Given that our disability representive has been forced out of office and that nobody from the Greens - right, @DavidShoebridge? - will be asking questions at Estimates on our behalf right now, I'll dump some excerpts from some writing I have done. It contains some dirty little secrets that the government and Coalition almost certainly do not want told. Here's the first one. If I had to title it, I'd call it 'Propaganda, government brainwashing and what Morrison did while he was Minister of Everything.' But instead, I'll give it my working title: 'Australia Inc: The Men Who Sold Australia.' 'I was in Linda Reynold's office, during her tenure as NDIS Minister, talking to one of those sharp young men that they employ as advisors. And then I mentioned the BETA unit. In my words, 'What about that cute little office attached to the side of Prime Minister and Cabinet? Where the Behavioural Economics team work, the ones who are paid to change the mind of the public on key issues?' The young man paused and a wry smile slid involuntarily across his face. 'You read a lot, don't you?' Yes. Yes, I do.' That's why I know about the secret behavioural economics propaganda unit and their work in Australia, and it's why you should, too. Let me explain this to you. We all know language can be distorted to suppress dissent and uphold tyranny. No longer do we need master propagandists like Joseph Goebbels; we have our own dedicated unit and AI tools to tell you, the Australian public, that black is white. Even if it's not. How did we get to this place? Behavioural economics itself has important Israeli intellectual roots. Two men named Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky developed their work on judgement, bias and decision-making while working together at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1970s. That work fed into the later American behavioural-economics movement. And later, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein turned it into the explicit government-policy idea of the “nudge” in their 2008 book. Because of course they did. It was of huge value to governments to be able to change the mind of the people. And the word 'nudge' is so much friendlier than 'brainwash', isn't it? The first government to create a central “nudge unit” was actually David Cameron's UK government in July 2010, with David Halpern running the Behavioural Insights Team inside the Cabinet Office/No. 10. And then NSW imported that model directly from Britain in 2012. The NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet contracted the UK Behavioural Insights Team to help establish Australia's first dedicated Behavioural Insights Unit. The OECD confirms this direct UK-to-NSW transfer. There was already some Australian federal interest even before that. The Productivity Commission held an entire Behavioural Economics and Public Policy roundtable in August 2007, bringing in senior officials and international behavioural-economics researchers. The idea was circulating in Canberra years before Morrison became a federal minister - but the Minister for Everything and our former Tourism Australia employee embraced it like no other Prime Minister before him. Why wouldn't he? The United States accelerated it back in 2014. Barack Obama's administration created its Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. On 15 September 2015 Obama issued an executive order directing US agencies to use behavioural science in program and policy design. That date is somewhat striking. It was also the day Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister. Just over two months later, on 23 November 2015, the Turnbull government announced Australia's federal 'nudge unit'. Assistant Cabinet Secretary Scott Ryan made the announcement at an ANU public-policy conference. He said BETA would be a joint initiative of seven Commonwealth agencies, located in PM&C, with Harvard Professor Michael Hiscox brought back to Australia to head it. Ryan made the announcement immediately before Cass Sunstein, the co-author of Nudge and former senior Obama official, addressed the conference. And this wasn't just announced in 2015. PM&C's annual report gives the exact commencement date - BETA was formally set up inside PM&C on 1 February 2016. There is an extraordinary little political detail here. Arthur Sinodinos had actually attacked behavioural economics in 2012, calling it essentially “economic and social regulatory engineering” and attacking the “nanny state”. Three days after BETA was announced, he was challenged about that in the Senate. Sinodinos acknowledged his previous opposition but said the Turnbull government had changed its position and now wanted to test behavioural economics as part of its deregulation agenda. Contemporary reporting was therefore pretty explicit about whose project this was. Peter Martin described “why Malcolm Turnbull is embracing behavioural economics” and reported that Sunstein was in Australia to help Turnbull launch the unit. The Mandarin similarly described it as the Turnbull government's new unit, following NSW, Britain and the United States. Peter Martin Turnbull himself later wrote the foreword to BETA's 2018 report and said his government had established BETA in 2016. And then Morrison took this a step further. He began to change laws, to organise with others and to do favours for those in power. Including in the media. One of the ways he did that is via giving them tax breaks through a special process called 'specific listing'. Specific listing is not the normal ATO DGR process. It is a government policy decision followed by Parliament changing the tax law to name the organisation. Treasury describes specific listing as exceptional, and unlike an ordinary administrative DGR decision, there is no merits review. That meant the Morrison government was effectively saying: these particular organisations do not need to fit neatly within an existing DGR class, we will put their names into the tax legislation. It's not a small thing. It means that you need to change a whole law, through a process. And Morrison had made himself the Minister of Everything during that time - including someone who had the same powers as the Treasurer. I went and looked at it and looked hard. Because men like Morrison only take calculated risks, and they only do things that will perhaps harm their reputation if there are big prizes as rewards. And when you look at how much was involved here - what he had to do to organise at this level, the risk involved in others spotting what he did, the lengthy process involved - well, there must have been a big prize at the end. There sure was. But first, what was the process? First, the organisations applying need to even know it exists, then they need to apply. The name of every organisation who wants anything outside of ordinary DGR status then sits in Subdivision 30-B of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997, so each one needs a bill through both houses. Treasury bundles them into omnibus Treasury Laws Amendment bills two or three times a year. I worked out that he did them in batches of seven. That means that seven Acts carried the names decided during Morrison's prime ministership, with assent on 1 March 2019, 13 February 2020, 19 June 2020, 3 September 2020, 29 June 2021, 22 February 2022 and 31 March 2022 (the last three inside the secret Treasury window). He gave some of them generic names; I assume so that they would not be easily spotted for what they were. Or