singling them out for investigation based on stereotypes about poverty and other discriminatory criteria.   In France, a recent Le Monde investigation found that the country’s social security agency relies on a risk-scoring algorithm that is more likely to trigger audits of rent-burdened households, single parents, people with disabilities, and informal workers.   In 2021, the Dutch government was forced to resign after revelations that tax authorities had wrongly accused as many as 26,000 parents of committing child benefits fraud, based on a flawed algorithm that disproportionately flagged low-income families and ethnic minorities as fraud risks.   EU policymakers struck a deal on Dec. 8, 2023, to pass the Artificial Intelligence Act, but French President Emmanuel Macron has since voiced concern that the regulation could stymie innovation. Even if the deal holds, it is doubtful that the regulation will impose meaningful safeguards against discriminatory fraud detection systems, let alone curb their spread. Previous drafts of the regulation had proposed a vague ban on “general purpose” social scoring, invoking the specter of a dystopian future in which people’s lives are reduced to a single social score that controls whether they can board a plane, take out a loan, or get a job.   This fails to capture how fraud risk scoring technologies currently work, which serve a more limited purpose but are still capable of depriving people of lifesaving support and discriminating against vulnerable populations.   Harmful deployments of AI are also piling up in the United States, and legislative gridlock is stalling much-needed action. Many states, for example, are relying on facial recognition to verify applications for unemployment benefits, despite widespread reports that the technology has delayed or wrongly denied people access to support. More than two dozen states have also deployed algorithms that are linked to irrational cuts in people’s home care hours under a Medicaid program that provides support for independent living.   In 2017, Legal Aid of Arkansas successfully challenged the state’s Medicaid algorithm, which replaced assessments of home care needs by nurses. The algorithm arbitrarily slashed home care hours allotted to many older people and people with disabilities, forcing them to forgo meals, baths, and other basic tasks they need help with.   Kevin De Liban, the Legal Aid lawyer who brought the lawsuit, told me that the switch to algorithmic assessments was bound to create hardship because many people did not have access to adequate support to begin with. When Arkansas rolled out the algorithm, it also reduced the weekly cap on home care support from 56 to 46 hours.   “People with disabilities would struggle to live independently under the best-case scenario,” said De Liban. “When the algorithm allocates even less hours than that, the situation becomes totally intolerable and results in immense human suffering.”   Congress has proposed a flurry of bills to regulate these technologies, but the most concrete measure so far has come from the White House. Its recent executive order directs generative AI developers to submit safety test results and federal agencies to establish guidelines on how they use AI.   In particular, federal agencies overseeing Medicaid, food assistance, and other benefits programs are required to draw up guidance on automating these programs in a manner that ensures transparency, due process and “equitable outcomes.”   What the order does not do, however, is impose red lines against applications of the technology that seem to be prone to abuse, such as facial recognition, predictive policing, and algorithmic risk assessments in criminal sentencing. Executive orders are also no substitute for legislation: Only Congress can grant federal authorities new powers and funding to regulate the tech industry, and only Congress can impose new restrictions on how states spend federal dollars on AI systems.   AI’s harm to public services offers a road map on how to meaningfully regulate the technology, and the costs of falling short. Perhaps the most critical learning is the need to set up no-go zones: bans on applications of AI that pose an unacceptable risk to people’s rights.   As EU policymakers finalize the language of the AI Act in the coming weeks, they have one last opportunity to tailor the regulation’s social scoring ban to AI-facilitated abuses in public services. A handful of U.S. cities have banned their government agencies from using facial recognition, but they remain the exception despite mounting evidence of the technology’s role in wrongful arrests.   These bans should also be considered when the risks posed by AI cannot be sufficiently mitigated through due diligence, human oversight, and other safeguards. Arkansas’s disastrous rollout of an algorithm to allocate in-home care is a case in point. In response to legal challenges, the state established a new system that continued to rely on an algorithm to evaluate eligibility but required health department officials to check its assessments and modify them as needed.   