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  • Labour sets a hard migration target and admits someone will pay for it

    Labour sets a hard migration target and admits someone will pay for it
    Sep 19 2026
    Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has told the country the government’s migration forecasts are no longer forecasts. They’re targets, 245,000 net overseas migration this financial year and 225,000 the next, and he’s tying them explicitly to the price of housing.Burke unveiled the detail at the National Press Club on Thursday, in a speech titled “The Work of Managing the Migration Program: Who Arrives, Who Stays, Who Leaves.” It had been delayed six weeks amid reported disagreement inside cabinet.It arrives as a package of regulatory changes rather than legislation. Compromise talks between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor broke down last week over a list of Coalition demands, including tougher rules linked to ISIS-connected partners and a push to tie migration numbers to housing completions.What changesInternational students will no longer be able to bring family members on most visas, with carve-outs for students from Pacific and ASEAN countries and some postgraduate courses. Working holiday makers move onto a ballot system: second-year places capped at 45,000, third-year places cut from 31,000 to 5,000.Visa processing is re-prioritised toward construction, health, agriculture, fisheries and teaching, after sustained complaints from those sectors about being outpaced by other visa categories. Migration agents who encourage “non-meritorious” claims face sanctions or deregistration.A hundred additional compliance officers and 250 extra detention beds are earmarked for pursuing visa overstayers. The skilled-migration points test is redesigned to weight a trade qualification the same as a university degree.Burke also flagged two further changes he wants but currently can’t deliver without Parliament: a cap on international student arrivals through an expression-of-interest mechanism, and tighter rules on protection-visa claims from countries where the refusal rate already exceeds 85 per cent.The same day, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its own population data, showing net overseas migration had already fallen to 292,100 in the year to March, the lowest reading since mid-2022, and below the 309,500 recorded the year before. Migration was easing before Burke’s speech. The new targets are designed to keep pushing it down further and faster, from a base that peaked at a record 538,000 in 2022-23 after the pandemic-era net loss of 85,100 people in 2020-21.The word doing the workThe shift from forecast to target matters more than it might read at first pass. A forecast is a prediction a government can revise without much political cost. A target is something a minister is accountable for delivering. If net overseas migration lands above 245,000 this year, that’s now a policy failure rather than an external shock: Burke’s own number, on his own record. Setting a hard number this way suggests the political cost of leaving migration levels open-ended has come to outweigh the risk of missing a stated target, which says something about how central housing pressure has become inside cabinet’s calculations.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.Who says they’ll pay for itBurke didn’t dress the changes up as cost-free. Asked about the economic flow-on, he said he “can’t quarantine any sector” of the economy from the impact. The National Farmers’ Federation took him up on it directly, warning that cutting backpacker numbers will hit the workforce that picks and packs Australian produce. Its chief executive put the consequence in plain terms: “We will see a lift in the price of food. We will see emptier supermarkets.”The criticism isn’t confined to industry. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has spent months campaigning for deeper migration cuts than Labor has proposed, yet her own plan, unveiled just days before Burke’s speech, didn’t go as far on backpacker visas as what he has now announced. That detail complicates a simple reading of the changes as Labor chasing One Nation’s base.Neither the Coalition, reportedly circling a target of 150,000 to 170,000, nor One Nation, which wants net-negative migration through a 750,000-visa cut over three years, has locked in a final position. Both proposed levels sit below Burke’s own targets. That puts the coming argument over how far and how fast to cut, not whether cutting is warranted at all. Every major party now agrees on that much.Why it mattersMigration policy has become inseparable from housing policy in this government’s own framing, and Thursday’s speech is the clearest statement yet of that link. It’s also a reminder that regulatory action doesn’t only run in one direction. The industries built around the settings Burke just changed (international education, horticulture, tourism, the migration advice sector) now have to adjust to a policy shift made by ...
