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

I received a goodbye message from a disabled woman this morning. She told me ‘she couldn’t take any more’. She had no hope left. Having someone like us in Parliament, someone who fought tirelessly for us, had been one of the things keeping her alive. I searched her Facebook wall, found her CoS, who called her and contacted police. An ambulance was sent. Her Facebook page has since entirely disappeared. I don’t have her number. This is the third incident like this in 2026. I don’t know whether she’s alive. I don’t know whether she’s going to spend six months in hospital, like the last disabled woman who reached this point. I don’t know what happens next. But I know what happened this week. A disabled man who sent Facebook messages to two women a decade ago, women who did not even make any kind of formal complaint to the Greens, a matter investigated by the WA Greens at the time, has been dragged through the political sewer and publicly compared to Bruce Lehrmann on Insiders. A man found by a Federal Court judge, on the balance of probabilities, to have raped a woman. Jordon has also been dealing with relentless stalking, has an AVO in place (as do others, against the same woman), and serious related matters are before police. Apparently, none of that warrants the slightest consideration from the self-appointed guardians of decency. And then there’s the particularly filthy business of ‘feels on wheels’. An insult coined by Labor in 2022 because Jordon cried in Parliament over dead disabled children, now being twisted into something sexual. What sort of miserable, grubby little bastard takes a man’s grief over dead children and repackages it as a sexual smear? And what sort of journalist repeats it without establishing where it came from? There is a special place in the political gutter for people who manufacture moral outrage out of somebody else’s suffering, then congratulate themselves on their integrity. These grubs couldn’t recognise due process if it walked into Parliament wearing a fucking name badge. They’ve confused cruelty with courage, public humiliation with justice, and political opportunism with principle. Their compassion is a theatrical production with a press release and a remarkably convenient list of people who don’t qualify for it. And while this circus was consuming every available inch of political oxygen, Parliament was getting on with the business of dismantling disabled people’s lives. The very changes Jordon had been fighting. The ones you’re not talking about while you’re talking about this. Cuts to essential supports. Data matching and surveillance. People being shut inside their homes and shut out of life. Disabled and aged Australians facing terrible harm at the hands of a government that treats us as disposable commodities. Fuck that. You can find an unreported complaint of an inappropriate Facebook message from ten years ago, but apparently you can’t find your conscience when disabled people are begging you not to destroy their lives. What a thoroughly rotten collection of political cowards. You have mistaken the absence of consequences for the possession of principles. You know every word. Trauma-informed. Safeguarding. Human rights. Procedural fairness. You can pronounce them all beautifully into a microphone. You just don’t give a fuck about practising any of them when doing so might cost you a headline, a preselection - yeah, looking at you, WA Greens - a dead cat on the table or a convenient political scalp. And spare me the lectures about protecting women. Where was this righteous fury when disabled women testified about being raped, beaten and abused in institutions? Where is it now, when disabled women and carers are trapped in violent homes because they cannot get the support they need to leave? Where is it when women are telling you that the loss of their disability supports will put their lives in danger?

The Labor Party no longer represents many of the people who vote for it. It is controlled by an unrepresentative coterie of factional controllers like Richard Marles. Internal politics is conducted almost entirely within an elite class. This has produced a timid managerial poll-driven approach to politics. Raising money and the compromises that go with it, including gambling interests, have supplanted party membership. By refusing to take the community seriously and by hiding from public discussion on issues such as AUKUS, Labor has disenfranchised its natural constituency. Can the Greens respond and capture those voters who are very much concerned about a timid government that has lost its moral bearings on such key issues as the genocide in Gaza? I agree with every word. pearlsandirritations.com/pos…