Beyond Robodebt: Media Representations of Welfare and Fraud Before and After the Robodebt Royal Commission

ABSTRACT Australia's Robodebt scheme, an automated debt recovery program introduced in 2016, was exposed by the Robodebt Royal Commission (RC) as a serious failure of public administration and source of significant harm for thousands of Australians. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Australian news media, this study explores whether the RC's revelations of governance failures and institutionalised stigma have sparked changes in media portrayals of welfare and a decline in stigmatising language. Our analysis of 307 news media articles from four outlets, spanning two periods—1 May 2017 to 30 June 2018 and 1 May 2023 to 30 June 2024—reveals that while stigmatising language declined in conservative news media after the Robodebt RC, most coverage framed the scheme as an administrative or policy failure, with only a minority addressing the lived experiences of Robodebt recipients and the deeper systemic and attitudinal factors at play. Our analysis contributes to understanding how discursive violence is not always communicated through explicit stigmatising language, but also through what is deliberately left unsaid. We conceptualise this as ‘violence by omission’, a form of erasure that silences those most impacted while obscuring the full scale and origins of harm.