Linkage

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.

Fifteen years ago, the biggest challenge that faced the Tablelands food bowl was water security.

Now, it’s how far farmers have to send their produce to market, because they have to cover the freight costs to the metro distribution hubs.

“That central point has been moved to further and further away, to a location where there is a lot of consumption, but … regional areas [suffer] because it takes time to get all the way back,” Mr Keevers says.

“We can all grow crops, there’s no fear of that, and we’ve got big producers, and we’ve got small producers.

“But the key is they have to have a home for their goods.

“If they don’t have a home for it, they’ll go broke.”

[…]

Griffith University’s Kimberley Reis, who researches local supply chains and how to make them more resilient, says the current model needs to improve.

“We don’t have a food system model that is based on supporting local and regional economies,” Dr Reis says.

She wants the big supermarkets to bring in local food procurement requirements, where food isn’t just grown locally, it’s also sorted in the region where it is grown.

In other words, “the produce doesn’t leave” the area at any stage.

“So that they [the big supermarkets] are showing good corporate responsibility to support the self-reliance and the resilience of that region,” she says.

But a Coles spokesperson says central distribution points and a national supply chain “is the most effective way for us to deliver value and quality for our customers”, with the same prices for shoppers in the supermarket giant’s city and regional stores.

You might have an idea about how supermarket specials work — there’s a retail price, and if there’s extra stock or a special promotion, there’s a discounted sale price.

But for thousands of products at Coles and Woolworths, like the box of Cadbury Favourites and the packet of Tim Tams, these specials aren’t occasional. They follow a clear, and sometimes predictable, up-and-down movement.

The ABC analysed the online prices of nearly 44,000 items at Coles and Woolworths available to purchase between the end of May and mid-August this year, not tied to any specific location.

The analysis assumes the shopper is taking one product off the shelf, and so it excludes “multi-buy” specials, such as two-for-one.

It found that roughly 2,500 products moved in weekly cycles, mostly alternating between two or three price points, just like the box of Cadbury Favourites.

If the social web of the past decade was defined by walled gardens and algorithmic feeds, the next decade could be defined by interoperable layers, where RSS plays the same role for publishing that SMTP plays for email: a basic, universal substrate that everything else can build on.

The important thing about the open social web is not which protocol “wins.” It’s whether we build an ecosystem where publishers keep control of their distribution and readers keep control of their attention. RSS remains one of the strongest tools we have to make that possible.

RSS has always worked quietly in the background. In a moment when the web is being reshaped by enclosure, consolidation, and algorithmic mediation, its reliability is exactly what we need. It offers a simple, durable way for publishers to keep control of their distribution and for readers to keep control of their attention, without permission, platform lock-in, or hidden agendas. If we treat RSS not as a relic of an earlier web but as the strategic infrastructure it already is, it can continue to anchor a more open, more resilient, and more humane internet for decades to come.

Using RSS is a way to regain control over the information you read online. Instead of letting platforms like Twitter or TikTok control what you see based on engagement metrics meant to prolong your time on the platform and subject you to endless ads, you can subscribe only to the sources and writers you want to read. Unlike enshittified social networks, your RSS feed will give you exactly what you signed up to read — no promoted posts, no algorithmic deboosting for posts that dare to link to articles, no ragebait from people you don’t follow.

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

"It was designed in the early 1960s by Frank Robert Wake, a psychology professor with Carleton University," Fodey explains. "The Canadian government paid to send Dr. Wake to the United States to study detection devices that were used there at the time. After about a year of research, Dr. Wake returned to Canada and used his findings to create the 'Special Project' as it was officially known. A sergeant with the RCMP later coined it 'the fruit machine,' and the name stuck."

The machine itself was dismantled long ago, but it "looked like something resembling a dentist chair in front of a camera mounted on a pulley," says Fodey.

"Men would be subjected to lewd images and photographs would be taken of their pupils in response to the various images," Fodey says. "The thinking was that if one's pupils enlarged at the sight of a naked man, this would indicate same sex attraction. It was, in a word, ridiculous."

[…]

When Fodey first started researching the film, she was shocked this had even happened — and how long it continued (it began in the 1950s and wasn't eliminated until — seriously — the early 1990s). But as her work continued, what surprised her most was how this went far beyond people losing their jobs.

