In The Guardian

Mark Aitken, a registered nurse for 39 years who spent 16 years in aged care roles including assessing elderly people for support and funding, said he quit his job in regional Victoria just four months into using the tool.

[…]

“Eight times out of 10, the outcome was different to one that I would have recommended, or my colleagues would have recommended,” Aitken said.

It follows previous controversies over automated decision-making tools being used by the government, including the robodebt welfare scandal, and concerns about algorithm-driven disability funding through the NDIS.

The IAT user guide does not explain how the algorithm weighs risk, need or complexity, and Aitken said this information was never revealed to assessors.

When he asked at a government seminar about the evaluation framework, including what data was being collected, how accuracy would be assessed, and whether results would be publicly reported, he said he felt “shut down”.

“I left my job because I didn’t want to be part of a system that removed the ultimate decision-making about support from real, experienced people who care,” he said.

“The government valued the algorithm more than people with skills, intelligence and knowledge.”

He said some assessors began “gaming” the system, inputting information they knew would generate the level of care the person needed even if that information did not accurately reflect their situation.

“People shouldn’t have to put in fake information,” Aitken said. “I just started to feel like it was going to be another robodebt, I became very uncomfortable, and just felt the tool wasn’t ethical.”

The real gender ideologues at work:

Aiv Puglielli, the Greens’ equality spokesperson, on Wednesday moved a motion calling on the upper house’s legal and social issues committee to investigate the scale of such crimes, as well as the state’s current response and support available to victims.

It follows what Puglielli described as a “disturbing” and “terrifying” series of attacks targeting gay and bisexual men across several states and territories since 2024. In some instances, videos of the attacks have been recorded and posted on social media.

As of October 2024, 35 people had been arrested in relation to such incidents, Victoria police confirmed in a statement to Guardian Australia.

Police said the alleged offenders – most aged between 13 and 20 – had used fake profiles on dating apps to lure their victims.

“The victims are then allegedly assaulted, robbed, threatened and subjected to homophobic comments,” a police spokesperson said.

[…]

During the June 2025 sentencing of a 19-year-old Victorian man who met and assaulted two people after speaking to them on the gay dating app Grindr, the court heard he admitted to police he had been inspired by vigilante-style videos he had seen on TikTok.

Puglielli said the inquiry would examine how influencers sharing far-right, misogynistic and homophobic “alpha male” content operate online, and how to protect young people from their messaging.

He alleged some perpetrators, often very young men, had been “groomed and radicalised by far-right manosphere influencers”.

This:

Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.

The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.

The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.

You can't make this stuff up:

Insiders at Australia’s biggest private company – Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting – have lifted the veil on what they describe as a “bizarre” culture within the organisation that includes annual requests to thank Australia’s richest person.

While not compulsory, the thank you messages are encouraged by senior executives and are requested across the company, including from workers at its mine sites.

[…]

One former employee describes the thank you messages as a “wild concept”, particularly given that Rinehart has become the country’s richest person in part off the back of her staff’s work.

“We are encouraged to email her thanks for literally making her the richest person around,” he says. “Because the transaction where I work my guts out and she becomes even more rich is not enough – we should thank her yearly, apparently.”

[…]

Insiders have told Guardian Australia that staff are frequently exposed to political material, with an email seen by the Guardian encouraging workers to listen to Trump’s inaugural address.

The email, sent as an Australia Day message by Veldsman, talks about Rinehart’s visit to the US and Trump’s “strong commitment to creating a field that attracts investment into the US, something our government here in Australia could learn a thing or two about! While Australia has punched above its weight on the global stage, we are faced with increasing headwinds brought about by ill-conceived tape and tax that is stifling business.”

Guardian Australia understands that Hancock Prospecting distributes the conservative magazine the Spectator in the company’s office buildings and mining sites.

