u/Niscellaneous

On July 23, in Horton Coastal Engineering Pty Ltd v Central Coast Council, Commissioner Joanne Gray of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales handed down a decision that unwound the Central Coast Council’s refusal of a development approval for a private seawall.

The decision was significant. This was the first seawall whose approval was obtained via litigation, before the Regional Planning Panel had considered it and without any independent expert assessment.

As climate change intensifies, Australia’s coastlines are shifting at a rapid pace. Often the ocean is inching inland. Warmer waters cause more intense storms and rising sea levels bring the tide in further. As waterfront property shot up in value, policies such as planned retreats from the coast and voluntary buybacks became political suicide. For local councils, they were simply fiscally impossible.

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in NSW, where large tracts of the shore are in private hands. This is playing out in Wamberal and Collaroy-Narrabeen, in Newport, and at The Entrance North, on the Central Coast.

Having been largely abandoned by the state government, councils are at the battle frontier with exposed beachfront owners who want to defend their tidal boundaries against an encroaching ocean.

The quagmire councils face is in part due to coastal mismanagement at the state level. In 2016, then minister for planning Rob Stokes unveiled the Coastal Management bill, which he said would be “one of the most innovative pieces of coastal planning legislation in the world”. The Coastal Management Act had this objective: “to manage the coast in an ecologically sustainable way for the social, cultural and economic wellbeing of the people of NSW”.

Last September, in an investigation into the Act and its implementation, the NSW auditor-general stated that the objectives were “not being achieved”. The result is that coastal management has disintegrated into an ad hoc system increasingly defined by lawfare.

The infamous mascot for this ad hoc approach to coastal management is Collaroy-Narrabeen. There, beachfront owners won development approvals and state subsidies for a 1.1-kilometre stretch of wall that serves no purpose besides protecting the 61 apartments and houses behind it. The engineering company behind the Collaroy-Narrabeen seawall was Horton Coastal Engineering (HCE), the same company behind the just-approved seawall that is the subject of this article.

On October 17, 2024, HCE lodged a development application (DA) for the 90-metre long isolated seawall at The Entrance North. Under the NSW planning regulations, if 40 days elapse without a determination from the consent authority – in this case the Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel – the development application is deemed to have been refused.

Six months after the DA was filed, in April 2025, the expert panel did their first site inspection and initial briefing on the DA. One month before that, Peter Horton, the director of HCE, had filed proceedings in the court on the grounds that the delay was a deemed refusal according to the regulations.

As to why the panel was delayed in assessing the DA, people familiar with the process speculate that it was under-resourced and overloaded. The panel and council were dealing with two other complex seawall DAs, one of which was the high-profile seawall at Wamberal, which had received 637 negative submissions.

Proceedings filed in the Land and Environment Court caused alarm for Central Coast Council councillor Corinne Lamont.

In letters written to NSW Planning Minister Paul Scully in April last year, Councillor Lamont called for an investigation, writing that “the significant seawall DA” could “ultimately be determined by litigation rather than through the expert Regional Planning Panel”. By going to court, the seawall would “avoid the rigorous assessment” that the expert panel would have conducted.

Lamont speculated that HCE had been “strategic” in waiting for the deemed delay period to transpire. Peter Horton disputes this, saying the beachfront owners did not want to go to court, as it cost an “enormous” amount of money, yet they were “forced into it” by the council and the panel’s six-month delay.

Though costly to the home owners, there is no doubt the Land and Environment Court is a more favourable avenue for the approval of seawalls. In Horton’s words, the expert panel members “were essentially anti-seawall and there was no prospect of any meaningful engagement with them to change that ideology”.

There is likely truth in Horton’s assertion that the panel would be unlikely to approve the seawall. This is not because of an anti-seawall ideology but because the panel is required by the Act to be satisfied that the protection works will not have an adverse impact on the natural coastal system. If further erosion is caused on adjacent land, arrangements have to be made to remedy it for the entire life of the seawall.

Civil engineer Angus Gordon, who has been involved in coastal management for 56 years and was an architect of the Coastal Management Act, has written that it is practically impossible for an isolated seawall, as opposed to a “whole-of-embayment” defence strategy, to meet these conditions.

Councillor Lamont’s alarm was well-founded. On July 23, the court overruled the consent authority’s deemed refusal, a decision that was made without the independent expert a d vice of the planning panel.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Land and Environment Court process is its discretion as to whether independent external experts are called. In this case, they were not. The expert evidence came from two people with stakes in the wall: one was a council engineer and the other was the engineer of the wall itself.

According to Angus Gordon, the failing is allowing such matters to go to court at all. The Land and Environment Court was created to adjudicate on matters of land use, not the management of natural hazards. “Hazard management,” he says, “is clearly well and truly outside the competency of the Land and Environment Court.”

A serious shortcoming in the judgement, according to Gordon, is that the court should have had regard to the location of this strip of coast in a beach fluctuation zone. Seawalls are the hardest form of adaptation: the vertical concrete redirects the gusto of the ocean elsewhere. These are called “end effects” – the effects of a seawall beyond its immediate footprint. The judgement, according to Gordon, treats the end effects in a cursory and two-dimensional manner; in other words, as if the coast simply moves forwards and backwards, with some spillage left and right of the wall. But coastal processes are more than just in and out; they include complex longshore processes.

On this point, the commissioner accepted the submissions of both the council engineer and the seawall engineer, who argued that modelling the longshore processes is not necessary and limited data is available. Gordon fervently disagrees: the process for calculating longshore sediment transport was developed more than six decades ago and reformulated over just as long. To calculate the longshore effects of a beach with a seawall versus without a seawall is “not complicated at all and could be done on a single piece of paper” he says

As to the impact of end effects, the commissioner deems them “acceptable”. Again Gordon fervently disagrees: the disruption to natural processes, including longshore processes, “must, by definition, increase hazard, whether at the site or on adjoining properties”.

Horton Coastal Engineering Pty Ltd v Central Coast Council sets a legal precedent. As the council contended, approval of the wall “would lead to the undesirable outcome of continuous seawalls along North Entrance Beach and other Central Coast beaches”.

As to this, Commissioner Gray conceded the case has precedent-setting power, but that “it alone is insufficient to warrant its refusal”.To Gordon, the state government seems to be facilitating that “the community’s beaches be replaced by vertical concrete walls”.

At a time when coastal communities should be being pulled back from the ocean, a perverse incentive to stay is being created.

Collaroy-Narrabeen’s wall undoubtedly created an expectation among other exposed beachfront owners in NSW of successfully defending their properties.

The Entrance North decision turns that into a common law precedent.

Andrew Denton is a broadcaster and television producer. He is the founder and director of Go Gentle Australia.

Shane Lewis was 65 when diagnosed with the aggressive bulbar form of motor neurone disease and given six months to live. Like one in three people with MND, he chose voluntary assisted dying rather than continuing to suffer and face an uncertain death by choking or through respiratory failure.

The nearest voluntary assisted dying (VAD) doctors who could complete Shane’s assessments were in Tatura, a 90-minute drive from his home in Alexandra, north-east of Melbourne. Because the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act’s obscure carriage service provisions forbid any use of telehealth for VAD, Shane’s wife, Marlene, had to drive him to those appointments. He was depleted from the disease; she was exhausted from caring for him. The nightmare began before they even turned out onto the street.

They had bought an accessible van, as Marlene could no longer lift Shane’s wheelchair. Patient transport exists in theory, but navigating that bureaucracy is overwhelming for a carer already at breaking point.

On one trip, in 37-degree heat, Shane lost control of his bowels for the first time, as his muscles had deteriorated. Marlene cleaned him up in a public toilet, far from home, humiliated and exhausted.

That afternoon she phoned her daughter, Nicole, in tears. “She was crying and extremely distressed and overwhelmed,” Nicole says.

Shane eventually accessed VAD, and Nicole is grateful her stepfather had that choice. She is angry he faced needless hardship.

“Terminally ill people do not have time to waste,” she says. “They should be at home making memories with their families, not being dragged across the state by exhausted carers for appointments that could be done by phone or video.”

It’s hard to draw a line between Shane’s ordeal and the heady days of the early internet era, when Myspace ruled social media. At the time, there was rising concern about cyberbullying and the proliferation of pro-suicide chat rooms. So, in 2005 the Criminal Code Act was amended to make it an offence to use a carriage service such as telephone or internet to counsel, promote or provide instruction on suicide.

The law was never intended to apply to states’ medical laws, which clearly define VAD as distinct from suicide, and which offer eligible, terminally ill people a peaceful death.

Yet the consequence of this legal anomaly is stark: despite telehealth being an accepted tool across our healthcare landscape, VAD health professionals now risk prosecution and a $364,000 fine for “inciting or counselling” suicide via a carriage service.

This unforeseen clash between state and federal law has had terrible consequences.

Brian Dick, 81, dying of prostate cancer, endured a four-hour round trip from his home in Swan Hill to Bendigo for his VAD assessments, despite a broken back and ribs from a recent fall. The morphine couldn’t control his pain: “Just stop the car, stop the car. I can’t handle the motion,” he told his daughter, Rebecca.

In Queensland, Tom, 79, died of lung disease before his VAD medication arrived because pharmacists had no choice but to post the script by mail. Then there’s the impact on too few rural VAD practitioners covering too much of the country. Two doctors made three trips totalling 8500 kilometres to assess him. Those trips took them away from other patients.

A broad coalition, including Australia’s peak medical body, the Australian Medical Association, as well as state and territory attorneys-general and health ministers, the Law Council, pharmacists and more than a dozen health organisations, support amending the Commonwealth criminal code.

Their call was echoed at Labor’s recent national conference, an otherwise heavily stage-managed event, where delegates across factions, in a rare moment of dissent, carried a motion to overturn the ban.

The fix they seek is not complicated: one paragraph in the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act to excise heavily regulated states’ and territories’ VAD laws from the definition of suicide under the Act.

Yet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is unconvinced. He is joined in this by his attorney-general, Michelle Rowland. “My concern,” Albanese says, “is … the potential for misuse but also the potential it has to undermine the system itself.”

Their unwillingness to listen to the coalition of sensible people seeking change, and to address the clear evidence of harm being done in its absence, is puzzling.

It brings into question the role and influence of the only other prominent voice speaking out against lifting the prohibition: the leadership of the Catholic Church and its surrogates.

Melbourne’s Archbishop Peter Comensoli, a chair of the Australian Catholic Bishops Commission, says the current laws were appropriate, as “removing Commonwealth protections would effectively make it easier to access substances intended to end a patient’s life”.

He must know this is nonsense. The “Commonwealth protections” don’t offer any safeguard at all, nor were they ever designed to. They were written 12 years before VAD was legislated in Victoria.

Removing the telehealth ban does not dissolve a single one of the many safeguards already built into state laws. These safeguards involve multiple, carefully considered 
steps, each designed to ensure a person understands, and genuinely chooses, what they are asking for.

The safeguards have been proved to work. Strong penalties, including jail time, exist in states’ laws for anyone found to have coerced someone towards VAD; yet, in the more than 7000 VAD cases since 2019, each examined by a government-appointed independent review board, not a single coercion charge has been laid.

The fearmongering from Catholic voices continues, determined to defend Vatican law rather than mend an Australian one not fit for purpose.

It’s hard to know why. The question of VAD has long since been settled. The Church’s view, that only God decides the manner and hour of our passing, has been rejected by every Australian parliament, bar the Northern Territory, which will soon do the same. Consistent polling over the past decade shows more than 70 per cent support for choice at the end of life, including among those who identify as Catholic.

Upholding the telehealth ban changes none of this. All it does is guarantee that terminally ill Australians, too sick or too far away to travel to a doctor, will suffer.

Nonetheless, Brendan Long, a senior lecturer at the Catholic Notre Dame University, warns there would be an “increase in wrongful deaths” if Labor scrapped the ban on telehealth VAD, which he calls “death by text message”.

Sydney Catholic archbishop Anthony Fisher suggests people using what he calls “tele-death” would be approved for VAD “without any serious consultation with a doctor” or without discussing what “their present needs for palliative care might be or for other kinds of medical treatment”. All of this is blatantly untrue.

The language is ugly. The cynicism is breathtaking. Every day, across Australia, palliative care services, many of them run by Catholic Health providers, use telehealth to advise on medications and decisions at the end of life. Responding to the prime minister’s concerns, Palliative Care Australia reaffirmed telemedicine’s important role in providing “safe, effective and efficient” care, especially in rural and remote areas.

Still, the insinuations about unseen coercive forces off-screen continue. Setting aside the fact that there will always be at least one face-to-face assessment, any evidence of coercion since VAD became legal has been all the other way: some families, desperate not to lose a loved one, will try to discourage access to VAD; some doctors disapprove and won’t help; some faith-based hospitals and aged-care facilities refuse to allow it.

In a dark irony, perhaps the most blatant act of coercion comes from the Catholic Church itself. The Vatican, which describes VAD as an “intrinsically evil act”, instructs priests not to administer the last rites for parishioners who seek it. Imagine that. A lifelong Catholic and, on your deathbed, the priest turns away.

As I wrote this, an email arrived in our office from a woman I will call Sally:

“I’m hoping you can offer some assistance. My grandmother is terminally ill. We have started the VAD process at her request, and she has been assessed by the first doctor and progressed to the next stage. However, my grandmother is extremely religious. I understand the church does not support assisted dying and will not provide religious support to my grandmother, including last blessings. My grandmother won’t go through with VAD if this is the case.”

Why? Because the men from Rome, trading under the banner of “mercy”, insist that your death is God’s business, and God’s business alone.

The cruelty of it beggars belief.

Sydney’s Royal National Park, just south of Sutherland Shire, was Australia’s first, gazetted in 1879. It is the second such national park in the world, younger only than Yellowstone in the United States. Spurred into action by environmentalists and public clamour, Australian governments have set aside more than 600 national parks since, to protect the nation’s most outstanding natural and cultural values. Now those values are being gazumped by polluting corporations and their client politicians.

New South Wales Minister for the Environment Penny Sharpe has announced the Minns government’s promised Great Koala National Park will now be dependent on a market condition; namely that it will be used to offset carbon emissions under an application to the Clean Energy Regulator. In essence, the park’s very presence will help polluters continue to pollute. “The project must be approved,” Sharpe says, “before the NSW Government can move to legislate the Park.”

The word “must” is a fabrication and Sharpe’s statement is an up-front broken promise. Premier Chris Minns went to the state election promising the Great Koala National Park without conditions. Sharpe’s stipulation shows how Labor is on track to make Australia, in the words of former environment minister Tanya Plibersek, the “Green Wall Street of the world”.

In 2025, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese picked Queensland senator Murray Watt to be his second minister for the environment. Watt has repeatedly betrayed the environment while taking on Albanese’s tactic of slamming green critics by framing their motivation as hate for Labor rather than love for nature.

The Albanese government has approved 36 coalmining and gas projects and more are in the pipeline. Last September, Watt gave Woodside a 40-year extension for its export gas operations at Murujuga on the Pilbara coast of Western Australia. In giving the nod to Woodside, he ignored First Nations defenders of the world’s greatest rock art site, which has suffered from gas export industrialisation there.

This year, Watt’s decision on Woodside’s proposed $30 billion Browse Basin gas extraction project will be particularly contentious. The project will impact the fragile Scott Reef ecosystem off north-west Australia, as well as the petroglyphs at Murujuga, to which the gas will be piped for processing and export. A huge greenhouse gas load will be injected into the planet’s already overburdened atmosphere if the Browse Basin gas extraction goes ahead. Watt’s history makes it naive to think cultural and environmental considerations will outdo his relationship with Woodside.

Albanese has turned his left-dominated team into the most environmentally averse Labor government in history.

While the press gallery dutifully covered Albanese’s most recent visit to Murujuga in July, this time to announce an oil refinery will be added, Pilbara woman Raelene Cooper, who heads the Save Our Songlines defenders, was detained for approaching Albanese and carted away. The press gallery dutifully ignored her.

With Cooper out of the way, Albanese made no mention of the oil refinery’s potential impact on the World Heritage rock art site. It is safe to say he consulted neither Indigenous nor environmental groups about the project.

That attitude may come back to bite his Labor successors, but it is a constant feature of his career. In 1996, his first speech to the House of Representatives put his disposition on early display.

Having won the inner-Sydney seat of Grayndler, Albanese lambasted a collection of locals who had campaigned against him on the noise impact of the Labor-financed third runway at Sydney Airport. He complained that “the negative coalition which made up the No Aircraft Noise Party – Tories, Trotskyists and political opportunists – were united only by their vehement hatred of Labor”.

These days he uses the same false pejorative, truncated to “no-alition”, when the Coalition votes with the Greens, usually for opposite reasons, against Labor. This is the exception, of course: most often, the Coalition votes with Labor.

Arriving in Adelaide for Labor’s national conference last month, delegates were met with billboards that were all decent and gently worded and paid for by community groups wanting Labor to save the Murray–Darling rivers system and end native forest logging. Within hours the advertisements were taken down. The airport billboards promoting the gas industry, including fossil fuel giant Santos, remained up.

Santos donated $63,200 to Labor ahead of the 2025 election. According to Climate Integrity, “across the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the Nationals, at least $3.98 million was donated by fossil fuel companies in the 2024-25 financial year”.

Inside the conference, rebel Labor advocates including Ed Husic pursued a 25 per cent tax on gas exports. Albanese’s team kept the debate on the tax, also a long-held Greens policy, off the agenda. Santos won the day.

That’s a curiously perverse outcome for anyone clinging to the idea that Labor is the party for ordinary Australians. This prime minister has grown into his job by abandoning earlier, progressive politics that included defending refugee rights, opposing “willing backers of US militarism”, demanding greater action against global warming and promoting the republic.

His change has come at the cost of a widening gap between Labor and the Greens. Despite this, Albanese’s team have repeatedly needed the Greens to get Labor legislation through the Senate.

You wouldn’t know that from a casual look. Albanese is not in the business of thanking those espousing his own earlier ideals. Forged in the rough and tumble of NSW Labor politics, he has a keen disdain for competitors to his left and has institutionalised the Labor mantra of not letting the perfect get in the way of the good: that is, of condemning those who see Labor as having sold out.

Albanese may be an astute strategist but he is not an environmentalist. In 2024, he flew to Tasmania, donned a corporate Tassal coat and overrode then environment minister Tanya Plibersek’s alarm at scientific evidence that pollution from Atlantic salmon pens in remote Macquarie Harbour was causing the Maugean skate’s slide towards extinction.

Plibersek was nowhere to be seen. Albanese announced a $28 million subsidy to put oxygen pumps in the harbour. He had not only consigned the skate’s future to Tassal’s permanent, polluting presence but also relegated his former Sydney-based colleague and competitor for the Labor leadership to an embarrassing ministerial impotence.

Come the next election and Plibersek didn’t apply for a second round of such punishment. Instead, Albanese installed Watt to the ministry.

Psephological data suggests old parties will need alliances after future elections if they are to form government. That’s a worldwide trend, underscored in Australia by the diminishing vote for both Labor and the Coalition.

