In the Detail
Topic

Public policy

5 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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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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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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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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