The Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2025 is an embarrassment and another example of this government’s hypocrisy and deceit. Before the 2025 federal election, Labor condemned the Coalition over the RoboDebt scandal, using it as a key issue to win votes. Many Australians believed Labor would fix the injustice. However, this new bill seeks to retroactively validate the same flawed income calculation method that caused the RoboDebt problem in the first place—something Labor previously opposed.
The bill proposes offering small compensation payments—up to $600—to people who were wrongly charged thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Once someone accepts this payment, they lose the right to claim anything further. This is a deceptive tactic to avoid paying full compensation and to silence victims. The scheme is only open for 12 months, and is designed to quietly close the door on proper justice for those affected.
The bill lacks transparency and detail, with much of its implementation left to future decisions by the minister, bypassing parliamentary scrutiny. Advocacy groups like Anglicare Australia and the Australian Council of Social Service have raised concerns, saying the bill doesn’t properly address the harm caused. Instead of correcting past wrongs, the government is validating them.
This is not just a failure to act—it’s a deliberate attempt to avoid responsibility and cheat vulnerable Australians out of what they’re rightfully owed.
Transcript
The Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2025 is an embarrassment and example of the Labor government’s hypocrisy and deceit. Before and during the last federal election, Labor used the robodebt scandal—and it was a scandal—as an election weapon to electorally gut the previous coalition government. It worked, and Labor won the election based on the incompetence of the coalition and on what Labor highlighted as the coalition’s cruel betrayal of robodebt victims.
So what do we have here? Labor wants to pass this bill to retrospectively validate the unlawful income apportionment method that underpinned the robodebt rip-off. You pretended to oppose it, and now you want to invalidate it—the injustice, deceit and betrayal. To make matters worse, persons ripped off to the extent of thousands of dollars are being offered puny payments to a maximum of $600 when actually owed $15,000 or more. That’s not justice; that’s theft. Labor is inducing people to take $600 now so people go away and to ensure they never become able to reasonably claim what the government legally owes them. You’re conning these people. They’re already in misery, and now you’re conning them.
Applications for the scheme will only be open for 12 months. Accepting a resolution payment will discharge the Commonwealth from any further liability. That ends it. In other words, the compensation scheme is completely inadequate. Worse, it’s deceptive, deliberately dishonest. Many robodebt victims likely voted for Labor to get justice on robodebt. That’s what you promised them. Those same people will now never get close to what they’re owed. The government is blatantly cheating robodebt victims out of thousands of dollars—in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars.
This is not just an uncaring government, and on this issue its approach is not just lazily getting around paying lawful entitlements. No; this government is working hard to rip off innocent, vulnerable taxpayers. These faulty assessments extend back to September 2003—22 years. Instead of paying back exactly what each victim of the unlawful robodebt calculations is owed, the government is trying to introduce retrospective legislation to make what was unlawful then now lawful. And you wonder why we’re upset. This sneaky new bill is making what was illegal legal—the very reverse of your promise before the election. It will try to validate debts which were unlawful when they tried to collect them. I will say that again, in fact. This bill will try to validate debts which were unlawful when they tried to collect them.
With potentially millions of unlawful debts to deal with, the government is using this bill to welch on its debts to innocent Australians who are victims of government dishonesty. There’s been little consultation with this bill, and it shows. There is little detail about how the scheme should work, and in some areas detail is totally missing. Instead, much of the detail is left to the minister’s use of future legislative instruments to bypass parliament, to bypass scrutiny. Now there’s Labor’s catchcry: ‘bypass scrutiny’—two words that tell us all about Labor in government at the moment. It is the complete opposite of transparency—bypass scrutiny.
The government has not justified why it considers it necessary to rely on retrospective validation of the previously found unlawful means of calculation. The intention is clear: the government wishes to validate previous decisions that were made on an unlawful basis. You want to validate what you were supposed to fix. The rip-off that you were going to fix you are now validating, quietly cementing in place the Liberals’ violations that before the election Labor screamed about. Anglicare Australia, the Australian Council of Social Service and even the Commonwealth Ombudsman have indicated their concerns that the bill does not address cases where income apportionment wrongly resulted in debts and, in some instances, criminal prosecutions. This bill is an example of the government trying to cover up and weasel out of responsibility for the damage caused to innocent Australians who have been victims of the incompetence of governments, both the coalition and Labor.
