In the Detail

Investigations in the data.

An investigative newsdesk that reports from the public record — deep, graphics-led investigations grounded in primary data.

Latest · Investigations
Patents

Australia Abolished the Innovation Patent in 2021. New Ones Are Still Being Filed — and the Law Fixes the Last Day Any Can Exist: 25 August 2029.

Parliament closed the country's second-tier patent system with a single sentence — a test on 'the date of the patent' — and wrote no express wind-down provision. That test left the ordinary divisional route open. 508 applications have come through it since abolition, 137 of the rights they produced were enforceable at the register's late-July 2026 extract, and one drugmaker's patents from a single nine-member family were fought over in two Federal Court proceedings with a biosimilar rival — one brought against it, one brought by it. Costs went against the drugmaker in both, all nine patents are dead, and every right the system can still produce is gone by 25 August 2029.

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Investigations

Public-record data journalism. Every figure traceable to the dataset it came from, and the analysis published with it. Open to everyone.

Housing

Australia Has Nearly Enough Homes Under Construction to Hit Its Housing Target. It Finishes 172,928 a Year.

The National Housing Accord needs 240,000 homes a year. A record 242,874 dwellings are on site right now — but the pipeline is clearing more slowly than at almost any point in twenty-two years of ABS data. At the build-out rate that prevailed in the five years to 2019, that same pipeline would deliver 236,087 homes a year, within 2% of the target. The shortfall is not at the approval counter.

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Tax

Australia's Company-Tax Bill More Than Doubled in a Decade. The Big Four Banks Paid Almost Exactly the Same.

In 2013-14 the four major banks paid $9.5 billion in company tax — about a quarter of everything the ATO's large-company transparency data records. Ten years on they paid $10.0 billion: a fifth less in real terms, while the total climbed to $96 billion. Their share of the base more than halved. What grew in their place is the resources sector, whose tax swings with the iron ore and gas price.

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Disclosures

One significant Freedom of Information release, read in full. Plus a standing watch on every federal disclosure log. Open to everyone.

Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts

The Anti-Corruption Commission Wrote Agencies a Script for Senate Estimates. It Was in the Briefing Pack.

A 630-page estimates pack released by the Infrastructure department contains a National Anti-Corruption Commission document giving Commonwealth agencies question-by-question responses for parliamentary questions about NACC referrals — including what to say 'if pressed', 'if pressed further', and when to consider claiming public interest immunity.

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· 1 document
Department of Home Affairs

Inside the Suicide-Watch Procedure for Immigration Detention, a 72-Hour Commercial Boundary

Home Affairs released 228 pages of detention mental health policy under FOI. They show the contractor's own manuals: supportive monitoring of a person at risk of self-harm is at the contractor's cost for 72 hours and billable after that, the classification that unlocks extra welfare support is approved by a contract administrator rather than a clinician, and 'media notoriety' is an eligibility criterion for the national forum that decides it.

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· 2 documents
Services Australia

An Assessment Error Ran for Nearly Four Years and May Have Affected 41,300 People. A Year After the Fix, 53 Cases Had Been Assessed.

Services Australia's October 2025 estimates briefing pack, released under FOI, sets out an income assessment error that ran from December 2020 to September 2024, the remediation that had reached fifty-three people by the following August, and a contractor bill that is both sharply up on last year and well below where it was two years earlier.

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· 1 document
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Positions Members

Activist short research on ASX-listed companies, one at a time. Names, tickers and identifying detail are redacted out here. Invitation only.

Consumer · $150m–$500m

The redacted Roll-Up Whose Market Grew Every Year Its Own Sites Shrank

This business is sold as a defensive compounder riding a rise in demand that official statistics count directly — which makes it one of the rare companies whose market can be measured from outside the accounts. Measure it, and in redacted of its reporting periods since listing, volumes at the sites it already owned grew more slowly than the market did. In the latest half the market accelerated and those volumes stood still. Headline volumes keep rising anyway, because it keeps buying competitors — roughly redacted of a billion dollars of them. The multiple, and the broker targets above it, assume the market's growth eventually reaches the accounts.

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· Conviction: building
Technology · $500m–$1bn

The redacted Company That Moved redacted of Its Costs Off the Income Statement

For years this redacted business ran the cost of building its software straight through its accounts. Then, redacted ago, it began parking a large share of that spend on the balance sheet as an asset instead — one it has never written down. That switch, not the trading, explains most of the jump in its reported profit, and roughly redacted of that profit now leans on it. A directly comparable rival still expenses every dollar of the same work. After a heavy fall in the shares, the case for calling them cheap rests on the flattered number.

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· Conviction: building
Health care · $1bn–$5bn

redacted Doubled Its redacted and Its Revenue Went Backwards

A redacted company re-rated by redacted in twelve months on a headline operating metric that keeps compounding. Over the same twelve months its audited revenue line went backwards. Its own annual report concedes that part of that metric is redacted it is never paid for, and the split has never been disclosed. When the exchange queried the agreements behind the re-rating, the company answered that the revenue from them is immaterial.

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· Conviction: building
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