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    13 min
  • Labour's $560 million grants scheme sent three dollars to safe seats for every dollar sent to the Coalition

    Labour's $560 million grants scheme sent three dollars to safe seats for every dollar sent to the Coalition
    Sep 14 2026
    An independent investigation into a closed-door federal infrastructure fund found no link between where the money went and where it was needed, only between where it went and who was likely to win the seat.For every dollar the federal government spent in a Coalition-held seat through its $560 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Programme, it spent three dollars twenty in a seat notionally held by Labour.That is the headline finding of an independent Centre for Public Integrity investigation published this week. It sits at the centre of a growing row over how the Albanese government decided who got a slice of the country’s largest single-purpose community grants fund.The MLCI programme was set up to deliver on more than half a billion dollars in election commitments: sports facilities, parks, and community centres. Unlike most federal grant schemes, it ran on an invitation-only basis.The government selected roughly 220 projects and invited them to apply. There was no open or competitive process, and electorates left off the list had no way to be considered.The Centre for Public Integrity’s analysis, reported by the ABC’s Jake Evans for 7.30, found 73 per cent of the funding went to seats notionally held by Labour at the 2025 election, 23 per cent to Coalition-held seats and 4 per cent to everyone else.Breaking the labour-seat total down further: about $220 million went to marginal seats. Labour was actively contesting, and about $270 million went to seats it already held safely. Just $66 million was promised across every seat where Labour wasn’t competitive.The centre also tested whether the pattern could be explained by genuine need rather than politics. It compared funding against household income data and found no relationship. In fact, the poorest electorates in the country received a below-average share of grants.It found no link either to a measure of “community connectedness”, a proxy for how much infrastructure a place actually lacks. Forty-five electorates received no invitation and no funding at all.“Prima facie, it looks like the misuse of public money or serious pork-barrelling, as it’s sometimes called,” the centre’s chair, former justice Anthony Whealy, told 7.30. Executive director Catherine Williams summarised the imbalance in blunter terms: “for every dollar spent in a Coalition seat, $3.20 was spent in a notionally ALP-held seat.”Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.The golf club in the Prime Minister’s seatThe single detail driving the most attention is a $6 million grant to Marrickville Golf Club, the only golf club invited into the entire program and located in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler. The grant covers clubhouse refurbishment, an accessibility ramp and septic system repairs.ABC News revealed this week that Albanese has held an honorary membership at the club since around 2012, by his own account to parliament, and that it was never declared on his register of interests.He has said he holds no member card, has not visited the clubhouse in years, and was not personally involved in the decision to fund it. Those claims have not been disputed by any reporting to date. What is not in dispute is that the membership existed undeclared and that his own electorate’s golf club was the sole one funded nationally.Asked about it in Question Time, Albanese defended the grant on its merits and framed the scrutiny as an ordinary part of representing an electorate well: “If you’re a good local member, a whole lot of people will give you honorary membership of things. If you’re a good local member who stands up for your electorate, that will occur.”That framing sits uneasily next to the experience of Indi, the north-east Victorian seat held by independent MP Helen Haines, one of the 45 electorates that received nothing under MLCI.A local club in her electorate, Rutherglen Golf Club, nearly a century old and in need of repairs to asbestos-affected walls, white-ant damage and a sloping floor, asked Haines how to apply for MLCI funding. She had no answer, because there was no invitation to be had.“I was shocked by the scale of this, by the depth of this,” Haines told 7.30. Club member Ian Grimes put it more simply: “It just feels unfair and frustrating. We’re not asking for special treatment.”The government’s defenceInfrastructure Minister Catherine King has defended the programme as consistent with longstanding grant guidelines: ministers do not decide on applications inside their own electorate (a different cabinet colleague does), and every grant awarded is published on AusTender.She has also pointed to $1.7 billion made available separately through open, competitive schemes, Growing Regions and Thriving Suburbs.None of that addresses how the original 220 projects were chosen for invitation in ...
