In ABC News

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.

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.

[…]

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."

In evidence this morning the judge overseeing the case, Justice Michael O'Bryan, asked Coles to explain what it was telling customers with its prominent marketing campaign, featuring giant red hands pointing down.

"It's really asking a bigger question about what ordinary consumers understand about the Down Down program," Justice O'Bryan said.

In response, legal counsel for Coles John Sheahan KC said: "In terms of what consumers would take from the advertising campaigns and the red hand — not much."

"It's an indication that Coles is trying to keep prices low," he said.

[…]

Mr Sheahan said the ACCC case was too complicated because it relied on an assumption that the average shopper understood the many factors that went into deciding a price while they were browsing the aisles.

"It's too complex to credibly attribute to an ordinary, reasonable consumer walking down the aisle at Coles," he said.

"What they would be concerned [about] when they're walking down the aisle … is whether the claimed discount was, to use of the expression yesterday 'fair dinkum.'"

[…]

"In the end, all prices are temporary. Nothing lasts forever," Mr Sheahan said.

He said both sides accepted that the pricing tickets customers were shown in store were "literally correct".

Mr Sheahan repeated Coles's defence that it also reflected a genuine discount.

If Coles added background information about the price history to the ticket it would be too difficult to understand, he said.

Do I hear dominoes falling with grim predictability? Plus: there's a Northern Territory Government? You learn something new every day.

In short:

Health Minister Steve Edgington has announced the Northern Territory government will no longer fund puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormone treatments for children.

He said the government's public health focus would instead "remain on adolescent mental health services".

What's next?

Mr Edgington says the policy will affect "a handful of young teenagers" who had been accessing the treatments through the NT's public health system.

[…]

Children in the Northern Territory will no longer have access to publicly funded puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones after Health Minister Steve Edgington announced the government would follow Queensland's lead in suspending the treatments. […]

"Territory kids deserve to grow up free from these dangerous, ideologically driven practices with irreversible consequences," he said.

"The Territory's public health focus will remain on adolescent mental health services."

The move follows pressure from the Australian Christian Lobby, which presented a petition to the government in October 2024, calling on it to "suspend all medical and surgical transitioning for children in the NT".

"I have not seen anything like this anywhere else in the world," said Lisa Given, professor of Information Sciences from RMIT, who specialises in age-assurance technology.

"As people learn about the implications of this, we will likely see people stepping up and saying, 'Wait a minute, why wasn't I told that this was going to happen?'"

From December 27, Google — which dominates the Australian search market with a share of more than 90 per cent — and its rival, Microsoft, will have to use some form of age-assurance technology on users when they sign in, or face fines of almost $50 million per breach.

[…]

Despite the apparent magnitude of the shift, it has mostly gone unnoticed, in stark contrast to the political and media fanfare surrounding the teen social media ban, which will block under-16s from major platforms using similar technology.

As for why so few people have noticed, it may be because the changes took place away from the halls of parliament, in the relatively dry world of regulation.

[…]

Search engines will have a suite of options to choose from for checking the ages of their Australian users.

There are seven main methods listed in the new regulations:

• Photo ID checks
• Face scanning age estimation tools
• Credit card checks
• Digital ID
• Vouching by the parent of a young person
• Using AI to guess a user's age based on the data the company already has
• Relying on a third party that has already checked the user's age

A majority of Victorian renters have experienced a "significant tenancy issue", yet only half of them made a complaint due to fears of landlord retaliation, a new report based on a survey of 1,000 renters has found.

The survey by the Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC) found 79 per cent of renters in Victoria had faced at least one problem in the past 12 months.

The most common issues were delays to repairs and maintenance, "unreasonable" rent increases and excessive photos and videos being taken during inspections.

But only 52 per cent of the affected households lodged a complaint, and even fewer — just 2 per cent — escalated their complaint to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).

"What we saw is that there is a broader challenge that even where legal protections exist, renters may not feel safe or supported to use them," CPRC deputy chief executive Chandni Gupta said.