A nice little potted history of Australian telecommunication privatisation failure:

A closer look at the record tells a different story. Technological progress in telecommunications produced a steady reduction in prices throughout the 20th century, taking place around the world and regardless of the organisational structure. The shift from analog to digital telecommunications accelerated the process. Telecom Australia, the statutory authority that became Telstra, recorded total factor productivity growth rates as high as 10% per year, remaining profitable while steadily reducing prices.

But for the advocates of neoliberal microeconomic reform, this wasn’t enough. They hoped, or rather assumed, that competition would produce both better outcomes for consumers and a more efficient rollout of physical infrastructure. […]

The failures emerged early. Seeking to cement their positions before the advent of open competition, Telstra and Optus spent billions rolling out fibre-optic cable networks. But rather than seeking to maximise total coverage, the two networks were virtually parallel, a result that is a standard prediction of economic theory. The rollout stopped when the market was fully opened in 1997, leaving parts of urban Australia with two redundant fibre networks and the rest of the country with none.

The next failure came with the rollout of broadband. Under public ownership, this would have been a relatively straightforward matter. But the newly privatised Telstra played hardball, demanding a system that would cement its monopoly position in fixed-line infrastructure. The end result was the need to return to public ownership with the national broadband network, while paying Telstra handsomely for access to ducts and wires that the public had owned until a few years previously.

Meanwhile the hoped-for competition in mobile telephony has failed to emerge. The near-duopoly created in 1991, with Telstra as the dominant player and Optus playing second fiddle, has endured for more than 30 years. 

Queensland’s controversial ban on puberty blockers and other hormone therapies is unlawful because of a failure to properly consult health executives on a decision affected by political interference, a court has heard.

The supreme court in Brisbane on Wednesday heard the ban should be overturned as part of a legal challenge launched by the mother of a transgender child. The mother cannot be identified for legal reasons.

Her lawyers told the court that Queensland Health’s director general, Dr David Rosengren, was required by law to consult with the executive of any service affected “in developing a health service directive” before he issued the order, banning such transgender hormone therapies for new patients aged under 18, on 28 January.

[…]

On the day the directive was issued, the state’s health executives were called to a Microsoft Teams meeting at 10am for consultation on the decision, which lasted 22 minutes.

At the same time as that meeting, Nicholls was announcing the decision at a press conference, the court was told.

Mark Steele KC, representing the mother, said Rosengren had signed off on publishing the health service directive an hour earlier and had repeatedly urged staff to ensure it was published at 10.30am.

The directive was published at 11.06am.

Steele told the court that Rosengren must have done so to line up with the end of Nicholls’ press conference.

“That can’t be genuine consultation if it’s just a fait accompli,” Steele told the court.

Your regular reminder that solving every problem by creating a competitive market of private sector "service providers" does not work.

Just 11.7% of jobseekers in Australia found long-term employment through a job provider in the latest financial year, according to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’ annual report.

Service providers are allowed to claim publicly funded outcome payments when clients have completed four, 12 and 26 weeks in employment – regardless of whether the client or provider found the job.

[…]

Jeremy Poxon, a welfare advocate at the Antipoverty Centre, said the system was failing “en mass” to help get people into meaningful work.

“The government knows full well that this system is failing on this basic metric to help people into work,” he said.

It came as Guardian Australia revealed Centrelink has threatened payment suspensions to jobseekers at a rate of five a minute, despite serious concerns from social security experts that they are illegal.

Poxon said the data showed the system was better at punishing people than helping them into employment.

Couldn't have put it better myself:

Powerful financial actors have done a great job at framing themselves as the solution to, rather than the cause of, the prevailing crisis. They have incessantly pushed the now-dominant narrative that more real estate investment is a good thing because it will increase the supply of much-needed homes. Blackstone, for example, claims to play a “positive role in addressing the chronic undersupply of housing across the continent”. But the evidence suggests that greater involvement of financial markets has not increased aggregate home ownership or housing supply, but instead inflated house prices and rents.