The 2025 election was a perverse outcome. Fewer than 35 per cent of voters put Labor first, yet Labor won 62 per cent of the seats in the House of Representatives. The Greens, with 12 per cent, won only one seat. Despite scoring a similar vote to the previous election, they lost three seats. The bulk of the Greens’ nearly two million votes preferenced Labor, helping give it that distorted outcome. In his victory speech, Albanese made no reference to this.

He attacked defeated Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather, saying on the ABC’s 7.30, “I think he should look at the way he conducted himself in Question Time … including the questions he asked of me, some of which were pretty offensive.” Chandler-Mather had got under Albanese’s skin and there was to be no prime ministerial grace in the Labor leader’s post-election broadside.

Albanese has continued to ignore or put the Greens down, despite relying on their support for gun law reform, housing legislation and changes to environmental law. All up, Albanese has relied on the Greens to pass 91 Labor bills. Without this support, his government would have been stymied.

Unlike Julia Gillard’s joint signing of the agreement on the Clean Energy Act in 2011, Albanese has never held a meeting in public with the Greens.

He routinely meets Greens leader Larissa Waters, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s as if Labor won the last election outright and the Greens don’t exist. Labor didn’t and the Greens do.

Here is a political dystopia peculiar to Australia. In New Zealand, the Greens collaborate with the Labour Party to form governments, and regularly take ministries. This mutual support is also usual for democratic socialist minority governments upheld by greens parties across Europe.

Voters expect their representatives to maximise the power they’ve been given, not fritter it away. A most self-destructive moment for Labor’s relationship with the Greens in Australia came after last year’s Tasmanian election, when Labor refused to engage with the Greens, leading to a minority Liberal government. Subsequently, Labor’s poll ratings have declined.

The question remains: What happens in 2028 if, as seems likely, national Labor doesn’t secure an outright victory? Albanese won’t like it and may step down. Alternatively, he’ll need to negotiate a government with the independents or the Greens who take the balance of power.

In 2010, Gillard approached both the Greens and independents to form her minority government. She didn’t like the task but recognised the reality that politicians must work with the electorate’s choices. Her minority government passed more legislation than Albanese has managed in a longer period in office.

Regardless of the outcome in 2028, Labor will sooner or later need the Greens’ support again, in both the House and Senate, to form a government. This will require a degree of respect for the minor party and, consequently, a post-Albanese intermediary. Watt doesn’t qualify. Perhaps Labor should ensure Ed Husic remains on its team.

Last month, the Albanese government announced it was scrapping its Climate Active program, which had allowed companies such as EnergyAustralia, Telstra and Jetstar to claim they were “carbon neutral”.

The move followed EnergyAustralia’s admission last year that “offsets do not prevent or undo the harms caused by burning fossil fuels for a customer’s energy use. Even with carbon offsetting, the emissions released from burning fossil fuels for a customer’s energy use still contribute to climate change.” The power provider made this statement as part of a legally binding settlement with Parents for Climate, who had accused the company of trying to greenwash its 1.6 million customers.

Ever since, companies had been quietly quitting the scheme in droves.

Climate Active was established in 2019 and described itself as “an Australian Government program that supports national climate policy by driving voluntary climate action by Australian businesses.” The scheme’s fundamental flaw was that, in exchange for a small fee, it allowed companies to “make a government-certified carbon neutral claim”.

These claims about carbon neutrality were the scheme’s undoing. While it’s not illegal for the Albanese government to mislead voters or journalists about the effectiveness of carbon offsets, it is illegal for companies to mislead their customers. The big problem for the companies making the “carbon neutral” claims was it’s the courts, not the government’s spin doctors, that would decide whether consumers were being greenwashed or not. EnergyAustralia decided to settle rather than hear from the judge.

Awareness of how consumers are being misled by “carbon neutral” claims has grown since my colleague Polly Hemming first raised integrity concerns about Climate Active on these pages back in 2022. Last month, the New South Wales government announced a ban on coal and gas companies buying offsets tied to the trees protected by the newly established Great Koala National Park – though broader industries would be allowed to do so.

Despite the rapidly mounting concerns, the federal minister for climate change, Chris Bowen, seems determined to try to hold back the rising tide with a broom. His commitment to the offsets script goes hand in glove with his determination to keep approving and subsidising new gas and coal projects.

Not only did the Albanese government rush to approve the enormous North West Shelf gas project straight after winning the 2025 election, the prime minister has spent the past year arguing he couldn’t possibly increase taxes on gas exporters because doing so might deter the foreign-owned gas industry from investing in even more of the new gas wells that climate scientists say we absolutely cannot afford to build.

Carbon offsets are at the centre of the Albanese government’s strategy to pretend it is taking climate change seriously while simultaneously encouraging new investment in gas and coal. In reality, both cannot be true at the same time. In the topsy-turvy world of Australian politics, however, where power is the ability to talk nonsense and get away with it, the idea we can subsidise fossil fuels expansion while pretending to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is par for the course. It’s a rare journalist who asks questions designed to highlight this clear contradiction.

The term “carbon offset” is more widely used than it is widely understood. In short, the idea is that the harm of doing something such as burning fossil fuels can be negated if someone else does something beneficial, such as not chopping down a tree. There are obvious moral complexities in letting some groups do harm because another group does some good. (Would asbestos mining be fine if someone promised to spend more on lung cancer research?) The real problem with so-called carbon offsets, though, is that they simply don’t work.

In settling its case with Parents for Climate, EnergyAustralia said: “Some carbon offsets claim to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by planting trees or forest regeneration. However, EnergyAustralia today accepts the scientific consensus that these ‘offsets’ do not indefinitely remove greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, because carbon is stored in plants for a substantially shorter time than those emissions remain in the atmosphere.”

Climate science makes clear that when fossil fuels are burnt, a large proportion of the carbon dioxide they release stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Indeed, about a fifth of the emissions from the coal and gas we burn today will still be in the atmosphere in 1000 years. Climate scientists know that no promise made by a farmer or a state government to not chop a tree down can last that long. Likewise, no regulator or politician can meaningfully promise that bushfires or droughts won’t destroy the trees that are supposed to be doing the offsetting.

Which brings me back to problems the Albanese government, and Chris Bowen in particular, have to deal with between now and the minister’s stint as “President of Negotiations” at this year’s big United Nations climate conference, COP31.

In the coming weeks, Bowen is due to begin a review of his key climate policy, the safeguard mechanism. This tool is based almost entirely on the same carbon offsets used by the recently abandoned Climate Active scheme. The review will start just weeks after NSW Premier Chris Minns made it clear that he, like EnergyAustralia, thinks it is somewhat inappropriate to claim that saving trees can offset fossil fuels emissions.

Labor’s safeguard mechanism was introduced in 2023 and requires about 200 of Australia’s biggest polluters to either gradually reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or, if they prefer, buy as many carbon offsets as they need to meet their “emissions reduction” obligations. While these options provide “flexibility” for major polluters, the inconvenient truth of the scheme’s design was recently exposed by the ABC’s Four Corners. The program spelt out how mining giants such as BHP were choosing to abandon their existing plans to replace their fleets of diesel trucks with electric ones, because it was cheaper to buy carbon credits instead.

While it’s obvious why BHP’s shareholders might prefer the bigger dividends that come from simply paying someone to promise to not chop down some trees, this reliance on accounting tricks is bad not just for the environment but for the economy as well.

The scientific advice about what countries such as Australia need to do to avoid the worst climate scenarios is quite simple. We need to rapidly reduce use of fossil fuels and store as much carbon in our trees and soils as possible. Both are essential. The whole point of offsets is they ignore the “and”, pretending it’s fine to keep burning fossil fuels as long as we save some trees.

The economic advice is just as simple. For every billion dollars companies spend buying offsets, a billion dollars can’t be spent on actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions by investing in electrification or energy efficiency. Put simply, a company that buys offsets this year is not setting itself up to pollute less next year – on the contrary, next year it will still have to buy more offsets. It’s easy to see why the companies that make and sell the offsets are making so much money.

As EnergyAustralia says: “Carbon offsets should not be used to delay or diminish the important work that needs to be done to actively decarbonise. EnergyAustralia is now focused on more effective ways of helping its customers to directly reduce the emissions associated with their energy use.”

In the four years since Anthony Albanese became prime minister, Australia has approved more than 25 new gas fields and coalmines and has spent more than $10 billion a year on fossil fuel subsidies. While Labor has committed to reduce Australia’s emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, since coming to office actual emissions from burning fossil fuels have fallen by only 2.9 per cent, less than 1 percentage point a year. Luckily for the greenwashers, the number of offsets being printed is at an all-time high. The greater the supply of carbon offsets, the lower their price, and in turn the more companies that will follow BHP’s lead and abandon their efforts to reduce actual emissions.

The combination of EnergyAustralia’s admissions, the NSW government’s hostility to selling offsets to the fossil fuel industry and Bowen’s own abandonment of Climate Active are all ramping up the pressure on the Albanese government to drop the offsets charade.

Yet the prime minister is not for turning. If he won’t pick a fight with the gas industry in order to collect an extra $17 billion a year in tax, why on earth would he pick a fight with the fossil fuel industry over something as easy to ignore as climate science?

An expanding group of Liberals say the position of federal Liberal president Tony Abbott is “untenable” as a New South Wales corruption inquiry probes allegations of a $2 million far right-wing Christian conspiracy to take over the party.

The former prime minister stunned Liberal colleagues this week by using an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald to diminish the ongoing work of the Independent Commission Against Corruption and justify the dealings of the Opus Dei-associated Reformers sub-faction that the ICAC is investigating as part of Operation Rosny.

Abbott’s mentions at ICAC, his backing of the Reformers and his recent claims that multiculturalism has “failed” have caused Liberals to lose patience with him.

“He should go. He should,” one moderate Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper. “He hasn’t been able to prioritise the federal team and guess what the federal team needs in order to recover and become electable. He hasn’t done that.

“He continues to do what he wants to do and what is in the best interests of Tony and what Tony believes is best, not what the elected representatives think is best. And that is the concern that everybody had from the outset.”

The source said Abbott was attempting to undermine the ICAC, but he was also signalling a warning to the Murdoch press not to cover the investigation with too much prominence.

“He’s signalling to right-wing media like The [Daily] Telegraph and The Australian and others to not report on it – and they’re reporting very little on it – by saying that he’s not going to validate it,” the moderate MP says.

“He doesn’t believe it’s legitimate, but he’s also trying to create a counter-narrative that it’s rubbish.

“That would connect to Abbott and [Peta] Credlin’s relations with Lachlan Murdoch. These are signals. I think they’re playing in a very dangerous space and for him to suggest that ICAC has gone beyond its remit is crazy-town stuff.”

Another NSW Liberal makes a similar point about Abbott needing to resign, drawing a link to conservative NSW Liberal Damien Tudehope’s decision to quit the front bench ahead of the inquiry. Tudehope is not accused of corruption.

“It made Tony Abbott’s position untenable as well,” the Liberal source tells 
The Saturday Paper.

“As the figurehead of the entire broad Liberal church, not just the backer of a NSW right-wing conspiracy to take over the party, he can’t hold such an important position. This guy Damien stood down. Why isn’t Abbott?”

Another Liberal MP said Abbott had “impugned the integrity of ICAC”, while attempting to protect Angus Taylor. They said the party’s patience with the vocal president had already worn thin and a growing group of Liberals want a change.

“That’s the general consensus from about everybody, including most of the right now, because a lot of the right, which is more interesting, thought it was a bad move anyway,” they said, referring to Abbott’s election as president. “He’s destroyed us on multiculturalism and then [John] Howard’s had to try to repair it.”

The Saturday Paper contacted Abbott, but he said he would not be saying anything further than what was reported on Monday.

The first weeks of the Rosny hearings – including intercepted phone calls, messages, emails, metadata and rat emojis – have exposed the internecine war within the Liberals and drawn in senior figures such as Angus Taylor, Abbott, the late former Liberal figure Teena McQueen and Tudehope.

There are allegations of a promised $2 million in illegal, concealed political donations from fugitive property developer Jean Nassif, and the painting of key Reformers Jean-Claude Perrottet, Robert Assaf and Christian Ellis as obsessively believing they were doing God’s work to shift the party to a conservative Christian stance.

The Reformers had a four-year target to bring in 5000 new Christian conservative Liberal members and take over control of the Liberal state executive. At the same time, they allegedly attempted to oust the centre-right powerbroker Alex Hawke in the seat of Mitchell and moderate Julian Leeser in Berowra.

The Reformers advertised and ran faith-based meetings – such as “Children vs Radical Gender Ideology” and “Your Religious Freedom in 2019 – Is your faith under threat?” – that allegedly doubled as branch-stacking events.

The mission statement, outlined in a Reformers document, was to “ensure the best chance of Christian policy in government”. Its long-term goal was to have “75 per cent of the state executive, every winnable seat held by a conservative”. The “road to success” was taking over “left-wing branches by stealth”.

There was evidence that the Reformers unsuccessfully asked retired businessman and NSW Liberal member Frits Maré for $50,000 to set up a call centre to stack branches in a bid to unseat Hawke, and that young people were paid thousands of dollars, at least “from time to time”, to help stack Liberal branches.

The problem for Liberals was that the people being recruited were not Liberals.

“Most of these people that they were recruiting, the vast majority, had no interest in the politics of the Liberal Party. They were not Liberals,” the moderate Liberal says.

“They were recruited to the Liberal Party to promote their religious interest or the interests of their faith, whether it was euthanasia, abortion, gay marriage. Obviously the anti-vaxxers, and that is the problem. They’ve framed it as we’ve moved away from our core values. We have not. They have.”

The source says that is one reason the party is conflicted as it tries to take on the competition from One Nation.

Abbott, who had previously employed Assaf as a political adviser, defended the sub-faction on Monday. He conceded, however, that they “might have let their enthusiasm get the better of their judgement”.

In an interview with The Australian last month Abbott called the ICAC an “activist agency”, and in this week’s interview he appeared to question the commission’s judgement and take a side on the issue of corruption.

“There seems to be a level [of] incredulity directed against people’s Christianity, but my main problem is the factional weaponisation of what’s supposed to be an instrument of justice,” Abbott said.

“I’m surprised that ICAC has allowed itself to be caught up in an internal party squabble that involves no conceivable ‘corruption’ in the sense of people gaining an unfair advantage for themselves, especially this close to a state election.”

The Saturday Paper reached out to the corruption watchdog, but the ICAC declined to comment.

As branch-stacking is not illegal, key areas of interest for the ICAC are the cost of this work and whether donations from prohibited donors such as property developers and hoteliers were solicited, concealed and secured.

Sydney property developer Jean Nassif, who fled to Lebanon in 2022 before his company collapsed owing more than $1 billion, has been heard on police taps from 2021 boasting about branch-stacking and his influence over the then Coalition state government.

The ICAC alleges Nassif wanted centre-right Liberal minister David Elliott discredited and his north-west Sydney seat abolished. He also wanted the NSW Building Commissioner, David Chandler, removed. The voice tap has Nassif telling another developer that he was going to “fuck him sideways”.

It is alleged Nassif was prepared to pay $2 million evenly between Ellis, key Reformer Jeremy Greenwood and another Perrottet brother, Charles Perrottet, to achieve his aims.

A federal NSW Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper no one should underestimate Operation Rosny.

“Abbott should read the opening statement,” they said. “It would suggest there’s a serious set of issues under this, not just a bit of branch-stacking.

“They’re not just looking into a Liberal Party set of activities, although there’s certainly issues that pertain to that. It does look to be a very serious inquiry.

“I think anyone would be wise to wait and see, but for him to come out early and say there’s no corruption when millions of dollars have changed hands, according to ICAC … How can you say that on what they’ve just asserted in their opening statement?”

The inquiry’s opening statement points to evidence of bank account transactions and efforts to conceal donations through lobbying and consultancy firms and sham invoices.

The ICAC inquiry, which is expected to run public hearings for another six weeks, has already dragged in Taylor as a potential “shaken down” donor to the Reformers, and led to the resignation of Tudehope, although the former shadow attorney-general has not been accused of wrongdoing.

The inquiry heard about the make-up and influence of a shadowy hard-right leadership forum known as RELM, or Right Elected Leadership Meeting. Members included long-time ultra-conservative powerbroker David Clarke, long-term state frontbencher Anthony Roberts, former Liberal MP Kevin Conolly, former Liberal figure Matthew Camenzuli, former NSW upper house MP Lou Amato, former senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, former federal minister Santo Santoro, and former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet, as well as McQueen and Tudehope. Damien Tudehope told the inquiry the former premier “would have been identified with RELM, but he very rarely turned up”.

The chair of RELM was Dallas McInerney, the suspended boss of Catholic Schools NSW, who is under investigation by the ICAC for his alleged role in funnelling Catholic funds to the Reformers.

McInerney is Angus Taylor’s long-time friend and supporter. According to evidence from another Reformer, Dylan Whitelaw, Angus Taylor was also a member of RELM.

Describing its purpose, Whitelaw said RELM would “make decisions on behalf of the right in terms of where the votes were going for certain preselections or branch meetings et cetera”.

Tudehope says RELM, which came together “two or three times a year to discuss things”, does not exist anymore.

Early on in the hearings, the inquiry was shown a March 8, 2021, text message from McInerney to Reformers members asking how they were going stacking the Liberal state council and saying he wanted to “shake down Angus for 10k”.

On March 11, 2021, Whitelaw told a group chat that “Dallas has told me he got commitment from Angus for the $15k injection plus a $3k monthly donation!”

Whitelaw told the inquiry he did not know if Taylor made a donation and he would be “very surprised” if he had.

Taylor has insisted to journalists repeatedly, before he went on holiday this week, that “no payment was made”. He said he would not be providing a running commentary on the inquiry.

The Liberal leader is not accused of wrongdoing.

Evidence to the ICAC last week placed Abbott, then a federal backbencher, at the first Reformers recruitment event in 2018. Other such special guests included former broadcaster Alan Jones, Tudehope and McInerney.

Abbott’s backing then and now, according to one federal NSW Liberal, means his position as federal president is certainly 
exposed.

“He’s gone out so early. He’s risked his position, absolutely,” the MP says. “He’s putting it at risk.”

While the Reformers are under investigation and have not been active since 2021 or 2022, they have had an impact, according to a federal Liberal source.

“The entire scheme before ICAC was designed to wipe out moderate MPs and hand their seats and positions in the party to extreme conservatives – and they’ve had a stunning amount of success,” the source tells The Saturday Paper.

“The moderates have been replaced or taken down by the growing influence of conservative voices on the party’s increasingly extreme policies. Now we have a rump in opposition.”

Former NSW Liberal minister and party fundraiser Michael Yabsley says the Reformers appear to be one of the more recent incarnations of pushes within the party towards the Christian right. He recalls the Lyons Forum of the early 1990s, disparagingly called “The God Squad”.

While Yabsley is out of day-to-day politics, he is advocating for the major parties to go beyond tinkering and seriously address big money in politics.

“Whenever the shit hits the fan with this stuff – as it has in NSW at the moment, as it has in Victoria with the IBAC report, and welcome to the CFMEU-related royal commission – it’s as though this stuff has never happened before. But the truth is, it happens all the time,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “There are more loopholes than you could drive a truck through in relation to making donations.”

