Federal Parliament sitting week: Monday 26 October, Tuesday 27 October, Wednesday 28 October, Thursday 29 October

Bills Passed
Minimum tax on family trusts
Income Tax Rates Amendment (Minimum Tax on Discretionary Trusts) Bill 2026
Parliament has passed a law requiring discretionary trusts to pay a minimum level of tax, closing a loophole that allowed high-income earners to minimise tax bills through trust structures. The law sets a minimum tax rate that discretionary trusts must pay regardless of how income is distributed among beneficiaries. This affects high-net-worth individuals and families who use discretionary trusts for tax planning.

Overhaul of tax laws
Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 3) Bill 2026
A broad package of tax law changes has passed both the House and Senate, now law. The bill makes various amendments to income tax and other tax provisions across the Treasury Laws. This affects individuals, businesses, and other taxpayers across Australia.

Second wave of tax changes
Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 4) Bill 2026
A second major tax reform bill has passed both chambers and is now law. The bill contains further amendments to tax legislation following on from the first tax reform package. This affects individuals and businesses subject to Australian tax law.

Domestic gas must stay in Australia
Domestic Gas Reservation Bill 2026, Domestic Gas Reservation (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2026, Domestic Gas Reservation Levy Bill 2026
Parliament has passed three linked bills requiring gas companies to reserve a portion of their production for the Australian domestic market rather than exporting all supplies. The laws create a reservation requirement on liquefied natural gas exports and introduce a levy on gas companies to fund the scheme. This affects gas producers, exporters, and Australian consumers paying energy bills.

Military base security upgrades
Defence Legislation Amendment (Accelerating Capability and Protecting Bases) Bill 2026
Parliament has passed changes to defence law to accelerate military capability and improve protection of defence bases. The bill amends Defence Legislation to streamline processes and strengthen base security arrangements. This affects defence personnel, military operations, and national security arrangements.

Bills Introduced
No bills were introduced at Second Reading stage last week that remain under debate. All bills that progressed through the House during the sitting week either passed or are awaiting Senate consideration.

Worth Watching
The Senate did not sit during the week of 26–29 October, so no bills moved through the upper house. The three gas reservation bills and tax reform bills that passed the House will now move to the Senate for consideration when parliament resumes sitting.

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Weekly Federal Parliament Briefing — sourced from Hansard via OpenAustralia API. Parliamentary material Copyright Commonwealth of Australia. This is a summary only.

Chapter 6c

Celina was back in Darwin at the end of July. It had taken her several weeks to access the databases she needed to. In the end, her findings were conclusive.

‘The Cunningham family probably never set foot in Launceston,’ she announced as we wheeled her suitcase and cabin bag towards Darwin Airport carpark. ‘Nor anywhere else in Tasmania for that matter.’

‘Cunningham is a common enough family name,’ I suggested. ‘As is Bruce, Beryl, Kyle and Kurt … Kurtis.’

‘That’s why it took me three weeks of solid database checking – births, marriages, driver and vehicle licences, public and private school records, medical databases and … yes … I even got access to Anglican Church records in Tasmania, thanks to the DDG’s intervention.’
‘Does Rufus know the outcome of your enquiries?’ I asked.

‘He rang me just before I boarded my flight earlier today from Launceston.’
‘So now he knows that our ‘Spider’ is the real deal.’

She nodded.

‘He told me to tell you he’ll be flying to Darwin tomorrow and expects to spend a few days here. Says we can use his hotel room as a safe house. Also says he’ll be bringing his successor with him and she’ll need to be briefed.’

It was a sledgehammer moment.

‘What does he mean – ‘successor’?’

‘I told me he is about to pull the plug – retire and do what he always wanted to do, write spy novels’.

‘And the successor?’ I asked.

‘I’m sorry you had to hear it from me first, boss, but it’s someone you know and I believe have a great deal of time for – Alice Wright.’

