Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
John Dardo, the NDIS integrity chief, revealed in fiery Senate testimony in 2024 that the scale of fraud in the scheme was so great that the justice system would be overwhelmed if all scams were prosecuted.
Up to 10 per cent of NDIS claims are inappropriate, made in mischief or are outright criminal, according to the scheme’s fraud boss.
Co chair of the Fraud Fusion Taskforce, John Dardo, told Senate Estimates that he couldn’t give an exact figure on fraud within the scheme, but said he had a good idea of the cost of what he called “integrity leakage”.
He described that as inappropriate claiming, claims made in mischief, and then there were those where it could be proven the claims were made with intent to defraud. He said those claims were around six to 10 per cent of the total budget.
“We have been transparent about the leakage out of the NDIS,” Mr Dardo said.
This year the scheme was originally forecast to cost the taxpayer $52 billion, but has been revised down to $50.7 billion, meaning the amount being lost in this financial year could be up to $5 billion.
National Disability Insurance Agency deputy CEO John Dardo revealed during a Senate Estimates hearing that fraud was costing up to $5 billion a year. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Mr Dardo, who is also deputy CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency, the organisation that runs the scheme, was unable to give a clear figure on just fraud, when questioned by Senators Anne Ruston and Pauline Hanson.
He admitted that sometimes the cost of prosecuting bad actors within the scheme was not worth their time, because to get a conviction they needed to prove there was intent to commit fraud, which is difficult to do.
Sen Ruston said that was a poor message to send out to would-be-fraudsters
Senator Pauline Hanson during a Senate
Estimates hearing. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Mr Dardo said only a small percentage of the six to 10 per cent responsible for “integrity leakage” had been taken to court.
At the moment he said there were 53 people who have been referred to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) and are in front of the court at various stages.
He said 16 were actively being prosecuted right now, nine were awaiting trials and there were nine briefs with CDPP to progress. There were also several dozen cases at a pre-warrant status.
Mr Dardo said most of their work was preventive and what they had achieved since 2022 was “mindblowingly awesome”.
“We’ve stopped over 2500 providers from being able to claim from our systems for a combination of reasons,” Mr Dardo said.
Those providers had claimed $5 billion in total.
Up to 10 per cent of NDIS claims are inappropriate,
made in mischief or are outright criminal,
according to the scheme’s fraud boss.
Picture: Damian Shaw
“We have several hundred more we are working through our pipeline looking at to stop claiming from this scheme.
“It is mathematically impossible to take 2500 providers and prosecute every single one of them and in fact you are not even sure that you should or need to because you’re not sure that all their behaviour was criminally malicious.
“But stopping those providers from claiming against the scheme means that genuine providers are actually getting the work and the business they should be getting and it means genuine participants are not being ripped off and it protects participants from providers that are dodgy and that is phenomenal.”
He said on average his team was rejecting from self managed participants $13m of claims a month.
“The breadth of interventions is unprecedented; it’s never been done in any government program in history,” Mr Dardo said. “Some of these interventions never existed before we built them in the Fraud Fusion TaskForce.”
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later.
A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs:
Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.
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Prediction: In less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam & automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense: iMessage, phone calls, Gmail.
My wife calls me, panicked.
The call is from her number, and her voice is unmistakable- that’s my wife.
‘Babe, our son is hurt. He got in a bike wreck. I’m at the emergency room but they won’t take our insurance and I need cash to get him help. Please send me 3000 dollars as soon as you can, he’s really not doing well.’
Me- ‘Wow, that’s scary. Tell me our passphrase and then I’ll send the money.’
Her (it) - ‘What? What passphrase? This is your wife, our son is hurt. Send the money now!!’
Me- ‘I’ll call you back. I don’t believe that this is my wife. If it is, I’m sorry, but we discussed this.’
The number? Spoofed. Easy to do and there’s no way to tell if a phone number is being spoofed aside from hanging up and calling back to confirm.
The voice? AI generated. Easily done. A few seconds of audio is all it takes to create a realistic audio deepfake.
What can you do?
1) Create a family safe word or passphrase. Ours is definitely not ‘Keep Going’ although we considered it. Discuss the passphrase far away from phones or any recording device. This is as analog as possible. Don’t forget that the trigger for the passphrase is just as important as the phrase itself. So instead of asking ‘what’s the safe word?’ have a separate triggering question. For example, you could say ‘I’m eating banana cream pie’ and this would trigger your spouse to respond ‘purple velvet pillows’ if that’s the safe word.