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    13 min
  • ASIC reveals 551 audit misconduct complaints, then faces questions about its own response

    ASIC reveals 551 audit misconduct complaints, then faces questions about its own response
    Sep 4 2026
    Australia’s corporate regulator told a federal parliamentary inquiry on Friday that the big four accounting firms have logged 551 complaints of alleged audit misconduct since mid-2023. But for the first time in this long-running inquiry, it wasn’t the accounting firms facing the toughest questions. It was the regulator itself.What ASIC told the committeeASIC’s executive director of enforcement and compliance, Chris Savundra, told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services in Sydney that KPMG, PwC, EY and Deloitte have together received 551 whistleblower complaints alleging audit misconduct since 1 July 2023.ASIC chair Sarah Court clarified the scope: the complaints relate to whether registered auditors misused or shared confidential client information, and ASIC used its compulsory information-gathering powers to obtain the underlying material.Court was careful not to overstate the figure. “I don’t want to suggest that there’s, you know, 550 serious whistleblower issues,” she told the hearing, adding that ASIC still has significant work ahead assessing which complaints warrant further investigation or enforcement action.When Greens Senator Barbara Pocock asked whether the 551 complaints were spread roughly evenly across the four firms, in the order of 125 to 130 each, Court asked that the hearing move off-camera before answering. As a result, the per-firm breakdown was not made public at Friday’s session.A tabled report calls KPMG’s disclosures “deceptive”The sharpest material to emerge from Friday’s hearing was a report by law firm Allens, tabled at the inquiry, examining how KPMG handled the whistleblower complaint that triggered the broader audit-leaks scandal: the alleged misuse of confidential Lendlease board papers to support KPMG’s audit-tender bids for Westpac and Dexus.Allens found that KPMG’s 2024 and 2025 Transparency Reports omitted any mention of an active whistleblower complaint, “despite indisputable evidence one existed.” The firm’s conclusion was blunt: those reports were “not transparent at all but misleading — at best deceptive, at worst fraudulent.”KPMG had classified the original 2024 complaint as an HR matter rather than an audit-quality or transparency issue, which is how it came to be left out of documents that regulators, investors and the public rely on.A KPMG spokesperson told the ABC the firm is “progressing work to address integrity issues, strengthen accountability and rebuild trust” under an action plan launched in June, while acknowledging “there is more to do.” KPMG has already cut almost 400 jobs this year following the scandal, after clients including Macquarie ended their engagements with the firm.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.The regulator under scrutinySenator Pocock used Friday’s hearing to challenge KPMG leadership’s repeated assurances of reform. She noted the committee had “spent hours listening to the leadership of KPMG… telling us that they’ve turned over a new leaf, that they are a new leadership, ‘there is new culture, trust us,’ and yet here we are.”Her expectation, she said, is that new leadership “requires delivery of outcomes,” and that KPMG will be called back before the committee if it doesn’t deliver.But the sharpest challenge to ASIC itself came from a separate whistleblower, whose June 2026 email to the regulator was also tabled at the inquiry. The email, following an earlier disclosure attempt in December 2021, accused ASIC of a “condescending tone” and argued the regulator “will need to be dragged kicking and screaming to take action that has been clearly available against at least one of the big four.”The whistleblower went further, alleging ASIC had “substantially done nothing bar tacitly endorse and further encourage misconduct,” despite auditor misconduct being listed among ASIC’s own stated regulatory priorities for both 2025 and 2026.ASIC rejected that characterisation in a statement to the ABC: “ASIC takes all whistleblower reports and allegations of misconduct seriously… assesses and progresses matters in a timely and methodical manner.” The regulator said a number of investigations and enforcement actions are already underway.Two further details complicate any simple read of the relationship between ASIC and the firms it regulates. Senator Pocock said ASIC signed new contracts with KPMG in March 2026, the same period the scandal became public. And the current chair of the Tax Practitioners Board, Peter de Cure, spent 25 years as a KPMG partner before taking the role.Neither fact establishes wrongdoing on its own, but both feed the underlying question this inquiry keeps circling back to: whether Australia’s audit regulators are positioned closely enough to the firms they oversee to regulate them ...
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    10 min
  • Public servants repaid almost half a million dollars in personal card charges this year. Is that a system working, or just one catching up with itself?