So … Doctor Wright, former psychiatrist and superb counter-intelligence operator, as it turned out, had finally arrived!

‘Good choice,’ I replied. ‘So did Rufus mention when Alice would be taking over his role?’
She shook her head.

‘He said he’ll fill you in when you collect him and Alice from their Canberra flight tomorrow morning. Oh, and he also mentioned about your cell phone being compromised, which he said would explain your recent bout of paranoia.’

I breathed a sigh of relief. So my cell phone had been spiked after all. Wish I knew how they did it.

‘I hope the rest of those cell phones the Brits gave us have also been quarantined,’ I sighed.
‘Mine certainly has,’ replied Celina.


Continued

For over 80 years, science treated bats like little winged owls with fancy sonar.

The universal rule in biology textbooks was simple: owls and bats have fixed, immobile eyeballs locked into their skulls. If they want to look at something off to the side, they have to turn their entire head.

It made sense on paper. Since echolocating bats rely so heavily on bouncing sound waves off surrounding obstacles, why would they bother wasting energy moving their eyes?

Well, it turns out bats have been rolling their eyes at us all along.

The 80-year-old myth gets busted
Back in the 1940s, zoologist Gordon Walls suggested that bats had fixed, immobile eyes, an idea that stuck around for more than eight decades.

But neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University have now discovered that bats can indeed move their eyes, and rather effectively too.

In fact, Seba's short-tailed bats can shift their gaze by around 10 degrees in either direction, tracking movement without having to turn their entire heads. And they're not simply glancing about randomly. Their eyes perform coordinated movements that help them keep track of what's happening around them.

How bats keep their eyes on the prize
Bats have something called the optokinetic reflex, which sounds quite complicated but is actually something you use yourself. Imagine sitting on a train, looking out of the window. As the scenery passes, your eyes naturally follow an object for a moment before quickly jumping back to focus on something else.

That's your optokinetic reflex at work. It helps keep images stable on your retina, even when the world around you is moving.

And bats do something remarkably similar. Their eyes smoothly follow moving objects, then make a quick little jump back to reset their gaze.

So, despite having sophisticated echolocation abilities, bats haven't abandoned the benefits of good old-fashioned eyesight.

Why bats need both eyes and ears
Now, you might be wondering why an animal with such impressive sonar needs to rely on vision at all. Well, echolocation and eyesight are useful for different things.

Echolocation is brilliant for detecting nearby obstacles, navigating in darkness and locating prey. But vision can help bats detect things much farther away, such as distant landmarks and features of the landscape.

And those eye movements serve another important purpose: helping keep their view steady while flying.

Imagine trying to focus on something while your entire body is bobbing, turning and swooping through the air. Without a way to stabilise your vision, the world would look like a very shaky home video.

By combining information from their eyes and ears, bats can build a much richer picture of their surroundings. Scientists call this multimodal sensing, which is really just a fancy way of saying that two senses are better than one.

So, after more than 80 years of being told they couldn't move their eyes, bats have finally set the record straight.

SOURCE
Bat study

If you're reading this while slumped in an office chair, I have some news.

We've spent years hearing that a quick 30-minute jog or a brisk walk around the block erases a day of sitting as your desk.

But massive new long-term health datasets that have tracked thousands of adults are blowing that comforting little myth out of the water.

It turns out that spending more than 10 hours a day parked on your backside may be doing more than making your hips tight. A major study involving nearly 50,000 older adults found that people who spent 12 hours a day sedentary had a staggering 63 per cent higher relative risk of developing dementia than those averaging around nine hours.

Here's what is actually happening inside your skull when you stay glued to your seat, and how to fix it without quitting your day job.

You can just exercise the risk away
For decades, public health advice treated movement like a simple math equation: burn a few calories, sweat a bit, and your body stays happy. We assumed that as long as you hit the gym three times a week, sitting for the remaining 12 hours was completely harmless.

That theory worked fine until researchers attached ultra-precise activity trackers to tens of thousands of people, and monitored their brain health over nearly a decade.