The ICAC inquiry is happening just as the federal Coalition has started seeing a small uptick in voter intention polling, as it contends with the serious competition from Pauline Hanson’s populist One Nation party.

“I do see some green shoots,” the Liberal MP says. “None of it is in a normal time. You wouldn’t say they’re good results, but given where we’ve been, they’re an improvement.

“In Victoria, my hopeful analysis there is, as an election approaches and that choice becomes stark – when people realise it’s either going to be a Labor or Liberal government – people are realising that One Nation is not really where they want to actually vote in an election, even if they want to indicate their annoyance mid cycle. That’s what we need to happen federally as well.”

Liberals are bracing for the next six weeks of the inquiry.

“Knowing how ICACs work, if they’re going to sensationalise it with Angus, they’ll set it up nicely. I know what New South Wales is like. It’s a show trial,” a Liberal MP says.

“No one has a good prognosis for Angus. It has potential to wound him and his credibility.”

Jeremy Greenwood and Dallas McInerney are expected to appear before the ICAC next week.

A member of the Thriving Kids advisory group has warned that the persistent lack of detail on the program – two months ahead of its targeted launch – leaves families unable to plan for their children who will be removed from the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Skye Kakoschke-Moore, who served on the advisory group as chief executive of Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA), is calling for “clear answers” from the states and territories charged with overseeing the program on what Thriving Kids will look like, and particularly what will happen as children age out of it.

“Children and families cannot be expected to navigate the gaps that emerge as governments wrangle over responsibility while essential supports vanish around them,” she says.

Thriving Kids is intended for children up to the age of eight with developmental delay or autism, whose support needs are deemed “low to moderate”. It is supposed to start rolling out no later than October 1, having already been delayed three months. Full implementation is due by January 1, 2028.

“This extra time needs to be used to work directly with families and communities to design supports that children actually need, including access to allied health, assistive technology and tailored programs that respond to local circumstances. Families are also asking what support will look like as children grow older. We need clear answers to that question,” Kakoschke-Moore tells The Saturday Paper.

A fundamental problem, says disability policy expert Jane Britt, is that Thriving Kids has “not been pilot-tested to ensure its clinical efficacy” when participants are diverted or removed from the NDIS.

State-based systems can lead to “inconsistency in service delivery”, says Britt, who is deafblind. They also foster a “location lottery”, she says, with people in metropolitan areas benefiting from more services than those in regional, rural and remote areas.

Her comments follow similar concerns raised by Thriving Kids advisory group member Dr Tim Jones last month.

In June, the ABC reported Jones’s warning that the state-based model is a departure from the panel’s original intention and could leave vulnerable families at risk. The doctor is the child and young person’s health chair for the Royal Australian College of GPs.

Another major hurdle to a timely rollout is Queensland’s continued resistance to signing on to the initiative. In February, all state and territory governments agreed in principle to limit NDIS access arrangements for children, based on Labor’s proposed amendments to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013. That legislation, opposed by the Greens and Coalition, is before a Senate inquiry that is not expected to report until August 14.

The Queensland government has since described Thriving Kids as a “bad deal”, as reported by the ABC.

The state’s minister for families, seniors and disability services, Amanda Camm, did not respond to The Saturday Paper’s request for comment.

A spokesperson for the minister for disability and the NDIS, Mark Butler, said the federal government is “continuing to engage with the Queensland government”.

At this stage, Australia’s federal and state governments are planning contributions of more than $4 billion over five years to implement Thriving Kids and other subsequent foundational supports.

“No one will be removed without somewhere for them to go,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said when the full suite of reforms was announced in May this year.

Britt says “grave concerns” about Thriving Kids were raised during the inquiry into the NDIS amendment bill, and the disability community was alarmed by internal government estimates of how many people will no longer be eligible. “We heard that 241,000 people will exit the scheme by 2031, with another 110,000 people diverted,” she says. “Yet the receiving system, Foundational Supports, is not yet fully operational, designed or user-tested by the people who will be accessing it.”

 

First announced in August 2025, Thriving Kids has attracted controversy ever since. The following month, CYDA surveyed 1535 parents, caregivers and young people with disability about the program, which was then due to roll out in July this year. Four in five respondents believed the process was being “rushed”, didn’t allow for co-design and review, and risked children “falling through the cracks”.

Senator Jordon Steele-John, Greens spokesperson for the NDIS and disability rights, says many people in the disability community “don’t feel their concerns have genuinely shaped the reforms that are now being implemented”.

“Right now, many people are experiencing reduced supports, lengthy reassessments and ongoing uncertainty about whether they’ll be able to keep the services they rely on or whether promised services eventually materialise,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “Disabled people and their families deserve better than this. There is still so little information about how Thriving Kids and the NDIS will work together.”

A government spokesperson tells The Saturday Paper that Thriving Kids will deliver “routine child development and health assessment checks, general parenting supports, local navigation, targeted supports and state measures to assist workforce capability readiness”.

However, disability advocates warn these foundational supports are not enough.

“Early intervention and community-based supports are incredibly important, but these services can’t become a substitute for properly funded, individualised supports through the NDIS,” says Steele-John.

Carol Hegan, a neurodivergent mother whose three young children with disability have been accessing NDIS services for several years, says the government is “asking families to have confidence in a system that has not yet been built”.

Hegan says NDIS supports have “genuinely changed” her family’s quality of life, but looming cuts to the NDIS and the rollout of Thriving Kids is a source of “uncertainty and distress” for her community.

Hegan, who is also a disability inclusion consultant and president of the Pilbara Disability Network, says she’s had hundreds of conversations with families like hers who are struggling to understand what the reforms mean for their children.

“Families want to know what services will exist, who will deliver them, how long they’ll wait, what eligibility will look like, and what happens if those services aren’t available when their child needs them,” she tells The Saturday Paper.

Hegan says in regional communities such as hers, these concerns are amplified because of existing service shortages.

“Reducing disability supports doesn’t reduce a child’s disability, it just transfers more responsibility onto families who are often already at capacity, already burnt out and already asking for more help and not being heard,” she says.

Hegan’s insight echoes that of CYDA’s survey, which found three in four respondents were worried about the rollout of Thriving Kids, with some “stressed and even suicidal”.

“Our community is anticipating a mental health crisis, which we are also not well equipped or resourced for,” Hegan says.

For people in the disability community, part of this crisis is the seemingly never-ending process of government consultation, with no clear indication of positive change.

In September 2025, the Thriving Kids initiative was referred to a federal parliamentary inquiry. The inquiry’s final report, “No child left behind”, published in December last year, made a number of recommendations, including that the Thriving Kids advisory group “undertake an inclusive co-design process and embed evidence-based policies and interventions”.

In June, the Senate inquiry into Labor’s proposed amendments to the NDIS Act was extended by eight weeks after outcry from the disability community over a public consultation period that allowed only a fortnight for submissions. The inquiry had received more than 4000 within that time.

“They have not finished public hearings and not all submissions are tabled, yet they’ve recommended that the amendment bill passes,” says Jane Britt. “The current evidence shows that the government is not truly hearing or responding to our concerns.”

Britt says while NDIS plans are cut and other services are still being designed, people with disability will turn to mainstream services that are already at capacity, including hospitals.

“The evidence from the NDIS inquiry already tells us there’s unmet need outside the NDIS, and cuts to the NDIS will exacerbate this issue,” she says.

Says Senator Steele-John: “Better outcomes come when lived experience is treated as expertise and when governments are willing to slow down, listen properly and get the reforms right.”

Hours into my research on the state of the climate, a siren on my phone jolts me out of my concentration. At first I don’t know what’s going on, then I recall it’s just a test of AusAlert. Developed in response to the findings of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, this new system will warn people of nearby bushfires, floods and other emergencies in time to get out of harm’s way.

This intrusion feels deeply ironic. As the world continues to tear itself apart with senseless wars and rampant capitalism, the physical processes that have held the Earth’s climate stable for millennia are starting to shift in ways that have scientists struggling to preserve our usual restraint.

Europe has been suffering through a brutal summer. Western Europe had its hottest June on record, with temperatures more than 3 degrees Celsius above average. France set a new June national record of 44.3°C, while the United Kingdom broke its June record on three consecutive days, reaching 37.3°C. As of late July, more than 330,000 people have been evacuated from their homes across France and Spain due to uncontrolled wildfires. Data from a study still under peer review suggests the combined excess death toll across Europe during the extreme heat is more than 27,600. French river water used as a coolant for nuclear reactors poses a risk: heat-related restrictions have seen the Golfech 2 nuclear reactor in southern France offline since July 9. As the fastest-warming continent in the world, the current conditions in Europe are a preview of the “new normal”.

Closer to home, an El Niño event is intensifying in the tropical Pacific Ocean, increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and destructive storms. El Niño events are part of a natural cycle that plays out every two to seven years, but they are now occurring on a planet that is being swamped by fossil fuel emissions. Because this El Niño will release stored ocean heat onto a planet already warmed by greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures are almost certain to reach a new record in 2027.

Importantly though, the science is nuanced. Journalistic hyperbole warning of a “super El Niño” doesn’t help an already baffled public understand what’s going on. When the media gets ahead of what the science says, scientists are the ones who cop the blame when the reality that plays out is more complex than simple headlines or sensationalist clickbait suggest.

That is now more dangerous than ever. As I write, One Nation is polling above a fifth of the primary vote – at times higher than any other party in the country – on a platform that dismisses climate change as “pseudo-speak for global wealth transfer”. When a headline promises a “super El Niño” and the season turns out to be bad rather than biblical, climate change deniers are ready to pounce, claiming scientists are crying wolf. The deniers aren’t held to account by actual evidence. They only need the gap between the hype and the reality to be wide enough to exploit, using every overstated forecast as ammunition to weaken support for strengthening Australia’s climate policy.

It’s no overstatement to say the latest El Niño forecast has scientists worried as we move further beyond the bounds of our historical climate. When the latest climate model forecasts were released, American scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote: “I’m generally pretty measured in how I discuss climate data … [but] it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.” There is inherent uncertainty in any form of modelling – climate, economic or otherwise – but when more than 90 per cent of 667 simulations run across 14 different seasonal forecast models predict record-breaking temperatures, you know you are entering uncharted territory.

Ocean temperatures are predicted to peak at 3.6°C above average, topping the all-time high of 2.75°C during the 2015-16 El Niño. What sets this event apart is that it is forming in an ocean that has never been hotter: this June was the warmest one the world’s oceans have recorded since 1900. The entire ocean has warmed due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, so the models tend to overstate the strength of recent El Niños relative to the historical record. Even correcting for this, the forecast peak is still a record-breaking 3.1°C. We are bearing witness to monumental changes that future researchers will look back on as a period when the Earth’s climate slipped off its moorings and into treacherous waters.

Aside from the transition from season to season, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the largest year-to-year source of natural climate variability on the planet. It is scientific shorthand for both El Niño and La Niña events, and the single most important driver of climate variability for eastern Australia, with the strongest impacts experienced during spring. Events typically peak in late spring to early summer, weakening as the monsoon arrives, before finally decaying in autumn.

The general perception that El Niño brings drought and La Niña brings flooding rain glosses over just how different each event can be. El Niño’s influence is typically felt most strongly across eastern and Central Australia, while western Tasmania, the eastern seaboard and much of Western Australia are barely touched. Although history tells us El Niño events have had huge consequences for Australian society, the forecast strength of an event in the tropical Pacific isn’t always the best guide to the effects in our region. For example, the extreme El Niño of 1997-98 passed over Australia with near-normal rainfall, while the far more modest event of 2002-03 pushed two-thirds of eastern Australia into severe drought. While the last very strong El Niño in 2015-16 drove severe mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, its impact on the mainland was subdued by a warmer than average Indian Ocean, sparing much of the country the worst of the forecast drought. Advances in the science now show it is the complex interactions of conditions in the Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans that collectively determine the severity of the impacts we experience.

When the Indian Ocean is cooler than normal, less rain falls across south-eastern Australia during winter and spring, which can reinforce drought conditions during El Niño years. Complicating things is the fact that the Southern Ocean can pull in more than one direction. In winter, when the belt of westerly winds sweeping across southern Australia contracts towards Antarctica, rainfall is dragged away from the continent, drying out places such as Victoria and South Australia, while increased onshore flow brings more rain to the east coast. In summer, if the westerlies are further north than normal – which often occurs during El Niño events – more dry air blows in from the interior, drying out the south-east and east coast while increasing the chance of heatwaves. Occasionally, when the amplifying forces of these different climate drivers combine, the impacts can be catastrophic – the Black Summer of 2019-20 was a product of a weak El Niño reinforcing sustained drying influences from the Indian and Southern oceans, layered over years of drought.

It is still too soon to know exactly what this El Niño will bring to Australia. What we do know is that the recent run of La Niña years has left us in a better position than the long dry did leading up to the Black Summer. So far, this winter has been warm and wet across much of the south-east. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, El Niño is now firmly established and likely to last until at least summer, with the models tipping a strong to very strong event. The BoM is also careful to note that a strong signal in the Pacific does not necessarily mean strong impacts in Australia – ENSO is only one of many influences on our climate. Models currently suggest a cooler-than-average eastern Indian Ocean developing over winter and persisting into spring, which could lead to the classic hot and dry conditions in south-eastern Australia that we associate with El Niño events. This could herald another bad bushfire season for the south, in places such as Victoria.

Which brings me back to that AusAlert siren that jangled my nerves. In October, the service will go live: an admission of the world we now find ourselves in. The siren that broke my concentration today was only a test, but on a planet that grows hotter with each passing year, it is only a matter of time before we must confront the emergency. Somewhere between those who want to terrify us and those who think climate change is a hoax lies a harder truth: a warmer planet will continue to disrupt everyone in our society, whether or not we understand or accept the science.

The nature of corruption is now top of mind for Victorian Labor insiders, as names of potential royal commissioners are workshopped for the inquiry that new premier Ben Carroll committed to this week, promising “exhaustive terms of reference”.

Some people think they already know what the inquiry will find, and they seek to minimise.

“You are not going to find hard-edged corruption in government, or at least I would be very surprised,” says a former cabinet minister.

“It is not brown paper envelopes of cash, for heaven’s sake. This is Melbourne, not Sydney,” says a factional chief.

It was wrong that criminal elements had been allowed to take over the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union and wield power on building sites. But unions are entitled to participate in politics, they say. “Influence is not corruption. Hard industrial bargaining is not corruption.”

Several sources for this story asserted that the CFMEU has acted as a protector and enabler of particular MPs, financing their campaigns or encouraging property developers to do so, in return for what one described as “general goodwill” – a conduit into government. Is that corruption?

Meanwhile, after a chaotic week, another boot is about to fall. Any day now, the report of Operation Richmond, an Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission inquiry into decade-old allegations of corrupt conduct in enterprise bargaining arrangements between the Victorian government and the United Firefighters Union, will finally become public after the UFU unsuccessfully challenged its release in court.

Those mentioned – including a bevy of current and former cabinet ministers and former premier Daniel Andrews – have been briefed as part of the natural justice process. They are prevented from talking about it under IBAC legislation and an injunction is in place preventing publication of any details that leak.

The people involved are nervous. Operation Richmond is likely to demonstrate the problems in Victoria have not been confined to one union, the CFMEU.

And an election is just four months away.

 

The starting points for a royal commissioner are clear enough from the report of barrister Geoffrey Watson, SC, that was tendered to Queensland’s Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU, and the work of investigative journalist Nick McKenzie at The Age.

Watson’s work suggests the threads may reach far and high and beyond the unions. His report mentions companies such as Built, Probuild and Multiplex as having provided work on union officials’ homes, even though they normally do not do domestic work.

Labor insiders interviewed by The Saturday Paper this week nominated the (now completed) contract for the West Gate Tunnel as an arrangement deserving investigation. That involves the Transurban Group, one of the world’s leading toll road operators.

As Carroll moves fast to set up the royal commission, the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland in the 1980s offers a relevant model and perhaps the most convincing riposte to fallen premier Jacinta Allan’s claim that royal commissions do not change cultures.

Carroll’s promise to appoint a special prosecutor to follow up any criminal charges mirrors the mechanism that allowed Fitzgerald’s inquiry to focus on systemic issues while the crooks were pursued by an office at arms-length from a compromised justice system.

That inquiry saw the police commissioner and four ministers jailed, and former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen charged with perjury. His trial ended in a hung jury and was aborted, but the government fell as soon as voters had a chance to cast their verdict.

Tony Fitzgerald wrote that the inquiry had “begun by pulling a few threads at the frayed edges of society”.

Where might the threads lead in Victoria? There are national implications. The Labor brand is damaged and the issues cross state boundaries. The ACT Integrity Commission recently made serious corruption findings against territory government officials regarding a multimillion-dollar contract awarded to Lendlease, over another firm that was better and cheaper, at the behest of the CFMEU.

As minister for infrastructure in the Rudd and Gillard governments, Anthony Albanese secured a huge increase in roads and rail investment with an emphasis on proper process: through the establishment of an independent statutory body, Infrastructure Australia. By all accounts the current prime minister was no friend of the CFMEU.

But federal government money is in the Victorian Big Build. One former federal minister describes his party’s current approach to the problems in the construction industry as “wilful ignorance”. That’s despite those problems affecting capacity more generally, including the ability to meet targets set in national cabinet for building housing.

Deborah Glass, the former Victorian ombudsman whose calls for a royal commission added considerably to pressure on Allan, says she is usually no fan of such inquiries.

“They can be a very unwieldy and an incredibly expensive tool. They need to be limited to the most extreme circumstances, but I think this is one of them,” Glass tells The Saturday Paper. “If Victoria had properly empowered, well-resourced, robust integrity agencies, there would have been less reason to demand it.”

The definition of corruption in the IBAC Act limits its powers to behaviour that involves criminality. But, says Glass, “Corruption involves a spectrum of activity. There are a lot of misuses of public funds and abuses of public trust that fall short of the criminal. And I’d be very surprised if there isn’t quite a lot of that involved in this.” The IBAC legislation, she says, needs reform.

As for what the royal commission might take into account, there’s the culture of the public service, as explored by several Victorian probes.

The Coate inquiry into the failures of Covid quarantine in 2020 led to a public service commissioner report recommending that departmental secretaries “not withhold relevant information from the government of the day”, even if ministers indicated they would rather not be briefed about problems.

Two years later, the IBAC inquiry Operation Daintree found the Health Workers Union had been given “privileged access” in the awarding of a $1.2 million training contract. Senior advisers had improperly pressured departmental officials and influenced the contract’s management, and senior public servants who knew there were problems did not push back.

In a report on the politicisation of the public service in 2023, Glass commented on “ongoing marginalisation of the traditional public sector” in the early development of the Suburban Rail Loop, the largest project in Victoria’s Big Build plans.

That project had been kept so secret that even the secretary of the relevant department didn’t know about it. Yet even as originally conceived – let alone after blowouts – it was set to dominate public spending for generations, crowding out alternative uses of public funds.

