Since 2015, the Australian government has raised an estimated $2.1bn in debt from Centrelink clients in a manner which the Federal Court has since ruled ‘unlawful’. Known as the Robodebt scandal, the scheme affected over 400,000 Australians, including some of the nation’s most vulnerable people. Inspired by real cases, Brooke Robinson’s bad machine is a fictionalised look at the human cost of an inhuman system, and our vanishing social safety net.