On this issue, the coalition in government was incompetent, negligent and uncaring. People died because of this—suicide. Labor in government, though, is deceitful, deliberately dishonest. Only One Nation has the integrity to restore sound, honest and caring government. Only One Nation cares about the Australian people. Only One Nation puts our country, Australia, first. One Nation will always act to protect the interests of Australians, and we’ll oppose this pathetically woeful bill, this dishonest, deliberately deceitful Labor bill.
The Labor Government is running scared of scrutiny. Their atrocious bill to establish an Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC) is significant legislation—and I’ll go so far as to say it’s the worst I’ve seen in my nine years in the Senate. It’s dangerous.
There were countless amendments that required answers, and many speakers were denied the opportunity to contribute. Serious questions remain unresolved.
The Albanese Government manipulated the speaking list to push One Nation Senators to the bottom. Just before it was my turn to speak, Labor guillotined the bill, preventing any further speeches from being delivered. I managed to use the debate on the guillotine to deliver part of my speech, which is the video you see here.
This marks a new low for the unscrupulous and arrogant Labor Government. The Greens should be ashamed for supporting the guillotine on such an important bill.
The CDC will provide the government of the day with cover to do whatever it wants. It’s expensive, it will control dangerous research, and the reporting and scrutiny provided in this bill are virtually non-existent. This is unacceptable.
One Nation will repeal this bill.
Transcript
Yet again, a guillotine stops debate immediately before I was scheduled to speak against this bill, and after pushing all three One Nation senators, who were going to speak, to the bottom of the list. One Nation opposed the guillotine. We want to know why the coalition and the Greens join with Labor in supporting big pharma.
Senator Canavan interjecting—
Senator ROBERTS: Except Senator Canavan. Thank you, Senator Canavan. This is significant legislation, and I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the worst legislation I’ve seen in nine years in the Senate. It’s dangerous. There are many, many amendments that need answers, and there are many speakers that missed out. There are many questions.
The first question I have for you is: why are you avoiding scrutiny? This is half a bill! The bill establishes what the CDC director can do. It does not, though, establish what the director cannot do. There’s nothing in this legislation to establish rules around the following, so can you please clarify. What is the process for determining where the CDC will be located and what the site features should be—what protections for the community? What research will be conducted at the CDC, if any? Will that research include gain-of-function research, which was the cause of the COVID outbreak in 2019, which killed millions of people? Who will own the taxpayer funded CDC research? There are no answers to these questions. These are fundamental. What research will be conducted in cooperation with research facilities overseas, and what countries should be excluded on national security grounds? Start with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and exclude Anthony Fauci’s haunts, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and America’s National Institutes of Health, and Fauci’s colleagues including Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak.
Will live animal testing be conducted, and, if so, on what animals and how? Will research be conducted on behalf of commercial corporations, and, if so, who owns the taxpayer funded research. What annual reporting will be produced to alert the parliament and the Australian people about the risks to which they’re being exposed? If the CDC facility handles sensitive material, what level of containment will be used, and what will be the process for investigating and rectifying breaches? And what is the purpose of and limit to research? Is it just ego—’Look at what we can do!’—or is there a genuine medical outcome they’re working towards?
We know the CSIRO at its Geelong facility is already conducting risky experiments on deadly viruses such as Ebola, and they’re experimenting on animals. Those are my questions. Additionally, what’s happening with taxpayer funds? We know the CSIRO monetises its research, or used to, and we know lately the CSIRO has been publishing the results of their research allowing corporations to piggyback off that research free of charge, saving them years in developing new drugs from which the Australian taxpayers will have no commercial benefit. The taxpayers pay and get no benefit. This is the state of medical research in Australia. What impact will the CDC have on the CSIRO? We don’t know. The bill doesn’t set out these matters. It’s a glaring omission.
The minister says the Australian CDC will undertake technical and advisory functions based on its public health expertise and knowledge and access to relevant information. What expertise? It hasn’t started yet. You’re assuming bureaucrats and health officials actually have the expertise and knowledge to perform these studies, yet there’s nothing in this bill to say they must have that knowledge—nothing. This is a pretence to give ‘thank you’ jobs to COVID era health officials who have a track record of very dangerous, dishonest and inhuman decisions. These bureaucrats will be given powers. The Chief Medical Officer, for example, must be a doctor, but the director of the CDC does not. What could possibly go wrong?
Continuing cover ups from the government and freedom of information—an issue which One Nation senator for Western Australia Senator Whitten has raised is the changes the bill makes to the Freedom of Information Act. The bill amends the Freedom of Information Act 1982 to exempt the CDC from freedom of information applications to which the same documents are currently open. I wonder if this is to cover up information from the COVID years or just to get ahead of the next lab leak.