Similar secrecy and extensive use of consultants featured in the planning for the 2026 Commonwealth Games, which had to be cancelled after major flaws in the financial modelling were revealed.

Glass was “deeply troubled” by the number of people she interviewed who feared for their careers if they spoke out. “Creeping politicisation is a reality in Victoria, and requires urgent attention.”

Three years later, here we are.

 

As for Jacinta Allan’s demise as premier last Tuesday, this is not the usual story about the power of Labor’s factions.

Though the Left and Right powerbrokers helped corral support for the resolution, the chaos surrounding Allan’s departure was a demonstration of their decline.

The factions are an unappealing but necessary part of the ability to resolve disputes, discuss policy and divide the spoils of power without threatening the stability of the government. But those in Victoria have long since been bled of any ideology or policy base. Now, to quote one former political staffer, they are “job placement agencies” and alliances of convenience, while real power has increasingly – first under Dan Andrews and then under Allan – been concentrated in the premier’s office.

Andrews’ rise, and that of his chosen successor, overlapped with the end of a stability deal negotiated between the Socialist Left and the Right. That collapse cleared the way both for centralisation of control and “industrial-scale branch-stacking” by former MP Adem Somyurek – the subject of a combined ombudsman and IBAC inquiry.

Andrews increasingly surrounded himself with people who did not have a base of support in factions and therefore lacked the diversity of views that can impose.

This was the context for what one former cabinet minister describes as “a horror story to do with the structure of the construction industry, the engagement by the government, and poor accountability”.

Big Build contracts were drawn in a hurry. The imperative was to get things done. Treasury, and other public servants, tried to introduce process and accountability but over time gave up or were sidelined. Projects were undercooked at the point of commissioning contract management, and financial controls were lacking. Adjustments to contracts were made due to state government changes to specifications, and people involved colluded to obscure the reasons for those changes.

Meanwhile, the structure of the industry shifted, with subcontractors and the rise of labour hire firms creating opportunities for featherbedding and skimming at multiple levels. There simply weren’t enough construction workers in Victoria and the Big Build added to the pressures, and thus the power, of the unions – as the CFMEU pushed out the more law-abiding Australian Workers’ Union.

Academic work on the nature of corruption parses it into different types and different levels. At its worst, a society becomes a place where corruption is simply part of how things work, throttling fairness and opportunity and, at its worst, personal safety.

Pre-Fitzgerald, Queensland was skating perilously close to this.

Melbourne, still one of the world’s most liveable cities, is not such a place. Most of life continues pleasantly and as normal.

And yet.

The whiff is beginning to pervade normal life and the ordinary conversations. One of the people I walk my dog with left a job on a construction site after being assaulted by a colleague, who was backed by the CFMEU. He was not foolish enough to stick around or complain.

My hairdresser’s girlfriend works for a real estate agent and worries about documentation regarding a property that changed hands twice, the second time for well below market price to a union official. It looks like cover for a bribe.

Watson’s report identifies connections between individuals involved in problems in the Big Build and in the tobacco wars, which have seen the firebombing of shops throughout Melbourne.

Systemic corruption has pervasive impacts. Professions become implicated – lawyers, accountants and others who give advice and expertise. The money has to be spent and it creates a network of beneficiaries who are not themselves corrupt.

Most Labor figures interviewed for this story believe the most likely outcome for Victoria’s election in November is the Liberal Party in some kind of partnership or coalition with One Nation – making the state a “live experiment” in what that might look like and what One Nation might demand in return for its support.

Meanwhile, the Big Build – a visionary collection of projects designed to keep the city liveable and productive into the next century – is the main legacy of this Labor government. It is of lasting value yet cannot now be talked about without a serving of shame.

Declaration: The author reported on the Fitzgerald inquiry for The Age over more than two years, and then spent a period on the inquiry staff assisting in writing its report.

The moment that set the New South Wales Liberal Party on course for yet another inquiry by the Independent Commission Against Corruption can be quite precisely established: 5.43pm on June 23, 2022.

That was when Ray Williams, then the Liberal MP for the electorate of Castle Hill, 
in the Bible belt of north-west Sydney, got to his feet to drop an enormous bucket on his own party.

Williams’s brief speech focused on a factional coup the previous year, which saw the mayor and six other sitting Liberal members of The Hills Shire Council dumped as candidates for an upcoming election and “replaced by the Liberal Party state executive without the usual preselection processes normally afforded to such positions”.

What he alleged went far beyond the usual factional shenanigans. He claimed the councillors were replaced at the behest of a property developer, Jean Nassif – who would later flee Australia, leaving behind a trail of defective buildings and exceeding $1.6 billion in debts. Nassif has denied allegations of misconduct.

“Apparently,” Williams told parliament, “prior to the council elections, Jean Nassif of Toplace met with Christian Ellis and other senior members of the Liberal Party, who were paid significant funds in order to arrange to put new councillors on The Hills Shire Council who would be supportive of future Toplace development applications.”

Ellis, he noted, was a member of the party’s state executive and also the owner of a lobbying company that listed Toplace as a major client.

Williams hinted at the identity of others involved but dropped only one other name: that of Ellis’s mother, Virginia, who was one of the replacement councillors.

Many more names were to come, however, in the contents of an anonymously authored document entitled “The Men Who Stole the Hills”, which subsequently began circulating in state parliament and eventually was tabled.

The dossier’s focus was a group of deeply religious members of the Liberal Party’s right faction founded by Ellis in February 2018, later registered as an unincorporated entity – ABN 35 184 583 948 – under the name NSW Reformers.

Dirt files or “shit sheets” are a common reality of modern politics, but this one took it to a new level: slickly produced, running to more than 300 pages, replete with the names and party offices held by members of the group, the relationships between them, including employment histories, along with times and dates of events involving them, maps, graphs, tables of data and full colour pictures of numerous party members and associates.

The Reformers believed they were doing God’s work, as “a movement that seeks to promote Christian values in society”.

The dossier described them as “a group formed with the sole and express purpose of recruiting or stacking branches to the NSW Liberal Party with the goal of installing their own people into Council and Parliament…”

The group’s “primary decision makers”, it claimed, were “a small body consisting of people who had known each other for years through shared community, religion, and schooling from the Opus Dei sect of Catholicism.”

The dossier alleged then premier Dominic Perrottet to be one of these three key “decision makers”. Also named was Damien Tudehope, the then minister for finance and government leader in the NSW upper house. The third was the premier’s brother, Charles Perrottet. No allegations of corruption have been made against Dominic Perrottet.

Supposed “main operators” or “stars” in the sect’s plan to control the party included Christian Ellis, Robert Assaf, Dylan Whitelaw and another Perrottet brother, Jean-Claude.

A raft of others were alleged to be supporters who had provided resources. These included former and current politicians, both state and federal. Tony Abbott was the most prominent. There has been no allegation of corruption against the former prime minister.

Key figures in the party organisational wing were accused of using their positions to advance the interests of the Reformers, including Dallas McInerney, chief executive of Catholic Schools NSW and a close ally of Angus Taylor, having previously held a fundraising role for Taylor in his electorate of Hume.

As one senior Liberal Party member tells The Saturday Paper: “When Ray Williams gave that speech, it invited people to go looking [for corruption]”.

The dossier also suggested where they might look.

“This,” says the source, “is all part of this death match that’s been going on for 20 years. “And now it’s all going to play out in the public domain.”

They describe an “internecine war fuelled by deep personal hatreds” that has been ongoing ever since the party’s right faction split in 2019, leading to the formation of the so-called centre right, under the leadership of Alex Hawke.

The hostility between the old right and the new centre right was more about personalities than policy or ideology, the source says. But there is also a sectarian element to it.

The hard right is dominated by conservative Catholics. The centre right is more associated with evangelicals – most prominently Hawke and Australia’s former Pentecostal prime minister, Scott Morrison.

The first attempt to investigate the allegations was a state parliamentary inquiry, chaired by Greens MLC Sue Higginson. It made only one substantive finding: that Christian Ellis and Jean-Claude Perrottet asked a businessman to contribute $50,000 to an operation to unseat Alex Hawke from his federal seat of Mitchell.

The investigation was frustrated by the fact that a number of key figures had failed to appear. Christian Ellis, Virginia Ellis and Jean-Claude Perrottet, the committee found, had “engaged in serious and deliberate attempts to evade service”.

Two others who had been summonsed, Charles Perrottet and Jean Nassif, also engaged in “serious and deliberate” avoidance on the basis that they were “out of jurisdiction”. Lobbyist Jeremy Greenwood and Dylan Whitelaw were also cited for avoiding giving evidence.

This behaviour by the potential witnesses, the committee found, served to “add weight” to Ray Williams’s claims. But the committee’s report made clear that getting to the bottom of the allegations would require ICAC’s scrutiny.

Credit to then premier Perrottet: he had already referred them, the day after they were made.

Almost four years later, public hearings will begin on Monday as part of the investigation known as Operation Rosny. They are expected to run for eight weeks and will explore three allegations.

The first relates to possible circumvention of electoral funding laws, including those that prohibit property developers from donating.

It’s alleged that between 2019 and 2023, “Persons, including Christian Ellis, Jeremy Greenwood, Robert Assaf and Jean-Claude Perrottet solicited or accepted political donations, including from prohibited donors, in amounts that were not declared and exceeded applicable donation caps, for purposes that included the recruitment and/or renewal of members to the Liberal Party.”

ICAC will further investigate whether some such donations were made by Catholic Schools NSW, arranged and approved by McInerney. And similarly, whether such donations were made through a company, Paslibdan Pty Ltd, “on behalf of prohibited donor Michael O’Hara”.

The second allegation is more serious and relates directly to the claim made in parliament by Ray Williams.

ICAC will investigate whether between “approximately 2020 and 2023, political donations were made by or on behalf of Jean Nassif and Toplace Pty Ltd … and were solicited or accepted by Christian Ellis, Jeremy Greenwood and Charles Perrottet”, and whether any such donations were made “in pursuit of outcomes desired by Nassif”.

The third strand to the Operation Rosny investigation involves claims that Labor member of Strathfield Council Karen Pensabene and her then council colleague Sharangan Maheswaran – a lawyer who has acted for Nassif and his company – had engaged a private investigator to conduct surveillance on a third councillor, Matthew Blackmore.

ICAC will examine a potential breach of public trust, “which could involve blackmail and/or possible breaches of the Surveillance Devices Act 2007”.

Reportedly, Maheswaran and Toplace executive David Krepp met the then building commissioner David Chandler and his staff “over problems Toplace was having with regulators” in April 2021. Two years later, he had his phone and laptop seized at Sydney Airport, shortly after police also raided Nassif’s home and office.

He complained to The Sydney Morning Herald at the time: “I am astounded that police now claim a power to seize personal electronic devices when no crime is being committed.”

The ICAC’s announcement of a public inquiry mentioned a substantial cast, as follows:

Jean Nassif  In 2023, a warrant was issued for Nassif’s arrest in relation to what police called a “large-scale fraud”. He has never been charged, having fled Australia for Lebanon in 2022.

His building licence was revoked in December that year after scores of defects were identified in several major unit developments by Toplace.

It is alleged he wanted to damage the political career of former Liberal transport minister David Elliott, and have the building commissioner David Chandler sacked.

Dallas McInerney The conservative Catholic and chief executive of Catholic Schools NSW has long been seen as a dominant figure on the hard right. He is being investigated over allegations of donations that were not declared, that exceeded applicable donation caps and were used to fund right-wing branch-stacking.

He is allied to the so-called Reformers, and also is close to Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. When it was announced that McInerney was being investigated by ICAC, David Elliott called for Taylor to resign, saying “the fact that Dallas McInerney was his campaign treasurer leaves him and the Liberal Party exposed”. There is no suggestion Taylor is implicated in any way. McInerney has “temporarily” stood aside from his job with Catholic Schools NSW.

Christian Ellis The founder of the NSW Reformers group is central to the allegations around the solicitation of donations in return for favours. Ellis has served on various powerful committees of the party, including the state executive, and his lobbying company worked for Toplace. His name comes up in relation to multiple allegations.

Jeremy Greenwood A lobbying partner with Ellis, Greenwood also worked for Toplace. He is a lobbyist for Catholic Schools NSW and the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.

He is facing similar allegations to those directed at McInerney. Greenwood has formerly worked for National Party leader Matt Canavan.

Robert Assaf Assaf also has tight connections to the conservative religious establishment, having worked as communications manager for Catholic Schools NSW. He is alleged to have solicited political donations, including from prohibited donors.

Damien Tudehope The shadow attorney-general and leader of the opposition in the Legislative Council is not accused of any wrongdoing yet has become something of a casualty of Operation Rosny even before the start of hearings. On July 3, Tudehope announced he was stepping aside from his positions, on the basis he had been called as a witness and that Project Rosny was investigating “several people with whom I have had close relationships during my political career”.

Tudehope is former president of the anti-abortion group Right to Life NSW, and spokesperson for the Australian Family Association. He once ran against the Liberal Party as a candidate for the Australian Family Alliance. For more than 30 years up to 2010, he worked as a solicitor for the law firm O’Hara & Company, whose principal, Michael O’Hara, is said to be similarly socially conservative.

Michael O’Hara Also the owner of dozens of hotels, O’Hara is under investigation to determine whether undeclared donations were made through one of his companies, Paslibdan Pty Ltd, to be used for branch-stacking. According to a list of witnesses released by ICAC on Wednesday, O’Hara will be the first to give evidence, next Tuesday.

Dylan Whitelaw Whitelaw will be the second to testify, and it appears the commission believes he will have a lot to say. His evidence is expected to run all day Wednesday and Thursday.

His name was omitted from the list of Operation Rosny targets on its release a few weeks ago. “The Men Who Stole the Hills” dossier noted he was an employee of Ellis. The parliamentary inquiry noted their close association, as well as efforts by Whitelaw to avoid its scrutiny.

Dominic, Jean-Claude and Charles Perrottet Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet is not a subject of ICAC’s investigations, but his brothers are central.

“Charles is the smartest of the clan,” says a senior Liberal source who has had dealings with the Perrottets over decades.

“And he’s charming. He was the ops man for his brother Dom, going right back to university days. Dom relied on Charlie to do all the heavy lifting.”

Whether someone so smart did accompany Christian Ellis to meet Jean Nassif and discuss donations for favours is something the inquiry will need to determine.

As for Jean-Claude, he is alleged to have sought $50,000 from Frits Maré for a branch-stacking operation in the Hills area to unseat Alex Hawke. The parliamentary inquiry has already found this to be the case.

 

In summary, things look more than a little sticky for a number of operatives for the hard right. They look sticky, too, for the Liberal Party more generally.

Tudehope recognised this when he stepped aside, lest he become “an unnecessary distraction for [opposition leader] Kellie Sloane and my parliamentary colleagues”.

David Elliott recognised it too, when he called for Angus Taylor to resign. You don’t have to have done anything wrong to risk appearing guilty by association.

Operation Rosny is likely to further cement the perception of the state Liberals, and in particular the right faction, as a home of corruption. It’s been only a decade since the party lost 10 members to an ICAC investigation involving dodgy donations from property developers.

In 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, pollster Roy Morgan ran a survey about how different professions were viewed by the Australian public. It revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Australians trusted nurses and doctors above all other professionals. Close behind them were pharmacists.

“Pharmacists are very highly trusted and valued for good reason, and patients interact with them more than they do any other kind of clinician in the healthcare system,” says Peter Breadon, health program director at independent think tank the Grattan Institute. Australians visit a community-based pharmacist on average 18 times a year, compared to six visits to their GP.

Community pharmacies – those not in hospitals – are privately owned businesses that must be owned by a pharmacist, although that isn’t necessarily the white-coated individual behind the counter. Each year the federal government pays those businesses about $3.8 billion for their services, most of which is a variety of fees paid to pharmacy owners for dispensing medications subsidised under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – including administration, handling and infrastructure, and dispensing of “dangerous medicines”.

These are highly profitable businesses, with data suggesting that the before-tax and inflation-adjusted profits of community pharmacies have more than doubled over the past decade.

The peak body for community pharmacy owners – as distinct from pharmacists themselves – is the Pharmacy Guild, which in the past five years donated more to political parties than any other healthcare operator, making it the 15th most extravagant political donor overall, outspending even the Minerals Council of Australia. It is also one of three principal partners of Patients Australia, whose website states it is an “independent not-for-profit organisation dedicated to championing and protecting the rights and interests of patients and improving patient experiences and health systems”.

According to a report released by the Grattan Institute this week, the Pharmacy Guild has long maintained a powerful hold over the pharmacy sector. It wields such influence that the details of that $3.8 billion government healthcare spend, spelt out in the five-yearly Community Pharmacy Agreement (CPA), are negotiated behind closed doors and exclude those most affected by those decisions: patients and even working pharmacists themselves.

“Pharmacy policy affects almost everyone: it affects what your medicine costs, it affects where you can get them, what other services might be available, and how these billions of dollars are spent,” says Dr Elizabeth Deveny, chief executive of the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, the national peak body for health consumers. “And when large amounts of public money are involved, people expect transparency, they expect good evidence, and they expect accountability.”

The CPA even dictates the discounts that individual pharmacies can offer to patients on their PBS medications. The most recent agreement reduces that discount from $1 per script to zero for most patients from this year. “One dollar may not sound like much, but if you’re on multiple medications and on a tight income, every dollar counts,” says Dr Danielle McMullen, GP and federal president of the Australian Medical Association, the peak body for Australian doctors. “I have seen patients who do forgo medicines, even pensioners where they’ve got the concession price.”

Nine years ago, a federal government review of pharmacy remuneration and regulation recommended that CPA negotiations include a range of stakeholders, including the Consumers Health Forum and the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, which represents Australia’s more than 40,000 pharmacists.

That hasn’t happened on the consumer side, says Deveny. “There is not much involvement. We’re told that it is a commercial process and that we can’t be involved on that basis.”

The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia – which declined to comment for this story – was a signatory to certain parts of the seventh CPA in 2020, not including the section on remuneration and funding. However, the society was completely left out of the eighth and current CPA in 2025. That agreement was signed exclusively by federal Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler and the Pharmacy Guild.

In nearly 10 years, it appears little has changed to make CPA negotiations more inclusive, nor to increase transparency and accountability for the billions of federal health dollars spent on the pharmacy sector. “Usually when you see an area of policy where policy is not working for consumers and for taxpayers, and where that persists over decades despite many evidence-based independent reviews recommending change, that often points to a problem with vested interests having too much influence over policy, and I think that’s the case here,” Breadon says.

The authors of the Grattan Institute report recommend that the CPA be scrapped and replaced with a more transparent process whereby pharmacy remuneration is set by an independent body such as the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, which exists specifically to give evidence-based pricing advice for health and aged care to the government.

Pharmacy Guild spokesperson and national vice-president Simon Blacker said in a statement to The Saturday Paper that the guild has been a leading advocate for affordable medicine.

