PROJECT SUMMARY

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Designing Automated Tools to Support Welfare Rights Advocacy

Focus Areas: Social Services
Research Program: Machines
Status: Active

Welfare rights lawyers across Australia advocate for claimants of income support payments (e.g., unemployment benefits, disability support pension, family tax benefit etc.) paid by Services Australia — Centrelink. Claimants rely on welfare payments as a substantive part of their income, and often depend on welfare rights organisations to assist them in disputing decisions by Centrelink. These disputes can range from alleged debt due to overpayment, cessation of payment, or denial of payment altogether.

When engaging a client to support a dispute claim, welfare rights lawyers often submit a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to Centrelink, to access client files. Centrelink provides this information in the form of a large PDF document (colloquially referred to as THE BRICK), which contains hundreds of pages of client data, including case notes and screenshots from Centrelink computers, documents using a lot of system and internal acronyms. Lawyers must then trawl through and make sense of this detailed document, reconstructing the history of a client’s case, while attempting to decipher the decisions made by Centrelink and their rationale. This is a heavy time consuming and onerous process, reducing the actual time a lawyer spends in engaging with their client, and making the legal arguments for the case.

Working closely with welfare rights lawyers (and their teams), advocacy groups, and users of social services — this project aims to collaboratively design, prototype, and pilot an automated data extraction tool to support welfare rights lawyers in making sense of Services Australia (Centrelink) system-generated FOI documents.

This project explores the following research questions:

  1. How can we digitally scaffold and support sense-making of Freedom of Information (FOI) system-generated responses through a data extraction tool outside the government system?
  2. What methods/approaches can facilitate collaborative design of Automated Decision-Making (ADM) support systems in social services with key stakeholders?
  3. How might we reclaim and democratize sense-making/deciphering of government ADM outputs from outside of government systems — designing for controlled activism?
  4. What impact can using an ADM support system, such as the data extraction tool, have on an organisational work flow and capacity of welfare rights lawyers to support their clients?

Key objectives are to:

  • Design, prototype and build an automated data extraction tool to support welfare rights lawyers in sense-making of system-generated FOI documents
  • Involve welfare rights lawyers, advocacy groups, and social service users and professionals in co-design of ADM tools to support such sense-making
  • Evaluate the Implications of the tool on organisational practice and processes

RESEARCHERS

Paul Henman headshot

Prof Paul Henman

Lead Investigator,
University of Queensland

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Terry Carney profil picture

Prof Terry Carney

Associate Investigator,
University of Sydney

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Robert Mullins profile picture

Dr Robert Mullins

Associate Investigator,
University of Queensland

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Awais Hameed Khan profile image

Dr Awais Hameed Khan

Research Fellow,
University of Queensland

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ADM+S professional staff Abdul Obeid

Dr Abdul Obeid

Data Engineer,
QUT

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Dan Trang

Dan Trang

Software Developer,
QUT

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PARTNERS

Economic Justice Australia

Economic Justice of Australia

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Services Australia

Services Australia

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Welfare Rights Centre

Welfare Rights Centre

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