Finally, I’ve already discussed sensitive biological agents with regard to Ebola. The CDC bill transfers responsibility for the Security Sensitive Biological Agents Regulatory Scheme from the department to the Australian CDC. This scheme regulates certain biological agents that are considered dangerous. Now, let’s take a closer look at this one. Who would decide if a biological agent is sensitive and subject to extra checks? The CDC. Who would be most likely to be importing sensitive biological agents like Ebola and heaven knows what else? The CDC. Who would now be their own regulator? You guessed it, the CDC. This is a recipe for no accountability, a recipe for disaster, a recipe for rampant, unbridled control over the people.
Officially, this bill simply brings together powers spread across several departments into one place. If that’s really the case, why does the bill have a price tag of $250 million for the first three years and $73 million per year after that? Shouldn’t the cost of the CDC be offset through savings in other departments? If that’s all they intend, then that would be true. Clearly the Australian CDC will be doing much, much more. You’re given them the money to do it, and they’ll be doing it away from prying eyes and protected with freedom-of-information blocks and negligible reporting criteria, regulating itself and sending the bill to the taxpayers. In nine years in the Senate, this is one of the worst bills I’ve dealt with. Minister, I’ve given you many questions. I’d like some answers.
I supported Senators Lambie and Pocock in their motion to pull the four key, genuine elements from Labor’s ‘closing loopholes’ industrial relations bill. Even though these passed the Senate, the Labor Government refuses to deal with them in the House of Representatives that they control. They are holding PTSD compensation for paramedics hostage for political reasons rather than do the right thing.
I had to remind the Senate that this motion is in support of the Senate’s will, the Senate has already decided this. What the Labor Party government is demonstrating is its repeated, deep, ingrained fear of scrutiny.
It’s not hard to see why the media is reporting on Labor sliding in the polls.
Transcript
I want to remind the Senate that this motion from Senator Lambie and Senator Pocock is in support of the Senate’s will. The Senate has already decided this. That’s all we want. Secondly, has anybody in the Labor Party heard of the ‘Kevin Rudd slide’ or the ‘Julia Gillard slide’? The press is now reporting that the ‘Anthony Albanese slide’ is at an even steeper rate than the ‘Rudd slide’ and the ‘Gillard slide’. All are self made and imploding. And then Senator Ayres has the hide to impugn Senator Lambie as if she couldn’t think of this herself. They can’t think for themselves, because they rely upon one party boss to drive them. That’s it. This is egregious damage to Senator Lambie, and I support Senator Lambie in her own right.
I also remind the Labor Party of housing, energy and immigration. They are destroying and gutting farming and gutting infrastructure, and now they want to tell lies about industrial relations with the closing loopholes bill that Senators Lambie and Pocock have seen their way through and from which they pulled out the four key elements that are genuine, which were lumped in there to hide the egregious loophole-closing when there is no such loophole. All we need is to enforce the Fair Work Act. The provisions are already there. This goes to honesty—or lack of honesty—in the Labor Party government, and it goes to their repeated, deep, ingrained fear of scrutiny. I’ll be supporting Senators Lambie and Pocock.
The author of the TGA 2022 Measures 1 Bill is not a servant of the people, but sees the people as their servants.
It destroys fundamental human rights, removes our tried & true system for authorising new drugs & places the Australian public at the mercy of incompetent bureaucrats.
Transcript
As a servant to the many and varied people making up the amazing Queensland community and Australian nation, I speak to the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (2022 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022.
It’s significant in my speech’s opening that I refer to myself as a servant to the Queensland and Australian people. Whoever wrote this bill is not a servant of the people—in fact, the proposer of this bill sees the people as their servants, slaves, serfs. It destroys fundamental human rights, smashes fundamentals of law, removes the tried and true system for authorising new drugs and places the Australian public at the mercy and under the control of unelected bureaucrats. The same bureaucrats proved themselves unfit to exercise their current already disproportionately large power during COVID, all with no accountability.
Let me explain this bill’s provisions. Firstly, introducing a framework for the mandatory reporting of adverse events. One Nation supports this measure. Secondly, it introduces a new marketing approval pathway for biologicals for export only. One Nation supports this. Thirdly, it enables the Secretary of the Department of Health and Aged Care to approve the importation or supply of overseas prescription medicines that are substitutes for existing medicines with no checks and balances on that process. One Nation opposes this measure.