    Public servants repaid almost half a million dollars in personal card charges this year. Is that a system working, or just one catching up with itself?
    Aug 20 2026
    Thousands of taxpayer-card transactions across federal departments were personal, not official, new Senate figures show. So far, every dollar we have traced has been paid back . That raises a narrower question than fraud, what prevention actually looks like .Federal public servants paid back around $480,100 in personal spending charged to taxpayer-funded credit cards in the 2025-26 financial year, figures tabled to the Senate this week show.Orders from Uber Eats and a single Defence transaction that brought the department’s total to nearly a quarter of a million dollars were part of the spending across at least eight departments and agencies.None of the departments involved characterise the spending as theft or criminal misuse. "It's said by everyone that personal charges are banned on the cards and the money is repaid once identified.It was never really a question of the money coming back. The harder question is what does a system designed to catch mistakes after the fact really prove?The numbers, by departmentDefence had the most total, 3,276 purchases the department itself says are “contrary to Defence policy,” worth about $240,000. At least $213,672 has already been paid back, a spokesperson confirmed.Then DFAT with 2,029 inadvertent transactions totalling around $151,000 for the financial year. The department’s spokesperson said the largest transaction, more than $3,000, was repaid in full.The Australian Federal Police recorded 987 incorrect personal transactions that cost more than $42,000. Between July 2025 and March 2026, Home Affairs staff were reimbursed for 477 purchases, totalling $28,400, including 149 Uber or Uber Eats orders worth about $5,500.The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was repaid for 81 purchases, valued at about $2,400, again mostly Uber. Health $5,370.16 (accidental private purchases) (repaid) Employment and Workplace Relations $8,688.02 (repaid) Social Services $2,250.00That is at least $480,100 across the eight departments and agencies cited in the figures, a minimum rather than a precise total, since the AFP's figure was only reported as "more than $42,000."The same figures, two readingsFinance Minister Katy Gallagher has defended the existing processes. “The information supplied shows that the system is working, in that the inappropriate use is identified and paid back,” she said in a statement. “Agencies and secretaries are required to manage the matter at the departmental level.One way of reading the figures is that misuse is being identified and the money is coming back in. Nothing in the tabled data says anything about a trend - the claim is harder to sustain as evidence the underlying rate of mistaken personal spending is actually falling. That’s just the total for one year.Deputy Opposition Leader Jane Hume put the opposing frame. She said: “It is encouraging that these purchases are identified and the vast majority repaid, but the scale is concerning.” It's a critique that doesn't quite provide us a way out.It’s also worth noting that the same repay-on-detection model has run under governments of both stripes without a structural redesign, so this is less a new failure than an old one nobody currently in office has moved to close.What matters here is not the difference between "the system caught it" and "the system failed." Both readings agree with that. It's between a control that prevents the mistake and one that only ever cleans it up, and on the evidence tabled this week, Australia's public service credit card system remains very much the second kind. Quick hitsRoblox has made a court-enforceable undertaking with the eSafety Commissioner after gaps in the platform’s child safety systems were found, including that adults could send connection requests to children without parental consent and that children’s accounts were not private by default.The company has three months to comply, or face penalties of up to $100 million. Communications Minister Anika Wells said the founder of Roblox had promised her personally that the company would accelerate. eSafety estimates that 1.7 million Australian children use the platform.Business leaders are divided on how much Australia’s migration intake should be cut. Federal budget forecasts show net overseas migration falling from around 300,000 to 245,000 this financial year, with the current permanent intake at 185,000 places. One Nation wants that cut to 130,000, the Coalition wants migration capped against housing construction but has not named a figure.E-commerce entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan said the debate should be about which migrants Australia admits, not the raw number, while Leora Healthcare co-CEO Esha Oberoi – whose aged-care and disability business is more than 45 per cent visa holders – said she doesn’t know how the sector operates without continued migrant staffing.What to readSubmissions on Labor's fix to the negative-gearing “widow tax” – the change that protects ...