But arbitrary cuts to people’s home care hours persisted: A 71-year-old woman with disabilities who sued the state for cutting her hours said she went hungry, sat in urine-soaked clothing, and missed medical appointments as a result. Despite additional safeguards, the overriding objective of the algorithm-assisted system remained the same: to reduce costs by cutting support.   For AI systems that raise manageable risks, meaningful regulation will require safeguards that prompt scrutiny of the policy choices that shape how these systems are designed and implemented. Well-intentioned processes to reduce algorithmic bias or technical errors can distract from the need to tackle the structural drivers of discrimination and injustice.   The catastrophic effects of the U.K.’s Universal Credit and Arkansas’s Medicaid algorithm are as much a consequence of austerity-driven cuts to the benefits system as they are of overreliance on technology. Spain’s sick leave monitoring algorithm, medical inspectors say, is hardly a solution to long-standing staff shortages they are experiencing.   De Liban, the Legal Aid lawyer, told me that trying to fix the algorithm sometimes distracts from the need to fix the underlying policy problem. Algorithmic decision-making is predisposed to inflict harm if it is introduced to triage support in a benefits system that is chronically underfunded and set up to treat beneficiaries as suspects rather than rights-holders. By contrast, benefits automation is more likely to promote transparency, due process, and “equitable outcomes” if it is rooted in long-term investments to increase benefit levels, simplify enrollment, and improve working conditions for caregivers and caseworkers.   Policymakers should not let hype about generative AI or speculation about its existential risks distract them from the urgent task of addressing the harms of AI systems that are already among us. Failing to heed lessons from AI’s past and present will doom us to repeat the same mistakes.   http://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/05/algorithms-too-few-people-are-talking-about http://pulitzercenter.org/stories/how-algorithm-denied-food-thousands-poor-indias-telangana http://pulitzercenter.org/stories/suspicion-machines-methodology   http://chrgj.org/focus-areas/technology/ http://chrgj.org/focus-areas/technology/transformer-states/ http://chrgj.org/2023/11/14/co-creating-a-shared-human-rights-agenda-for-ai-regulation-and-the-digital-welfare-state/ http://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/CHRGJ_Contesting-the-Foundations-of-Digital-Public-Infrastructure.pdf http://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Report_Paving-a-Digital-Road-to-Hell.pdf http://chrgj.org/2022/07/14/the-aadhaar-mirage-a-second-look-at-the-world-banks-model-for-digital-id-system/   June 2023   Automated Neglect: How the World Bank’s push to allocate cash assistance using Algorithms threatens Rights. (Human Rights Watch)   Governments worldwide are turning to automation to help them deliver essential public services, such as food, housing, and cash assistance. But some forms of automation are excluding people from services and singling them out for investigation based on errors, discriminatory criteria, or stereotypes about poverty. Despite these harms, the allure of tech-based solutions to complex social problems is proving hard to resist.   The World Bank is one of the biggest development actors driving this trend, particularly in the Global South, placing big bets on data-intensive technologies to help governments deliver services. This includes major cash transfer programs that give certain individuals or families financial support.   In the Middle East and North Africa alone, eight of ten borrowing countries have received Bank loans to upgrade these programs.   The Bank has long promoted cash transfer programs that select beneficiaries by trying to estimate their income and welfare. This approach, known as poverty targeting, has attracted intense criticism for undermining people’s social security rights, particularly in the wake of the economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic.   Poverty targeted programs are prone to error, mismanagement, and corruption, and routinely fail to reach many of the people they aim to cover. While the Bank has acknowledged these problems, it is financing a range of technologies it claims will make poverty targeting more accurate, reliable, and efficient.   This report documents the human rights impact of one such Bank-financed program in Jordan, known as the Unified Cash Transfer Program, but commonly referred to by its original name, Takaful. After screening out families that do not meet basic eligibility criteria, Takaful uses an algorithm to identify which of those remaining should receive cash transfers by ranking their level of economic vulnerability.   