that in some cases, that they had not even been commenced yet, like the Governor General's Foundation. Consider this. Scott Morrison had made himself a Treasury minister nine days after the Governor-General's foundation asked Treasury for a tax break. On 27 April 2021 the foundation, through Chris Hartley, wrote to Treasury seeking a specific listing as a deductible gift recipient. He copied the Official Secretary to the Governor-General and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The Treasury file, released under freedom of information, shows the request was progressed for the December MYEFO with PM&C in the loop. Treasury's own guidance says a specific listing is granted in "exceptional circumstances" and that the process can take up to two years. The Governor-General's foundation went from first letter to a line in MYEFO in under eight months, with a start date backdated to two months after it was incorporated. The Parliament then did its part at speed. The Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Support and Other Measures) Bill 2022 was introduced on 30 March 2022, the day after Frydenberg's pre-election Budget, passed both Houses that day and the next, and received assent on 31 March. Schedule 3 wrote the Ramsay Centre and the Future Leaders Foundation into the Act alongside the Lord Mayor's Charitable Foundation, a Korean War memorial in Perth and a Greek Orthodox cathedral fund. The Budget the day before had found the foundation $18 million over five years and $4 million a year after that. Our taxpayer money. Have a little think about that for a moment. Seven weeks later Morrison lost the election. In September 2022 the Albanese government cancelled the $18 million. The foundation's accounts for the year to June 2022 showed $2.1 million in donations, $475,000 in salaries and no leadership candidates. But nobody really looked at the other specific DGR listings, some of which were, I believe, entirely legitimate. Others, I believe, were not. Virginia Bell, the former High Court judge who inquired into Morrison's secret appointments, found that he exercised a statutory power from them exactly once: to kill the PEP-11 gas permit off the New South Wales coast. She found no exercise of any Treasury power. She wrote that once the appointments became known, "the secrecy with which they had been surrounded was corrosive of trust in government". Her terms of reference were the appointments, their implications, and the constitutional machinery under sections 64 and 65. She was not asked to audit Cabinet decisions, and so she didn't. Why did we let government write the terms of reference for this inquiry? It essentially allowed them to only investigate what they wanted to investigate, while investigating themselves. How do you carry out corrupt acts with ease if you are in almost the highest station in the land? Why, you change the laws. And that, increasingly, was what Morrison did. Only by the time of the election, he had run out of time. That's why he had to become the Minister of Everything to do what came next. The guy must have been sweating bullets. Morrison's commission over the Treasury took effect on 6 May 2021. Five days later, on 11 May, Frydenberg's Budget approved three new names and two extensions: Australian Associated Press, the Virtual War Memorial and Scripture Union Queensland, with Cambridge Australia Scholarships and Foundation 1901 extended for five years. Yes. AAP. The national newswire that News Corp and Nine had owned until 2020, when it was handed over to a consortium of 'philanthropists and impact investors' and reborn as a not-for-profit. Less than a year later, and five days after Morrison secretly became a second minister administering Treasury, Frydenberg’s Budget announced that AAP would be specifically written into the tax law as a DGR. Wildly sexy and far more interesting than just being a Murdoch organisation, I guess. Then the seven names of December 2021. Then, on 29 March 2022, the last Budget before the election: Melbourne Business School with no end date, Advance Global Australians, the Leaders Institute of South Australia, St Patrick's Cathedral Melbourne, a two-year extension for Sydney Chevra Kadisha, and "up to 28 entities related to community foundations affiliated with the peak body Community Foundations Australia", those generically named Community Foundations that were seemingly unrelated. Except they weren't. Nobody bothered to look, and nobody will bother to ask PMC today, will they? @senatorpennyqld @SenatorPayman @SenatorWong @DavidPocock @MurrayWatt Nobody bothered to look at the whole list. And that is the part I cannot get past. Because these were not all random little charities wandering independently into Treasury asking for help. By the end, the government was approving specific listings for whole groups of organisations, including “up to 28 entities” connected through Community Foundations Australia. Elsewhere in this post are philanthropy, impact investment, social ventures, outcomes funding, foundations, private capital and the deliberate construction of a market around things governments once simply funded as public services. That is why this shit is important. And that is why somebody sitting in Estimates should be asking PM&C and Treasury what these decisions were for, who proposed them, who met with whom, what advice went to ministers, and what relationship these specific listings had to the government's much larger social-impact-investment project. But our disability representative, Jordon Steele-John, is not there asking questions right now. So I am. I want to know what is happening with his disallowance motion on the NDIS. I want to know who is questioning officials about the decisions that are currently reshaping disability services. And I want to know why, at precisely the point when those questions should be being asked, so much political and media energy is being spent elsewhere. There is more to this story. A lot more. This isn't just about a handful of obscure tax concessions. It is about what happened when government stopped treating care, disability, welfare and other social services as things good governments SHOULD provide, and started building the machinery to turn human outcomes into things that could be measured, priced, financed and invested in. Under a LABOR government. That machinery did not appear overnight. It was built piece by piece, across departments, budgets, legislation, data systems, foundations and investment funds. By the Coalition, and then it was adopted by @Albo, @JEChalmers, @RichardMarlesMP and other men, following in the footsteps of the men who designed this abhorrent plan. The men who sold Australia. And once you follow those men and the money through it, some of those apparently unrelated decisions stop looking unrelated at all. You took away our NDIS, our jobs and our futures and expected disabled people not to understand the machinery being built around us. That was a mistake. There are thousands of us. We know how to read legislation. We know how to follow money. We know how to use FOI. We know how to compare company records, budgets, contracts and parliamentary documents until the thing somebody hoped nobody would notice becomes impossible not to see. You do not need money, institutional power or a newsroom to do that. You need evidence. We found it. We are going to tell others, for two years. And we are going to hold you to account. Australians have had Enough. enoughaustralia.com.