"Robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals." That was the scathing assessment by Commissioner Catherine Holmes in her overview of the Royal Commission into the robodebt scheme.

In 2015 the Government introduced automated systems that averaged a person's yearly income and applied it against their fortnightly payments from Centrelink, generating many incorrect debt notices against those already struggling to make ends meet. The scheme continued until 2019 and led to a class action lawsuit, before the creation of the Royal Commission.

Now, after hundreds of hours of hearings, hundreds of thousands of documents, and the heartfelt testimony of the people affected, the findings of the Royal Commission have been released: including damning indictments of the scheme and 57 recommendations for the government and the public sector.