Drawing on interviews with applicants and beneficiaries, government officials, community activists, and an analysis of World Bank documents, Human Rights Watch found that this algorithm is leading to cash transfer decisions that deprive people of their rights to social security. The problem is not merely that the algorithm relies on inaccurate and unreliable data about people’s finances. Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking that pits one household against another, fueling social tension and perceptions of unfairness.   The harms of Takaful’s targeting algorithm highlight the need for cash transfer programs based on the principles of universal social protection – providing all people with support during periods of their lives when their economic and social rights are particularly at risk, such as when they are children, face disability, become unemployed, or reach old age, and regardless of their income or wealth.   On paper, the Bank has endorsed this approach as the “cornerstone of inclusive social policy.” But it continues to fund poverty targeted programs in dozens of countries, despite the wealth of policy options available to finance their transition to universal schemes.   This gap between rhetoric and practice has devastating effects on people’s rights to social security and related rights to food, health, housing, and an adequate standard of living. Although Takaful has extended regular cash assistance to 120,000 households in 2022, this is only a small fraction of the households in Jordan living under the official poverty line, which itself is an inadequate measure of the number of people unable to realize their economic, social, and cultural rights in the face of high inflation and unemployment.   http://www.hrw.org/report/2023/06/13/automated-neglect/how-world-banks-push-allocate-cash-assistance-using-algorithms   Nov. 2020 (News agencies)   Robo-debt: 460,000 low income vulnerable Australians issued illegal debt notices using incorrect computer algorithm   Over 460,000 low income vulnerable Australians were issued false and illegal debt notices by Australian Government agencies. The scheme used data from the tax office and the Department of Social Srvices Centrelink office to automatically raise debts for thousands of dollars on welfare recipients, debts which in many cases didn't exist.   Laura Tingle (Chief Political Reporter): For years, the government defended robodebt despite concerns the system was unlawful.   Prof. Terry Carney, University of Sydney: It's the conduct that you would expect of a tin pot third world country administration.   Laura Tingle: As debt collectors chased down welfare recipients, including pensioners, the disabled and the most vulnerable low income earners, it was clear that the Government automated system was generating debts that didn't exist.   Penny Cahalan: You can't just tell people they owe thousands of dollars without providing any actual proof.   Katherine Boyle, Welfare Rights Centre: It's a nightmare of a system for most people to try and navigate. They're being encouraged to agree to what are potentially wildly inaccurate debts, if the debts exist at all.   Laura Tingle: The Government robo-debt scheme was found to be unlawful.   Mar. 2023   Robo-debt royal commission hearings final week: ‘It served them right, did it?’, by Rick Morton for The Saturday Paper. (Extract)   The royal commission has heard of at least two cases where a robo-debt victim has killed themselves after receiving a letter or debt collection notice. There are more. Beyond the loss of life, significant in itself, it is impossible to quantify the harm perpetuated against ordinary Australians on a massive scale.   People lost jobs or family through the devastating spiral caused by financial wounds, their physical and mental health conditions worsened. Others were ground down to nothing while attempting to flee domestic violence.   At no stage was it apparent that the people designing the scheme cared enough to imagine what its consequences might be.   Despite all of these personal harms committed against real people, there is an effect even harder to define: the loss of faith in institutions that were meant to intervene and did nothing, or that failed.   As robo-debt victim Matthew Thompson told the inquiry, there is already little regard for the behaviour of this new breed of senior bureaucrats and the ministers they serve.   “I really struggle with the way that politicians talk about people like me who access income support,” he told the commission on March 1. “I am made to feel like a welfare cheat. It makes me feel – I have very little faith in the system. Hearing what politicians say about the issue, it makes me sad and sick.”   Robo-debt was a vortex into which many other agencies were pulled.   Government Ministers demanded fealty and got it. They argued that poor people never did anything for the country and then sought to burnish their already fraudulent money management credentials off the misery of those same poor people.   