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    11 min
  • Deepfake investment scams are up 182% this year. The law meant to make platforms pay for hosting them doesn't fully switch on until March 2027

    Deepfake investment scams are up 182% this year. The law meant to make platforms pay for hosting them doesn't fully switch on until March 2027
    Aug 19 2026
    ASIC pulled down more than 19,000 scam websites and ads in the past year. Social media platforms carrying the fake ads face almost no enforceable penalty for it until next autumn.Nineteen thousand. That’s how many scam sites and ads ASIC says it removed over the past year, up 182 percent on the year before. The driver isn’t more scammers working harder. It’s AI doing the work for them.Deepfake video, cloned voices, fake news sites built in an afternoon, all wrapped around a face Australians already trust. This year alone, scams using a famous face to sell a fake investment have cost people at least 7.4 million dollars, according to National Anti-Scam Centre data.Here’s the part that matters if you’re the one deciding whether to click: the law built to make platforms pay for hosting these ads exists, but it isn’t fully running yet. Full enforcement doesn’t land until 31 March 2027.Elsewhere in Auspol* The Fair Work Commission’s minimum standards order for on-demand food and grocery delivery work formally started on 17 August 2026 — at least $31.30 an hour for “engaged time” on platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash, the date set when the decision was confirmed back in August.* ASIC’s FY2025–26 enforcement wrap, released 20 July, reported $830 million in civil penalties secured and $644 million returned to Australians, alongside 25 criminal convictions and more than 250 investigations opened.* On 10 August, ASIC used its administrative powers to remove or restrict 87 people and businesses from financial services and 27 from credit services, including advisers linked to the collapse of the Shield and First Guardian Master Funds.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.The deepfake economyYou’re scrolling and an ad plays. Decent production. A face you recognise — maybe finance commentator Alan Kohler explaining a “government-backed” trading platform, maybe a mining billionaire telling you she’s put her own money into it. None of it is real. The voice, the face, sometimes a whole fake news article sitting underneath as proof, all generated.ASIC chair Sarah Court’s advice is blunt: a quick search isn’t enough anymore to separate real from fake, because the fake sites are built specifically to survive that check.This isn’t a scattering of one-off cons. Nineteen thousand-plus sites and ads taken down in a year points to something closer to a production line.SmartCompany identified at least eleven Australian public figures currently being used as bait, spanning business (Dick Smith, Gina Rinehart, Alan Kohler), economics commentary (Tom Piotrowski, Stephen Koukoulas, Alan Oster), politics (Anthony Albanese, Angus Taylor, Jacqui Lambie, Pauline Hanson) and broadcasting (John Laws).None of them authorised any of it. None of them see a cent from it. They’re simply recognisable enough to make a fake platform look credible for the few seconds it takes someone to decide whether to click.A note on how solid these particular numbers are: the 19,000-plus takedown figure and the 182 percent increase come from three outlets — SBS, the regulatory wire MLex, and SmartCompany — all reporting the same numbers on 17 August, not from an ASIC document we could locate and read directly. Treat the scale as well-reported rather than independently verified against a primary release.The trend line isn’t in question, though. This is the third public warning ASIC has issued this year about the same deepfake mechanism, following releases in April and July, with the numbers worsening each time.Part of why this particular scam works so well on a younger audience is distribution. It doesn’t arrive as a cold call anymore.It arrives as a targeted ad in the same feed as content from a creator you actually follow, placed there by an algorithm that has no way of distinguishing a genuine endorsement from a fabricated one. It just knows the ad gets clicks, and shows it to more people who look like the people who already clicked.Who’s actually on the hookThis is where the accountability trail splits in two, and splits right now.Banks already have exposure. In June, the Federal Court ordered HSBC’s Australian arm to pay a $35 million penalty, not for a scam happening on its platform but for how it handled customers afterwards: an average 144-day delay investigating scam reports, and gaps in fraud controls on its internal payment rail.HSBC has already paid roughly $21.5 million in compensation, with more due, and recovered $6.5 million for customers. That penalty sits under an existing rulebook, the ePayments Code, and a court that used it.Social media platforms, where these deepfake ads are actually served, sit under a newer and different rulebook: the Scams Prevention Framework. Banks, telcos and digital platforms — social media, messaging services, search engines — were all ...
