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?

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

Well, I'm glad you asked, @JohnRowsthorne. I knew that some of you would be too clever to fall for that shit. Here's my response on Reddit just then to @friendlyjordies - before he deletes it, I guess. Jordan, we suggest you look at why you're being asked to put this about. The parliamentary record shows that Jordon Steele-John had a significant confrontation with the Labor government on Monday 12 October 2026, the day before the letter was delivered to David Shoebridge. The confrontation concerned automated government decision-making, something Steele-John has repeatedly challenged in relation to the NDIS. At approximately 12.04 pm AEDT, Steele-John spoke against provisions in the Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026 that would authorise computer programs to carry out certain Medicare administrative decisions. You know, the one using Palantir technology via Defence and Services Australia, aged care, veterans and the NDIS. He argued that removing human judgement from decisions affecting people's lives created serious risks. He said: "Automated decision-making processes that remove human beings from the loop or constrain their ability to intervene and utilise their expertise do not work. They place people at risk of harm." He also criticised technology companies selling automation systems to government: "It's nonsense. You've fallen for the con." NDIS Minister Jenny McAllister directly challenged him. She defended the proposed automation safeguards and described his approach to the debate as foolish, arguing that computers already play an essential role in government administration. The exchange was reported that same day by Medical Republic. And then this. Monday 12 October, 12.39 pm: Steele-John moved a telehealth amendment. He called for changes to Medicare's face-to-face appointment requirements, which can prevent disabled people, chronically ill people and rural residents from accessing subsidised GP telehealth appointments. McAllister said Labor would not support his amendment. Monday 12 October, 6.58 pm: Steele-John moved an aged-care amendment. Acting on behalf of Penny Allman-Payne, he moved an amendment calling for the government to: He connected the aged-care assessment system directly to the government's proposed NDIS assessment changes and its increasing reliance on automated decisions. The vote was deferred until Tuesday because it was after 6.30 pm. Abolish the Integrated Assessment Tool. End excessive aged-care co-payments. Fully fund aged care, including home support. Tuesday 13 October, 1.06 pm: Labor voted against the aged-care amendment. FOR13 AGAINST27 Steele-John and Shoebridge both voted in favour. All 23 Labor senators participating, including McAllister, voted against. Four Liberals, including Anne Ruston, so voted against. David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie, Lidia Thorpe and Fatima Payman supported the amendment. This was a concrete parliamentary defeat for Steele-John's proposal, just hours before the reported delivery of the letter. Nothing is an accident. And if you have a read at enoughaustralia.com and if you know anything at all about tech, data matching, algorithms or idk, life, then you should know that there is a reason that Labor colluded with the Coalition on this. Because it is the Coalition's proposal and project, and this is about the biggest collusion against Australian citizens in history. Gotta say, I am pretty disappointed that a talented young journalist turned out to just be the Dave Hughes of the Labor Party. What a waste of talent. If Jordan Shanks was actually a journalist, he would be asking BIG questions of Labor members like, oh, idk, Richard Marles (who is besties with Dutton) about data centres, Palantir, private equity rollups and - Pengana Capital Investments. Go have a little mother's look at THAT, including the following. Pengana funds and investment vehicles: Pengana Private Equity Trust (PE1) Pengana Global Private Credit Trust (PCX) Pengana Diversified Private Credit Fund Pengana AI Private Opportunities Trust (AIX) Pengana International Equities (PIA) Pengana High Conviction Equities Fund Pengana Australian Equities Fund Pengana High Conviction Property Securities Fund Pengana WHEB Sustainable Impact Fund Pengana Alpha Israel Fund Yep. And the companies that are included in that neat little batch of exy companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, ByteDance, Databricks, Handshake, Helsing, Mesoblast, Clarity Pharmaceuticals, Radiopharm Theranostics, Actinogen Medical, Brazilian Rare Earths, IperionX, Metallium, Charter Hall, Goodman Group, Stockland, Centuria, Qualitas and NEXTDC. Richard Marles' wife (and yes, yes, she is allowed to be successful and have her own money, yada yada) had declared a portfolio through Pengana Capital Investments, previously valued at $91,000. But this is very relevant when you look at how this is playing out, how decisions made by a bunch of government actors are affecting the issue around ai, data centres, government cuts to social services, including aged care and the NDIS, where disabled and older Australians are dying on the daily due to automated decision making. That's what the Bill was. It creates a statutory framework for Commonwealth payments to medical practices and healthcare providers. It