The conventions of ministerial responsibility, that ministers should take responsibility for the collective actions of government, exert a powerful pull on the political class even when they are being disregarded. For the most part, the conventions are uncontroversial and underpin the dominant strategy of all governments - to take credit for delivering popular policies to voters and thereby reaping the electoral reward. Millions of taxpayers' dollars and party funds are devoted to conveying the positive message that we have ministers to thank for our prosperity.

But if credit for success is to be milked for all it's worth, blame for failure, as a matter of logic, must also be acknowledged. Indeed, ministerial responsibility is commonly associated with the admission of mistakes and with the supposed obligation on ministers to resign for administrative failures in their department. Such an obligation of so-called "vicarious responsibility" has never operated in practice in Australia or, for that matter, in other Westminster jurisdictions, apart from a handful of quixotic resignations in the United Kingdom. But it exerts a continuing hold on the public mind, regularly reinforced by newspaper letter-writers and opportunistic opposition politicians.

Ministers sometimes hope to earn brownie points for admitting to responsibility for administrative mistakes for which they cannot possibly be blamed, knowing full well that retribution will never ensue.The recent massive miscalculation by the Australian Tax Office and the Treasury of the likely costs of the JobKeeper program provides a good example. The initial announcement was left to officials, but the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, under opposition pressure, was quick to accept responsibility. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, also jumped in saying that "ultimately I too have to take responsibility for those things". The admission was safe because it was clear that the fault lay not with ministers, but with the agencies. The responsibility of ministers in such cases is confined to explaining what happened and imposing any necessary remedies. To reinforce the point, the Treasury secretary, Dr Steven Kennedy, appearing a few weeks later at the Senate COVID-19 committee, accepted "full responsibility" himself for all the revised costings.

The alacrity with which ministers accepted responsibility for a failure clearly attributable to their public service advisers contrasts with the usual reluctance shown when answering for failures that flow from their own policy directions. In such cases, as we know, ministers are much less forthcoming, adopting a large number of well-known tactics for denying responsibility - prevarication, diversion, refusing to comment on spurious grounds of security, and so on. As many commentators have noted, the present prime minister is a master of the art of avoiding responsibility for questionable actions.

From this perspective, Mr Morrison's apology for hurt and harm caused by the flawed robodebt scheme can be seen as a reluctant admission forced on him by the power of public expectations. The apology still included some hints of qualification. It was expressed conditionally - "I would apologise" and "I would regret" and referred to "any hurt" or "hardship" as if there might not actually be any. Nonetheless, it was an apology, and therefore an admission of responsibility for harm, which the Prime Minister had been resisting for a long time. Only the day before he had deflected a similar parliamentary question by blaming the Labor government for the policy of matching welfare payments and tax data. He had also allowed the Attorney-General, Christian Porter, to maintain his legalistic stance that apologising would prejudice ongoing litigation between the government and robodebt victims.

Mr Porter's disclaimer was reminiscent of the Catholic Church hierarchy's refusal to apologise for abuse by paedophile priests for fear of prompting claims for financial damages. Good advice from a technical legal perspective, perhaps, but disastrous in terms of public confidence and trust.

Mr Porter had also insisted that the courts had merely found the robodebt scheme "unlawful" rather than "illegal" which would have implied criminal liability. The distinction may have impressed lawyers but would have seemed pointless nit-picking to most people. If paying attention at all, members of the public would simply have noted that the courts had ruled against the scheme and that the government was facing demands for compensation.

In the end, public pressure on the government won out, grounded in an expectation that ministers should take responsibility and apologise for harm done to citizens. The public narrative, as represented on mainstream media outlets such as Channel 9's A Current Affair, had replaced its usual view of Centrelink clients as dole-bludgers and welfare cheats with sympathetic stories of undeserved suffering by the children of angry suburban mums and dads. The Prime Minister got the message even if his Attorney-General did not.

Whether this volte-face represents a genuine turning point in government ownership of responsibility for hardship caused by income data matching remains to be seen. Ministers of all governments have a long history of avoiding responsibility for Centrelink decisions which dates back to the agency's original establishment as a supposedly arms-length executive agency in the 1990s. Centrelink adopted the practice of answering directly to the public, usually through its spokesperson, Hank Jongen, sometimes listed as a "general manager", who combined information with explanation and justification of policies. Though Centrelink has since been brought under more direct ministerial control, ministers rarely front up to the media, and the redoubtable Mr Jongen still continues as agency spokesperson and occasional advocate.

The government has yet to decide how far to persist with income data matching. Indeed, its overall approach to welfare assistance is in limbo, pending decisions on how to deal with the Job Seeker payments after September. Will it listen to the voices that are urging a continuation of the more general level of assistance? Or will it reassert Coalition principles that welfare should be minimal and discouraging, a view that supports a tough line on income data matching? For the moment, judging from responses to stories of robodebt suffering, public opinion may be veering in a more generous direction. By eventually accepting responsibility for robodebt hardship, the Prime Minister may have been nudged towards a softer line in the upcoming battles on welfare policy.

One policy area where the Prime Minister has successfully stood out against accepting responsibility is community grants. Not only has he brushed off Labor's questions about the role of his own office in recommending sports grants but he has also avoided taking collective responsibility for the grossly negligent and improper way in which the various programs were administered. First the Auditor-General and then the Senate review committee revealed alarming breaches of proper process by ministerial advisers in both the minister's and the Prime Minister's office, working together with bureaucrats in Sport Australia and the Department of Health. The whole sports rort affair, which widened into similar abuses of process in other grants schemes, was, and is, a government-wide scandal which deserves a government-wide response from the Prime Minister.

The contrast with robodebt is indicative. With sports rorts, the innocent victims were the sports bodies who applied in good faith and were passed over in favour of applications that were assessed as less worthy but came from electorates considered more crucial politically. Though many of them complained initially, the government was quick to offer the chance of redress through subsequent grants schemes. No one had a family member whose life was damaged. Commercial television lost interest and the government could relax.

Any sense of outrage that still lingers comes from those who care about issues such as administrative integrity and the rule of law, a section of society that conservative politicians worldwide are learning they can ignore with impunity. Here, ministerial responsibility is likely to fail, leaving accountability to other institutions, such as the Auditor-General, the Senate and the public service as a whole. As the former minister in charge, Bridget McKenzie, recently claimed, it was the job of public servants, not ministers and their advisers, to raise procedural objections. From this perspective, sports rorts remains a serious failure by the public service.