When Guardian Australia broke the first story which revealed the Coalition’s robodebt scheme was flawed and grossly unfair at the tail end of 2016, the government’s media strategy was to dismiss reporter Christopher Knaus as a leftwing journo.

Almost nine years on, Knaus is one of the key voices in SBS’s three-part docu-drama, The People vs Robodebt, which tells the story of how a disastrous automated Centrelink debt recovery scheme was exposed by brave whistleblowers, victims, digital activists, lawyers and journalists.

The media strategist who framed Knaus as a leftwinger, former Liberal staffer Rachelle Miller, also features in the film.

“We were able to sell a different story to the mainstream media,” Miller says in episode one which airs on SBS on Wednesday.

Miller, who slowly began to realise the scheme was unfair, says friendly media outlets such as the News Corp tabloids and The Australian were fed the narrative that “we were recovering debts because we were trying to protect the integrity of the welfare system”.

The series reveals not only the tragic toll the scheme had on victims and their families but how the hard work of everyone involved eventually led to the scheme being declared illegal and the awarding of compensation.

In July 2023 the royal commission’s report labelled the scheme “crude and cruel”, “neither fair nor legal” and a “costly failure of public administration”.

It said that “more friendly media” was used to counter negative reporting on the scheme.

In the weeks after his initial report, Knaus obtained leaked documents and spoke with internal Centrelink whistleblowers to report a string of exclusives about the failures of the robodebt scheme, including revealing its deeply flawed reliance on the unlawful process of income averaging.

Jenny Miller and her son Rhys Cauzzo, who took his own life because of Robodebt. Photograph: supplied by SBS

In one exclusive, published two days before Christmas, Knaus reported: “A Centrelink compliance officer has broken ranks to describe the government’s crackdown on welfare debts as grossly unfair, saying its new automated compliance system is flawed and overly harsh on those on sickness benefits.”

Tips from victims began to pour in, leading to sustained reporting by Knaus and his former Guardian colleague Luke Henriques-Gomes.

Earlier this month the government agreed to pay $475m in additional compensation to roughly 450,000 victims of the robodebt scandal, in the largest class action settlement in Australian history.

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The People vs Robodebt trailer on SBS On Demand

Creator and executive producer of the documentary, Michael Cordell, says he wanted to bring the scandal alive because despite it being a “morally bankrupt scheme” it had not caught the imagination of the wider Australian public and it deserved to.

“The reasons for that are complex,” Cordell says. “Perhaps there’s an empathy deficit for people on welfare.”

The tools Cordell used to tell the story were a hybrid drama/documentary form in which interviews with key individuals were supplemented by a dramatisation of events.

At the heart of the film is Jenny Miller, the mother of Rhys Cauzzo, who was hounded by debt collectors for $17,000 and took his own life aged 28.

In a shocking turn of events after the part-time florist died, the Department of Human Services released personal Centrelink information about Cauzzo to the media in an attempt to create a “counter-narrative” and discredit him.

The royal commission later revealed Cauzzo’s debt had been unlawfully calculated using the “income averaging” method, like the hundreds of thousands of other victims of the scheme.

All episodes of The People vs Robodebt are available to stream on SBS On Demand now, with episodes dropping weekly on SBS at 7.30pm each Wednesday