Australia

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

BOM launched its new website, which was also built by Accenture Australia, in October 2025 during an extreme weather event. It was widely criticised for its costs and poor design, including changes to its rain radar display.

Upon launch, BOM said the website cost $4.1 million to reconfigure. But it has since been revealed that the real cost was approximately $96.5 million, owing to the cost of upgrading and testing its back-end systems.

Much of the cost can be attributed to the $78 million contract signed with Accenture, which initially started as a $31 million contract and grew across nine extensions.

During a Senate estimates hearing late last year, Greens senator Barbara Pocock described the broader program as a "nightmare Harvard case study in contract failure and management of contracts", specifically citing Accenture in her criticism.

"This is a firm that is famous for 'land and expand'," she said.

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In the US, President Donald Trump has taken the axe to the government workforce, with science and climate agencies taking major hits.

In Australia, the CSIRO is also facing significant cuts.

Most recently, it was announced that the organisation would lose up to 350 full-time equivalent jobs across its research units, including reports of over 100 job losses in their Environmental Research Unit.

Senator Whish-Wilson said, given this, Australian scientists would be "rightly questioning" what the government's priorities were.

"Scientists are going to be devastated if they hear that tens of millions of dollars are being spent on new web services when they're being told there's no money to pay for their salaries and for the critical science that they do," he said.

"[Science] which, by the way, feeds into Australian Climate Services and will be used on this website or updated web portal."

Supporters of capitalism like to claim that the supermarket is a wonderful capitalist invention. In fact, the supermarket has been a central figure in pro-capitalist propaganda since the Cold War. For decades, popular culture has linked socialism of any variety with images of grey, joyless stores and empty shelves.

This image is so persistent that we even saw people sharing pictures of supermarket shelves emptied by pandemic panic-buying as if it was a taste of socialism at work. The idea that these photos came from supermarkets operating under in a capitalist economy doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds.

Such propaganda has fostered a common-sense notion that publicly owned supermarkets must inevitably lead to a lack of choice or to food shortages. However, the experience of capitalist supermarkets themselves disproves the idea that bureaucratic planning and centralized control always gives rise to such problems.

Supermarkets don’t spontaneously adapt to the signals of a vibrant free market: they are highly planned economic structures. Decisions are made months or years in advance to secure reliable supply chains, meet seasonal demand, and keep shelves filled.

Moreover, far from being a diverse industry, supermarkets tend toward consolidation. In Australia, just two supermarket chains account for over 65 percent of market share, in a pattern that is repeated all over the world. The business model of supermarkets relies on scale. They could fairly be described as natural monopolies — or in Australia at least, duopolies.

The modern supermarket is the result of large-scale logistics engineering and industrial food production. Neither of these things are inherently capitalist, although the inequality and exploitation that currently define the food system certainly are.

• This inquiry is about finding ways to put the people who use human services at the heart of service provision. This matters because everyone will use human services in their lifetime and change is needed to enable people to have a stronger voice in shaping the services they receive, and who provides them.
• In the study report for this inquiry, the Commission identified six services for which the introduction of greater user choice, competition and contestability would improve outcomes for the people who receive them. These services are: end-of-life care services; social housing; family and community services; services in remote Indigenous communities; patient choice over referred health services; and public dental services. This final inquiry report sets out tailored reforms for those six services. There is no one-size-fits-all competition solution.
• Users should have choice over the human services they access and who provides them, unless there are sound reasons otherwise. Choice empowers users of human services to have greater control over their lives and generates incentives for providers to be more responsive to their needs.
  • Competition and contestability are means to this end and should only be pursued when they improve the effectiveness of service provision.
• A stronger focus on users, better service planning and improved coordination across services and levels of government is needed. Governments should focus on the capabilities and attributes of service providers when designing service arrangements and selecting providers — not simply the form of an organisation.
• Each year, tens of thousands of people who are approaching the end of life are cared for and die in a place that does not fully reflect their choices or meet their needs. Reforms are needed to significantly expand community-based palliative care services and to improve the standard of end-of-life care in residential aged care facilities.
• The social housing system is broken. A single system of financial assistance that is portable across rental markets for private and social housing should be established. This would provide people with more choice over the home they live in and improve equity. Tenancy support services should also be portable across private and social housing.
• Family and community services are not effective at meeting the needs of people experiencing hardship. Practical changes to system planning, provider selection, and contract management would sharpen focus on improving outcomes for people who use these services.
• Current approaches to commissioning human services in remote Indigenous communities are not working. Governments should improve commissioning arrangements and should be more responsive to local needs. This would make services more effective and would lay the foundation for more place-based approaches in the future.
• Patients should have greater choice over which healthcare provider they go to when given a referral or diagnostic request by their general practitioner. A simple legislative change would help. More patient choice would empower patients to choose options that better match their preferences. Public information is needed to support choice and encourage self-improvement by providers.
• Public dental patients have little choice in who provides their care and most services are focused on urgent needs. Long-term reform is needed to introduce a consumer-directed care scheme. This would enhance patient choice and promote a greater focus on preventive care.

• Greater competition, contestability and informed user choice could improve outcomes in many, but not all, human services.
• The Commission has prioritised six areas where outcomes could be improved both for people who use human services, and the community as a whole. Reform could offer the greatest improvements in outcomes for people who use:
  • social housing
  • public hospitals
  • end-of-life care services
  • public dental services
  • services in remote Indigenous communities
  • government-commissioned family and community services.
• Well-designed reform, underpinned by strong government stewardship, could improve the quality of services, increase access to services, and help people have a greater say over the services they use and who provides them.
• Introducing greater competition, contestability and informed user choice can improve the effectiveness of human services.
  • Informed user choice puts users at the heart of service delivery and recognises that, in general, the service user is best placed to make decisions about the services that meet their needs and preferences.
  • Competition between service providers can drive innovation and create incentives for providers to be more responsive to the needs and preferences of users. Creating contestable arrangements amongst providers can achieve many of the benefits of effective competition.
  • For some services, and in some settings, direct government provision of services will be the best way to improve the wellbeing of individuals and families. The introduction of greater competition, contestability and choice does not preclude government provision of services.
• Access to high-quality human services, such as health and housing, underpins economic and social participation.
  • The enhanced equity and social cohesion this delivers improves community welfare.
• Government stewardship — the range of functions governments undertake that help to ensure service provision is effective at meeting its objectives — is critical.
  • Stewardship includes ensuring human services meet standards of quality, suitability and accessibility, giving people the support they need to make choices, ensuring that appropriate consumer safeguards are in place, and encouraging and adopting ongoing improvements to service provision.
• High-quality data are central to improving the effectiveness of human services.
  • User-oriented information allows people to make choices about the services they want and for providers to tailor their service offering to better meet users' needs.
  • Transparent use of data drives improvements in the performance of the system for the provision of human services and increases accountability to those who fund the services.

Well, that's Australia. Punching above our weight in punching down, while simultaneously a world leader in shooting ourselves in the foot.

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.

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“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.”