Um… You've heard of the Nazis, haven't you?

During the final day of the hearing on Tuesday, the court heard from a member of the public who observed the rally on December 3, 2023.

Mark Doery was a witness presented by the defence.

"It just looked like a bunch of boys in a group, going for a walk," Mr Doery told the court.

"Nothing stood out as offensive to me, but that's just me."

[…]

"The prosecution has not proved the behaviour of the accused was offensive," Mr Sewell said.

Ultimately, Magistrate Mike Wardell agreed and said he had not been convinced of Victoria Police's case that Mr Sewell's behaviour during the rally was "deeply or seriously insulting".

"Behaviour deemed unacceptably offensive by some, may not trouble others at all," Magistrate Wardell said.

"The test … is whether the impugned behaviour is so deeply and seriously insulting … as to warrant the interference in the criminal law.

"Society is evolving in attitudes all the time … Fringe groups are arising all the time."

Human civilisation is now officially too stupid to be allowed to continue:

There's only a handful of lenders in Australia that are accepting cryptocurrencies as collateral for loans.

While there's no clear and present danger to Australia's financial system, the federal government and regulators are watching them.

"Crypto assets can be highly volatile," ASIC told the ABC.

"Lenders securing loans with crypto may risk the collateral becoming insufficient to cover the loan if the value of the crypto drops quickly.

"For consumers, this means a higher risk of having your loan called back early, and needing to sell your crypto assets to cover a default."

But here's the problem.

The industry's keen to grow, but economists have told the ABC the further the industry grows, the more it will present a major risk to Australia's financial stability.

"What the law needs to do, what regulators need to do, is to ensure that people who are not especially sophisticated, or who don't have the capacity to understand and assess the risks that they might be exposed to aren't sucked in by unscrupulous operators," Saul Eslake says.

In 1987, the Medical Journal of Australia published a paper titled Gender-disordered children: does inpatient treatment help? by Robert Kosky, then director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Services in Western Australia.

It described eight children, all under 12, who were hospitalised at Stubbs Terrace between 1975 and 1980 for what the paper called "gender identity disorder".

The children were separated from their families and treated for months at a time. The paper argued their "cross-gender behaviours" were the result of inappropriate family dynamics — and suggested the hospital program corrected them.

When Anja Ravine, a trans youth health researcher at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, came across it decades later, she was alarmed.

"It's implicit that they were expecting gender identity to return to what was expected. So that is really within the definition of conversion therapy."

Efforts to suppress or change a person's gender identity or sexuality, often referred to as "conversion therapy", are now illegal in most parts of Australia.

"We know now that people who've been exposed to this actually carry long-term psychological scars. It's very harmful," Dr Ravine said.

Despite being nearly 40 years old, the Kosky paper is regularly cited by opponents of gender-affirming care in submissions to lawmakers, courts and medical regulators around the world.

Even in Australia, the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, has written a clinical guide on how doctors should care for gender diverse youth that also cites the paper.

Dr Ravine said that the study being used is "deeply troubling".

There are investors like the Wilsons all over Australia, who have built or bought disability homes where they are not needed, often under the guidance of property or investment advisers.

Property investment adviser Goro Gupta said part of the problem was that the NDIA — the agency that administers the policy — has not released clear data about where eligible people with a disability want to live.

That has meant many SDA houses have been constructed on the outskirts of capital and regional cities where the land is cheap.

"That's why, of course, the average investor wants to invest," Mr Gupta said.

At one estate in outer-western Melbourne, he was incredulous that so many houses for people with profound disabilities had been built.

"In these areas, there's a lack of amenities," he said.

"It's not close to shops, it's not close to the allied health services that people with disabilities need on a day-to-day basis.

"I mean, have a look at this area. It's paddocks."

For some investors who have overextended to build the homes, renting them out as a normal property is not an option because the returns are nowhere near enough to cover their mortgage repayments.

That means the homes are sitting empty in the hope that an eligible disability client will move in.