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    10 min
  • The NDIS bill is about to pass. Nobody agrees on how much of it is fraud

    The NDIS bill is about to pass. Nobody agrees on how much of it is fraud
    Aug 18 2026
    Two credible sources, two very different numbers, and a Senate debate running out of time to reconcile them.Debate on the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 opened in the Senate on Monday, 17 August, with the government confident it will pass this sitting week with Coalition support. The bill would cut at least 160,000 people from the scheme and bank $37.8 billion in savings over four years, the single largest saving measure in May’s federal budget.Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John used the floor to make the moral case against it directly. “The eyes of five point five million disabled people fall at this moment on this Parliament,” he told the chamber, accusing the government of “backing billionaires and gas companies instead of disabled people.” He did not soften the closing line: “Shame on you. You will be condemned by history.”Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.Shadow Health Minister Anne Ruston made the Coalition’s case for supporting the bill anyway, in the same debate. The scheme was designed to support around 410,000 people. It now supports 782,000, nearly double the original estimate. Costed at $13.6 billion, it now runs above $50 billion a year.This is, by Ruston’s count, the government’s third attempt at slowing that growth: an 8 per cent target set in 2023, missed; a 5 to 6 per cent target set in January, also missed, with growth still near 11 per cent; a new target of 2 per cent set in this year’s budget.Both of those accounts are true at once. The scheme has grown at the rate Ruston describes, and cutting 160,000 people from it will do the harm Steele-John is warning about. The debate isn’t really about whether those two facts exist. It’s about which one should carry more weight in the vote.What actually changed this weekWhat moved this week wasn’t the underlying fight, which Inside Auspol has covered since the bill’s Senate committee report was tabled on 14 August. It was the amendments negotiated inside it.The government and the Greens agreed to limit the disability minister’s power to cut funding across entire categories of NDIS support. Any decision made using an automated system must now be reviewable by a human, and the decision-making framework behind it has to be published before it’s switched on.And a new clause bars restrictive practices, including forced medication, from being used as a condition of NDIS eligibility, with any genuinely required treatment funded instead through the public health system.That last change addresses a gap that predates this bill rather than one it created. Somewhere in the scheme’s operation, a person could reportedly be pressured into a restrictive practice to keep their support. The amendment closes that specific door.The fraud number that depends on who’s askingThe most contested figure in the debate isn’t about who gets cut. It’s about why.The Grattan Institute, an independent think tank, told the Senate inquiry in its submission that fraud accounts for just 2 per cent of the bill’s projected savings — $900 million of the $37.8 billion package.Ruston, on the same day, cited a different figure on the Senate floor: an Australian National Audit Office estimate that up to 10 per cent of NDIS payments are “non-compliant, incorrect, or fraudulent,” worth roughly $5 billion a year at today’s spending.The two numbers aren’t measuring the same thing. Grattan’s 2 per cent is specifically fraud, calculated against this bill’s projected savings. The audit-derived figure Ruston cites is a broader compliance estimate — built from an earlier and smaller year of NDIS spending, and folding genuine fraud together with incorrect claims and administrative non-compliance. Different measure, different baseline, different year.Neither figure appears to be fabricated. But the gap between “2 per cent, and specifically fraud” and “up to 10 per cent, loosely defined” is wide enough to support two entirely different political arguments from the same evidence base, and so far, nobody in the debate has been required to reconcile them.The gap advocates are pointing at insteadPeople with Disability Australia’s acting chief executive, Megan Spindler-Smith, isn’t disputing the fraud figures at all. Her concern is what replaces the NDIS supports being cut.“We are feeling pretty devastated,” she said, adding that the disability community’s warnings during the Senate inquiry have not been “adequately heard.” Her specific example is Thriving Kids, a $2 billion program meant to catch people leaving the scheme. It currently only covers children up to age eight, leaving older children, teenagers and adults with disability without a confirmed alternative.Health Minister Mark Butler says that gap will close. He points to a technical advisory group developing ...
