The major villains in the Robodebt saga have gained plenty of attention. But nobody should forget that this fiasco might never have happened but for two other factors.

The first is that weak government lawyers averted their eyes as their agencies inflicted unlawful practices on vulnerable people.

The second factor is just as bad: the systems aimed at holding government legal services to an acceptable standard simply did not work.

The Administrative Review Council had been de-funded and as a result there was no high-level entity charged with advising the Attorney-General on the overall integrity of the administrative law system. That needs to change.

The Office of Legal Services Coordination, which is supposed to be the government’s internal regulator of its own legal services, still exists but the report of Royal Commissioner Catherine Holmes describes it as ineffective and disheartening. That also needs to change.

Those government lawyers who failed to discharge their professional responsibilities might not have the name recognition of former ministers. But that too could be about to change.

The worst of these people seem to have been included in the sealed chapter of the commission’s report which recommends further civil and criminal action.

There could be no other explanation for the decision to include the ACT Law Society as one of the organisations that will receive referrals based on that chapter. That suggests the worst of these lawyers are at risk, at a minimum, of disciplinary proceedings over what they failed to do when confronted with unlawful conduct by the agencies they were supposed to advise.

Holmes has devoted a separate chapter to the way some of these lawyers conducted themselves. It makes for depressing reading.

But there is also a smattering of heroes in this extraordinary report and one of them is legal academic Terry Carney, whose work on the Robodebt scandal is repeatedly endorsed by Holmes.

And for good reason.

While some lawyers were securing their careers by placating their bosses and defending the indefensible, Carney was doing his best to set things right.

On March 8, 2017, when he was a part-time member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, he blew the whistle on Robodebt’s unlawful basis.

Holmes says Carney was the first to hand down a decision giving reasons for concluding that Centrelink was recovering welfare debts using a technique known as income averaging that had no basis in law.

There were eventually hundreds of similar rulings.

The Department of Human Services never lodged an appeal against Carney’s original decision, or against four more rulings in which he hammered away at the unlawful basis for this scheme.

Human Services failed to report Carney’s decisions to the OLSC, which was a breach of its obligation to report significant legal issues as soon as possible.

Instead, Holmes writes that the department simply ignored Carney’s rulings and continued its use of income averaging despite the fact that Carney had repeatedly made clear that this was unlawful.

His original decision was handed down in March 2017. In September of that year his appointment at the AAT was not renewed.

After almost 40 years he was given his marching orders six months after producing the first decision that made it clear that Robodebt was based on unlawful conduct.

Holmes raises the question of whether the former government, in order to inhibit scrutiny of the scheme, might have moved certain officials inside the bureaucracy.

She notes that Carney was removed after ruling five times against Robodebt. She also notes that the position of Renee Leon as secretary of Services Australia was abolished after she gave a direction to her department to stop using income averaging.

But Holmes concludes that there was insufficient evidence to draw an inference that Carney’s removal was an attempt to prevent further scrutiny of the scheme.

Carney takes a similarly cautious approach: “It’s always easy when you are speculating to come to the wrong conclusion.

“For whatever reason, I was not reappointed. But it did the public a favour because it meant I was able to publish.

“By March of the following year I would have had to resign anyway. I could not have just sat there giving decisions that had no impact. Public servants were not appealing against the decisions. And the reason? Well they were not saying decisions by Carney and other members were wrong. They were just not appealing it to the next level.

“Why would that be? Well if they did, it would become public and the reasons would become public that would be prejudicial to the scheme. The obligation on lawyers is to check whether things are illegal or not,” he said.

Carney returned to academia and wrote two critiques of Robodebt that are cited throughout the report of the royal commission.

His first article was published in 2018 in the University of NSW Law Journal Forum, under the title: “The new digital future for welfare: debts without legal proofs or moral authority.”

His second article, published in the Alternative Law Journal in 2019, does not mince words. Its opening paragraph, just like Holmes, focuses on the reversal of the onus of proof that lies at the heart of the scheme.

Despite losing his AAT post and having his rulings ignored, Carney was right all along. But vindication is not enough.

Weak lawyers survived inside the bureaucracy due to the systemic failings identified by Holmes. Two reforms stand out: The OLSC needs an overhaul and the Administrative Review Council should be re-established.