Mean Streak

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.

About the Author

Rick Morton is the author of four non-fiction books, including the critically-acclaimed bestseller One Hundred Years of Dirt which was long listed for the Walkley Book of the Year 2018 and shortlisted for the National Biography Award (NBA) 2019. He has since been a three-time judge of the NBA. Rick is the senior reporter with The Saturday Paper and 2 x Walkley Award winner for his coverage of the Robodebt Royal Commission. He documented this saga in his latest work Mean Streak, a book about the illegal and fake debt trap set by the Australian government, bureaucratic harm and the fight to put people back into policy. He lives in Queensland.