In ABC News

"Affordable" housing deja vu:

It was spruiked as a scheme to allow low and middle-income earners to purchase their first home in Canberra, but almost five years after signing on, some participants are yet to move in.

Instead, some buyers say they have been left stranded as they grapple with incomplete works while locked in contractual disputes with the builder.

[…]

Last month, Ms Lawther brought an independent assessor to her practical completion inspection, resulting in them both being told to leave the property due to unauthorised access.

In a subsequent email, the builder advised independent inspectors would not be allowed on site prior to handover because the homes had already been inspected and passed by the certifier.

[…]

Earlier in the process, buyers said they were shocked to discover their homes had not been built from brick, despite it being the only external material on the inclusions list.

Instead, the Suburban Land Agency endorsed the use of foam cladding, but admitted the builder had failed to properly communicate the change with the buyers. 

Well, this is good news for the current account balance:

Independent satellite monitoring has detected massive plumes of methane emerging from one of Australia's largest oil and gas complexes.

The persistent clouds above Chevron's Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on Barrow Island off Western Australia's Pilbara coast were picked up by five consecutive passes of the Tanager-1 satellite since November last year.

The most recent, in late August, recorded an average emission rate of about 7.8 tonnes of methane an hour.

That is the equivalent of burning more than 110,000 kilograms of coal within a span of 60 minutes, calculated using an online tool by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The repeated detections, the latest far exceeding a "super emitter" event under US EPA guidelines, prompted a United Nations (UN) warning to Chevron.

According to the UN, methane is responsible for about 25 per cent of global warming and is a greenhouse gas 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide

An investigation by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) has found an "alarming lack of transparency" from major government contractors operating inside the privatised employment services system.

It has also raised concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest arising from for-profit companies in the system making large donations to Australia's major political parties.

[…]

It shows how for-profit "employment services providers" can use aggressive tax minimisation, large dividend payouts, offshore-related party payments, tax havens, and opaque financial reporting to extract profits from the system, without breaking any laws.

And it questions if the system is meeting the public's expectations.

"It's no secret that Australia's system of privatised employment services has failed," the report argues.

"The Howard-era system fills the pockets of private equity and millionaires, while leaving jobseekers without work."

Australia's growing reliance on temporary migrant labour has fuelled a booming labour hire industry, with contractors sitting between growers and workers, often recruiting, transporting and housing them.

While some operate legally, others prey on vulnerable migrant workers, paying them cash, well below the minimum wage.

[…]

The Modern Slavery Act, introduced in 2018, requires companies with annual revenue above $100 million to file a report each year, identifying the modern slavery risks in their operations and supply chains and what they're doing to address them.

It was designed to encourage transparency and improve corporate behaviour.

Four Corners used data analysis tools to analyse hundreds of annual modern slavery statements from 50 food companies between 2020 and 2025.

One in four contained sections that were more than 80 per cent identical to previous reports.

[…]

Former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Allan Fels has dedicated a lot of time to the plight of migrant workers. […]

He describes the Modern Slavery Act as a symbolic and tokenistic law. "It's the sort of law you pass when you want to look as if you're concerned about something, but you don't intend anything to happen," he says.

An independent review of the Modern Slavery Act handed to the federal government in 2023 concluded Australia's framework should be strengthened.

"The report spells out what's obvious to regulators like me — that the law was never intended to be associated with any real action. It was just a law you put on the books as a sign of concern, but with no intent to take serious action," he says.

The system working as intended:

A National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) service provider was allowed to pocket more than $1 million by incorrectly billing for personal training services, while at least 4,000 other providers also incorrectly charged Australians with disability, the federal government says.

The provider that incorrectly billed for more than $1 million charged disabled Australians $193.99 an hour, nearly three times the government's recommended price.

The rort centres on a category of service called "other professionals", which was intended for services provided by a qualified therapist to deliver evidence-based supports.

However, unscrupulous providers submitted a range of other claims under that item, including payments for decluttering, personal training, golf lessons, float tanks and horse therapy.

The report, released tonight, recommends scrapping rules that force developers to include a minimum number of car park spaces when building housing.

The "Wasted Space" report found that upwards of 40 per cent of car parks were left empty each night in apartments in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

"State and local governments typically require new housing to include off-street parking — often much more than residents want, needlessly driving up the price of housing," the report said.

The report found these parking minimums increased construction costs by $70,000 for a two-bedroom Sydney apartment.

Competition led to Coles shortening the amount of time it established a higher price before it was discounted — down to four weeks under its internal policies known as "guardrails".

The guardrails were designed to ensure shoppers weren't misled by prices rising and falling too quickly.

But Coles was desperate to move quicker because it was watching arch-rival Woolworths do exactly that and feared being left behind.

During the trial, Coles admitted it had broken its guardrails on pricing for at least two products — Arnotts Shapes biscuits and the Nature's Gift dog food.

It also downplayed the significance, saying it was due to mistakes and errors — not any "planned" campaign.

The ACCC hit back, saying 62 of the 245 products were sold at the higher price for less than 28 days before being discounted, and it wasn't just one or two "outliers."

Er… Nothing.

Entry into Australia's supermarket sector isn't so simple, according to retail expert Lisa Asher from the University of Sydney.

Aldi entered the market in 2001 and it had taken the company 24 years to get to 600 stores, which was a market share of slightly less than 10 per cent, she said.

"So this idea that it's easy to get market share when Aldi is one of the most innovative grocery retailing models that we have at the moment in the world," she said.

[…]

Ms Asher [highlighted] that divesture powers existed in places such as the United Kingdom and United States.

Without these powers in Australia, she said retailers such as Coles and Woolworths had minimal competition.

In 2000, Franklins had about 12.3 per cent of Australia's market share.

Now, no single retailer outside of Coles and Woolworths has more than 8 per cent.

"There are no disincentives for entrenching market concentration and dominance," she said.

The focus should be less on large foreign chains entering Australia's grocery market, and more about empowering local entrepreneurship, she said.

The ABC used data analysis tools to investigate about 11,000 food products listed on the Woolworths website, and looked at the percentage changes for the main or “characterising” ingredient — like raspberries in raspberry jam — across a 15-month period.

Of these, the ABC then selected 47 products where the main ingredient appeared to decrease in proportion, according to the label.

These products include ice cream, meat, dips, jams, cereal and packaged meals, with some brands represented more than others.

[…]

While some manufacturers said their changes were to improve the recipe, others said they were due to supply chain cost increases and wanting to keep the price of the product low.

Similar changes, where the quality of the product decreases but the weight and price stay the same, have been labelled as “skimpflation” in overseas media.

Supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths expect to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more to repay staff the companies underpaid, following a legal judgement experts say could have wide-reaching implications.

Woolworths has flagged potential additional costs topping $500 million after tax, while Coles has put its preliminary estimate at up to $250 million.

The development could see the total cost of the underpayment scandal soar past $1 billion, with Woolworths having already repaid $330 million to thousands of staff, while Coles has repaid $31 million so far, and had set aside a further $19 million before Monday's extra provision.

On Friday, the Federal Court handed down a judgement on the historical underpayments of employees at the two major supermarkets, affecting nearly 30,000 employees.

The dispute centred on annual salary arrangements, where the employees were paid above the award rate over the year, in place of calculating actual entitlements — under what was known as a "set-off" arrangement.