However, the guild also fought a furious but ultimately unsuccessful public campaign against the introduction of 60-day prescribing in 2023, an initiative that meant patients with certain chronic diseases enjoyed a dramatic reduction in the cost of their medications and needed fewer visits to their doctor and pharmacist. While the guild claimed at the time the move would lead to the closure of between 200 and 600 community pharmacies due to financial pressures, the health minister’s office tells The Saturday Paper that 54 new pharmacies have opened nationwide since the change.

The Grattan Institute report also found the guild exerts extraordinary control over pharmacy ownership and location, preventing new pharmacies from opening too close to existing ones and steadfastly resisting efforts to open up the sector to supermarkets, as is common in other countries.

The Pharmacy Location Rules mean any pharmacist wanting to open a new pharmacy or relocate an existing one must apply to the Australian Community Pharmacy Authority. These rules dictate, for example, that in some settings the new premises must be at least 1.5 kilometres, as the crow flies, from any other pharmacy, and must be within 500 metres of a supermarket and/or – depending on the size of the supermarket – a full-time prescribing medical practitioner. The rules vary according to the context, such as a greater number of nearby doctors or a new pharmacy in a shopping centre.

Breadon says the location rules were originally developed to address an oversupply of small pharmacies in the 1980s, but “it’s pretty clear that constricting where businesses can open and who can own them, by definition, limits competition”.

A lack of competition could benefit pharmacy owners, who are able to charge whatever they like for non-PBS medications on private prescriptions, including big-selling items such as the new GLP-1 RA weight-loss drugs. “Patients don’t always understand that medicines might be different prices at different pharmacies and to shop around, so particularly if they’re non-PBS or if they’re below the PBS price,” the AMA’s Danielle McMullen says.

The guild defends the location rules as vital to ensure that Australians have equitable access to medicines and pharmacy services. “Removing these patient protections would not create more access to care – it would risk concentrating pharmacies in the most commercially attractive locations while leaving vulnerable communities with fewer healthcare options,” Simon Blacker says.

One subject that the Grattan Institute report’s authors and the guild might agree on is pharmacist prescribing. Both the guild and the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia have pushed for pharmacists to be allowed to independently prescribe medications for certain minor conditions, such as uncomplicated urinary tract infections. Unsurprisingly, the medical establishment is against it.

“There is very little evidence to support this autonomous pharmacy prescribing,” says Dr Michael Wright, Sydney GP and president-elect of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. He argues the evidence that has come from pilot trials of pharmacist prescribing focuses on whether a patient received a prescription, not clinical outcomes or cost-effectiveness, “which are all the things that are important to us, which there just isn’t the evidence for”.

However, there is a strong appetite for the “integrated pharmacists” who work within general practices not to dispense medication but to manage it, which is also recommended in the Grattan Institute report. “Pharmacists are the experts in medication management, and having a pharmacist working with you and your practice is an amazing way to identify medication issues, make sure people are on the right medication, get them off unnecessary or the wrong medication,” Wright says.

While the political heft of the Pharmacy Guild looms large over the Australian pharmacy landscape, Breadon thinks it may soon face challenges. That’s partly because of the rise of non-guild entities such as Chemist Warehouse, which merged with Sigma Healthcare. The company now operates about 9 per cent of pharmacies.

Breadon also suggests the guild didn’t win many friends in government with their aggressive campaign against 60-day prescribing. “The other change is the government’s facing a lot of pressure in terms of healthcare spending, so there’s fiscal challenges,” he says. “They’ve got more reason than ever to try and get value for the healthcare spend.”

To understand Australia’s approach to artificial intelligence, you have to understand the colonial mindset that enfeebles Australian politicians.

Australia has a long history of giving away its resources. Soon after white settlement, governors saw their role as supplying England with everything from Norfolk Island pine for ships to wool for mills.

The mindset has continued and worsened. Australian politicians will frequently see foreign business interests as the answer to Australian problems. They will make huge concessions in negotiations, and come back with very little to show for what they have given away.

They will almost always assume a foreign company can do something better, that a foreign businessman is smarter, that the country has to rush lest it miss out.

With all that in mind, the way Australia treats gas is instructive in considering how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese intends to treat the copyright of writers and musicians when negotiating with AI companies.

Fresh from defending his government’s right to give away more than half the gas Australia exports, the prime minister has been flirting with the idea of giving away the copyright of Australian creatives in exchange for tech companies building giant data centres that no one but the tech companies want built.

Different resource, same extractive solution. Same trading of cows for beans.

The exploitation of Australian resources by foreign companies is so vast, and has been happening for so long, that it is hard for most Australians to comprehend just how royally we have been shafted. Unfortunately for the AI industry, however, they come offering a dud deal just as Australians have begun to realise how easily foreign grifters beguile governments. Hopefully the public outrage about gas has stiffened the government’s resolve in negotiations with the tech industry.

 

Australia’s approach to the export of resources is a joke. The so-called Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) collects less revenue than the beer excise. Even though Japan has no gas reserves of its own, the Japanese government collects more revenue from importing gas than the federal government collects from its export. New Zealanders have experienced no shortage of diesel in recent months, even though New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon failed to fly around Asia promising “gas for diesel”.

None of these facts are in dispute. They all come from official sources of data. What’s alarming is that the same prime minister who wants to negotiate a deal with big tech continues to insist we are getting a good deal from the gas industry.

It was a pity that INPEX Holdings Australia paid zero company tax and zero PRRT between 2015/16 and 2022/23, while selling our gas abroad. To their credit, Chevron did pay $30 in company tax in 2020/21. That’s not a typo: not $30 million; $30.

After Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and the world price of gas more than doubled, not even the best accountants and lawyers could convince the Australian Tax Office that the gas industry made no profit here in Australia. As a result, gas exporters paid $12 billion in 2022/23 on the sale of $92 billion worth of our gas. To put that into perspective: it accounts for 1.8 per cent of Commonwealth revenue and 0.5 per cent of gross domestic product.

To be clear, the reasons the profits are so high is because Australia is literally giving these companies most of the gas they export free. Imagine how profitable Coles would be if we made farmers give them free fruit and vegetables.

A country whose leaders are willing to give away gas to Chevron, Shell and INPEX simply can’t be trusted to negotiate with global tech companies about how best to protect copyright or the terms on which data centres can be built in people’s neighbourhoods and use copious amounts of energy and water.

There has always been something deeply insecure about Australian governments when it comes to negotiating with foreign companies and foreign countries. Their fear of missing out in relation to foreign investment is such that while Qatar exports about the same amount of gas as Australia, they collect about five times as much tax revenue.

While Norway has used its resources industry to provide free university and build a $3 trillion sovereign wealth fund, in Australia voters are told we have to cut the National Disability Insurance Scheme and charge young people $50,000 for an arts degree because we can’t stop giving away so much gas.

In what Senator David Pocock describes as “the ultimate dirty deal”, a draft of which was leaked to him, United States tech companies are seeking exemptions from copyright laws in exchange for building the data centres they need to mine the life’s work of Australian writers and musicians, in order to “train” the artificial intelligence they sell around the world.

In the words of songwriter Paul Dempsey, “The idea that copyright law should be watered down or chiselled away at to provide a freebie or a handout to gigantic multinational, multibillion-dollar companies to train their AI models makes absolutely no sense to me. I simply don’t get it.”

Bizarrely, under the “dirty deal”, the “pay-off” for letting the big tech companies train their algorithms on creatives’ work is that the tech industry will do Australia the favour of building data centres most voters don’t want. Put simply, if we give our intellectual resources away, the tech industry will take all our renewable energy and turn it into noise.

While such an agreement may seem laughable, that is exactly the deal our governments have repeatedly settled for when dealing with foreign business interests. For decades our “best negotiators” have agreed to give away our gas for free to “encourage the gas industry to invest in Australia”. Few people realise the “investment” in Australia is really just the construction of export hubs required by these foreign companies to haul away all the free gas we gave them.

 

This week Prime Minister Albanese gave a major speech on AI, spelling out the need for a “framework” to ensure both “faster approvals” for big tech and “genuine community consultations”. If that sounds familiar, it’s the same kind of promise we have been making to frackers and coalminers who want rapid approvals to destroy farmland as they boost profits.

While Albanese made it clear he wants to protect artists’ copyright, he also made it clear that a lot of details are yet to be determined. Australian authors, songwriters and the communities faced with the construction of enormous data centres in their midst will need to be hypervigilant while the prime minister’s “framework” is being developed. History suggests governments will agree to almost anything if they get to be photographed with a shovel and can make vague promises about future economic benefits.

Just as most people can’t imagine how big a coalmine is – the biggest in New South Wales is more than nine kilometres long – most people can’t quite comprehend how big the proposed data centres are likely to be. While we used to pretend data was stored “in the cloud”, the people of Plumpton, about 30 kilometres from Melbourne’s central business district, have recently realised the cloud is more like an enormous vibrating factory that will cover about 490 soccer fields or 8700 residential blocks of land. So much for the housing crisis.

If the Plumpton data centre goes ahead, it will use more energy each year than all of the electricity generated by Victoria’s largest remaining coal-fired power station at Loy Yang. So much for the climate crisis.

Then there’s the noise. Unlike factories, which start and stop, AI data centres never sleep. Their cooling fans, pumps and electrical equipment generate a constant low-frequency hum, 24 hours a day. Even where operators meet noise limits, nearby residents often complain that the persistent background noise, especially through the once-quiet nights, now defines their lives.

Other countries know how to stand up for themselves. While just over three years ago many people at the top of Australia’s national security apparatus were warning of Chinese invasion “within three years”, countries such as Ukraine, Norway and Finland, all of which share a border with Russia, have a far more independent approach to foreign policy than Australia.

Likewise, while Norway is a much smaller country than Australia, it has accumulated a $3 trillion sovereign wealth fund by heavily taxing the same gas companies that say they won’t invest in Australia if the government taxes them. Maybe Australia should ask Norway to negotiate with the big tech companies on our behalf.

If Anthony Albanese is serious about progressive patriotism – a term he offered up last year, hoping it would appeal to the instincts of the left and right – he needs to put the interests of ordinary Australians first. Just as the Australian public, including both One Nation and Greens voters, overwhelmingly supports a 25 per cent gas export tax, the vast majority of Australians want our communities and culture protected from big tech companies. The prime minister might settle for vague promises of future benefits, but Australian voters want concrete promises, not the promise of a handful of concreting jobs.

When the Liberal Party thinks about combating One Nation, one name comes up more than any other: Malcolm Roberts.

There is a considerable, almost daily, effort by journalists to air the long-held convictions of Pauline Hanson’s longest-serving colleague, an avowed conspiracy theorist on everything from climate change to the Bondi terrorist attack.

Roberts has speculated that the anti-Semitic attack was a “false flag” operation as he didn’t have “data” to rule out the idea. He called the United States the “world’s greatest terrorist organisation” and has said he regards American radio host and Sandy Hook school shooting denier Alex Jones as a “great guy” and a “beacon of hope”.

The former coalmine manager, who regards the United Nations as an “insidious institution” and thinks it is “highly likely” the US military is spraying “chemtrails”, appeared on a 2025 podcast, Conversations with Adrian, praising Vladimir Putin for “standing up to the globalists” with his invasion of Ukraine. He said the Russian president had earnt his “respect for doing so”.

One Queensland Coalition MP says Roberts makes “RFK Jr look like a moderate”, referring to the Trump administration’s controversial secretary of health and human services.

“If we went into any sort of agreement with One Nation, we’d all be like Barnaby, having to distance ourselves on a daily basis from Malcolm Roberts. That’s a look into the future,” the Coalition MP says, referring to Barnaby Joyce, who has tried to play down the senator’s views since defecting to the party.

“What the future of an agreement and formation would be? It’d be horrific. We’d be constantly having to defend ourselves and distance ourselves from his comments. When they were just a small party, they seemed harmless. Where would he fit on a One Nation front bench? You couldn’t put him in health. You couldn’t put him into defence. You couldn’t put him in foreign affairs. You couldn’t put him in trade. On the economy, he’d take us to the gold standard and nationalise the banks. We have to take this stuff seriously. We can’t just ignore it anymore.”

Liberal leader Angus Taylor has also been highlighting Roberts’s deficiencies, despite also making the oft-used observation that One Nation under Hanson is a “one-person show”.

“The question here for Pauline Hanson is, what is she going to do about it?” Taylor told reporters in Melbourne on Thursday, in the midst of his midwinter national tour. “She’s over in Italy right now, living it up. It seems that she needs to deal with this, and she needs to deal with this now.”

Another senior Liberal says it is time Roberts’s “pretty strange views” are assessed more widely.

“If they want to be a serious party, then they’ve got to expect the kind of scrutiny that serious parties get, and some media are prepared to go for the dig and actually find information out,” the source says. “The mainstream media, I think, have not really held her and the party to account for some of the batshit crazy stuff that they come up with.”

The source points to a 2019 Hanson policy for a 10 cent bounty on cane toads, quickly rubbished by ecologists because the introduced pest breeds too quickly.

“Your bounty on cane toads was a classic. That means everybody goes out and belts up the cane toads and gets rid of them. But actually, what happens is that the smart person will go, ‘I’m going to breed up cane toads so I can go and kill them, so I can keep on getting the bounty.’ And that’s what’s happened in the past when they’ve done things like put a bounty on feral animals. They go out and actually exacerbate the problem.

“That’s the kind of challenge I think we have, is the lack of scrutiny that she’s getting, because her policies sound right on the surface.”

Liberals have expressed relief after Taylor’s speech at The Sydney Institute last week, where he made his first sustained criticism of Pauline Hanson and her party, warning of an “eternity of pain” if her “random grab bag” of economic ideas were implemented.

“It appears as if Angus has, at last, made his mind up about what his position is in relation to One Nation,” the senior Liberal tells The Saturday Paper of the internal impact of the opposition leader’s speech.

“If there’s a party position in relation to it, we just need to know what it is, and it’s just been washing around, and so I think the clarity that he was able to provide by the speech, in terms of, ‘Yes, we are actually going to take One Nation head on’, was the first time I’ve actually seen that clarity.”

Liberals The Saturday Paper spoke to this week are commending Taylor for prioritising economic policy rather than debating with journalists about whether he supports multiculturalism.

It is understood there is considerable Liberal polling, focus group and opponent research work going on behind the scenes, between the federal secretariat and leaders’ offices at federal and state levels.

“That’s standard political practice. What’s changed, obviously, is the rise of One Nation. It used to be focused on Labor. It’s now a split between what are people saying about Labor and what are people saying about One Nation – and we’d be negligent if we didn’t do that work,” a senior Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper.

“I think it’s a moving feast because it’s really interesting. Sometimes when you talk to people, they don’t really even know, and struggle to articulate, why they’re supporting One Nation.

“There’s a pleading: ‘Can you tell your leadership to be better so we can support you?’ So, I think there’s a window that is open for us to convince people to come back.”

There has been a schism in the Coalition over the past year about how to approach One Nation. In that time, Pauline Hanson’s party has grown to four Senate seats, secured the defection of former deputy prime minister and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, spiked in voter intention polls and won seats in South Australia and at the Farrer byelection.

Liberal colleagues say South Australian senator and powerbroker Alex Antic is now “entirely isolated” in his view that the Coalition should do a deal with One Nation to defeat Labor. Fellow traveller and Taylor-backer Tony Pasin is said to have seen the “error of his ways” after he floated the idea of a non-compete pact for the parties.

One conservative Liberal MP sees Taylor’s reset on One Nation through the prism of rivalry with the more definitive Andrew Hastie, who had earlier declared “war” on the far-right party.

“The way I see it is him fearing ‘I’ve got to worry about Hastie’ as much as anyone else. ‘I need to be showing that I’m not weak with them,’ ” the source tells The Saturday Paper.

“At the end of the last sitting week, Hastie was saying, ‘I won’t bend the knee [to One Nation]’, and Angus was equivocating, and maybe Angus has felt the pressure to step up and differentiate against them.”

For her part, Hanson filmed a social media post from a car in London during a trip to see Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and far-right activist Tommy Robinson, stressing to Taylor she was “not your enemy” and that they needed to team up to oust Labor.

“Listen to the people, Angus, and work with me,” Hanson says in the video. “Stop denigrating One Nation and work together.”

It is not something that would have happened while John Howard was prime minister.

Former Nationals Senate leader Ron Boswell, who died in early January, told The Saturday Paper in December that his party and the wider Coalition needed to take on One Nation, just as he was renowned for doing during the Howard era.

“They’re not as clumsy now as they were then, but that little escapade in the Senate with the burqa, I would have ripped that to pieces,” he said. “She’s a lot more careful, but she’s still the enemy.”

Boswell’s approach was to attack Hanson and point out inconsistencies and consequences, while also researching her party for ties to other ultranationalist groups.

“I investigated all those and found out these people were using Pauline Hanson as their political voice. I don’t think she’s going there now, but she doesn’t offer anything other than a voice for the people that just can’t achieve,” he said.

“She’s going to be a lot harder to attack, because she’s learnt that she still is a political party of protests that will achieve nothing other than to diminish the conservative vote.”

The former senator also declared that, by consensus with the likes of then Nationals leader Tim Fischer and then treasurer Peter Costello, Hanson could not get Coalition preferences.

Echoing the Taylor of today, Costello said in 2003 the policies of One Nation would “destroy Australia”, before adding: “That’s the reason why you shouldn’t vote for them.”

Convinced early not to cosy up to One Nation, Liberal MP Garth Hamilton says the Coalition can’t run away from what Boswell and others were trying to do.

He sees the latest polls, indicating a shift of two to four points back to the Coalition at the expense of One Nation, as showing the effectiveness of holding them up to scrutiny.

“I’m genuinely trying to live up to the standards of Ron Boswell,” the member for Groom, a rural seat centred around the city of Toowoomba, tells The Saturday Paper. “I had the pleasure of knowing him. I didn’t agree with all of his policies, but I admired the principled stance he took previously with regard to One Nation, and I think it’s an important legacy for us to remember.”

According to another senior figure of the Howard era, political strategist Ian Hanke, the Gina Rinehart-backed One Nation can no longer be regarded as a fringe party.

“That’s 30-odd years ago. It’s a different world, different environment, and what we’re seeing here now is a fundamentally different thing, even though the key player may be the same,” Hanke, a key adviser to Peter Reith and Kevin Andrews, tells The Saturday Paper.

“They have shown over the past six months, since January this year, they are now a third force in Australian politics at this moment, just on voting intention, not in parliamentary representation as such. Yes, or maybe never but at this moment in the polls – and they are remarkably consistent. This is not an aberration at this moment. It is a feature.”

He says the Liberal parliamentary party has only itself to blame for not doing “hard intellectual grunt work” since it lost power in 2007.

“The focus has been on immigration. That is a factor, but every piece of public opinion polling that you see, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ ” Hanke says. “And my side of politics has done nothing on the economy basically for years. There hasn’t been a reform package. There’s been tinkering, but no reform package to make people better off.

“Until the Liberal Party starts to address a genuine reform package, and that includes social reform, it includes tax reform, it includes workplace relations reform and so on, even the NDIS – these things have to be addressed, and addressed as a package, not piecemeal, but with a coordinated understanding of what needs to be done to make people’s lives better.”