Make it fun, silly, and easy to remember. And DON’T WRITE IT DOWN.
2) Cognitive security is an essential skill in 2026. Assume every image and video you see online is fake until proven otherwise. Expect scams and spammers, and be pleasantly surprised when it’s not.
3) Figure out a backup communication option with people who you absolutely need to be able to reach. Don’t just rely on a phone number for communication. Have redundant, ideally encrypted methods of communication with family.
What did I miss? I think (hope) Nikita is wrong on the timeframe- agentic bots like Claude bot are impressive but not quite ready to flood the phone lines in just 90 days. But I think it’s going to be a huge problem by the end of the year. I already get dozens of increasingly realistic spam calls and texts daily- it’s only going to get more annoying. Have a plan to keep your family and your finances safe!
"Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts."
Patrick Moynihan
Been thinking a lot about this Ted Chiang quote recently: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.”
Economist Thomas Piketty, writing for Le Monde (archive) on the success of Europe’s social democratic model and countering “the narrative of a ‘declining’ continent”:
If someone had told the European elites and liberal economists of 1914 that wealth redistribution would one day account for half of national income, they would have unanimously condemned the idea as collectivist madness and predicted the continent’s ruin. In reality, European countries have achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social well-being, largely due to collective investments in health, education and public infrastructure.
To win the cultural and intellectual battle, Europe must now assert its values and defend its model of development, fundamentally opposed to the nationalist-extractivist model championed by Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States and by Vladimir Putin’s allies in Russia. A crucial issue in this fight is the choice of indicators used to measure human progress.
For these indicators, Piketty mentions some of the same factors that economist Gabriel Zucman detailed in his Le Monde piece I posted in December:
More leisure time, better health outcomes, greater equality and lower carbon emissions, all with broadly comparable productivity: Europeans can be proud of their model, argues Gabriel Zucman, director of the EU Tax Observatory.
Senator Barbara Pocock criticised the merging of the Financial Reporting Council, the Australian Accounting Standards Board, and the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board into a new body called External Reporting Australia.
Greens Senator Barbara Pocock. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)
The Greens and the Albanese Labor government are still at odds over whether active partners of accounting firms should serve as members of its revamped rulemaking body for accounting and audit.
Senator Barbara Pocock told Senate estimates that she remains concerned about conflicts of interest people may have when rules are being developed by the new body responsible for audit, accounting and sustainability standards.
Pocock made the criticisms of the proposed structure at the same time as the government was preparing to table it in the House of Representatives for parliamentary debate.
The legislation merges three existing structures — the Financial Reporting Council, the Australian Accounting Standards Board, and the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board.
It creates a new body, External Reporting Australia, with a governing board that oversees specialist standard-setting boards within a single structure.
The ERA will also have its own secretariat to run its own affairs, which will remove the influence of Treasury on the accounting and audit standard-setting structure.
The Treasury has supplied the secretariat for the Financial Reporting Council since it began operating in 1999, but the new proposal would allow a permanent secretariat to develop a stronger corporate memory.
Staff in the Treasury who were previously part of the FRC secretariat would be rotated from one division to another, which means knowledge of financial reporting is sparser than it otherwise ought to be.
Senate estimates did not feature much discussion of the technical elements of the proposal, as Pocock and the Greens have been more concerned with replicating the governance model they successfully implemented with the Tax Practitioners Board.
Pocock and her colleagues successfully secured the Albanese government’s acceptance of amendments to tax agent regulator laws that prohibit partners or directors of entities with direct financial links from serving on the authority’s board.
She said she found a letter from Assistant Treasurer Dan Mulino unconvincing on the issue of avoidance of conflicts of interest because Mulino said the process of appointing members of boards would focus on ensuring people with real or perceived conflicts of interest do not dominate standard-setting boards
She told Treasury staff during estimates that she remained concerned about appointing active partners in accounting firms to standard-setting boards that have financial interests, and that she wanted them to be free from those interests.
Treasury official Tony McDonald told Pocock that the way to avoid regulatory capture is to first recognise that the standard setter sets standards, not regulates those who must comply with them.
“The way to avoid regulatory capture in this instance is that it is not a regulatory body — it is a standard-setting body,” McDonald said.
