Lessons from ‘Dutch Robodebt’ - Restitution means little without reform

This article is based on ANU research published in the Australian Journal of Political Science, September 2025, Reform after Robodebt: lessons from the Netherlands by Jacob Priergaard.

What was ‘Dutch Robodebt’?

From 2009 to 2014, the Netherlands introduced a range of ‘anti-fraud’ measures designed to help citizens comply with the terms of a childcare payment.

As ANU expert Jacob Priergaard explains in his recent paper Reform after Robodebt: lessons from the Netherlands, a number of these measures were illegal.

Decisions were to be made using algorithmic software that claimed to detect fraud. Dutch authorities later found this software was biased against parents with minority identities.

According to Priergaard, a PhD scholar at ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, administrators also used group-based punishment for individual non-compliance.

“[They] assumed that where a majority of parents were being fraudulent in their use of a childcare facility, then all recipients at that facility were fraudulent.”

That won’t surprise Australians, but what happened next will. The government admitted to it all.

In 2017, the Dutch public learned about these measures. The parliament began an inquiry into their illegality. In 2020, that inquiry described the scandal as an ‘unprecedented injustice’.

The response reflected this. “Victims were compensated €30,000 for the damage suffered and any debts they had to government bodies were cancelled,” Priergaard explains.

Then, in January 2021, “The [Dutch] Prime Minister [Mark] Rutte declared that the government should be ashamed of its actions as he and his Cabinet resigned.”

After that, an election was called. The scandal also sparked wholesale reform of social services. Public servants, academics, researchers, and business leaders were called to the parliament to debrief, discuss the disaster, and decide what to do.

This was led by parliamentarians, not the unelected. Legitimacy, fairness, restitution, and preventing a ‘2.0’ were on the agenda.

What was Australian Robodebt, and how was it different?

Illegal, automated welfare compliance policies that target the vulnerable and inflict brutal personal harm? This should ring a bell for Australian readers.

Here, the Commonwealth did the same. Its methods and fallout are the primary target of Priergaard’s scholarship: the compliance scheme eventually known as ‘Robodebt’.

For those who need a reminder: In the 2015–2016 Budget, the Australian Government claimed it could raise legitimate debts on Australians.

It planned to do this with unsupervised, automated comparisons of two sources of government-controlled data: social services payments and annual taxable income.

According to Priergaard, Robodebt “came to epitomise a decline of legitimacy” in social services policy. His paper, and other work, specifies this decline was already “well under way” at the time.

The Federal Court later ruled Robodebt illegal. When a Royal Commission investigated the scheme, it found that the public servants in charge knew it was illegal but implemented it anyway.

Like the Netherlands’ childcare scandal, Robodebt caused public and legal outcry. Unlike the Netherlands, the Australian Government’s response to this outcry seemed dismissive, navel-gazey and muted.

Priergaard’s work draws our attention to the institutional origins of the scheme. In his comparison with the Netherlands scandal, he notes Australia’s “stronger institutionalisation” of social services policy settings directed at compliance.

Specifically, he shows that the Commonwealth has had a “clear mission of compliance” since the 80s. Since then, new measures have been added in ‘layers,’ without regard for their cumulative effect.

In contrast, he says, “there was no longstanding or clear mission associated with fraud and compliance in the Netherlands”. So, it follows that it was easier to reverse course.

What can it teach us about Australian government?

It seems when something goes awry in Australia, the executive declines to admit fault, and so restitution is left to courts.

Robodebt followed this pattern. After investigations by parliamentarians, it was sent to a Royal Commission, which recommended prosecutions and outlined reforms to the public service.

Far from submitting dramatic resignations, almost everyone involved defended their decisions to the hilt at the Royal Commission. Since then, they have escaped prosecution.

Initially patient victims thought they might never get restitution and were forced to sue their own government.

Eventually, they won. They got their own money back, plus damages. With that, the executive finally compensated citizens it harmed even as it claimed to represent them.

The case means we may now never know if public servants broke the law.

Priergaard notes this affects the legitimacy of the Commonwealth and causes tensions between branches of government. As legal scholars remind us, the Commonwealth is not the whole government. Thankfully for victims, the judiciary and legislature represent Australians too.

In this case, the judiciary halted Robodebt and got restitution, despite the Commonwealth’s wishes. As for the legislature, ‘strong parliamentary opposition’ from Labor and the Greens helped corral the unelected toward justice.

In Priergaard’s words, “Responses to institutional crises are about restoring legitimacy … In the Netherlands, that restoration is occurring through an open, pluralistic reform process controlled by parliament. In Australia, that restoration is occurring through a conservative, opaque process controlled by the public service.”

Fighting back by changing the conversation

Priergaard’s work shows the fire of reform can always be lit again. By starting with language, we can end with real institutional change.

He notes that in the Netherlands, public administrators and parliamentarians alike talked about the childcare scandal in a language of fairness, victimisation, and restoring legitimacy. That language became real reform. It put citizens back at the centre of policymaking.

In Australia, the Robodebt scandal was dressed in the language of blame. All were concerned first with assigning it, then putting it all in the past, as quickly as possible.

Even now, discussions of reform after Robodebt too often focus on changing the process of public administrators, not the broken structures in which they work. Improving processes matters, but technocratic tinkering isn’t the road to real reform.

The first step down that road is rhetorical. That rhetoric must be translated to structural change where citizens come before the needs of bureaucrats.

Priergaard has shown us that Australia can follow the Netherlands’ lead, but only by talking about fairness, harm, and the victimisation of citizens.

As his analysis proves, it isn’t enough for leaders to tinker, or call for small changes to the process. Parliamentarians and public servants have to start by listening to voices other than their own when deciding Australia’s direction. Only then can a real reform of the welfare system take shape – one that everyone can see is necessary.

If you don’t know what that looks like, he says, just look to the Netherlands. There, they did.