"In fact, for many, losing their jobs was the least of what they endured directly because of this campaign," she says. "Poverty, homelessness, having to go back in the closet, substance abuse, gay aversion therapy, sexual assaults, and for some — suicide. The consequences of this campaign, as one of our survivors captures perfectly in the film, was a scenario from a horror story."

Shocked, but not surprised.

Australia's universities are paying external consultants and contractors an estimated $1.8 billion a year without disclosing which firms they are hiring and what the money is being spent on.

Consultancies have been accused of infiltrating universities, wasting scarce public funds on questionable advice about cutting courses and jobs, and undermining the sector's principles of public good.

[…]

When the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) embarked on a process in 2024 to reduce debt and balance its budget, it could have sought advice from its own Business School, which includes some of the finest minds in finance, accounting and economics.

Instead, it called in external consultants from KPMG, which charged about $7 million for what UTS academics have described as "cookie-cutter" advice on how to save money.

After winning the contract, KPMG embedded itself within UTS as it began assessing which courses and academic programs were generating revenue for the university and which were not.

At least 24 KPMG staff, including directors and partners, soon had UTS email addresses, could access the university's Microsoft Teams and SharePoint systems, and were attending staff meetings.

"That is the standard operating procedure: get into a client and look as much like you're a part of the client, infantilise the client, make them think that they can't do things without you," says former KPMG partner turned whistleblower Brendan Lyon.

Mr Lyon, now a professor of practice at the University of Wollongong, said when he was at KPMG, the education sector was seen as an area ripe for revenue growth.

"That was a real focus. They'd recently recruited a former vice-chancellor of an Australian university. From what I saw within KPMG, it was a real growth area and a real growth target," he said.

UTS staff had to use a freedom of information request to access the report KPMG wrote for the university. The document they were given was highly redacted.

Eventually, a handful of staff, including associate professor Paul Brown, were allowed to view a copy of the report under strict supervision.

[…]

Dr Brown said that while there were some suggestions that made sense around working capital, he was shocked to see that one section of the report suggested the university should change its organisational structure to be more triangle-shaped.

"We laughed because it was like a Woolworths-type organisational structure, not a university with all its complexities … where you're going to do serious research and have to do world-leading innovation," he said.

"Just the lack of understanding … was astounding," he said.

Just popping this here, as it seems Canada is preparing to be the next lemming over the cliff.

Governments in the U.S. and around the world are increasingly adopting these restrictive measures in the name of protecting children online. But in practice, these systems create dangerous new forms of surveillance, censorship, and exclusion.

Technologically, the age verification process can take many forms: collection and analysis of government ID, biometric scans, algorithmic or AI-based behavioral or user monitoring, digital ID, the list goes on. But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. Once that valuable data is collected, it can easily be leaked, hacked, or misused. (Indeed, we’ve already seen several breaches of age verification providers.)

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Age verification technology itself is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive. These restrictive mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet. They are tools of censorship, used to block people from viewing or sharing information that the government deems “harmful” or “offensive.” And they create surveillance systems that critically undermine online privacy, chill access to vital online communities and resources, and burden the expressive rights of adults and young people alike.

This is a topic I've been avoiding for years...but ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Here's how I understand the homelessness crisis, and what the solutions are.

There are, in my mind, a few rules for "CEO said a thing!" journalism if it's to qualify:

• You can never directly challenge anything the CEO said, even if the CEO has a long history of false or misleading promises and claims.
• You can never include any useful historical context about the company or executives' past statements, even if they've been proven repeatedly wrong. The CEO's comments should always exist in a magic vacuum.
• You should never, under any circumstances, actually take the time to talk to, and quote, an objective expert or academic in the field you're writing about, especially if they're inclined to criticize the CEO. This can slow down publication time and impact the quest for news-cycle ad traffic.
• You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).

When I entered the journalism industry sideways as a telecom beat reporter, I quickly noticed that most U.S. journalism – especially U.S. business journalism – wasn't particularly interested in context or the truth. 

I'd look around and read mainstream coverage of the broadband giants I wrote about, noticing they didn't mention these were lumbering, anti-competitive, unethical monopolies coddled and created by corruption. I thought it was weird, but young and insecure, I thought maybe the problem was somehow me. 

But as I got older it became very clear to me that most of these outlets really weren't interested in conveying factual reality to readers. They were interested in building an elaborate alternate reality with one central function: coddle unchecked wealth accumulation with a vast scaffolding of strange mythologies.