There is a lot of talk about human rights in prison – with things like ‘the Mandela Rules’, ‘the principle of equivalence’, and access to health care without discrimination.

Procedural fairness, often called “natural justice”, is a collection of rights, established under common law in Australia around the 1980s.

Generally, debts can be put into two categories. First, there are private debts (e.g. from a bank, a landlord, a car dealer, or ‘Afterpay’). Second, there are debts owed to the State (e.g. unpaid fines).

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The concern for those who are subjected to government decisions is that they often do not get to see the integrity of the information which was considered by the decision-maker and don’t get to check if it’s correct.