Hanke says he has not worked for the Liberals in two years, but he wants to tell the party now not to be afraid and to stop trying to “stretch out the Howard era”, and “drag it into the future”.

Taylor backed up his speech at The Sydney Institute with a radio interview on 2GB, where several listeners rang in to say they did not like him attacking Hanson and One Nation. Taylor explained his primary focus remained the “dangerous and deluded” Labor government. He said his words about One Nation had been delivered with a “heavy heart” in deference to the “good people I want voting for us”.

Pressed again, he insisted he was “not conflicted” and attacked One Nation for not having a plan for the future of the country. “They are,” he repeated, “a one-person show.”

Colleagues say they want strength of conviction from their leader as they are led into the fray. One said, “You don’t walk into your mistress’s bed with guilt on your face,” adding, by way of explanation: “If you’re making a decision, make a decision.”

Liberal MPs who are pleased about Taylor’s economic focus stress the new attack is along policy lines amid an ongoing cost-of-living crisis and a widespread distaste for mainstream politics.

“It was clear from Angus that this has to be the modus operandi moving forward,” one MP says. “We don’t want to criticise Pauline Hanson personally or directly. I don’t think that’s valuable, to play the person. We also very clearly don’t want to criticise people that are looking to support One Nation. We understand why they’re feeling that. It’s about looking at policies, which it should always be about.

“It was a clear increase in outlining some of their policy failures, and, ultimately, when you’re polling like One Nation, they should expect to be held to the same standard as other political parties.”

As well as countering One Nation, however, the Liberal Party has considerable work to do in rebuilding itself. Asked if the party had the appetite for grunt work and big, wide-ranging reform, the conservative MP says the first step has been taken with the proposal to index tax brackets.

“I think there’ll be more. Look, the one thing that 2019 did for Labor is, while they lost, it sort of helped them define who they are, and they’ve harked back to it halfway through this term,” the MP says.

“They’ve implemented almost everything they had as policies in the 2019 election midway through this term, bar the franking credits. So that policy sort of reminded them who they are.

“I do think we need this term to remind ourselves who we are. We’re a lower spending, lower taxing, rewarding-Australians-with-more-of-their-own-money government, and I think we’ve taken one step towards that, but we probably need to take a couple more.”

A few weeks ago, on the first day of the last parliamentary sitting fortnight before the winter recess, a group of hard-right Liberals met for dinner at Molto Italian, a restaurant on Canberra’s Kingston Foreshore.

The group was there principally in support of Liberal leadership hopeful Andrew Hastie. They included Queenslanders Garth Hamilton, Henry Pike and Cameron Caldwell, and Western Australians Rick Wilson and Ben Small.

At the table, they discussed the Liberal Party’s conundrum as it attempts to counter One Nation – which happens to be the issue on which Hastie is thought most likely to win the ailing party’s leadership.

In particular, they discussed the merits of Operation Catapult, the 1940 operation in which Winston Churchill ordered British forces to destroy the fleet of their own ally, France, to keep it out of German hands.

The action was so ruthless that Churchill believed it helped to convince the United States of Britain’s determination to defeat Nazi Germany.

“We are,” one member of the dinner group tells The Saturday Paper this week, “preparing for the fight of our lives.”

Hastie had first stepped back from the leadership in late January, when, at a hastily arranged meeting in Melbourne with Angus Taylor, he agreed to stand aside and give Taylor a clear run in the race to topple then leader Sussan Ley.

Just over four months after Ley was deposed, on June 23, the day of the Molto dinner, Hastie took his first decisive step back towards the leadership.

That Tuesday began with the regular meeting of the Coalition party room, followed by an 11am debrief for the media, a weekly ritual when parliament is sitting.

When a journalist asked whether One Nation was mentioned, the person doing the briefing played it down, acknowledging that while there had been a couple of passing references there was nothing more to it.

At 11.23am, just as the partyroom debrief was wrapping up, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald published a story headlined: “Hastie gets security upgrades as One Nation campaigns against him”.

Embedded in the story was an arresting quote from Hastie, leaked straight from the partyroom meeting, that was soon being read aloud in offices across Parliament House.

“I would rather get taken out in a box than bend the knee to One Nation,” Hastie told his Coalition colleagues. “I will never surrender to One Nation, and we will do them, and do them slowly.”

The contrast with Taylor, whose approach has focused on pandering to Pauline Hanson’s agenda, was stark and registered immediately with the party room.

“He knew what he was doing. I knew exactly what he was doing at the time. Everybody else did, too. No one missed it. It was a statement of intent,” one MP who was present at that day’s meeting tells The Saturday Paper.

“Hastie actually told his colleagues directly, ‘I am different to this guy at the front, and I’m going to be different.’ And that was a big wake-up call to the podium. Like, oh, we get it, you mean business. Like, you’re not going to serve dispassionately in the team and wait for it, you’re going to stand up and fight for it.”

With Question Time looming, Taylor’s office soon issued a media alert advising the press gallery that Taylor would front reporters with shadow treasurer Tim Wilson at 1.15pm, in the Opposition Leader’s Courtyard.

Taylor let Wilson go first, with a spray against Labor’s deal with the Greens to pass changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax.

The Liberal leader then followed a similar line, railing against Labor’s “toxic taxes” and accusing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of breaking key election promises and then flip-flopping on the detail.

The media pack wasn’t especially interested in housing taxes or the budget, however. Less than a week after Pauline Hanson’s first National Press Club address, an early question went straight to her vision of an Australian “monoculture”.

Taylor dodged it, reaching for boilerplate about parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

A couple of questions later, Taylor was brought back to the idea of monoculture versus multiculturalism: Did Taylor think multiculturalism was still a principle integral to Australia’s cultural identity?

“I’ve been very clear about what we’re committed to,” Taylor replied.

There were two follow-up questions, which Taylor dodged, before he was asked whether he would endorse Hastie’s comments about not bending a knee to One Nation.

“No,” he said, underlining the contrast Hastie had drawn hours earlier. “We want One Nation to vote against these tax increases. Of course we do.”

Albanese didn’t need long to notice. Question Time had barely started when he ripped into Taylor with savage effect.

“Those opposite, in the three right-wing parties, all choose irrelevance,” Albanese said.

“They all choose irrelevance and not to debate. Although, it must be said that the member for Canning has said, in his party room, that he wouldn’t bend the knee to One Nation.

“It’s a real contrast with the bloke, the current leader of the opposition, who, when asked a question about monoculturalism four times, couldn’t give an answer.”

The issue has only got worse for Taylor in the days since.

Taylor got another chance to make the argument on his own terms two-and-a-half weeks later, in a Sydney Institute address on Thursday. This time he came prepared, casting One Nation as a “column of smoke” that is long on grievance and short on a costed economic plan.

Hanson’s top four spending commitments could add roughly a trillion dollars to the budget over a decade with no credible way to pay for it, Taylor warned, that, if implemented, would trigger economic chaos.

This week, a string of national polls showed Labor’s primary vote climbing back up. Newspoll had it at 33 per cent. The same poll had the Coalition’s primary sliding to 17 per cent under Taylor, lower than under Ley, and lower than the numbers Taylor cited as his own reason for challenging her.

Another problem festering in Taylor’s backyard was the shock revelation last week that the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption is investigating Dallas McInerney as part of its probe into illegal donations and branch-stacking in the NSW Liberal Party. The Catholic Schools NSW boss and Liberal right-faction powerbroker helped deliver Taylor the leadership and was, until this week, Taylor’s own campaign treasurer.

McInerney has stood aside from Catholic Schools NSW while the commission investigates whether he signed off on illegal donations used to recruit party members. Last week, he resigned from the board of the NSW Education Standards Authority.

Former NSW Liberal police minister David Elliott says the association is enough for Taylor to resign outright, arguing that his leadership was terminal. “Angus is hiding beyond the inquiry,” Elliott says, “but you don’t get that luxury in leadership.”

No wrongdoing has been alleged against Taylor himself, but McInerney is not a peripheral figure in his leadership: without McInerney, Taylor doesn’t have the votes he would need to survive a second challenge.

Making matters worse, Taylor is on the record backing Christian Ellis, one of the three other men now at the centre of the ICAC inquiry. In 2022, when Ellis was seeking a spot on the party’s constitutional standing committee, Taylor gave him a written endorsement, declaring that “our party will do well to have people like Christian elected to positions of state council”.

Ellis’s own past activities in the NSW seat of Farrer are instructive. In 2021, the Sydney-based conservative bought a livestock property in Deniliquin and emerged as a preselection challenger to Sussan Ley, backed by a wave of new branch members.

The threat to Ley, then a 20-year incumbent, was serious enough that in March 2022 the Liberal Party’s federal executive intervened. Then prime minister Scott Morrison appointed a three-person committee, including himself, to bypass the ordinary preselection process across a dozen NSW seats and hand-picked Ley as the candidate for Farrer, sparing her a vote she risked losing.

“This has been a major shock internally,” one NSW Liberal says of the ICAC investigation. “You cannot imagine the chaos behind the scenes, but yet it strikes me that Angus doesn’t get that yet. The thing about Angus is, when it comes to actual politics, he’s very slow on the uptake. So I don’t believe he would have paid much attention to this scandal in the beginning.

“Imagine if Labor’s Federal Electorate Council president in Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler was before ICAC for a week of hearings for [allegedly] being corrupt and funnelling CFMEU money into NSW Labor to fund a whole lot of branch-stacking? It would be the biggest story in the country, right? But that’s exactly what has just happened to us … and Taylor hasn’t reacted yet.

“We’re talking about Taylor’s No. 1 ally in the whole of the Liberal Party, who’s his own conference president, who’s helped him raise money, and he might be about to go down for corruption. Now, call me a pessimist, but it looks bloody likely to me that that is going to have consequences for Taylor.”

(No findings have been made against Dallas McInerney and The Saturday Paper is not suggesting they will be, just that he has been named in the investigation.)

The same source raises similar issues of political naivety with Taylor providing a written reference for Christian Ellis.

“Angus is so stupid at politics that he probably would have provided that reference without knowing Christian Ellis,” says the NSW Liberal.

“There’s two problems with that: on the one hand, it’s good for Taylor that he probably doesn’t know the guy; but it’s bad for him that he writes references for people that he doesn’t know, saying they’re of good character.”

The source draws a comparison with various other errors in Taylor’s time in politics, including using doctored council records to falsely claim Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore had spent $15.9 million on travel. The real figure was under $6000.

“He just lets himself be used up as a product, and he’s so politically dumb he doesn’t see it,” the source says. “I mean, I know that if I write a reference for anybody, I’m like eight levels of analysis on how this could fuck me up one day, and I have to do it all the time for constituents, but I still get paranoid about it.”

A spokesperson for the opposition leader said: [Taylor] has no involvement in, or knowledge of, the matters before the NSW ICAC, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while those processes are under way. 

(The Saturday Paper is not suggesting that Ellis has acted corruptly, just that he has been named in the investigation.)

At this stage, Hastie’s fight isn’t so much with Taylor. It’s with One Nation and the right-wing media system that supports it, in particular Sky News.

“Sky News was always bent, we all know that,” says one member of the Molto dinner group. “But now it’s almost exclusively devoted to promoting One Nation, so we are saying to each other, ‘Why prop it up? Why go on it?’ Sky News has zero interest in talking about the problems we face as a party. It wants to ignore entirely the problem of Gina’s ownership of the party. Sky News doesn’t want to talk about any of that, so we have resolved that we need to find other ways to reach people.”

In this reckoning, Pauline Hanson, Gina Rinehart, Sky News and the rest of the far-right online biosphere are the French Navy. Hastie’s version treats One Nation as an existential threat to be neutralised in public, not a rival faction to be out-schemed in private.

What a Hastie push actually looks like is shaped as much by geography as by temperament. He doesn’t have the numbers or the machinery that comes with a NSW or Victorian power base. Canberra sitting weeks aside, Hastie is in Perth most of the time, with a young family, two or three hours behind his colleagues on the east coast.

Those close to him say his intention is not a coup. Instead, he intends to make such a strong case for his leadership that the party has no choice but to turn to him, if and when the party room decides they cannot go on with Taylor.

The working assumption inside the group is that they have six to eight months to make the case before the window closes and the party is stuck with Taylor as they go into the next election, due in May 2028.

The biggest complication for Hastie’s plan is not inside the party, however, but in his history with Ben Roberts-Smith, the former special forces soldier who is being prosecuted for five counts of the war crime of murder.

Hastie was one of 21 former SASR comrades who gave evidence against Roberts-Smith during his earlier defamation trial, at significant personal cost within an insular and famously loyal military community.

It was, by any measure, an act of integrity, but not one that sits comfortably with large parts of Hastie’s own conservative base.

Even inside the parliamentary Liberal Party, many of the people who would be natural Hastie supporters believe Roberts-Smith should not be punished, whatever the courts ultimately find.

In Western Australia, One Nation has named Hastie’s seat of Canning as a priority target, with the party’s chief strategist, James Ashby, declaring on Sky News last week that its 430 registered members there “expect us to run a very strong candidate”.

Ashby made no secret of the reason: One Nation intends to stand by Roberts-Smith “right to the very end, despite what the allegations are”. The party will turn Hastie’s role in the defamation trial into the centrepiece of a campaign to unseat him.

Hastie’s camp sees the issue differently, however. They believe Hastie’s support for a proper court process for Roberts-Smith’s alleged crimes is an asset rather than a liability.

“Because Hastie’s brand is integrity, my view is that the BRS problem solves itself,” a source said. “You don’t get many politicians these days whose primary appeal is honesty.”

The same supporter added that Hastie’s stand against Ben Roberts-Smith and One Nation has won Hastie the trust of the party’s moderates, who are increasingly warming to him as the only credible alternative to Taylor.

“It has to be Hastie,” the source added. “And it will be Hastie.”

Whether or not Hastie, still only 43, is the answer to the Liberal Party’s existential crisis is not something anyone in Canberra can say with certainty. What can be said is that, in a party built on caution, Hastie has bet his entire future on the opposite instinct.

I did find this thread and tried messaging the user; however, I get the following.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NikonFilmmakers/comments/1l9qnwf/z9_28135_pz_ronin_rs_4_pro_interested_in_your/

Unable to message this account.

Planning on getting into some minor filmmaking because work wants more video than photos.

I don't have a ZR or the 28-135 PZ, just a Z8 and Zf with a small variety of lenses. I'm thinking about an RS5, but not just yet.

But one thing that I'm stuck on is how the PZ lens works with the DJI RS5's controls?

Can you use the gimbal's touchscreen to zoom in and out? Or do you need to use the body / lens controls for zoom? Because I just don't feel like touching the body or lens to zoom is the right move or does it not really matter for smooth video?

Which kind of leads to the next question: I know I can use the MC-N10 to remotely zoom, but I'm guessing that the MC-N10 takes up the same USB port as the enhanced intelligent tracking module would for fixed focal length lenses.

If that's the case, am I right to assume that the only option is then DJI focus motor is the only option that will work to use the power zooms function with the gimbals screen.

Or is there another solution that I'm missing?

As the hard-right remaking of the Liberal Party intensifies, The Saturday Paper can reveal that far-right members aligned with South Australian senator and powerbroker Alex Antic last weekend took over the executive positions in Sturt, the former seat of moderate Christopher Pyne.

Several party sources who were in the room say it was a clean sweep of the Sturt Federal Electoral Convention, the local grassroots unit of the party. It had long been held by the moderates, but the far right prevailed in a 179-155 vote.

The new president, Peter Varricchio, made a speech at the event that veered, sources say, into a push to “hunt moderates” and colleagues on the centre-right. “That’s removing them from the party,” says a Liberal source who witnessed the speech.

“It was all a bit deranged. It was very much a Sky attitude, beat up on the moderates. He just said we’ve got to get rid of moderates. They are holding us back.”

Those present say they also heard comments from the floor about “One Nation’s values being Liberal values”.

The sources were also concerned to hear what they described as attempts to recast the legacy of Robert Menzies, the revered founder of the Liberal Party and Australia’s longest serving prime minister.

“Some idiot from the Institute of Public Affairs even wrote an article that said Menzies would vote One Nation today,” another Liberal source tells The Saturday Paper.

“It’s such a distortion of the truth, right? It’s just madness. We’ve been infected with this MAGA–Farage-type, far-right-wing populism.”

Sturt, in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs, is a leafy seat the Liberals would dearly like to win back. It was the Liberals’ only Adelaide seat in 2022 but was lost in 2025 to Labor’s Claire Clutterham in a 7 per cent swing away from the Liberals’ two-term member and former Pyne staffer James Stevens.

A senior source within the Liberal Party’s South Australian branch rejected the on-the-scene accounts relayed to The Saturday Paper but declined to comment further.

Peter Varricchio, an Adelaide podiatrist who will fundraise for and support the next Liberal candidate to run in Sturt in 2028, posted to social media on June 28 to thank his “in-laws who came out today among the 334 members”. He promised that “change is happening to get our country back”, and he replied to a supporter, “LWC next”, meaning the Liberal Women’s Council.

Earlier that same morning, Varricchio posted, without comment, an article about people starting to hang banners over highways with Pauline Hanson’s favoured “Fire the Liar” three-word fundraising slogan.

Varricchio is in the camp of Antic who, in the face of dire Liberal polling two years out from the next federal election, has been espousing the view that the Coalition and One Nation should work together to defeat Labor.

“My great hope is that the centre-right in this country can band together at least a little bit,” Antic told Sky News last month.

“Ultimately, if it looks like some sort of coalition, I mean, I’m only a backbencher, but I just want to see this country saved. I don’t think the attacks on each other are very helpful from either side.”

The Saturday Paper reported a year ago on the backbencher’s efforts to install allies and push the party further to the right. Antic has steadily recruited religious conservatives to Liberal branches and he announced in May he was running for the presidency of the South Australian Liberal Party – a move that would challenge his right-faction colleague, the current president Leah Blyth.

Liberal MPs note that Antic rarely interacts with his own colleagues, spending most of his time in parliament with One Nation members and United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet. He also maintains a friendship with SA One Nation leader and former Liberal senator Cory Bernardi.

“It is an absolute mess. Antic wants to control the division so that he can join with One Nation,” one Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper.

“Angus [Taylor] is doing nothing about it, and he has had multiple people go to him and warn him about this, and a number of colleagues are very concerned about the fact that Antic continues to sit in our party room when it is clear that his loyalties lie elsewhere.”

Liberal unity and discipline are what Taylor is pleading for, as the latest Newspoll shows the Coalition’s primary vote has fallen to a record low of 17 per cent.

After Pauline Hanson’s contentious speech at the National Press Club last month, One Nation took a hit in the polls taken by Newspoll, Resolve, Roy Morgan and RedBridge Group, but the change in voting intention flowed largely to the Labor government. The Coalition is now polling worse than it did when the opposition leader ousted his predecessor, Sussan Ley.

Addressing the joint Liberal and Nationals party room in Parliament House for the last time before the five-week midwinter break, Taylor strongly reinforced the need for opposition members of parliament to focus on Australians who were angry, hurt and “grieving for their country”.

