The episode is variously called ‘the Greek Social Security Scandal’, the ‘Greek Compensation Case’ or the ‘Greek Conspiracy Case’. It’s familiar to Australians of a certain generation.
In short
On the 1 April 1978, the Commonwealth Police (at the behest of the Commonwealth Department of Social Security) carried out a series of dramatic dawn raids, during which they arrested 180 Sydney-based Greek-speaking migrants, as well as some of their doctors and insurance agents. They were charged with defrauding the Department of Social Security by making false claims for sickness benefits and/or invalid pensions. In addition, the Commonwealth abruptly suspended the social security payments of over 1000 Australians of Greek origin—before any evidence had been presented to the courts. While the Committal hearings were underway in New South Wales Court of Petty Sessions from 1978 to 1982, these individuals survived on community support; some left the country and returned permanently to Greece. Initially, sensationalist media reporting came out hard against the defendants—building an image of an international conspiracy costing the Commonwealth over five million dollars. In the economic climate of the late 1970s, the Fraser government stoked anger against ‘dole cheats’, reinforcing demeaning and punitive attitudes towards welfare recipients, admittedly a deeply ingrained feature of Australian political culture. But as Stephen Garton’s history of Australian welfare argued, the incidence of welfare fraud was actually quite low. The Commonwealth had only 246 successful prosecutions for welfare fraud between 1974 and 1976 [1]. Within their own Greek-speaking communities, the defendants were also subject to disdain and ostracization. At least two people took their lives during the trials.
By the end of 1979, most of the charges against individual pensioners were dropped and their benefits reinstated. And by 1982, after nearly five years in the courts, all criminal charges were withdrawn or dismissed, including those against four Greek-speaking GPs and psychologists whose reputations had been tarnished. Under the Hawke-Labor government, a Special Inquiry was launched into the legal proceedings, chaired by Dame Roma Mitchell of the Human Rights Commission. The Mitchell Inquiry (as it became known) strongly criticised the police investigation and found that natural justice had been subverted. It led to the victims being paid compensation from the Commonwealth. In total, the Scandal cost the government nearly 10 million dollars.
The Scandal was described by one QC as “the most humiliating failure in Australian legal history”. [2] Senator Grimes (Shadow ALP Minister for Social Services in the late 1970s) argued that “only history will give us the full story; how the Government, Government agencies and departments could have persisted the way they did with this stupid expensive and soul-destroying case”[3]. It sparks obvious comparisons with the recent RoboDebt scandal, albeit on a smaller scale. Beyond the bureaucratic blunder, it also represents a callousness we now recognise as integral to Australian welfare systems.
At this point, it’s important to stress: persistent stereotypes in this country criminalise non-AngloCeltic and working-class peoples who claim social security benefits. Different groups have been scapegoats at different moments in Australia’s settler-colonial past, and in the case of First Nations people, consistently so.
Why tell this history?
Concentrated in the hardest, dirtiest and lowest-paid industrial work, Southern European migrants had the highest rates of workplace accidents. However, the statistics reveal that Southern European migrant workers had less success in having their compensation claims approved than their Australian-born counterparts [4]. The Scandal was rooted in discriminatory views of Greeks, in particular, as malingerers, and the stereotype of Southern European migrants as suffering from so-called ‘compensation neurosis’ [5].
Anecdotally, mentions of the Scandal—of any allusion to ‘welfare cheats’ in this era of the 1970s—inevitably sparks recognition within certain migrant-background circles, especially first and second generation Southern European cohorts. Wryly, they chide “people submitted dodgy claims.” Is there a moral value in rehashing the Scandal, given the stigma is so enduring, the stereotypes so prevalent, both among diaspora groups and beyond? If the victims were vindicated, and the Mitchell Commission laid bare the failure of justice committed, then why are these the first thoughts that spring to mind for many when remembering the Scandal?
Community responses
This isn’t the full story, however. In the late 1970s, individual welfare workers and legal practitioners from newly-formed community legal aid centres and welfare organisations worked on behalf of the victims. Think: Redfern and Marrickville Legal Centres, and the Greek Australian Welfare Workers Association. They organised legal support funds, combated negative media reporting, and organised social support groups and mental health care for the victims. In the oral histories I’ve conducted with some of these individuals, the Scandal is recounted with outrage. Obviously. But it’s more complicated than that. Shame always is. Their recollections are often tempered with some tongue-in-cheek allusions to the ‘Mediterranean Back’ stereotype, as well as references to a collective shame. Some also give space to the effects of internal community stigmatisation and express a disdain for an ethnic community politics that prizes respectability over social justice. Perhaps this is the lot of socially-mobile ‘model ethnics’, cornered into behaving in a way that is ‘deserving’ and not demanding of social care in Anglophone Australia. Receiving this history requires an empathy that breaks us away from the limits of a liberal multiculturalism that pits us against each other.
Finally, any historical account of the Scandal needs to incorporate a broader history of welfare systems and Social Security benefits in Australia—and it is impossible to explore this past without encountering systemic failures, deep-rooted classist attitudes, and punitive and moralising practices towards racialized and ethnicised welfare claimants. The long-term legacies of the Social Security Scandal, in particular, are understudied. I suspect the Scandal had multilayered implications, culturally and legally (especially if we tie this to broader conversations about occupational health for working migrants and state-level reforms to compensation schemes in the 1980s).
In another post, I’ll get into the sources available—including the archival material (court case files and Mitchell Commission papers) and community documentation (including literary works). It’s fascinating!
This is a work in progress.
[1] Stephen Garton, Out of luck: poor Australians and social welfare 1788-1988 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), 158.
[2] ‘“Humiliating failure” in Greek conspiracy case’, 8 June 1982, The Australian.
[3] ‘$10m payout to Sydney Greeks: Conspiracy Case Shameful: Howe’, 11 June 1986, The (Melbourne) Age.
[4] See, as just one example, ‘Census of Manufacturing Statistics ABS’, 1982.
[5] A term cited several times in issues of the Medical Journal of Australia throughout the 1970s.
