A political obituary for Alan Tudge

It was once cynically said that democracy means the “bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people”. And so it was for Alan Tudge, whose political legacy has seemingly few points of distinction when cast against the record of the worst government in Australian history.

The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era was, after all, one marked by repeated attempts to leave in its wake a new Australia: one in which truth is denigrated and corruption venerated, where any semblance of ministerial responsibility has been swept away, and where calculated assaults on the most vulnerable and marginalised are reduced to the natural order of things.

In this blended sense, the signal quality of Tudge’s political legacy is not how anomalous it was, with its legion of controversies, but how emblematic it was. Writing in The Age last week, Matthew Knott appeared to pick up a variation of this theme when he suggested it was ultimately Tudge’s “tumultuous personal life” inside the Canberra bubble that “caused [him] the most damage”.

Others, however, might say the bare facts of Tudge’s political career aren’t so easily pressed into the service of that narrative. Tudge was not, and never was, merely a bit player in the myriad failings of the former government. And much less was his affair with his former media adviser, Rachelle Miller, his most conspicuous contribution to Coalition scandal, notwithstanding Miller’s subsequent allegations of emotional and physical abuse (which Tudge denied).

On the contrary, he’s a man who at 39 entered Parliament as the member for Aston in Melbourne’s outer east, professing a singular desire to emulate those who had championed the cause of the “less fortunate” and the “majestic possibility” of all lives. And he’s a man who at 51 resigned from Parliament, having given lie to those sentiments while in government.

As the junior welfare minister in 2016-17, for instance, Tudge presided over the introduction of a series of punitive and degrading reforms, including the cashless welfare card, random drug testing for welfare recipients in certain areas, and, not least, the unlawful and now disgraced robodebt scheme.

Tudge, for his part, never pretended to be anything other than a jealous guardian of the scheme. When confronted with media reports regarding the legality of robodebt in early 2017, he responded by launching what appeared to be an undisguised campaign of intimidation against the thousands who had and would in time fall victim to it by leaking to “friendly” media the private data of those who’d complained. Among those ensnared in this ugly tactic was the family of a dead man — 28-year-old Rhys Cauzzo — whose suicide after being menaced by Centrelink debt collectors was known to Tudge when his office forwarded Cauzzo’s private information to The Australian.

It was a familiar cadence, given that just weeks earlier, in December, Tudge had already taken it upon himself to both sheet home and elevate the brutality of the welfare crackdown on A Current Affair. There, he invoked the language of welfare cheats by deliberately conflating non-compliance with welfare fraud in a bid — as counsel assisting the royal commission suggested — to cloud the mental faculties of those targeted by the scheme and coerce them into paying.

“We’ll find you,” Tudge memorably warned. “We’ll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison.”

During his testimony at the royal commission, Tudge denied he’d ever engaged in any kind of strategy of intimidation against welfare recipients. In the same breath, he also refused to take responsibility for the illegality of the scheme, preferring to lay blame with others while downplaying the significance of his failure to make inquiries about its legality, despite holding a law degree.

Courtesy of the royal commission hearings, however, we now know that high-ranking public servants within the department and some members of government, such as Morrison, were aware of the scheme’s illegality before its inception but pressed on regardless. Although it’s true seven Coalition ministers other than Tudge also carried responsibility for robodebt at some point, what distinguished Tudge was his ability to introduce new depths to the government’s utter disdain for the vulnerable, many of whom were poor, and some desperately so.

By the time robodebt was finally abandoned in late 2019, Tudge had long since moved on to different policy areas, all of which sustained the cleft between his pre-politics concern for the dignity of all lives and his actions as a minister of the Crown.

Under the citizenship and multicultural affairs portfolio in early 2018, for instance, Tudge spoke of the “integration challenge” to Australian multiculturalism, and the threats to social cohesion posed by certain ethnic groups. To this end, he singled out the suburb of Dandenong as an example, which incidentally is home to a high proportion of Sudanese communities. Merely months later, as the Victorian election approached, the storm clouds of Coalition rhetoric around the dangers of “African gangs” in the state gathered force.

In the same year, Tudge echoed then home affairs minister Peter Dutton’s call to welcome to Australia white farmers from South Africa allegedly fearing persecution, telling journalists Australia is a “very generous country”. But the precise limits of such generosity proved elusive. It did not, for instance, extend to non-citizens who found themselves scrambling for income as the pandemic descended in early 2020, whom Tudge instructed to “go home” if they were worried they’d be unable to support themselves. It did, however, extend to more than 10,000 wealthy foreign investors later that year, whose travels to Australia Tudge prioritised over the thousands of Australians still stranded overseas.

There were yet other political controversies that should have spelled the end of Tudge’s political career. Among them was his decision in 2020, as acting immigration minister, to leave a Hazara Afghan asylum seeker in detention, despite a ruling by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal that the man be granted a visa.

His unsuccessful push, in the same year, to have mobile phones banned from immigration detention centres, on the (unfounded) footing that “disgusting, disgraceful” detainees were using them to access child pornography, marked another low point. As did his decision to send unsolicited criticisms of the sentencing practices of the Victorian Supreme Court to The Australian in 2017, which almost resulted in his prosecution for contempt of court.

Beyond these, there was also his direct involvement in the Coalition’s notorious car park rorts, which the auditor-general likened to “sports rorts on steroids”, and finally his crusade, as education minister in 2021, against the national curriculum, which he derided for teaching students a “negative, miserable view of Australia”.

In his valedictory speech last week, no reference was made to his failings as a minister or the scandals that coloured his time in office. Nor was any remorse expressed for the pain and anguish his conduct visited on robodebt victims and other welfare recipients.

Most tellingly of all, Tudge didn’t care to reflect on whether he had, as promised in his maiden speech to Parliament, embodied the values of “opportunity”, “generosity” and the “majestic possibility of each life”.

But perhaps that’s unsurprising for a man who readily embraced division, railed against the vulnerable and the marginalised, undermined the rule of law, reignited the history wars, and presided over one of the most shameful public policy failures in living memory.

What do you make of Alan Tudge’s legacy? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.