“The regulations of auditors are clearly within [the Australian Securities and Investments Commission].”
McDonald said it was critically important that people undertaking work relevant to standard setters be part of that process.
He said that the intent of the legislation, as outlined in the correspondence from Mulino, was to strike the right balance between people who were actively involved in accounting firms and companies and other stakeholders who would bring an alternative point of view.
“These are points that were raised in the parliamentary inquiry and parliamentary evidence as well. They are not easy issues. It is about striking the right balance,” McDonald said.
Pocock told McDonald that she saw a real risk to the standard-setting process from having people on the standard-setting boards who are making decisions on standards while receiving income from their accounting firms or companies.
West Australian Labor Senator, Glenn Sterle, says federal government agencies have to do better to stop unethical road freight operators underpaying drivers and sending legitimate operators out of business. Picture supplied.
The sham contract driver crisis pushing long-established trucking companies out of business could be fixed in months if the tax department did its job, says Labor senator and former truckie, Glenn Sterle.
"I want to see government agencies, including the ATO and the Fair Work Ombudsman, prosecuting the mongrels running the businesses responsible - this problem's far bigger than wage theft," Senator Sterle said.
"Legitimate operators are desperate for help," he said.
"If we don't act, if government agencies don't act, the road transport industry is heading over a cliff.
"It's a problem on steroids - there are suggestions that up to 40 per cent of drivers in the sector may be now employed illegally as ABN contractors."
Sham contracting means drivers are misclassified as independent contractors with their own Australian Business Number (ABN), despite not having their own truck and being recruited to work under conditions that legally define them as employees.
Senator Sterle said "good, decent operators" were going to the wall because they paid drivers properly, including their pay as you earn taxes.
They were losing freight contracts to shonky competitors who did not pay award wages, superannuation, workers' compensation commitments and leave entitlements, shaving up to 30pc from their payroll costs.
That, in turn, enabled them to pitch for work at unrealistically cheap rates.
"I've had trucking companies tell me they have clients - national businesses - asking them to match the cheapest tenders, or lose the work," he said.
While sham contracting tended to be more prevalent among city-based road transport operators, trucking industry officials have warned rural communities were experiencing the industry's black economy impact, as well.
Smaller and family-run regional and interstate carriers were particularly vulnerable to the freight industry's high operating costs, tight profit margins, elevated interest rates and fierce competition, according to a recent assessment by credit analysis group, CreditorWatch.
It noted they also lacked the cash reserves and negotiation leverage of larger logistics companies.
Among the rural industries considered most likely to be enticed to use unusually cheap freight providers is the horticulture sector, although feedback from industry leaders suggested sham contract operators were not obvious.
"That's not to say it isn't happening, and it's certainly not condoned, but there doesn't seem to be evidence of it impacting our industry," said National Farmers Federation Horticulture Council chairman, Jolyon Burnett.
The farm sector was well aware of the cost pressures associated with moving produce, but also tended to rely on farm-connected freight operators or contractors recommended by retailers.
He felt major horticulture retailers were expected to be dealing with credible operators and would be conscious to avoid connections with illegal employment schemers.
"We shouldn't have to put a bomb under government agencies to fix this," said Senator Sterle, whose family has lengthy ties to the trucking sector, including his own 11 years as a former owner-driver.
"I can't understand why the tax office is asleep at the wheel.
Senator Glenn Sterle says decent road freight operators are going to the wall because they pay drivers properly. File picture.
"There's a lot of unpaid tax and superannuation going unaccounted for, yet at the same time ATO's not afraid to jump on a family business that might be a few weeks late submitting their BAS details."
Australian Taxation Office officials told a November meeting with the trucking industry that while road freight companies must report annually what they paid contractors, which should identify tax avoidance through cash payments and income under reporting, the system was "less effective than it could be".
The ATO had agreed to review how the taxable payments annual reports were used to identify and act on omitted income, labour expenses and non-lodgement of tax returns to better detect operators in the shadow economy.
However, Senator Sterle, who convened the meeting, expected more decisive action from the ATO and other government agencies, including Border Force, the Fair Work Ombudsman's office and the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator.
He had identified transport operators who were employing unwitting foreign-sourced drivers on sham contractor arrangements and he expected relevant federal government agency officials to "drive into their yards and interview people".
"If you're employed as a driver you should have a payslip, if you are a contractor you should be able to prove it with a truck and registration papers," he said.
