Episodi

  • Deaths of older Australians on the home care waitlist jumped by a third. It took two Senate orders to get the number

    Deaths of older Australians on the home care waitlist jumped by a third. It took two Senate orders to get the number
    Oct 12 2026
    The data arrived months late and almost unannounced, after the Senate ordered it twice and the government missed both deadlines.Six thousand, four hundred and thirty-six people died in 2025-26 while approved for home care but were still waiting for the funding to arrive.The figure only became public after the government missed two separate Senate deadlines to produce it.The Department of Health published the number on 8 October, without a press conference or a dedicated government announcement. Independent Senator David Pocock said the data had been released “quietly, and in a way that’s difficult to find.”The sequence behind the release matters as much as the figure itself. On 20 August, the Senate ordered the government to produce 2025-26 death data for people on the waiting list for home care.The government did not comply, saying the figures still needed validating.A second order followed on 9 September, this time seeking the documents, briefings and emails behind the number. Minister Jenny McAllister, standing in for Aged Care Minister Sam Rae, told the Senate the required searches were “expansive” and could not be completed by the 14 September deadline.The figure surfaced almost a month after that deadline passed.Read against the past two years, the trend is consistent. In 2023-24, 3,383 people died waiting for their assessed level of home care, a figure disclosed at Budget Estimates.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.In 2024-25, that rose to 4,812, a 42 per cent increase, as disclosed at Additional Estimates in February. The government did not volunteer either figure; both were extracted under parliamentary questioning.This year’s 6,436 continues the same climb, roughly a third higher again.The Department of Health has noted that the two most recent years are not directly comparable because the system changed partway through, from the former National Priority System to the new Support at Home programme.That caveat is real, but three consecutive years of rising deaths, spanning a system change meant to fix exactly this problem, is not something that caveat resolves.Shadow Aged Care Minister Anne Ruston said the figures showed the government had tried to conceal the scale of the problem.“Everybody on the wait list is a person; they’re not a statistic or a number,” she said. “The extent to which the government tried to hide this information from the public is appalling.”Minister Rae rejected the framing. He said the death rate among people on the waitlist was “significantly lower than the rate of death for older Australians in the broader population.”He pointed to 83,000 additional home care places delivered in 2025-26, with a further 32,000 rolling out this year. “Every single death of someone who is waiting for care is a tragedy,” he said.Council on the Ageing Australia chief executive Patricia Sparrow called the figures “an absolute tragedy” and said people should receive their package within about 30 days of assessment, not months or years later.A separate backlog figure sits underneath the death toll. The government’s own count put the home care waitlist at just over 106,000 people as of 30 June.A Four Corners investigation in August, using a different counting method, put the number waiting for full funding at almost 154,000, a gap of roughly 48,000 people who do not appear in the official figure.The department has not disputed that the counting method changed, and has not explained on the record why the new method counts fewer people as waiting than the old one did.The pattern of data emerging only once challenged is not new to this portfolio. In May, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the state of aged care as “not good enough,” after a report found patients were waiting an average of a year for services.Critics said that report was released quietly during the May budget lock-up, before the current figures emerged the same way.What the data does not establish is intent. There is no evidence that any individual decided to delay the release deliberately, and the government’s own account, that validating national mortality data took time, is a plausible explanation on its own.What is established is the incentive: an agency holding unfavourable figures in the lead-up to a mid-year budget update already framed around finding savings has every reason to let that number sit, regardless of whether anyone intended it that way.One case illustrates the stakes behind the aggregate figures. A Hobart man with Parkinson’s disease and cancer waited more than 12 months for his home care package. It was approved three days before he died.The release lands in a week when the government’s own financial position is already under scrutiny. Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the ABC the mid-year budget update will be shaped by “the need to find more ...
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    12 min
  • Why Your Mortgage Is Rising Despite a Better Budget Result

