Host Nat Barr has taken on Barnaby Joyce during an intense live interview on Sunrise.
Barr confronted the opposition spokesperson for veteran affairs over the fallout from the Robodebt Royal Commission, going head-to-head over claims he made about the previous government’s response to the illegal scheme.
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During the segment with Joyce and Minister for Families and Social Services Amanda Rishworth, Joyce claimed the former government abandoned Robodebt when they knew it was unlawful.
“People have to know — as soon as we knew it was illegal, we stopped the scheme, the Coalition stopped the scheme. But that is not good enough,” he said.
Barr challenged Joyce on this, telling him that was not the case.
“Actually not what the royal commissioner says,” she said. “She said that you pressed on even though the legal advice was unlawful and doubled down.”
She then pressed Joyce over whether he believed former prime minister Scott Morrison should resign over the robodebt scandal.
Morrison was the social services minister who brought the proposal for the scheme to cabinet ahead of its implementation in 2015.
“We are hearing this morning that Liberal MPs want Scott Morrison out over his role in this. Do you?” Barr asked.
When Joyce didn’t answer directly, she challenged him again asking: “But the question was, do you think Scott Morrison should go Barnaby?”
Joyce refused to give his opinion on Morrison’s future one way or another.
“Look, I don’t like telling other politicians to leave politics,” he said. “That’s their decision.
“They will make that decision and when they decide to make it, they make it.”
He added: “It’s a decision that’s made by the person themselves as to what they want to do with their career, not for other people.
“Otherwise you always get the inevitable. We tell all the Labor party members that they should leave politics, they tell us that we should all leave politics.
“You know, there’ll be no one left in the place.”
Earlier in the segment, Barr told Rishworth that she was stunned by one of the robodebt royal commission’s findings.
“One of the royal commission’s recommendations is to require that any new federal budget policy is to be lawful,” she said.
“Amanda, call me stupid. But isn’t this a ‘der’ moment before you put something in a budget?
“Shouldn’t it be lawful? Wouldn’t this have happened before?”
In response, the minister agreed that the former government got it “horribly wrong”.
“The royal commission has provided a shocking indictment of the way the previous government operated and how it looked at something like this debt scheme, which was designed to claw back money from Australians (who), in many cases, didn’t owe it to fix a budget black hole,” she said.
“That’s what it was designed to do.
“And the public service unfortunately seemed to be in a position where they needed to capitulate to the government and not actually check whether it was legal.
“So this is a damning indictment and what I would like to hear from Barnaby — he has the opportunity now and indeed, a from the former Coalition government — is an apology because they got it horribly wrong.
“They didn’t check the legality of this and there have been real human consequences as a result.
“It is time that we draw a line under robodebt and actually get on with not demonising people on social security, but actually ensuring that there’s a strong safety net.
“But to, to make sure that something is legal was something the previous government didn’t do.”
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