The thing is, institutional investors aren’t really into producing housing. It is directly against their interests to significantly increase supply. As one asset manager concedes, housing undersupply is bad for residents but “supportive for cashflows”. Blackstone’s president famously admitted that “the big warning signs in real estate are capital and cranes”. In other words, they need shortages to keep prices high.

Where corporate capital does produce new homes, they will of course be maximally profitable. Cities such as Manchester, Brussels and Warsaw have experienced a proliferation of high-margins housing products such as micro-apartments, build-to-rent and co-living. Designed with the explicit intention of optimising cashflows, these are both unaffordable and unsuitable for most households. Common Wealth, a thinktank focusing on ownership, found that the private equity-backed build-to-rent sector, which accounts for 30% of new homes in London, caters predominantly to high-earning single people. Families represent just 5% of build-to-rent tenants compared with a quarter of the private rental sector more broadly. These overpriced corporate appendages are a stark reminder of the market’s inability to deliver homes that fit the needs and incomes of most people.

[…]

In recent decades we have been living through an ever-intensifying social experiment. Can housing, a fundamental need for all human beings, be successfully delivered under the machinations of finance capitalism? The evidence now seems overwhelming: no.

As investors have come to dominate, so the power of residents has been systematically undermined. We are left with a crisis of inconceivable proportions. While we can, and should, point the finger at corporate greed, we must remember that this is the system working precisely as it is set up to do. When profit is the prevailing force, housing provision invariably fails to align with social need – to generate the types of homes within the price ranges most desperately required. In the coming years, housing will occupy centre stage in European politics. Now is the time for fundamental structural changes that reclaim homes from the jaws of finance, re-empower residents and reinstate housing as a core priority for public provision.

Fears about losing jobs to automation have become commonplace, but according to United Workers Union (UWU) research and policy officer Lauren Kelly, who researches labour and supermarket automation, rather than manual work being eliminated, it is often augmented by automation technologies. This broadens the concern from one of job loss to more wide-ranging implications for the nature of work itself. That is, she says, “rather than replace human workers with robots, many are being forced to work like robots”.

In addition to the monitoring tactics used upon workers, supermarkets also direct their all-seeing eye towards customers through an array of surveillance measures: cameras track individuals through stores, “smart” exit gates remain closed until payment, overhead image recognition at self-serve checkouts assess whether you’re actually weighing brown onions, and so on. Woolworths even invests in a data-driven “crime intelligence platform”, which raises significant privacy concerns, shares data with police and claims that it can predict crime before it happens – not just the plot of Minority Report but also an offshoot of the deeply problematic concept of “predictive policing”. Modern supermarkets have become a testing ground for an array of potential rights-infringing technologies.

Late last year, the company introduced a new framework to enforce an efficiency rate for picking of 100%. Workers who weren’t meeting the standard would be put into a coaching program. Some were directed to “stop all time wasting and non-productive behaviors”, according to warning letters seen by Guardian Australia. Failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action and even loss of employment. One worker described it as a “bullying” tactic.

[…]

A spokesperson for Primary Connect, Woolworths’ supply chain arm, said its coaching framework helped “to ensure a fair approach to the standards is applied to any personal circumstances or abilities”.

[…]

But Guardian Australia spoke to a dozen current and former workers for Woolworths and Primary Connect, who claim the standards are unfair and putting their safety at risk. All requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

As more people shop online, there’s been growing attention to the treatment and tracking of workers in warehouses run by e-commerce conglomerates like Amazon. In June, the state of California fined the company for failing to properly disclose its productivity targets to workers – a decision the company is reportedly appealing. But Australian warehouse workers have long been subject to this style of control. Engineered standards were introduced by Australian supermarket chains in the late 1980s and 1990s and were the target of industrial action.

“It’s a fantasy of total efficiency,” Christopher O’Neill, a research fellow at Deakin University who studies workplace automation, said of engineered standards. “The argument was: this was a ‘scientific’ way of rationalising work and eliminating wasted time,” he said.

“It’s basically a pseudoscientific veneer over this kind of fantasy of being able to control every second of every day.”