In the Detail
Topic

Open data

15 investigations.

Procurement

Named, Then Paid: Employers on the Government's Own Gender-Reporting Non-Compliance List Won $14.9 Million in Federal Contracts While Listed — $6.8 Million of It Above the Threshold Where a Compliance Letter Is Required — and No Official Has to Check the List

Since 2013, a Prime Minister and Cabinet policy has required every employer covered by the Workplace Gender Equality Act to produce a WGEA letter of compliance to win Commonwealth work at or above the procurement threshold — and WGEA does not issue that letter to an employer that has not met its obligations. The Act itself says non-compliant employers 'may not be eligible to compete for contracts'. An exact ABN join between WGEA's three published non-compliance lists and 200,391 AusTender contract records shows what that produces in practice: 302 new contract notices worth $14.9 million went to 21 listed employers while their names sat on the live list — 30 of them, worth $6.8 million, at or above the threshold where the letter requirement applies; most of the rest below it, where it does not. The Department of Defence accounts for 96% of the money. One naval-parts supplier was awarded new Defence contracts in 18 of the 19 calendar months since it was named. Part of the design explains why the list leaves no mark: the government's own guidance asks whether officials must check the non-compliant list, and answers, verbatim, 'No.'

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Aged care

Excellent by Default: 77% of Aged Care Homes Hold the Top Compliance Rating While One Home in the Public Data Has Actually Been Graded — and That Home Ranks Below All of Them

Star Ratings' Compliance rating was redesigned from 1 November 2025 to run off graded audits against the strengthened Quality Standards. Nine months in, the August 2026 public extract records a graded assessment for exactly 1 of its 2,600 homes. 2,003 homes — 77% of the extract, 83% of those with a rating — display the five-star tier labelled 'Excellent', which the published methodology reserves for an 'exceeding' audit grade none of them has had. The department's own worked example gives a fully-conformant audited home four stars; the one home actually graded is capped at three. By design, audits arrive with registration renewals that run out to 2029, so almost no home was due yet — but while the Commissioner told Senate estimates that audits are under way and finding non-conformance at 'most places', no count of those audits appears in any source this analysis could find, the regulator's sector-performance data stops at December 2025, and the metric that used to report audit numbers was retired from its Corporate Plan.

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Parliament

The Reviews Parliament Ordered: Deadline-Day Compliance, Four Reviews With No Public Trace, and a Definition Amended 321 Days Before Its Review Began

Between 2012 and 2020 the Commonwealth Parliament passed 303 principal Acts. 43 of them order a review of the law itself — 51 obligations in all. Where the status can be resolved from the public record, the system mostly delivers: 19 of 30 resolved obligations were met. But among the 14 that met a hard calendar deadline, the median margin was 8 days, on statutory windows that ran from about six months to five and a half years — three had zero days to spare. Five reviews arrived 430 to 984 days after soft triggers, and for four obligations whose dates have passed, no review can be located in the sources this analysis searched. The fuel-reporting review is the sharpest case: Parliament amended the definition the review was directed to examine 310 days after the review fell due, review work began 321 days after that — and the report reproduced the superseded definition and recommended no change.

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NSW

A Minister Was Questioned in Parliament From His Published Diary — 54 Meetings on the Record. Nine Months Later, NSW Republished It With 57, and No Note.

NSW ministers' diary disclosures run on a one-month clock: 245 of the 257 files published since January 2024 carry server timestamps 30–32 days after their quarter ended — the cadence the Premier's memorandum sets, matched almost without exception at the level a file timestamp can show. The record is less fixed than it looks. Three of one minister's diaries were republished in June 2026 — the two that can still be compared came back changed — one of them 581 days after it first went up, and 280 days after a budget estimates chair had examined him from it. At least two other ministers' diary files were changed in place at the same URL. One superseded version is still online with nothing marking it superseded; two others now return 404. No instrument requires any of this to be noted, and none of it was.

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Parliament

Seven Rounds of Senate Estimates, 2019–2022: The Other 25 Portfolios Left 2 Questions Unanswered Between Them. Prime Minister and Cabinet Left 358.

Senators put 37,056 questions on notice across the seven Senate estimates rounds from October 2019 to February 2022. The other 25 portfolios still owe two answers between them. The Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio owes 358 — the oldest due 6 December 2019 — and since the committee itemised the backlog and asked for it in December 2022, the number outstanding has fallen by eight. A second stock is now forming in Home Affairs.

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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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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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Rooftop solar

Australia's Wealthiest Postcodes Have the Least Rooftop Solar

Rooftop solar is often cast as a benefit for households wealthy enough to own a home and buy panels. The installation record says the opposite about where it landed. Across 2,321 postcodes, the most advantaged tenth of the country has the lowest uptake of any group — 132.7 small-scale solar installations per 1,000 residents against a peak of 218.8 in the second-most-disadvantaged decile — and it stays lowest even when the comparison is narrowed to owner-occupied detached houses. The certificates that subsidise those panels are recovered from every electricity bill, including the renters and apartment-dwellers who install the fewest.

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Negative gearing

Cheap Money Nearly Switched Off Negative Gearing. The Rate Rise Switched It Back On.

In 2021–22, with the cash rate at a record-low 0.10%, the share of Australian landlords reporting a rental loss fell to 41.9% — the lowest in a quarter-century of tax records — and their combined losses shrank to $5.98 billion. Two years later, after the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.35%, 1.27 million landlords were negatively geared again, within 4.4% of its 2017–18 peak, and their losses had jumped to $15.22 billion. No tax law changed in between.

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Health

Medicare Now Runs at Two Speeds: 94% Bulk-Billed in the Poorest Areas, 68% in the Richest

The national bulk-billing rate has recovered to 82%, and the government points to it as proof its incentive is working. That single number is now an average of two different systems. In the most disadvantaged areas GPs bulk-bill 94% of visits; in the wealthiest, 68% and falling. The gap has widened from 18 points to 26 in under four years. A targeted incentive producing a targeted result is what policy is meant to do — the finding here is the size of the split, and that a headline number reported as national is no longer descriptive of anywhere.

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Procurement

Contract Creep

A Commonwealth contract enters the public record at the price it was signed at. Amendments revise that price upwards afterwards, without a second announcement. Across five financial years and 323,211 contracts, the revisions added $109.7 billion — and a measurable cluster of contracts stops just short of the line where competitive tendering becomes compulsory.

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Road safety

Australia Set Out to Halve Road Deaths by 2030. They're Rising Instead — and Half the Increase Rides a Motorcycle.

The National Road Safety Strategy promised a 50% cut in the road toll off a 1,139-a-year baseline. The year to June 2026 recorded 1,325 deaths — up 16%, five straight years of increases, and the most in a calendar year since 2010. Motorcyclists are close to half of the increase. And it is not happening on the high-speed country roads the strategy was written for.

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