The data revealed something shocking. That 5-kilometre run at 6 AM is still doing you plenty of good, but it might not completely cancel out the effects of spending the next nine hours glued to a swivel chair. The sheer uninterrupted duration of sitting creates a distinct biological bottleneck.

The blood flow pump
So, why could sitting affect your brain? One possible explanation comes down to a process called cerebral perfusion, which is just the technical term for how blood flows through your brain tissue.

Your brain is a massive energy hog. It accounts for only two per cent of your body weight but devours around 20 per cent of your body's energy.

When you move, the muscles in your legs contract, helping push blood back towards your heart and supporting healthy circulation.

But when you sit motionless for hours, those muscles aren't doing much work. Blood can pool in your lower limbs, and research suggests that prolonged sitting can temporarily reduce blood flow through the brain.

In one study, researchers found that taking short walking breaks helped prevent this reduction in cerebral blood flow.

Scientists are still investigating whether these changes contribute to dementia risk over time, but it's another good reason to stand up and walk around occasionally.

What changes you can make today
Recent findings show that total sitting time matters, but breaking up those long blocks of inactivity works wonders. You don't need an intense workout every hour; you just need to turn the muscle pump back on.

• Set a 45-minute timer: Every three-quarters of an hour, stand up for two minutes. Walk to the kitchen, stretch, or do a quick lap of the corridor.

• Pace while on calls: If you're on a phone call that doesn't require a screen, stand up and pace around the room.

• Fidget on purpose: Even micro-movements, like calf raises at your desk, help push blood back up to your brain.

Your brain isn't built for a static life. Give it a quick splash of fresh blood every hour, and your future self will thank you for it.

SOURCES
Sedentary behaviour & Dementia study

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” -
is possibly attributed to Mark Twain.

There was a time only a few months back when you could spot an AI fake just by counting the fingers on someone’s hand. If the image showed seven knuckles and it just looked "odd", you knew a machine faked it! Oh how we miss those days.

AI fakes sway opinion, the news, and even distort the truth
Recent wars in the Middle East, and war in Ukraine spawned billions of posts, including fake news, with dubious credibility. Mark Twain was right!

Those days of you easily spotting fact from AI fake - are dead and buried. AI has won!

Today’s AI tools no longer generate "AI slop" they spit out crystal-clear video, cloned voices, and punchy articles in seconds. Whether it is a dodgy clip of a politician, a fake celebrity flogging a scam, or a cooked-up protest photo designed to start a comment-section war, our phone screens are drowning in AI slop that's hard to discern and confirm is even real.

Experts tell you to zoom in and check for weird shadows or blurry earlobes, but let’s be honest: nobody is doing that on the train or bus to work.

So, stop getting played, you need to stop acting like a forensic detective and start following the money.

Follow the Money, Not the Pixels
Before looking at how to spot a fake, ask yourself why so much of it slips through the net.

The dirty secret: Big Tech loves a good fake
Nothing keeps you glued to your screen quite like a healthy dose of rage. An AI image that makes your blood boil keeps you doom-scrolling, arguing in the comments, all the while they make money from those ads in your feed.

Tech billionaires love to talk about online safety. Yet recent numbers from the Australian media watchdog (ACMA) show social platforms are actually taking less action against misinformation than they used to.

Why would the casino kick out its best money-earners?

Worse still, all this fake rubbish gives real-life crooks the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. Experts call it the "liar’s dividend." When everyone knows anything can be faked, a corrupt politician or a sleazy boss caught on a real camera can just shrug and say, "Wasn’t me, mate...it’s a deepfake." AI doesn't just make us believe lies; it also gives people caught doing the wrong thing an easy excuse.

Your Gut Before Your Screen
The biggest giveaway of an AI fake isn't on the screen. It is in your stomach.

