Rick Morton

The head of the federal corruption watchdog, Paul Brereton, told a deputy commissioner “not to get too hung up on whether there is a corruption issue” as the agency rationalised why it would take no further action against six people referred to it by the robodebt royal commission.

The agency in charge of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is sending out more than 1000 eligibility “reassessment” letters each week, purporting to give participants with disability just 28 days to respond to a general request for evidence or lose their access to the multibillion-dollar support scheme.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission offered former solicitor-general Justin Gleeson the critical job of reconsidering an investigation into the Robodebt Six – but then abruptly rescinded the deal over concerns a former Coalition minister among the people referred for possible corruption findings would complain about the appointment.

In the first six months of the National Anti-Corruption Commission's operation, the body's key governance officer became so “alarmed” at the behaviour of executives that she decided to leave the fledgling agency rather than continue to fight over disclosures and other processes.

By insisting that Australia’s housing crisis is all about supply, governments are ignoring the decades-long trend of shrinking households, which is also contributing to social isolation.

The Australian Curriculum requires Year 7 students to understand how an average smooths out a data set's rocky terrain into a single flat horizon, an abstraction that fails to represent reality's complexities. When senior executives at the Department of Human Services took a recipient's annual reported income from the ATO and divided it by 26 to calculate average fortnightly earnings, this statistical expertise escaped them. It was as if welfare recipients, society's most vulnerable, experienced the Australian economy, with its gigs and historic precarity, like clockwork.

The Department of Employment allowed the incorrect cancellation of welfare payments in the privatised employment services caseload because it failed to read properly new legislation when it began in April 2022.

In his new book Mean Streak, Rick Morton explores a moral vacuum, a dodgy debt generator and a multibillion-dollar government shake-down.

An external review of the Commonwealth's punitive, malfunctioning mutual obligations framework will not report until after the next federal election, even as thousands of jobseekers await resolution on payments unlawfully suspended or cancelled.

The largest reforms to the National Disability Insurance Scheme are moving so fast that promises made to people with disability are already “being broken” to secure billions of dollars' worth of budget savings. The rush is to deliver a new needs assessment model that will dictate funding in NDIS plans for hundreds of thousands of participants.