Fourthly, it eliminates the human rights of people to contest decisions on the provision of documents the secretary requires. One Nation totally opposes the removal of common law rights to due process. Next, it enables the secretary to require any person to provide information or documents relevant to a possible contravention of the act. This bill does not do so fairly,
and therefore we do not support this provision.
Next, it permits therapeutic goods advertising. In the absence of justification for making this charge, One Nation opposes this provision.
Finally, it clarifies the secretary is not obliged to observe natural justice. One Nation will defend the rights of everyday Australians to enjoy basic human rights provided across 1,500 years of common law, and so we oppose this provision.
This is a significant bill with new powers and provisions that did not go to committee inquiry. It sums up the arrogance of this Soviet-level government that such a wide ranging bill removing basic human rights, smashing legal principles, containing significant penalties and coercion and with a huge impact on the approval of new drugs will be forced through parliament without being subject to committee inquiry, especially after the separate Scrutiny of Bills Committee in its seven-page report thrashed the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (2022 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022.
Here are the main elements of that criticism.
First is the reversal of the evidential burden of proof:
Item 2 of Schedule 5 seeks to insert proposed section 45AC into the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 (the Act) to create an offence for failing to comply with a notice from the Secretary requiring the production of information or documents.
Proposed subsection 45AC(3) provides the defence of reasonable excuse, yet the defendant must prove their defence. In simple terms, this bill treats anyone coming to the attention of the secretary of the health department as guilty unless proven innocent. The presumption of innocence dates from Roman Emperor Justinian in the sixth century and, for 15 centuries, has remained a fundamental principle of Western law.
If the bill allowed the normal checks and balances that criminal and civil courts provide, the defence of reasonable excuse would not be necessary. It would be available automatically.
This bill is extinguishing our defendants’ existing legal rights, all this smashing of legal rights and principles from a Labor government.
Second is strict liability offences:
Item 2 of Schedule 5 proposes to introduce subsections 45AC(2) and 45AD(2) which contain strict liability offences for failure to comply with a notice—
to produce documents. The recipient of a notice does not have to be a large corporation that can afford the compliance cost. It can be any medical professional or administrator. If the recipient fails to produce a notice, as the secretary demands, then a strict liability offence is committed. If the defendant was in hospital the whole time, for instance, it doesn’t matter—here’s the fine, $27,000, pay up, no appeals! Does that sound fair? No.
Third is procedural fairness. Item 1 of schedule 10 to the bill seeks to insert subsection 61(13) into the act so that the secretary is not required to observe any requirements of natural justice in relation to releasing information under the act. What does the secretary think they are?
Fourth is the incorporation of external material. These are all criticisms from the Scrutiny of Bills Committee.
Instruments made under items 12, 15, 16, 20 and 30 of schedule 12 to the bill allow for the later inclusion of any written matter from any suitable source. The material itself is not included, so anyone subject to government action under the bill will have no idea of the full legal position they’re operating in. How can Australians follow the law if we’re not able to determine what the law is? We cannot.
The last time this was used was to remove the reference in the Banking Code of Practice to the international standard for handling customer disputes, which was only available to paying customers from an American company that maintained the code. That document established banking customers had rights they were unaware of. Linking to the document, instead of explicitly setting out the rights, let the banks run riot from 2003 through to the banking royal commission final report in 2019.
The ALP have learned nothing from history, or they have deliberately ignored history. These four criticisms alone from the Senate Scrutiny of Bills Committee are all valid. The Soviet-style government should have addressed all before the bill came to the Senate. I urge all senators to vote this bill down and resist the attack on common law rights and restore principles of law that everyday Australians have held since Western settlement of our beautiful country.
Slipped into the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (2022 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022 are provisions that circumvent the approval process for new drugs. The policy direction implicit in schedule 9 should have been set out in a separate bill sent to the committee, widely consulted and properly debated. So extreme is this provision.
In schedule 9, after subsection 19A(2)(2B):
The Secretary may, by notice in writing, grant an approval to a person for the importation into Australia, or the supply in Australia, of specified therapeutic goods (the subject goods) if the Secretary is satisfied:
(a) that there are no registered goods that could act as a substitute for the subject goods; and … … … …
(c) that all of the following apply:
the subject goods are not registered or approved for general marketing in any of the foreign countries specified by the Secretary in a determination under subsection (3);
the subject goods are registered or approved for general marketing in at least one foreign country that is not specified by the Secretary …
What? Those statements appear to cancel each other out.