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    9 min
  • NDIS report due as agency's own data shows growth already easing

    NDIS report due as agency's own data shows growth already easing
    Aug 14 2026
    NDIS report lands today, and the government’s own numbers are quietly moving in its favourThe Senate committee examining Labour’s $37.8 billion NDIS overhaul hands down its final report today, as new agency data suggests the government’s own “unsustainable growth” argument is already softening on its own.The Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee’s final report on the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 is due today, capping a process that began when the bill was referred for inquiry on 14 May. It has not run to schedule. A report originally due in June slipped after the government struck a deal with the Greens to extend the inquiry by eight weeks, producing an interim report and a handful of amendments: limits on the minister’s power to cut funding across an entire category of support in one move, and stronger transparency requirements around decisions made by automated systems. Disability groups say those changes were welcome but don’t touch the core of what they’re worried about.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.The bill would cut $37.8 billion from the scheme over four years and reduce participant numbers by roughly 160,000 over the same period. The government’s own account of the bill, published on the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing’s website, lists its purposes as clarifying eligibility, addressing fraud within the NDIS, and putting the scheme “back on a sustainable footing”. Labour has framed the changes publicly in the same terms: slowing growth to a sustainable rate and cracking down on fraud.Skye Kakoschke-Moore, chief executive of Children and Young People with Disability Australia, said on Thursday the report needs to reflect what the community told the committee during the enquiry: that the bill is “neither reasonable nor necessary and should not pass in its current form.” She described the months of hearings, some of them “harrowing”, as work that “cannot have been for nothing.” Her organisation has been consistent on this point since June, when it warned the committee that the funding changes could “segregate people with a disability again”.The Disability Advocacy Network Australia struck a similar note, saying it backs “genuine, well-sequenced reform that creates a sustainable NDIS” but that the bill as it stands “risks causing foreseeable harm to people with disabilities”.Neither organisation is arguing against reform in principle. Both are arguing this specific version of it isn’t the right one, and both are making that argument on the record, hours before the committee that will decide the bill’s next stage hands down its findings.What the growth numbers actually showThe government’s central justification is that NDIS growth has become unsustainable. That claim is worth testing against the scheme’s own reporting, not against either side’s press statements.The National Disability Insurance Agency’s quarterly reports show 661,267 participants as at 30 June 2024, rising to 717,001 by 31 March 2025 and 739,414 by 30 June 2025. In annual terms, that’s growth of about 10.8 per cent to June 2025, below the 12 per cent the NDIA itself had projected in its 2024 Annual Financial Sustainability Report.That doesn’t resolve the argument either way. It doesn’t mean the scheme wasn’t on an unsustainable trajectory over a longer horizon, and it doesn’t undercut the fraud concerns the bill separately cites as a reason for reform, which are a distinct issue from the growth-rate question. What it does show is that the specific number the government leans on most heavily in public, that growth is out of control, was already easing on the agency’s own data before the bill has cut a single dollar. Anyone assessing today’s report, in government or in the disability sector, is working from a starting point where that particular justification is softer than the rhetoric around it suggests.Three bills, one fortnightThe NDIS report lands in the middle of a sitting fortnight where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor are negotiating three separate pieces of contentious legislation at once. Albanese told Labour’s caucus on Monday he expects the NDIS changes to pass “in this sitting fortnight” after meetings with Taylor.Those same two leaders have also met repeatedly this week on the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, which would cap free-to-air gambling ads at three per hour between 6am and 8.30pm, ban betting ads during live sport in that window, and bar athletes and influencers from appearing in gambling promotions. Its provisions are still being negotiated bill-by-bill rather than settled, with a separate Senate committee due to report on that legislation on 17 August. Albanese and Taylor have also been ...