Sources who were present tell The Saturday Paper that Taylor said the opposition’s focus should be on the Albanese government for “breaching trust” over the tax changes “they did not have a mandate for”.

“We need to be unified, we need to be stable and, most importantly, we need to demonstrate to Australians that we have a strong plan and a strong united team,” Taylor told Sky News later on Tuesday.

“One Nation can’t provide that. Labor has demonstrated that their team is taking this country in the wrong direction. That’s the job we’ve got ahead of us. I know we’ve got to rebuild trust in order to achieve the outcomes we want to achieve in the lead-up to the next election. But we are absolutely, resolutely focused on that.”

Insiders fear the polling numbers have further to fall.

This week, frontbencher Melissa McIntosh, the member for Lindsay in New South Wales, failed to muster support from colleagues for a Sky News-style rebrand of the party.

South Australian Liberal and Taylor’s lieutenant Tony Pasin has also tried to walk back his interview last month with The Australian, in which he was quoted as saying the Liberals could work “hand-in-glove” with One Nation to “appropriately target” seats in order to get a conservative government elected.

Taylor quickly objected, telling the ABC, “We won’t be doing that.”

Pasin later said his comments were “misinterpreted”. “It’s not a suggestion that we shouldn’t run against each other,” he told reporters who were reading out his quotes in Canberra this week. “I simply said we should work together to defeat Labor.”

Liberals are divided over whether they should work to push back One Nation. In Taylor’s Parliament House press conference on June 23, his repeated dodging of questions relating to multiculturalism and Hanson’s idea of a monoculture left colleagues flummoxed.

“He’s had every opportunity and he hasn’t been able to take advantage of any of them,” says one Liberal MP.

“His speech to the party room should have been about ‘how I’m going to do better’, because really he botched the opportunities that we had with the budget with the GST, negative gearing and the widow’s tax by not being able to articulate that Australia is a multicultural country,” the MP tells The Saturday Paper. “Why? What is he afraid of?”

Liberal backbencher Andrew Hastie is a study in contrasts, declaring he won’t “bend the knee” to aggression from far-right rivals. He says personal attacks from One Nation have left his home and electorate office in need of extra security.

“One Nation has declared war on me, so they shall have war,” the former SASR captain and deputy opposition leader in the House wrote in an email to supporters.

“The real enemy isn’t me. It’s Labor.”

Hastie, an ambitious “new right” faction Liberal who pulled out of contesting the leadership in January, told the ABC this week of the “strong” need for the Liberals to show the party is “committed to winning government, delivering centre-right government for the Australian people”. He set a deadline, saying the party had to “build out” a policy platform “by the end of the year”.

He doesn’t favour the preference deals with One Nation that are backed by new Liberal Party president Tony Abbott. Nor has he hinted at any support for a three-way coalition or a non-compete policy.

“I think it signals weakness. I think it signals a lack of confidence in our values, in our party, in our policies. And weakness is provocative, and it’s contagious as well,” the member for the Western Australia seat of Canning told the ABC.

Hastie is seen by colleagues as behaving in a “surgical” manner. As the leader of the party’s organisational wing, Abbott shares this reputation but with a very different impact.

Abbott deviated from parliamentary party attacks on the Labor budget in an interview with his former chief of staff Peta Credlin on Sky News. He backed Australia’s “Celtic culture” and “foundational Judaeo-Christian ethos”, which he said should not change to suit migrants.

“Every time Tony opens his mouth, it’s as if he speaks for Angus in the party,” the Liberal source notes. “That’s even disturbing the guys in the hard right. You’re seeing the right sort of fall into two camps, one under Hastie and one under Angus, and plenty of floating between the two.”

Taylor this week appeared to appeal for more patience with his leadership, telling Radio 2GB: “You can’t turn around a tanker in a few months.”

Liberal insiders say the leader is getting the clear air that Sussan Ley did not. After four-and-a-half months in the job, there has been no internal sniping nor major freelancing.

One Liberal MP says there is goodwill towards Taylor and they want him to succeed, but the frustration about distractions is real.

“His senior team – and I include Tony Abbott in that – won’t have anyone else to blame but themselves,” they say.

“I don’t think the federal president’s doing him any favours at all. It’s becoming a weakness for him, to be frank.”

Most accept the party rebuild will be a longer process, however.

“We’re in a stage of laying out our policy, and I think that that takes some time, and you have to have the discipline to see that through,” the Liberal National Party member for the Queensland seat of Groom, Garth Hamilton, tells The Saturday Paper.

“There’s a lot of people doing it a lot tougher than the Liberal Party right now, and I think it should just be head down, bum up, and keep working.”

Hamilton has been spearheading Liberal scrutiny of One Nation, particularly over the party’s employment of a convicted rapist and Hanson’s comments on monoculturalism.

“I think it is important to provide scrutiny to what is becoming a serious challenge in the political space,” he says.

“I think that their policies do deserve scrutiny, and I think that the best way to differentiate ourselves is to start by making clear where those differences are.”

The LNP member for Wide Bay, Llew O’Brien, says Taylor and the National Party’s Matt Canavan had come into their leadership positions at the “absolute worst possible time”, as Hanson’s One Nation party enjoyed a temporary boost.

“This feels like a honeymoon period where people have woken up and noticed them all of a sudden,” O’Brien tells The Saturday Paper. “It’s almost like they’ve been elected to opposition … and they’re under more scrutiny now.”

The Coalition’s task is not insurmountable, according to O’Brien.

“I’ve literally had those conversations where people have said, ‘I’m going to vote One Nation, but I want to vote for you’, so that would indicate that it is soft and that there is a chance that we can get them back.

“But it’s going to be something we’ve got to do, as much as it is that One Nation has to falter,” he says.

Asked what the Coalition will offer voters, a Liberal source says, “I think we need more policy initiatives coming out. Absolutely.

“Taylor did the indexation of the taxation brackets. I think that was a positive policy idea. I think it’s something that unifies the party and the base as well.”

They’re concerned, however, at the lack of product differentiation.

“There’s the issue. Why buy the light product when you can get the heavy?”

Australian-first investigation reveals fossil fuel industry reaching potentially millions of Australian children, through 260+ programs across every stage of childhood.

Major coal, oil and gas companies are reaching Australian children through schools, museums, science centres, sporting clubs, early learning programs, scholarships and career pathways, according to a landmark new report released today by climate communications charity Comms Declare.

The report, From Cradle to Career: Fossil Fuel Industry Presence in Australian Childhood Settings is the first national investigation into the scale of fossil fuel industry engagement with children and young people in Australia.

Researchers identified 260 publicly documented programs and sponsorships run or funded by fossil fuel companies and industry bodies that reached children aged 0 to 18 in recent years. One fossil fuel industry-linked education provider, Teacher Earth Science Education Programme Ltd (TESEP), projected its activities could reach more than two million Australian students over five years.

The investigation also identified more than $54 million in disclosed funding across just 6 of those programs. Funding figures were located for only a fraction of the programs examined, suggesting the true amount spent is likely substantially higher.

Comms Declare founder Belinda Noble said some of the programs involve science and climate change education. “Big coal, oil and gas companies are helping drive climate change, yet simultaneously funding educational programs that shape how young Australians understand energy, resources and climate issues.”

“Oil and gas companies sponsoring climate education is like a tobacco company giving cancer advice.”

“We need to ensure children receive accurate, independent education, free from corporate influence,” added Noble.

PureProfile polling commissioned by Comms Declare in April found that 87 per cent of parents and grandparents believe educational programs should be funded by governments, rather than fossil fuel corporations, and 58 per cent support fossil fuel advertising bans.

The report also identifies significant governance and transparency gaps, with little public visibility over how sponsorship arrangements, educational materials and industry partnerships operate in practice.

“Six years ago an ASIC investigation forced banking programs, like Dollarmites, out of schools. Now big polluters are using the same loopholes to reach children, proving we need to find different ways to fund children’s programs once and for all,” added Noble.

Comms Declare is calling for a Senate Inquiry into the scale, nature and impact of fossil fuel industry engagement with children and young people, alongside renewed calls for a national ban on fossil fuel advertising and sponsorships. The organisation says an inquiry could examine the current agreements and arrangements, identify options for strengthening governance, transparency and accountability, and possible pathways for alternative funding.

The Australian Capital Territory banned fossil fuel sponsorships in its schools in early 2026 and more than 60 jurisdictions globally have voted for, or enacted, restrictions on fossil fuel marketing.

Programs by company

Santos 71

BHP 49

Woodside 47

Glencore 30

Chevron 22

Shell 17

Multi-company, industry body, other

Instances of program presence by jurisdiction

National 119

Western Australia 120

Queensland 105

New South Wales 75

Tasmania 47

South Australia 46

Northern Territory 26

Victoria 7

The tables show the more than 260 programs, partnerships, sponsorships and initiatives identified through this investigation. Many of these activities span multiple states and

territories, demonstrating the national reach of fossil fuel industry engagement with children, families and educational institutions. Programs are listed in every jurisdiction where they

operate, meaning state and territory totals cannot be combined into a national total

It’s the moment Australian wildlife researchers and rescuers, infectious disease specialists, veterinarians, poultry and dairy farmers, zoos and aquariums and governments at all levels have been dreading since 2021.

On June 14, a sick bird washed up on an isolated beach near Esperance in Western Australia. It was discovered by chance by veterinarian Dr Toni Howlett, who happened to be walking there with a friend and took the bird in for care. The brown skua later tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1. Shortly after, another sick bird – a northern giant petrel – was found in the same area and also returned a positive test. A third WA case turned up on a beach near Quindalup, and one on South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula.

For several years now, this strain of avian influenza virus has been wreaking destruction on populations of birds and marine mammals around the world. Scientists have reported once-heaving colonies of seals and sea lions all but vanished and carcasses of dead pelicans and seabirds dotted across beaches that used to be alive with a cacophony of squawking, chattering birdlife.

Closer to Australia, the virus had already caused a mass mortality event in late 2025 and early 2026 among southern elephant seal pups on remote Heard Island in the subantarctic, killing an estimated 13,000 animals. The virus’s impact prompted the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to reclassify the species as “vulnerable”. The dramatic decline in elephant seal numbers could have significant ecological impacts, too, because they are top predators, says Jane Younger, senior lecturer in Southern Ocean vertebrate ecology at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart.

“If you’re taking out a huge proportion of those animals, it’s a change on the scale of what the whaling was back in the 17th and 18th centuries,” she says.

The arrival of the virus in Australia was inevitable. “It’s taken longer, maybe, than some of us expected,” says wildlife epidemiologist Bethany Jackson, of Murdoch University in Perth.

That delay might explain the almost preternatural calm among responders to this potential catastrophe. Having seen the almost apocalyptic wildlife effects elsewhere, those on the frontline in Australia have been getting ready to act.

“I feel that this moment is significant but not scary, because we’ve known about this virus for a long time,” Jackson says.

“Australia’s in the best position in terms of preparedness, because other countries were obviously unprepared or unaware of a new variant, whereas Australia’s been aware, prepared, setting aside funding.”

A comprehensive, cross-sector collaboration has been established to ensure that anyone likely to encounter or be affected by the virus knows what’s coming and how to deal with it. “One of the key things I think Australia has really taken away from the lessons overseas is this critical need to work together,” says veterinary scientist Tiggy Grillo, national coordinator of Wildlife Health Australia.

Her organisation’s One Health approach, she says, “is about working together across sectors, knowing that the health of humans, animals and the environment are all interlinked”.

That framework is what led to the federal minister for agriculture, Julie Collins, standing alongside WA Premier Roger Cook, Australian Chief Veterinary Officer Beth Cookson, Threatened Species Commissioner Fiona Fraser and federal Minister for the Environment and Water Murray Watt at a press conference when they announced the discovery of the virus on the Australian mainland.

It’s a complex and comprehensive range of strategies involving everyone from volunteer wildlife rescuers to zoo veterinarians to national poultry companies. It’s ensuring that everyone knows what to look for in sick animals, how to report a suspected case, and what to do when the virus is detected in a nearby jurisdiction or in closer proximity.

There are echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic in education and training around the personal protective equipment required for handling and housing sick animals, ensuring adequate supplies of PPE are available or easily accessible, and even in the signage to be used at affected premises.

The poultry sector was already on high alert courtesy of another highly pathogenic form of avian influenza a couple of years ago, which became the largest historical outbreak of the H7 strain in the Australian commercial industry.

Once again, the biosecurity message is going out to both commercial and backyard chicken owners. “So, minimising overlap with wild populations, fencing your flocks in, not letting them free range, being really mindful of the water supply,” Jane Younger says. “If you are taking water that’s not mains water, that could be contaminated by ducks or geese, then that’s probably introducing more of a risk.”

Poultry producer Inghams has already implemented biosecurity protocols, including a full lockdown, across its Western Australian operations. It is also seeking approval to temporarily move its free-range flocks indoors.

The dairy sector is also watchful, given the spread of avian influenza through herds in the United States caused a drop in milk production. Animal deaths were limited, however, and Dairy Australia has said the risk to the Australian industry is low. Farmers have been informed of the signs of illness and encouraged to follow biosecurity practices.

About 110 human cases of infection have been reported worldwide – most in the US. This strain appears to have a much lower fatality rate than historical strains of H5N1, with 11 deaths reported in 2025.

Most importantly, there’s no evidence so far of person-to-person spread, and those infected were in close contact with infected animals. Government ministers have also stressed that there is no risk to humans from eating properly cooked chicken meat or eggs.

“Over the last two years, there’s been a lot of work prioritising sites – ecologically important sites – as well as priority species,” says Grillo. “So really trying to understand which species are vulnerable to the virus and potentially susceptible to infection but also vulnerable from other threats.”

The bird species experts here are most concerned about are similar to those affected in other countries: seabirds that live in large colonies – albatrosses, gannets, gulls and terns – birds of prey, crows, shorebirds, pelicans, ducks, swans and geese. Among mammals, the pinnipeds – seals, sea lions and elephant seals – are known to be at high risk, but there are also concerns about land-based mammals, particularly scavengers such as Tasmanian devils or quolls, which could be exposed through eating dead infected animals.

If further action is needed to control the virus, one option is to close off public access to high-risk areas such as national parks, both to limit spread and also reduce other stressors on wildlife.

There has also been a lot of work on public education and messaging around what to do if people encounter a sick animal. The three priorities are: avoid, record and report.

“The main message … for any member of the public is to avoid picking up wildlife but to record what you see and to report it to the emergency animal disease hotline,” Grillo says.

As yet, there is still no widely available vaccine to help get H5N1 under control. An avian influenza vaccine was successfully trialled in 207 critically endangered Californian condors, and in July last year the Marine Mammal Center in the United States began trialling an avian influenza vaccine in northern elephant seals and then Hawaiian monk seals. “If the vaccine works for that type of seal [monk seals], then it could work for other types of seals,” Younger says.

Such a measure will only be practicable for a small number of extremely at-risk wildlife species and animals, however. The rest will have to weather the viral storm and that knowledge is a heavy burden to bear for those in the field.

“We all have that weight in our bellies, and it’s not fear – it’s just maybe a pre-emptive sadness that this may impact our iconic fauna, and that realistically we can’t eradicate this,” Jackson says.

That doesn’t mean a huge outbreak is inevitable. “Whilst this is a concerning development, to have another case in a different jurisdiction, it is another seabird, it is a migratory species, and there is no indication that it has spread beyond those populations,” Chief Veterinary Officer Cookson said at a press conference on Wednesday, announcing the third and fourth cases.

The timing, the species involved, their migratory patterns and the locations in which they were discovered are just some of the factors that will influence whether or not the virus has or will spread into local wildlife.

“We might come out of the end of this and say, ‘Great, that happened and we haven’t seen ongoing spread to our local resident wildlife,’ ” Grillo says. “That would be fantastic if that’s what happens over the next few weeks.”

She emphasises that vigilance is vital. “That doesn’t stop us from continuing to be aware and being aware of those key messages around avoiding, reporting and recording to ensure that we’re doing our bit, so we don’t let our guard down.”

Emergency Animal Disease Hotline 1800 675 888

Labor flew into damage control this week after a moment of accidental candour from Clare O’Neil on ABC Radio.

Responding to questions about house prices, the Housing minister delivered what might seem a statement of the obvious about the cyclical nature of the real estate market.

“We see periods of very significant house price growth and then we see the market make a correction, and that’s what we’re seeing at the moment,” O’Neil said.

That word has a specific meaning in relation to markets, however. A correction is generally considered to refer to a fall in prices of between 10 and 20 per cent. A deeper decline is known as a bear market, characterised by widespread investor pessimism.

The mere use of the word was enough to make headlines, particularly in the financial media, and those hostile to the Labor government and its budget changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing treatment of real estate.

No matter that the minister went on to quote Treasury modelling that forecast the tax changes would cause only a slowing of house price growth by about 2 per cent below what it otherwise would have been, which she called “meaningful but moderate”.

No matter, either, that Treasurer Jim Chalmers later corrected her use of “correction”, saying she meant it only in the general sense of the word.

O’Neil’s comment and the aftermath perfectly illustrates the government’s dilemma – one that prevents it from touting the apparent success of its biggest reform. Labor must make the case that the tax changes in the budget will make it easier for first-home buyers to compete with property investors, knowing the political risks of any action that might reduce the wealth of those who already own homes.

O’Neil’s choice of language was all the more problematic because it echoed what others were saying.

The veteran finance journalist Alan Kohler, for example, a former editor of both The Australian Financial Review and The Age newspapers and long-time finance presenter on ABC News, also used the word in one of his spots this week.

“Housing is in full correction mode, with the [national] auction clearance rate down to a six-year low of 47.4 per cent,” he said, citing the numbers for the week to last Sunday from the property data company Cotality.

The number of houses put up for auction fell 10 per cent compared with the previous week, Kohler noted, almost a quarter of scheduled auctions were withdrawn and a half of those were sold before auction.

“So, obviously, vendors don’t want to take their chances with an auction at the moment,” he said.

Notably, the Cotality data showed the fall in auction clearance rates was most dramatic in the cities where prices had previously been growing fastest. In Perth and Adelaide, only 40 per cent of homes that went under the hammer were sold. In Brisbane, the rate was a miserable 33 per cent.

The auction clearance rate is a leading indicator. When it plunges, prices inevitably follow. Historically, the pattern is that they decline between about 4 and 8 per cent, then after a year or two the market recovers and prices continue their general upward trajectory.

The two most recent declines have been particularly large, says Cotality’s research director, Tim Lawless.

“The largest decline we’ve seen across our combined capitals index was an 8.2 per cent drop in housing values from peak to trough, and that was between 2017 and 2019. The second largest fall was just over 8 per cent through the middle of 2022 to early 2023.

“With that context in mind, a 6 to 8 per cent drop – or even more than that – it seems the historical precedents are already there. Arguably we’re facing stronger headwinds now than were there for those previous downturns,” says Lawless.

Most of the banks and other big financial institutions are forecasting a smaller decline than that, although at least one, the United States investment bank Morgan Stanley, is tipping  a 10 per cent drop – into correction territory.