And thirdly:
the manufacturing and quality control procedures used in the manufacture of the subject goods are acceptable; and
So not even a good manufacturing process is specified. The minimum required for a supermarket packet of vitamins in Australia, just acceptable. What on earth does acceptable mean? This gives bureaucrats unlimited power with no accountability.
It goes on:
(d) that the subject goods are of a kind included in Schedule 10 to the Therapeutic Goods Regulations 1990—
Which, for clarity, includes vaccines, and—
(e) that the approval is necessary in the interests of public health.
That’s in the bureaucrat’s opinion. Let’s take a closer look at this deceit.
The wording of this section is turned around. A drug can be approved if there is no drug already available that can substitute for the new drug. Isn’t that any new drug? Because by definition there will be no existing drug to substitute for it. Isn’t this just a backdoor to allow the secretary to approve new drugs at their discretion without a specified approval process? This is being sold as a measure to combat drug scarcity, yet it’s not how the section was actually written.
This section does not contain any of the following. There’s no explicit binding limitation that this provision can only be used in the case of a drug scarcity. There’s no definition around when the provisions are exercised other than a general statement about the interests of public health, which could be anything that the bureaucrat decides on a whim. There’s no sunset clause. With a wave of the secretary’s magic sceptre, even under the excuse of shortage, drugs and vaccines are approved permanently. There’s no requirement for safety testing.
There’s no suitable requirement for manufacturing quality and consistency.
If powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies have the ability to get a new-generation drug approved with a shiny new patent to replace a drug that’s out of patent and all they have to do is stop making the old drug to create a deliberate shortage, what do you think the drug company will do? Of course this will be rorted. We’ve no protections in place to stop that happening.
Four hundred new mRNA drugs are in development. Two mRNA manufacturing facilities are already under construction in Australia alone. What did the drug companies know last year when they started construction of these plants? This bill is what they knew. This was coming for them.
Schedule 9 will save drug companies billions in regulatory costs. During COVID the TGA approved 23 new drugs under an emergency use authorisation. There was no long-term safety testing, minimal testing of any kind, no testing on progeny and no close monitoring of the Database of Adverse Event Notifications other than to minimise the extent of the harm family doctors reported all over Australia or, rather, doctors were reporting until AHPRA bullied medical professionals into silence.
With the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (2022 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022 the Albanese Labor government is setting Australia up to be a paradise for big multinational pharmaceutical companies and to be a killing field.
Separately on today’s Notice Paper is the Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2022, which, if passed, will require every business in the country to introduce vaccine mandates for their staff, for their people. Employers who do not will face savage penalties. The Albanese Labor government is not a government of the people. It’s a government of the global elites, for the global elites. And with big pharma’s $500,000 in election campaign donations to Labor, it’s a government under globalist elites—the globalist predators: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.
Welcome to the facade that they have in front of them, apparently with the consent and aid of the Greens and with the Liberals-Nationals, who scored big pharma election donations of $500,000, another half a million bucks.
I’m old enough to remember when the Greens campaigned against foreign multinational pharmaceutical companies. Now the Greens actively expand big pharma’s influence. They expand their market share, profit and control over people. Talk about ‘please explain’.
We cannot say with complete certainty whether the 20,000 excess deaths up to October 2022—that’s in just 10 months—were the cause of COVID vaccines or some other factor. Most likely it’s a combination of many factors with medical experts saying quite clearly that excess deaths are directly and indirectly attributable to COVID injections causing heart attacks, blood clots, cancers, Alzheimer’s and many other adverse effects.
What is inexcusable is not knowing the causes and not caring—inhuman. How can 20,000 extra Australians die in a 10-month period and there not be a hue and cry to get to the bottom of it? It’s immoral; it’s inhuman. Yet now Labor wants to give these callous, shifty bureaucrats greater power to work for their big pharma mates. Surely we have to understand why so many people are dying before we make any significant change to the authorisation of new pharmaceutical drugs.
If, as seems highly likely, the extreme level of harm being experienced is confirmed and death is confirmed as being due to the mRNA technology or the spike proteins in these hideous things, and we as a Senate approve a dismantling of the drug approval process, then the very people we are here to represent will rightly damn you all for all time.
I am appalled and disgusted that the Albanese Labor government would even think about introducing this monstrous, inhuman bill.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/lVSkGWh_s5A/hqdefault.jpg360480Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-03-24 09:16:442023-03-24 09:16:49Health Dictatorship cemented into Law
