July 2026

Another government. Another algorithm. Another vulnerable group of Australians fed into a bureaucratic machine and told to accept whatever answer comes out the other end.
Apparently, Canberra has learned nothing from the Robodebt scheme, a bureaucratic disaster that led to thousands of deaths, a Royal Commission which made damning findings and Federal Court cases resulting in compensation payments totalling more than $500 million.
The latest example is in aged care, where the Federal Government’s new Integrated Assessment Tool — the IAT — is being used to decide how much in-home support older Australians receive.
It is part of the Support at Home program, which was supposedly designed to help older Australians stay in their own homes rather than being pushed into residential aged care.
A noble aim and a policy goal most Australians would support.
But then the politicians and bureaucrats got involved.
They created a digital assessment tool, fed the answers into an algorithm, and allowed the machine to determine funding levels for elderly people with complex, often severe, medical needs.
Worse still, the human beings doing the assessments reportedly cannot override the result.
Think about that.
A trained assessor can sit across from an elderly person, speak to their family, review the medical evidence, understand the lived reality of their condition — and still be powerless if the algorithm says no.
That is not efficient government. That is bureaucratic stupidity dressed up as technology.
And the consequences are not theoretical.
Graham Crossan, an 80-year-old Melbourne man with late-stage motor neurone disease, cannot eat, speak or breathe without help. He uses a ventilator for 22 to 23 hours a day. He needs two people to lift him. His 79-year-old wife Gaynor is his primary carer.
Any reasonable person would understand that this is a case requiring the highest level of support.
But the algorithm decided otherwise.
The Crossans appealed. They provided specialist evidence from an occupational therapist experienced in progressive neurological disease. The Department knocked them back again.
Gaynor Crossan was left asking the obvious question: what else could possibly be required?
That question should shame everyone involved in this system.
This is precisely the kind of nonsense Australia was told would never happen again after Robodebt.
The Robodebt Royal Commission made it abundantly clear that automated systems must have transparency, fairness and human oversight. The lesson was not complicated. Do not allow a computer-generated formula to make life-altering decisions about real people without proper human judgment.
Yet here we are.
Different department. Different cohort. Same mentality.
The machine says no. The citizen must prove otherwise. And even when they do, the system still says no.
The Government says the system is designed to improve consistency and fairness. That is the standard defence whenever bureaucracy replaces judgment with a formula.
But consistency is not fairness if the consistent result is wrong.
A wrong decision repeated efficiently is not good administration. It is industrial-scale failure.
The problem with these systems is that they suit the bureaucracy more than they serve the public. They create the illusion of order. They produce neat categories, tidy budgets and defensible spreadsheets.
But human need is rarely neat.
A person with advanced motor neurone disease does not fit conveniently into a bureaucratic box. A 79-year-old wife caring around the clock for her dying husband cannot be reduced to a data point. A home-care package cannot be assessed properly by a machine that fails to understand urgency, complexity, dignity and common sense.
That is why human override matters.
Not as an optional extra. Not as a later review pathway. Not as a political patch-up after the media exposes a scandal.
It should be built into the system from the start.
The Federal Government has now announced a rapid review. It has created a special pathway for people with fast-moving illnesses such as MND. It says it is listening.
But this is what governments always say after the damage has been done.
They design the system badly. They fail to manage it properly. They ignore warnings. They dismiss concerns. The complaints pile up. The media starts reporting horror stories. Then suddenly there is a review, a pathway, a promise to do better.
Older Australians should not have to become case studies in failure before Canberra pays attention.
The numbers already show the system is in trouble. More than 1,100 review requests were lodged in the first five months of the algorithm’s operation. Advocacy groups report rising demand for help. Medical experts have called the system unsafe. Even one of the people involved in designing the tool has reportedly expressed fury at the way it has been turned into a prescriptive algorithm.
That should be enough to stop this nonsense immediately.
The algorithm may have a role. Technology can assist decision-making. It can help organise information, identify patterns and improve consistency.
But it must never replace judgment.
When the computer result conflicts with medical evidence, lived reality and basic decency, the computer must lose.
This is not a radical proposition. It is common sense.
The bigger issue is cultural. Too many politicians and public servants have become infatuated with systems, processes and mechanisms, while losing sight of the people those systems are supposed to serve.
The elderly. The disabled. The sick. The exhausted carers. The people least able to fight a department.
These are precisely the Australians government should protect from bureaucratic cruelty.
Instead, they are being forced to battle an opaque machine.
The Robodebt scandal was meant to be a warning. It exposed what happens when government combines arrogance, automation and indifference.
The tragedy is that the lesson appears not to have been learned.