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Rick Morton in conversation with Jacinta Parsons

Sun Bookshop

Event Date: 21 October 2024 06:00 PM to 21 October 2024 07:00 PM
Author / Presenters: Rick Morton, Jacinta Parsons
Event Organiser: The Sun Bookshop
Ticket Price: Free

Join us for a conversation between Rick Morton and Jacinta Parsons on Mean Streak, the powerful story of robodebt. From award-winning journalist and writer Rick Morton comes Mean Streak, a gripping and horrifying account of how, over the course of four and a half years, Australia's government turned on its most vulnerable citizens. Robodebt was a new debt-creation system that was used to illegally pursue close to half a million Australian welfare recipients for fake debts generated by the thousands. It was described by the Royal Commission's report as a 'massive failure of public administration' caused by 'venality, incompetence and cowardice'. Essentially, Australians were gaslit by their own government, which doggedly and knowingly concocted a program that was both mathematically wrong and illegal, just to shake down innocent people for money, then lied about it for four and a half years. Robodebt is a historic and appalling political tragedy, a scheme created deliberately and sustained by institutional cowardice, clearly displaying the systematic contempt that a government had for its own citizens. Powerfully moving, deeply compelling and utterly enraging, Mean Streak reveals disturbing truths about the country we have become and the government that was. In the mode of a corporate thriller, this is a scouring cautionary tale of morality in public life gone badly awry - a story that is bigger than robodebt, and far from over.

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