It is difficult to attach a coda to a years-long abuse that will linger for decades in the minds of welfare recipients past and present. If this inquiry does nothing else, it has furnished the bones of the worst abuse of Australian citizens committed deliberately and with legal and personal impunity over five years.   There were multiple moments where documents were wilfully disappeared or left in the apparently inert state of “draft”; where ignorance was installed as a default operating system; where dozens of public servants from the middle ranks all the way to the top either knew or should have known, who, in their commitment to each other but not the people who suffered under their arrogance, sought to cover up an extraordinary act of cruelty.   Their ministers demanded fealty and got it. They argued that poor people never did anything for the country and then sought to burnish their already fraudulent money management credentials off the misery of those same poor people. What has been examined only slightly in this inquiry is an inconvenient fact: even if it were legal, robo-debt would still have killed people. It would still have crushed people.   Robo-debt’s architects didn’t even have the faux-decency to try for legal justification: they had long since given up the moral argument.   Whatever Commissioner Holmes finds in her final report, the key witnesses will have been provided with more procedural fairness and due consideration of law than any of the 460,000 robo-debt customers were ever given. Justice, like income, is also uneven.   Aug. 2022   Edwina MacDonald, Acting ACOSS CEO said:   “It is six years since people began receiving Robodebt notices, and the Australian public still have no answers regarding who is accountable, who knew what when, and how something that was unlawful and caused so much harm was allowed to continue for so long.   “Hundreds of thousands of people were victims of Robodebt and we are yet to see anyone held to account.   “Robodebt hit people when they were going through the hardest of times – after the death of a family member, in the wake of a natural disaster, and when they were living on next to nothing, struggling to cover the cost of three meals a day.   “In allowing an algorithm to make crude decisions about an essential human service, Robodebt revealed disdain and contempt for people receiving social security payments".   June 2021 (ACOSS)   This morning’s ruling on the Robodebt class action shows why we need to improve the basic rights protections of everyone receiving social security in this country, said ACOSS today.   As Justice Bernard Murphy found, Robodebt has been “a shameful chapter in the administration of the Commonwealth social security system and a massive failure of public administration.”   ACOSS CEO Dr Cassandra Goldie said:   “Today’s ruling reveals just how far we have to go to improve the basic rights protections for people receiving social security in this country.   “The law fails to give people the justice they so clearly deserved, with 443,000 people affected by Robodebt who will not receive compensation for the hurt and anguish this horrific scheme caused over many years.   “The ruling found that it should have been “obvious” to government that this scheme was deeply flawed". From as early as December 2016, ACOSS warned the Federal Government about the devastating human impacts of RoboDebt. It is indefensible to assert that the Government did not realise that Robodebt had serious failings from the start or that it was not alerted to the serious consequences on people with serious vulnerabilities.   Indeed, right now, the Federal Government is again being warned about the risks of digitised human service delivery – without adequate human involvement and adequate rights protections.   Today’s judgement highlights again how wrong Robodebt was. It also makes clear that we need much stronger legal and rights protections in place if we are to ensure that this kind of harm is not repeated again".   http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/11/robodebt-five-years-of-lies-mistakes-and-failures-that-caused-a-18bn-scandal http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/royal-commission-into-robodebt http://theconversation.com/amateurish-rushed-and-disastrous-royal-commission-exposes-robodebt-as-ethically-indefensible-policy-targeting-vulnerable-people-201165 http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/march/rick-morton/robodebt-and-empathy-bypass#mtr http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/tag/robo-debt http://www.acoss.org.au/media_release/robodebt-royal-commission-must-deliver-answers-accountability-and-protections/ http://www.acoss.org.au/media_release/shameful-chapter-restitution-but-not-justice-from-robodebt-class-action-ruling/ Visit the related web page
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