From the @TheAusInstitute - Cancellations for people who fail to reconnect with employment services within four weeks are set to resume on October 26, more than two years after being paused. “We are extremely alarmed by this announcement that will see the screws turned even tighter on welfare recipients who are already under so much strain,” said The Antipoverty Centre co-coordinator Jay Coonan. Two subsequent reports by the Commonwealth Ombudsman exposed unlawful cancellations and failings in how affected people were compensated. But welfare groups have accused the government of pushing ahead without detailing how it has fixed the identified failures. “Last year, our own analysis revealed that roughly 310,000 people had had their payments cancelled illegally,” said Economic Justice Australia CEO Kate Allingham. Read the full piece on The Point: Welfare groups criticise Albanese government's plan to restart Centrelink payment cancellations | The Point thepoint.com.au/new/261021-w…

While Australia stared at the crippled dead cat they just threw on the table, Labor and the Liberals were quietly passing legislation that should have been front-page news. The dead cat was Jordon Steele-John. I don’t know for sure who threw it there. But I know what happened in Parliament while everyone was looking. On Monday 12 October, Labor and the Coalition backed the Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026. Sounds harmless, doesn’t it? It creates a legal framework for more than $1.4 BILLION a year in government payments to healthcare providers, including corporate-owned businesses. But buried in that legislation are powers to let ministers decide payment rules, demand records, share personal information, investigate providers, recover money and authorise computers to make decisions, including decisions requiring judgement. Parliament’s own Human Rights Committee had already warned that these information powers could seriously interfere with Australians’ privacy and that the safeguards might not be good enough. They passed it anyway. Then came the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2026. More computer-made decisions. More use of income data to calculate family assistance and child support. New powers to change certain decisions already under review by the Administrative Review Tribunal. Some provisions improve review rights. Others expand automated administration. After Robodebt, you might reasonably expect Parliament to examine every one of those powers with a microscope. And then there was the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026. This changes aged-care subsidies, accommodation deposits, means-testing arrangements and government debt recovery. It also establishes a limited pathway for reconsidering certain aged-care assessments. Not the unfettered right for qualified assessors to override an algorithm when it gets someone’s needs wrong. After months of pressure, the government finally agreed on Thursday to an independent review of its aged-care assessment system. Now consider what we’ve been uncovering at Enough Australia. Private equity buying up healthcare businesses. nib acquiring independent NDIS plan managers. Publicly funded services being consolidated into corporate groups. Governments increasingly relying on data, payment rules and automated administration. These laws do not hand Medicare or the NDIS to nib. But they help build the administrative and funding environment in which large corporate operators can do business. We, the public, pays for it. The government writes the rules. Private businesses can receive the money. And increasingly, computer systems help decide who qualifies, what gets paid and what happens when the records don’t agree. Labor and the Coalition did not agree on every amendment, particularly in aged care. But they supported key parts of this expanding administrative machinery. And who was sitting in Parliament on Monday warning about exactly this? Jordon Steele-John. On Tuesday, he supported an amendment seeking to abolish the controversial aged-care assessment tool. Labor voted it down. On Thursday, the government announced a review of that system. By Thursday afternoon, the headlines were about Jordon himself. The decade old allegations against him deserve a fair, independent investigation. So do the decisions being made about the rest of us. Because while everyone was staring at the dead cat, Parliament was deciding who controls the money, who controls the information and how much power human beings will have when the computers get it wrong. That’s the story we should be reading. Www.enoughaustralia.com