Rick Morton

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.

A concerted effort to remove children from the National Disability Insurance Scheme will reduce spending by $500 million in the next year, accounting for a third of all scheme savings booked to the federal budget bottom line over the same period.

Gender parity in federal cabinet will be achieved for the first time, through Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's frontbench refresh spurred by the retirement of former Labor leader Bill Shorten from politics this week.

If Peter Dutton ever had a so-called “two-term strategy”, that strategy disappeared on Sunday when he soft-launched his election campaign in the Victorian seat of Chisholm.