also - Supports payments encouraging practices to adopt digital health technology. - Allows computer programs to make certain administrative decisions about incentive payments. - Enables eligibility, participation and some payment rules to be established through regulations. - Expands compliance, record-keeping and information-sharing arrangements. The Bill formalises a system where government money can flow to corporate healthcare providers under centrally determined rules, with information sharing, compliance monitoring and automation built into the administration. Larger businesses, like nib, will have advantages in meeting reporting requirements and operating at scale. And yes - Malcolm Turnbull DID co-found Pengana. With THAT GUY Russel Pillemer in 2003. Pengana’s Australian Equities Fund holds shares in nib, the corporate health insurer expanding into the NDIS, while Monday’s Medicare legislation strengthens the framework for government payments to health providers and digital technology adoption. Oh, and at the risk of this becoming longer than this already is, there's also the not inconsiderable issue that Australia is turning publicly funded healthcare and disability support into corporate investment opportunities. nib is a GREAT example. Under Mark Fitzgibbon, brother of former Labor Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, nib went from a mutual health fund to an ASX-listed corporation. Back in 2009, Mark's meetings with senior Defence officials about nib's business opportunities sparked questions in Senate Estimates while his brother was Defence Minister. Joel's office maintained the meetings were handled properly. Fast-forward to the NDIS, and nib raised $158 million to buy up independent plan managers, acquired a digital marketplace connecting disabled people with support workers, and now manages funding for more than 40,000 NDIS participants. The company has openly told investors it expects the government's new plan management reforms to favour large operators like itself. Meanwhile, Parliament is expanding automated administration of public healthcare payments and arguing over billions in private health insurance subsidies. This is the political economy of modern Australian human services where public money (including from the Future Fund) creates the money, government policy reshapes it, corporations consolidate it and we cripples, older people and kids in childcare centres are increasingly treated as units of revenue. It does other things, which nobody is looking at while they are defaming a crippled guy and calling him a 'sleaze' and 'sex pest' because of 'inappropriate comments' they reckon he said more than a decade ago, when he was 21. It gives legal powers for provider eligibility, payments, audits, information-sharing and debt recovery, with important details left to ministerial rules. On Monday, Jordon Steele-John moved a telehealth amendment, while Labor and the Coalition both supported the bill’s main framework. We should be asking why a disability scheme founded on individual choice is being redesigned in ways that large corporate intermediaries themselves expect to benefit from, and whose financial interests are being served when Parliament makes those decisions. While you were all looking over there and dutifully printing shitty hatchet jobs on crippled stalking and coercive control victims (who, by the way, have an AVO (like many others) against the very unwell person making the allegations). And yes, it came from 'inside the Greens' - but the Greens didn't orchestrate this all of this. You know who orchestrated this. And you should know why. You could write a real story about this, or do a real piece on the issues if you were a real journalist, rather than someone who was more rusted on to Labor than a bolt on a jetty. But now I guess you'll just be writing Newspeak at Minitrue like the rest of the paid for hire journos. What a waste of talent. I wonder when you will just give up and become a political staffer instead. No offers, I guess, because too useful on the outside. NB: The Greens insiders? Well, @SerkanTheWriter, who I am exceedingly disappointed with, could tell you. So could I. And I could tell you a shit load about a little cabal around Sophie McNeil and equally about some shitfuckery over this side of the country - preselection for Shoebridge's position only shut yesterday. And you can guarantee that Sarah Hanson Young et al will be pushing as hard as possible to replace Shoebridge. As for Labor, this is just two birds with one stone and the chance to get rid of a troublesome thorn in their sides while painting the Greens as chaotic and piss poor. While getting rid of one of the hardest working Greens that there are. Which, I agree, is piss poor behaviour. Shoebridge's staffer is among the people in the NSW Young Greens minutes from 2018 that Jordan Shanks has just posted. Quel surprise. @GreensNSW and @TheGreensWA need to fucking clean house. And urgently, because if this is how they treat their friends (I can almost hear the 'Jordon is a nice guy, but...' from here) then by fuck how do they, and Labor, treat their enemies. Because this is not just about your petty political circuses nor your minor power grabs, you resoundingly obtuse twatwaffles. This is about AUSTRALIA. And all of our futures. Get your shit together. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” - George Orwell, Animal Farm