Many bank economists, as well as Lawless, nominate drivers other than the tax changes. A bigger influence, they say, is rising interest rates. The Reserve Bank has increased the cash rate three times this year, in February, March and May, each time by 25 basis points. Most financial analysts predict one or two more hikes before rates start coming down, sometime in the latter half of next year.

Even before rates started rising, says Lawless, other factors – such as the declining affordability of houses, inflation, the cost of petrol, the Iran war and general unease about the state of the nation and the world – were combining to slow the market.

“On our numbers, the market actually moved through its peak rate of growth, at least on a national basis, in October last year. Back then we were seeing national home values rising at 1.3 per cent a month. And it’s been gradually fading since, to a flat result in May,” he says.

“Looking at how the daily index is tracking, I expect our national index will be slightly down at the end of June, by about 0.2 or 0.3 per cent.”

His point is that the housing market was turning long before the government announced its tax changes. “There is definitely a bit of a pile-on [on] the budget,” he says.

Despite all the criticism, the changes are not particularly radical. They limit negative gearing for residential property investments to new builds and replace the existing 50 per cent capital gains discount with a new “cost base index” that adjusts for inflation and imposes a minimum 30 per cent tax on gains. The aim is to remove the advantage that property investors have over owner-occupiers, particularly first-home buyers.

Existing investors will be grandfathered. Furthermore, the changes do not come into effect until July 1, 2027 – by which time, it is hoped, the other factors depressing prices will have abated. The cycle of interest rate rises is expected to be over.

The weird thing is that the government has been so cautious in its defence of the measures, if not of the problem they are intended to fix.

As O’Neil said in that ABC interview, house prices had jumped 50 per cent “since just before Covid” in 2020.

“Our government is reacting to what we are seeing in Australia today, which is home ownership rates for young people falling through the floor. Let’s not beat around the bush here. We’ve got a broken housing market.”

Runaway house prices were not just hurting young people, she said, but were changing “what fairness and equality mean in Australia”.

A report from the Grattan Institute last year set out the magnitude of this problem in disturbing statistical detail.

Since the turn of the century, it said, the cost of housing had far outpaced wages, with the result that the price of a typical home had grown from about four times median income to eight, and nearly 10 times in Sydney.

On average, it took 12 years just to save up a deposit.

“Unsurprisingly,” it said, “home ownership rates are falling fastest for younger people. Whereas 57% of 30–34-year-olds owned their home in 2001, just 50% did so by 2021. And just 36% of 25–29-year-olds own their home today, down from 43% in 2001.”

The decline in the ownership rate was even greater for the poorest 40 per cent in each age group.

Housing was the major driver of increasing wealth inequality in Australia, Grattan said.

“Since 2003–04, the wealth of high-income households has grown by more than 50%, much of that due to increasing property values. By contrast, the wealth of low-income households – mostly non-homeowners – has grown by less than 10%.

“The growing divide between the housing ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is largely generational.”

That fast-growing cohort of mostly young people unable to buy a home was doubly cursed by rising rents – up “roughly 20% in Sydney and Melbourne in the past four years, and by much more in Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth”.

Since that report was published in March last year, Australia’s housing crisis has worsened. According to figures from the Real Estate Institute of Australia, house prices went up a further 12 per cent nationally.

So the market was due for a correction, but the government is keen to downplay the role of its policy changes. In that interview O’Neil “absolutely” claimed credit for making it easier for first-home buyers to get into the market but ducked questions about collapsing auction clearance rates.

Likewise, another Labor frontbencher, Tanya Plibersek – usually one of the government’s most assured media performers – stumbled through an interview on the Seven Network’s Sunrise program, talking down the impact of the policy changes when host Natalie Barr repeatedly pressed her on whether the government wanted house prices to fall.

“Well, what we anticipate over time is not that house prices will continue to fall but that they will grow more slowly,” she said.

But the problem will not be fixed if that happens, says Matt Grudnoff, senior economist with The Australia Institute.

“What we need to see is house prices remaining flat for 10 or 15 years in order for incomes to catch up,” he says.

His hope is that the current cyclical downturn will not end in the same way as others have over recent decades, with investors re-entering the market and prices booming again.

Because the government’s tax changes make housing less attractive to investors, he says, “I think this will actually, for the first time ever, have an impact and flatten out prices.

“There are some people out there who will be upset by a flat housing market. They’re the people making money from the current [tax regime]. But if we want home ownership rates to go up, then we need investors to sell up, and we need first-home buyers to be able to get into the market.”

There are more than 2.3 million individual housing investors, equivalent to roughly 10 per cent of the working-age population, according to the Reserve Bank. Most of them are so-called “mum and dad” investors, who own only one rental property. Many people who do not own an investment property aspire to do so.

The “narrative” around wealth accumulation, says Andrew Saikal-Skea, an independent financial adviser, has long been “that if you want to get ahead in Australia, buy property”.

“There’s been such consistent and such tremendous growth in residential property for so long that a lot of people really viewed that as almost a defensive asset. It’s not a defensive asset, it’s very much a growth asset.”

He believes the tax changes will alter that narrative.

“I think what this is signalling is that the government, the [tax] environment is not just going to be wildly supportive of continued huge property growth.

“And I think that change in the narrative is really contrary to the Australian story over the last 30 years, and that’s probably more impactful than the actual economics,” he says.

Experts differ over exactly when and how Australian attitudes to housing shifted, from houses being places to live to becoming vehicles for wealth accumulation. In his Quarterly Essay on Australia’s housing “mess” a few years ago, Alan Kohler nominated a date – December 23, 1999 – as crucial. That was when the Howard/Costello government cut the capital gains tax by 50 per cent.

It’s true that this cut, in combination with the generous provisions for negative gearing – now undone by Labor’s changes – coincided with the rapid escalation in house prices. But Kohler and other economists also cited other factors. Between 2003 and 2009, net migration tripled and has remained high since. Periods of very low interest rates also encouraged people to borrow more. And grant schemes for first-home buyers, brought in by various governments, state and federal, Labor and Coalition, served to increase demand, while doing nothing to increase the supply of housing.

Though the Albanese government has sought to lay most blame on Howard’s CGT cut of 1999, Grattan’s report from last year argued that its impact is greatly overstated.

“The value of these tax advantages – about $10.9 billion a year – is tiny compared to Australia’s $11 trillion housing market,” the report noted. “Instead, the biggest problem is that housing construction in recent years hasn’t kept up with increasing demand.”

Close to $11 billion is still a huge amount to be handing to investors, every year. And the claim that the problem is supply requires some clarification.

The problem, says Grudnoff, is not a lack of housing, “it’s who’s buying the housing”.

When he compared census data on Australia’s population growth with the growth in the number of dwellings, he found that the number of houses was increasing faster.

Over the two decades to the most recent census in 2021, he says, “the population increased by 34 per cent, but the number of homes increased by 39 per cent”.

More recent quarterly data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, he says, shows the number of dwellings is still increasing faster than the population.

Moreover, the average number of people living in each household declined, from about 2.9 in the mid 1980s to 2.5 in the early 2000s. It has declined further since the pandemic, as more people have taken to working from home and want more space in which to work.

Also, more wealthy people have second houses, and the number of Airbnb-style short-term rentals has surged.

It comes back to that “narrative” cited by Saikal-Skea: Australians want more and better housing per person.

For that, Kevin McCloud and Scott Cam might be as much to blame as Howard and Costello. Their real estate makeover TV programs – Grand Designs and The Block – premiered about the same time as house prices took off. There are now at least a dozen such programs on Australian TV.

About a decade ago, the noted Yale economist Robert J. Shiller – best known for having established the US benchmark Case-Shiller Index of housing affordability with his fellow economist Karl Case – produced a paper on what he called narrative economics.

Economic decisions, he suggested, were infected by all manner of “deeply human phenomena that are difficult to study in a scientific manner”.

One of the case studies he offered was the global financial crisis of 2007-08.

The proximate factors that caused it were arcane financial instruments such as collateralised debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities, but essentially it came down to imprudent mortgage lending by financial institutions to people who could not afford it.

But, said Shiller: “A narrative approach to understanding the crisis might take us back further in time.” He went on to call out a couple of TV shows that had become wildly popular half a decade earlier, which “depicted individuals buying homes, fixing and prettifying them a little, and then reselling them at a large profit”.

It was the public buy-in to that narrative of growing wealth through property that led to the “liar loans”, the dodgy packaging and sale of them and thence to disaster.

The lesson is that solving the housing crisis will likely require more than change to the tax laws. It will require us to buy into a different narrative, such as existed decades ago, in which houses were homes, not positional goods or investment vehicles.

As KPMG’s most senior leadership resigns over governance failures, it can be revealed that the consultancy is still being paid by the government to offer ethics training to top-level public servants.

The contract for the ethics training has been twice extended and is now drafted in such a way that will allow it to run until 2028 without tender.

Since the KPMG scandal broke on March 24, with myriad accusations of misuse of confidential client information, the firm has signed 31 new Commonwealth contracts worth nearly $24 million.

These contracts include work for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – which is conducting multiple investigations into KPMG – the Department of Finance, the Attorney-General’s Department, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Department of Defence.

Documents obtained by Greens Senator Barbara Pocock – a member of the Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services – show the Australian Public Service Academy is persevering with a $1.3 million contract for KPMG to run a course on ethics for the country’s 300 top public servants.

The flagship induction for newly minted Band 1 members of the Senior Executive Service – the SES is divided into three levels, known as bands one, two and three – was developed by KPMG and is aimed at instilling ethical leadership values in the officials who will shape government policy.

The current contract, first executed in December 2023, puts KPMG at the heart of a program intended to build a culture of integrity, accountability and public trust in the Australian Public Service, the very qualities the firm now stands accused of systematically betraying in one of the most serious corporate ethics failures in Australian history.

Issues with KPMG’s ethics training contract were first raised in June 2024, when Pocock pressed the Australian Public Service Commission on why it had awarded the consultancy a contract that allowed it to identify and duchess senior decision-makers in the public service. At the time she told The Saturday Paper this was “a ‘land and expand’ contract that you dream about – and they got it”.

According to the federal parliamentary library, KPMG currently holds 297 active contracts with the Commonwealth, worth a combined $653 million, including the 31 new contracts awarded since the scandal broke in March.

The Albanese government has since imposed a three-month ban on new KPMG work, but the contracts already in place, including the one paying the firm to teach ethics to the public service’s most senior leaders, remain unaffected.

“Is this a joke?” Pocock asks The Saturday Paper. “Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does – $1.3 million in ethics and leadership training from morally bankrupt KPMG. You can’t make this stuff up.”

The ethics training, says Pocock, has an obvious alternative. “KPMG could run a great class in unethical leadership: how to monetise confidential information, cover-ups, and how to undermine whistleblowers.”

Pocock has written to the federal minister for the public service, Senator Katy Gallagher, demanding the Albanese government force the immediate cancellation of KPMG’s ethics training contract.

“What exactly has the government paid for? This is a firm that misused confidential client information to secure more work, misled the parliament and seriously mistreated whistleblowers – among other things,” says Pocock.

“Our most senior public sector leaders should not be undertaking any form of training – let alone on ethics and leadership – from a firm that has by its own admission breached the most basic ethical values and whose leadership has failed.”

The timing, she says, makes the arrangement not just indefensible but farcical, with the federal government currently conducting an independent review into KPMG.

“The government is paying disgraced KPMG for their so-called ethics expertise at the same time it is conducting an independent review into KPMG’s governance, culture, ethics and integrity frameworks,” Pocock adds. “Labor needs to wake up and listen to the outrage of ordinary Australians.”

For Pocock, the contract is not an isolated procurement failure. It reflects the deeper problem of government officials consistently giving KPMG the benefit of the doubt long after it had become clear that KPMG had its own integrity issues.

“Not only did KPMG fail to learn from the awful lessons of the PwC debacle,” she says, “it sought to present itself as the ethical alternative to secure lucrative contracts – including this one.”

The PwC debacle, which detonated across the Australian political landscape in 2023, remains the benchmark against which all subsequent Big Four scandals are measured. At the centre of that scandal was the revelation PwC had used confidential information obtained while advising the federal Treasury on new multinational tax avoidance laws to help win new business by tipping off its corporate clients and allowing them to sidestep the very legislation PwC had been paid to help design.

Subsequent inquiries led by Labor Senator Deborah O’Neill, Liberal Senator Paul Scarr and Greens Senator Barbara Pocock, found PwC had engaged in a deliberate strategy over many years to cover up the breach. Eventually, the company was forced to split out its government consulting business and a number of partners lost their registrations.

Pocock is blunt about what she believes is driving KPMG’s ongoing presence in Canberra, providing advice to government officials. “Labor has rose-coloured glasses for KPMG, even when they behave unethically. The government is completely addicted to KPMG.”

She says the Greens are now demanding the government review all 297 active contracts with KPMG and ban the firm from government work until all investigations are complete.

The structural fix, Pocock says, is long overdue.

“The government needs to review all contracts with KPMG and ban dodgy firms from government work. It needs to establish a consultant regulator and increase penalties for egregious behaviour and ethical failures.”

KPMG Australia has faced multiple challenges to its reputation over the past six years, including accusations that it lied to previous Senate inquiries into the Big Four consulting firms, repeatedly ripped off taxpayers while contracted by the Department of Defence, and provided conflicted advice to the New South Wales government over its controversial state-owned rail corporation. In the United States, the firm was fined after more than 1100 partners and staff were found to have systematically cheated on courses about independence, audit and accounting rules.

When details of the ethics course first came to light two years ago, Pocock told The Saturday Paper her main concern was that the course would be used by KPMG to recruit top talent from the public service. “How could the people involved in the letting of that contract possibly believe that this was not a farming opportunity for KPMG?”

In September 2023, Pocock accused KPMG Australia’s then chief executive, Andrew Yates, of lying to a Senate inquiry into the integrity of consulting services provided to the Australian government.

The accusation came after questions over whether KPMG used “power mapping” to track who within government departments should be targeted and charmed to help win new business.

Pocock subsequently produced a KPMG-branded, colour-coded chart that showed 72 decision-makers within the NSW Department of Transport, humiliating Yates and forcing him to correct his earlier evidence to the committee.

“Now KPMG Australia has won a contract that puts them in front of a few hundred very senior up-and-coming public servants where their main focus will be to build relationships,” Pocock told The Saturday Paper in 2024. “That is a crème de la crème contract for the KPMG playbook.”

The current crisis that has engulfed KPMG Australia has been building since March 24, when Senator O’Neill rose in the Senate to read into Hansard detailed allegations made by a former KPMG executive turned whistleblower.

Those allegations centred on claims the most senior members of the firm’s auditing division – a division that is supposed to showcase the firm’s ethics and integrity – had systematically exploited its privileged access to confidential client information to gain a secret commercial advantage in the competition for some of Australia’s most lucrative audit contracts.

The most serious allegations concerned Lendlease, a KPMG audit client of more than 68 years, which has since dumped KPMG as its auditor. According to the whistleblower, Lendlease board papers were taken by KPMG and circulated within the firm to support its pursuit of major audit contracts with Westpac and Dexus.

This week The Australian Financial Review revealed an investigation conducted by blue-chip law firm Allens found that KPMG partners had twice accessed pitch documents submitted by EY and PwC to the Lendlease board. This confirmed the most serious claims made by the whistleblower.

The findings, which had not previously been reported, raised new questions about the evidence given to a parliamentary inquiry earlier this month. During the hearing, KPMG chairman Martin Sheppard repeatedly said there had only been “three instances” of misuse that the firm had uncovered.

Shortly after the details of the Allens investigation were published, KPMG announced that Sheppard would be leaving the firm, along with audit partners Eileen Hoggett and Paul Rogers.

Their departures followed the earlier resignations of chief executive Andrew Yates and audit head Julian McPherson.

Despite their resignations, Yates and McPherson remain deeply embedded within the firm and its culture, with KPMG paying the pair’s legal bills and other related expenses.

Just as damaging to KPMG’s reputation has been the way it has treated the whistleblower, who had spent nearly two years trying to be heard inside the firm, including escalating concerns to senior executives, independent directors and ultimately to KPMG International.

Each time, KPMG managed to look inward and find nothing wrong. The whistleblower, meanwhile, was forced out of the company.

“This person found themselves on the outer at work, removed from regular duties,” O’Neill told the Senate in March. “And they eventually found themselves headed out the door as part of a highly convoluted HR process that seemed to commence around the same time as they started raising their concerns about the behaviour they had witnessed.”

In addition to the allegations involving Lendlease, the whistleblower alleged the Westpac audit tender was further corrupted by intelligence fed to KPMG from inside the process – including advice to cut its fee by about 25 per cent and guidance on managing the perception of its bid.

A third allegation concerned Telstra, where KPMG personnel were allegedly offered access to restricted documents from Telstra’s own IT environment via a company-issued laptop during a live external audit tender.

Further allegations concerned the Macquarie Group audit contract, worth almost $75 million in annual fees, and Dexus, where KPMG was simultaneously acting as internal auditor while it was positioning itself to bid for the company’s external audit contract.

The whistleblower further alleged that, during a meeting at KPMG’s Barangaroo office, an arrangement was proposed where a laptop containing Dexus internal audit documents would be left open and unattended, allowing external audit personnel to view them.

KPMG’s response to the whistleblower’s allegations was to assure both the whistleblower and independent KPMG directors, including former NSW premier Mike Baird, that it had engaged national law firm Ashurst to conduct an independent investigation into the allegations.

However, at a public hearing in Canberra on June 19, senior lawyers from Ashurst denied any such investigation had taken place during the time specified by KPMG.

KPMG’s independent directors told the same hearing they had lost trust in the consultancy.

O’Neill described the evidence given to the inquiry by the firm’s senior figures as “truly shocking”.

She is demanding KPMG immediately release confidential whistleblower investigation documents to ASIC, the Tax Practitioners Board and the public, after reviewing the files under restricted conditions as chair of the parliamentary committee probing the scandal.

O’Neill, who was granted access to KPMG’s legal advice on the condition it could not be shared beyond the committee, said Tuesday’s resignations confirmed the firm was “only just beginning to understand the scale of its cultural failures”.

She noted KPMG had yet to comply fully with the committee’s order for the production of documents, a situation compounding ASIC’s complaint that the firm’s insistence on legal professional privilege was hampering its own investigations.

Inside the APS Academy in Canberra, however, KPMG’s course on ethics and leadership is still running, teaching Australia’s most senior public servants the virtues of ethical behaviour that the firm itself has so demonstrably failed to meet.

A spokesperson for Senator Gallagher said: “It would be a breach of Commonwealth procurement law for any minister to interfere with a procurement contract or decision, including termination.

“I am surprised that Senator Pocock is calling on the minister to break the law and do something which she does not have the power to do, and even if she did do as Senator Pocock seeks, it would have no legal effect.

“The allegations about KPMG are being treated very seriously by the government.

“Dr Ian Watt AC has been appointed to undertake an independent review of KPMG. The review will examine relevant aspects of KPMG’s culture, ethics, integrity and governance to assess the firm’s ethical standards. Whilst that review is under way KPMG will not bid for any Commonwealth government contracts.”

The Australian Public Service Commission declined to comment.