In The Guardian

Woolworths and Coles are big companies that plan to stay around for a long time. Could not one or both of them commit to a policy of truthful advertising and stand by it long enough to establish a reputation that customers could trust?

This hasn’t happened – with supermarkets, or telecoms, or banks or anywhere else, at least in the absence of comprehensive public shaming driven by government action. But why not?

One explanation, apparent from the evidence in the Coles case, is that no one wants to be the first to move. Given the short-term pressure that decision-makers are under, it’s easy to imagine that any proposal of this kind will be put in the too-hard basket and left there.

Another possibility is that distrust is so widespread that no single company can break the pattern. The era of neoliberalism has certainly strengthened this distrust. There was a time when used car dealers were famously untrustworthy but financial institutions were pillars of probity. Today, when buying a second-hand car, the biggest risk is not that the speedo will be wound back but that you will be sold a loan with deceptively high interest. In this context, you just assume everyone is lying.

Last week, the German-owned supermarket chain took another step into the Australian mainstream, trialling a grocery delivery service with DoorDash in Canberra ahead of a potential expansion around the country.

Aldi has long resisted offering deliveries, given the service would make a basket of groceries more expensive, undercutting its price advantage over Coles and Woolworths.

[…]

Aldi tried a similar service with a third-party delivery provider in the UK, but it didn’t last. The chain is also hesitant to build its own delivery system because that would add significant costs to the business, which would either result in higher grocery prices or less profits for its German owners.

Prof Gary Mortimer, a retail expert at the Queensland University of Technology, says Aldi has had to respond to the delivery trend.

“Online food and groceries now represent anywhere between 10 to 12% of supermarket revenue,” Mortimer says.

“As Aldi enters into that space, even using a third-party provider like DoorDash, Coles and Woolworths will be looking at how they go about defending that market share.”

Retail expert Bronwyn Thompson says Aldi considers the competitive advantage of a delivery service to be worth the additional expense.

“If they’re trying to be more of a ‘whole shop’ destination, this is part of that,” Thompson says.

Guardian Australia has spoken with several young workers and families who feel their teenagers were pressured to join the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) in their first days on the job, including a 14-year-old who was recruited in mid-2024 on her first shift at Hungry Jack’s.

[…]

Lachlan, said he got a text from the union around the time his daughter Sarah was signed up, but he did not believe that was sufficient. Lachlan is a union member himself, but in his view the SDA organiser’s manner left no room for his daughter to say no.

He said it was not the right approach for a 14-year-old first-time worker: “I support the unions, but I don’t support predatory tactics.”

He said Sarah is now a member of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU), an upstart union that formed in 2016 in opposition to the SDA.

[…]

In the mid-2010s, a series of reports in the Age detailed how part-time workers at McDonald’s, Coles and other retail employers were being underpaid due to deals negotiated by the union, leading to accusations of a “cosy” relationship between the SDA and employers. “[The SDA] has always bargained in the best interests of workers within the industrial relations framework at the time,” the union said at the time.

A number of SDA-brokered deals between workers and employers came under scrutiny at the time. Its 2015 deal with Coles, for example, had to be remedied after the Fair Work Commission decided it failed the “Better-Off Overall Test” (BOOT) because a cut in penalty rates had left a substantial number of workers worse off.

Well said:

This week, it was revealed that despite the Australian government’s world-first teen social media ban, around seven in 10 children remain on major platforms. What’s more, the eSafety report also shows that there has been no notable change in cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children.

For a policy that was touted as the solution to keeping kids safe from harm online, this is a damning indictment of the ban’s effectiveness.

Who could possibly have predicted that this wasn’t going to work? Well, lots of people.

Countless experts were ignored, including those in the fields of digital wellbeing, digital rights advocacy, youth mental health and more than 140 academics and 20 Australian civil society organisations. Even the eSafety commissioner herself had doubts, and internally the government was aware of a lack of evidence to support the ban before they passed the legislation anyway.

[…]

Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram.

Not only is the social media ban working just as predicted (that is to say, it’s not); what other, more effective alternatives might the Australian government have pursued while spending the better part of two years chasing this red herring? What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?

If this is the first time you’re hearing about it, you’re not alone. Despite the significance of the changes, these latest rules are the result of industry codes, which differs to regular legislation. These codes don’t go through parliament. Instead, they’re developed by the tech industry and registered by the eSafety commissioner in a process called co-regulation. On one hand, this can be good: it can allow for more flexibility or technology-specific detail that is less appropriate in legislation. On the other: it creates risk of industry co-option, and by bypassing parliamentary process, can give an enormous amount of power to an unelected official (in this case, the eSafety commissioner).

Greens senator David Shoebridge has called the implications of age verification for search engines “staggering” and noted that “these proposals don’t have to go through an elected parliament and we can’t vote them down no matter how significant concerns are. That combined with lack of public input is a serious issue.”

The age verification policy development process has been littered with blunders that make a mockery of meaningful consultation and evidence-based policy development. It is particularly striking that these codes were drafted before the completion of the government’s $6.5m trial into the efficacy of age assurance. Later, the trial’s preliminary findings conceded the technology is not guaranteed to be effective, and noted “concerning evidence” that some technology providers were seeking to collect too much personal information.

While a government-commissioned survey on the teen social media ban found overwhelming support in theory, it also found most people have no idea what that means in practice, with many uncomfortable with the methods it might entail – such as biometric face scanning or handing over your credit card details. And while there was much fanfare around the social media ban, it’s not clear there is a social licence to extend this approach to search engines and beyond. It seems many people may be unpleasantly surprised.

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.