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    10 min
  • Independent MP refers Labor's gambling reform to corruption watchdog over industry donations

    Independent MP refers Labor's gambling reform to corruption watchdog over industry donations
    Aug 13 2026
    Andrew Wilkie says $4 million in gambling-company donations and a Sportsbet-funded dinner for a former minister raise questions serious enough for the National Anti-Corruption Commission. The government rejects any suggestion of influence. Separately, the same week saw Labour and the Coalition finalise a deal on a different bill: the one that makes big tech pay for news.Independent MP Andrew Wilkie referred the federal government’s gambling reform policy to the National Anti-Corruption Commission on Wednesday, telling reporters at Parliament House that industry donations may have improperly shaped the legislation. “This morning, I referred the gambling reform matter to the National Anti-Corruption Commission,” Wilkie said. “My concern [is] that individuals in the federal government, when formulating gambling reform policy, have been improperly influenced by individuals in the private sector. This has resulted in policy so clearly at odds with research, public opinion, and the public interest that the implementation of such policy could be characterised, in my opinion, as serious corruption.”Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.A sitting MP has now put the word “corruption” on the record about legislation his own government is actively trying to pass. What hasn’t happened is any confirmation the watchdog will act on it. The NACC doesn’t confirm or deny whether it takes up a referral, and nothing reported this week says it has taken Wilkie’s. So far, what’s confirmed is the referral itself and the political pressure now sitting alongside the bill.The money behind the complaintWilkie’s referral leans on a figure first reported by Nine newspapers in late July: gambling companies donated $4 million to the Labour Party between 2021 and 2025. Eight other independent MPs back his concern that the bill is inadequate. Northern Sydney MP Sophie Scamps went further than the donation figure alone. “It’s not only those $4 million in donations over the last five years; it’s lavish gifts,” she said. “We heard about the lavish birthday party that was put on for the former communications minister; we know about the tickets to sporting events.”The former minister is Michelle Rowland. In 2023 she was dined by Responsible Wagering Australia, the lobby group representing Sportsbet, Ladbrokes and Bet365. A year earlier, she’d accepted a $19,000 donation from Sportsbet directly. Neither detail is new reporting: what’s new is an MP asking the corruption watchdog to weigh whether it amounts to more than a bad look.Under Labour’s proposed reforms, betting ads would be capped at three per hour between 6am and 8:30pm, with a ban on gambling advertising at live sports, in stadiums and on player jerseys. Those are genuine restrictions. They’re also well short of the 31 recommendations delivered by a 2023 parliamentary enquiry chaired by the late Labour MP Peta Murphy, which called for gambling advertising to be phased out entirely and drew support from across the political divide. Few of those 31 recommendations have been implemented.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addressed the referral in parliament the same day. He didn’t dispute Wilkie’s right to make it. “Our government is determined to get the policy right,” he said. “We have exchanged views across the parliament, including with crossbenchers and including with the opposition, and we will get it right. I don’t suggest members on any side of this debate have been influenced, other than by how we deal with a complex issue.” Wilkie points to the donations as the explanation. Albanese points to a complicated policy area negotiated in good faith with the crossbench and the opposition. Both accounts are now on the public record, and neither has been tested by an actual investigation.A different bill, the same two negotiatorsThe gambling fight wasn’t the only thing moving through parliament this week. Albanese and opposition leader Angus Taylor finalised amendments to the News Media Bargaining Incentive bill after meeting on Monday, ahead of its introduction to parliament on Thursday. The legislation forces large digital platforms, those earning $250 million or more a year from search or social media services in Australia, to pay a 2.5% levy if they don’t strike voluntary commercial deals with news publishers.That 2.5% figure is itself a retreat from the government’s original plan: a flat 2.25% levy on a platform’s Australian gross revenue, announced last week, which prompted enough pushback from the Coalition to send Albanese and Taylor back to the negotiating table. What came out the other side reinstated a cap limiting any single media company to 25% of the total levy payout after the government had flagged scrapping it. The minimum number of deals a platform must sign to avoid the levy rose during ...
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