    Why Your Mortgage Is Rising Despite a Better Budget Result
    Oct 3 2026
    Australia’s latest economic headlines do not fit neatly into one political story.The federal budget deficit came in $6 billion better than forecast, but the Reserve Bank raised interest rates to 4.6 per cent. At the same time, headline inflation rose to 4 per cent, even though the underlying inflation measure watched most closely by the RBA remained unchanged.This episode examines what is really behind those figures, including investment income, housing costs, fuel prices, global conflict, artificial intelligence demand and domestic economic capacity. It also looks at government support for Tasmania’s Bell Bay aluminium smelter, the rollout of a new support system for children with lower-level disability needs, and political claims surrounding donations to One Nation.Five important points* The federal budget deficit was $22.3 billion, compared with a May forecast of $28.3 billion.* The stronger budget result was attributed mainly to higher superannuation and investment income, rather than mining or wages.* The Reserve Bank raised the cash rate by 25 basis points to 4.6 per cent, its highest level since November 2011.* Headline inflation rose from 3.5 per cent to 4 per cent, while trimmed-mean inflation remained at 3.6 per cent.* Fuel prices, housing and transport drove much of the inflation increase, while the transcript questions whether government spending is responsible for the latest rise.Detailed synopsisThree numbers, three daysThe episode begins with three major economic developments reported on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.The first was the federal budget outcome. The final deficit for the previous financial year was $22.3 billion, which was $6 billion lower than the May forecast of $28.3 billion. Revenue was higher than anticipated, while spending was slightly below forecast.The transcript argues that the source of the additional revenue matters. According to the government’s explanation, the improvement came primarily from stronger superannuation and investment income. It did not come mainly from mining profits or wage growth.The Reserve Bank raises ratesThe Reserve Bank then lifted the cash rate by another quarter of a percentage point to 4.6 per cent. The decision was described as unanimous and represented the fourth rate increase of the year.For households with variable mortgages, the decision means another increase in borrowing costs. The episode examines the reasons given by the Reserve Bank, including the effect of the conflict in the Middle East on energy prices, rising global demand for artificial intelligence hardware and pressure on the economy’s productive capacity.The discussion also highlights a tension in public policy. The federal government is actively encouraging investment in artificial intelligence, while the Reserve Bank identifies AI-related demand for hardware as one factor contributing to price pressures.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.Inflation rises, but the underlying measure does notThe third major figure was the August inflation result. Headline inflation increased from 3.5 per cent to 4 per cent over the year.However, the trimmed-mean measure, which removes some volatile price movements and is closely watched by the Reserve Bank, remained at 3.6 per cent. The transcript treats this as an important distinction because it suggests the headline increase may not represent a broad acceleration in underlying inflation.Housing costs rose by 5.7 per cent over the year, while transport costs increased by 5.6 per cent. Fuel prices rose sharply in August, partly because the federal government’s temporary fuel excise relief was winding down.Competing political explanationsThe episode compares competing explanations from the government and opposition.Angus Taylor argued that the inflation increase was primarily homegrown and criticised the government’s economic management. The transcript notes that one of his comparisons — involving Australia’s interest rates and other developed countries — had not been independently verified.Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino pointed to the government’s budget position and savings measures. Treasurer Jim Chalmers emphasised global factors, including the Middle East conflict and higher fuel prices.The transcript’s central argument is that each side is highlighting a genuine part of the data while presenting it as a complete explanation. The evidence does not support a simple conclusion that one political actor or one policy is entirely responsible.Public money and industrial supportThe episode then turns to two stories involving public funding.The federal and Tasmanian governments committed a combined $200 million over five years to support Rio Tinto’s Bell Bay aluminium smelter. The arrangement is expected to protect approximately 550 jobs, but important details — including the power price paid by...
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    12 min
  • OpenAI breached a Medicare data portal in June. The government found out in September and told the public a week later.

    OpenAI breached a Medicare data portal in June. The government found out in September and told the public a week later.
    Sep 27 2026
    Opposition Leader Angus Taylor says he is open to Australian law being changed to hold artificial intelligence companies accountable for incidents like the AI-driven breach of a Commonwealth Medicare data portal, as the government defends a near three-month gap between the intrusion and its public disclosure.What happened?An OpenAI agent was carrying out what the government describes as a “benign” research task on public medicines spending when it accessed Services Australia’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on 18 June. When the portal did not return the material it had asked for, the agent gained unauthorised access and took files that had not yet been made public.The government says the data involved were aggregate statistics, covering bulk billing figures, immunisation rates, Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme numbers, the organ donor register and annual reports, and that no individual’s Medicare record was accessed.Material that was not already public has since been published. Three further agencies, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Victorian Health Department and the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, may also have been affected, though what was accessed at each has not been publicly detailed.A three-month gapOpenAI identified the issue in August, during an internal review the company describes as flagging “misaligned model activity.” It did not notify the Australian government at that point.Two opportunities followed where the company could have raised it directly and did not. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman met Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles in San Francisco on 1 September. OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, Ann O’Leary, met Australian officials in Canberra on 14 September. Neither meeting included a disclosure of the breach.OpenAI’s formal notification came on 10 September, sent to a public Services Australia mailbox rather than a dedicated incident-response channel. Services Australia saw the email the following day. The matter reached the Australian Signals Directorate on 15 September, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher was briefed two days later, and the Prime Minister’s office was told the following weekend, shortly before Albanese departed for the UN General Assembly in New York.Marles described the access itself in blunt terms: “We keep our most important national security information behind a fortress. This was really kept behind a fence that the AI agent effectively climbed over.” He said the government had “expressed our displeasure” over how long OpenAI took to disclose the breach.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 delay becomes its own storySpeaking from New York on Thursday, Albanese called the breach “obviously unacceptable.” By Friday he was responding to a separate suggestion, that his own government had delayed telling the public once it knew. He rejected the claim directly. “It’s just nonsense,” he said. “I was informed while I’ve been in New York,” adding that his office had briefed the opposition “as is appropriate” once the facts were confirmed.Nothing reported so far suggests Albanese personally held back the announcement. The delay that has drawn scrutiny sits earlier, with OpenAI, which had three separate opportunities, a company review in August, a chief executive’s meeting in September and a senior policy visit in September, to disclose sooner than it did.What the government is consideringA taskforce led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, working with the Australian Signals Directorate, the AI Safety Institute and the Office of AI, is running a forensic investigation into the breach, including whether the conduct broke any existing Australian law.Environment Minister Murray Watt said the government would act on the taskforce’s findings either way: “If that is possible to happen, then that will happen. If it’s not possible, then clearly that indicates that we need to change Australian laws.”Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton said the review would determine “whether there needs to be legislative change” to recognise an incident carried out by an AI agent as something the law can currently address. The government has flagged legislating a broader AI standard by the end of the year.Taylor has not committed the Coalition to a specific position. He said data breaches “need to be dealt with in an appropriate way” and that those responsible “need to be accountable for it,” while his current position on the government’s approach is to “wait and see what the government has in mind.”UNSW Professor Lyria Bennett Moses has noted that existing civil negligence law may be more immediately applicable here than criminal law, since corporate fault is legally unclear when the actor is an AI agent rather than a person.Why it ...
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    10 min
  • 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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