Sue

I am getting increasingly uncomfortable with the buildings being lit up, the gushing praise and the almost saintly status being bestowed upon Helen Haines. Because none of that is going to help Helen. And frankly, it feeds straight back into this angels & demons narrative that has taken over everything. Helen is a remarkable woman. But I reckon she’d be the first to tell you she’s also an ordinary woman, an Australian citizen who went to work on Monday and had her life torn apart. She voted against the government’s NDIS changes. She’s been a strong ally to disabled people & now she faces a long recovery in which she may need many of the very supports she has fought to protect. And what I want to know is whether she’s getting the best possible care in hospital. Whether there are enough nurses to nurse, without having to double as disability support workers. Whether ambulances are still ramped up the wazoo and emergency departments are bursting at the seams. What I want to know is whether Helen will get the prosthetics, orthotics, wheelchair, home modifications & personal support she may need to rebuild her life. And here’s a particularly cruel irony. Helen is 65. Unless she was already an NDIS participant before her 65th birthday, she cannot access the NDIS now. So who is going to fund and provide those supports? How many systems will she have to navigate? How many bureaucrats will get a say in what she needs? I want Helen to have every possible opportunity to recover, to go home, and, all the Gods willing, to return to the life and work she loves. Without having to fight for every bloody thing along the way. And I want to know why we are still so hopeless at preventing violence against women. The man accused of attacking Helen reportedly had significant mental health concerns. His lawyer told the court today that he has a rare neurological condition. There have also been reports of chronic pain and difficulties accessing the NDIS. We don’t yet know his motive or the full circumstances of his medical care. None of that excuses what happened to Helen. Not one bit. But nor should we ignore what happens when people with serious illnesses, disability, homelessness or drug dependency fall through the cracks of systems that are supposed to help them. Mental illness doesn’t make someone a violent criminal. And women should not have to pay the price when someone becomes violent, whatever the reason. I want women to be safe walking down the street. I want people who need treatment to receive it. And I want governments to stop waiting until somebody is dead or catastrophically injured before they take any of this seriously. We are well past the tipping point. And I’m sure the government will shortly announce another grand plan to fix the NDIS market, as though concentrating services in the hands of increasingly large corporate providers & private equity interests, while destroying jobs and choice, is somehow going to improve our lives. It won’t help Helen. And it won’t help the thousands of other Australians already fighting to get the care they need. The bitter irony is that Helen Haines & Jordon Steele-John, himself a survivor of violence, are precisely the kinds of politicians who understand what’s wrong with these systems and have been trying to fix them. We need politicians from every side of politics working together to make things better. Not more theatre, not more political point-scoring, and certainly not more bloody platitudes. I don’t object to people expressing their love & admiration for Helen. I share it. But if we really want to honour her, perhaps we could start by making sure the systems she fought to improve actually work for her, and for everybody else. Prevention is always better than remedial treatment. And both are a hell of a lot better than thoughts & prayers. You can light up every building in Australia. But you can’t illuminate your way out of a broken health, disability & care system.

While Australia stared at the crippled dead cat they just threw on the table, Labor and the Liberals were quietly passing legislation that should have been front-page news. The dead cat was Jordon Steele-John. I don’t know for sure who threw it there. But I know what happened in Parliament while everyone was looking. On Monday 12 October, Labor and the Coalition backed the Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026. Sounds harmless, doesn’t it? It creates a legal framework for more than $1.4 BILLION a year in government payments to healthcare providers, including corporate-owned businesses. But buried in that legislation are powers to let ministers decide payment rules, demand records, share personal information, investigate providers, recover money and authorise computers to make decisions, including decisions requiring judgement. Parliament’s own Human Rights Committee had already warned that these information powers could seriously interfere with Australians’ privacy and that the safeguards might not be good enough. They passed it anyway. Then came the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2026. More computer-made decisions. More use of income data to calculate family assistance and child support. New powers to change certain decisions already under review by the Administrative Review Tribunal. Some provisions improve review rights. Others expand automated administration. After Robodebt, you might reasonably expect Parliament to examine every one of those powers with a microscope. And then there was the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026. This changes aged-care subsidies, accommodation deposits, means-testing arrangements and government debt recovery. It also establishes a limited pathway for reconsidering certain aged-care assessments. Not the unfettered right for qualified assessors to override an algorithm when it gets someone’s needs wrong. After months of pressure, the government finally agreed on Thursday to an independent review of its aged-care assessment system. Now consider what we’ve been uncovering at Enough Australia. Private equity buying up healthcare businesses. nib acquiring independent NDIS plan managers. Publicly funded services being consolidated into corporate groups. Governments increasingly relying on data, payment rules and automated administration. These laws do not hand Medicare or the NDIS to nib. But they help build the administrative and funding environment in which large corporate operators can do business. We, the public, pays for it. The government writes the rules. Private businesses can receive the money. And increasingly, computer systems help decide who qualifies, what gets paid and what happens when the records don’t agree. Labor and the Coalition did not agree on every amendment, particularly in aged care. But they supported key parts of this expanding administrative machinery. And who was sitting in Parliament on Monday warning about exactly this? Jordon Steele-John. On Tuesday, he supported an amendment seeking to abolish the controversial aged-care assessment tool. Labor voted it down. On Thursday, the government announced a review of that system. By Thursday afternoon, the headlines were about Jordon himself. The decade old allegations against him deserve a fair, independent investigation. So do the decisions being made about the rest of us. Because while everyone was staring at the dead cat, Parliament was deciding who controls the money, who controls the information and how much power human beings will have when the computers get it wrong. That’s the story we should be reading. Www.enoughaustralia.com