Fakes are built for speed
They make you angry, scared, or smug so fast that you hit "share" before your brain kicks into gear. If a breaking news post or a leaked audio clip backs up everything you already reckon about the world—or makes you want to throw your phone at the wall—take a breath.

Hate Albo, Trump or Pauline Hanson? - they have you covered! Hate the Greens or Labor? - they have you covered too. Hate Putin, Netanyahu, Hamas, the IDF, Greta Thunberg...don't worry they will all be in your feed.

YouTube has a real problem with AI slop crowding out genuine content.

Ask yourself...*Who posted it first?
If a massive scandal is really unfolding, real journalists with their jobs on the line will be covering it. If the source is some anonymous account called "TruthSeeker99" with a blue tick, it is probably garbage.

Digital Receipts
Since you and I cannot discern whether it's a fake anymore, camera makers, and tech companies alike have begun inserting invisible digital receipts within files.

Big camera brands and newsrooms now use a tool called Content Credentials. Think of it like a tamper-proof safety seal on a tub of peanut butter. When real photographers and journos take photos, the camera adds a digital timestamp inside the file. If someone uses AI to doctor it later, the seal breaks.

Google is fighting this with SynthID - it hides invisible watermarks inside AI pictures and voice clips. Even better, you already have the best bullst-detector in your pocket: Google Lens.

Next time you're about to zealously share a post that seems too wild to be true, take a moment to check who's behind it before feeding the outrage machine.

Is that poor kid in Gaza hobbling in the dust and mud real?
Did North Korea really launch 10 new missiles?
Did Trump really say that?
Did Albo really fall off the stage - (fact check - Yes!)

Real Life is Messy
Real life is chaotic. When a regular person pulls out an iPhone during a wild event, the camera shakes, the wind ruins the audio, and someone’s thumb covers half the lens.

AI fakes are usually too neat. If a "leaked" voice recording of a CEO like it was recorded in a soundproof Hollywood studio with zero background noise, don't buy it. And look outside the frame.

If a massive riot or disaster just hit the middle of Sydney or Melbourne, thousands of commuters would be filming it. If only one cinematic angle exists on the whole internet - it likely never happened.

Don’t Be a Free PR Agent
Politicians in Canberra will spend the next decade arguing over internet laws and free speech, while scammers and AI run laps around them. No government law will protect you - so shields up.

Your best weapon is simple: don't be an unpaid worker for someone else’s scam. Next time you are about to zealously share that post, that seems too wild to be true - take ten seconds to check who is selling it and leave the outrage machine starving.

Canberra will say all the right things and claim to protect you and your family - but misinformation and lies (call it propaganda) have always been a tool for dubious intent and manipulation. You cannot escape it.

It's up to you to be discerning and to take everything you see and hear with a pinch of digital salt - heck even this article may be AI Slop!

Lastly - if you want to check news articles for credibility - head to debunkit.ai or Snopes. Another good Australian site is AAP FactCheck

THE 'BUSY TAX' SCAM: How Lazy AI Prompts Save You Thousands While You Sleep

Ever checked your bank statement and wondered where all your money went?
You're not bad at budgeting. You’re just another exhausted Aussie.

It’s called the "Busy Tax". When your typical Aussie is juggling work deadlines, screaming kids, and dinner, who has two hours on a Tuesday night to argue with an internet provider or decode 40-page car brochures or read hotel reviews?

Nobody! So you overpay.

Big companies know you're too busy to care. A few well-crafted AI prompt can slash your biggest bills in under five minutes.

Car Shoppers. Buying an EV? Stop Reading Endless Car Reviews
Shopping for an electric car used to mean looking at prices, kicking tyres and cup holders. Now? It’s a nightmare of "kilowatt-hours", battery capacities - that sound like high school science homework.

Forget scrolling through forum flame wars. Give an AI your exact life, and let it do the grunt work.

Here's a great prompt for your AI.

"Compare the 5 most popular electric and hybrid family cars for a family of four, with a large dog, in suburban Sydney doing 350 km a week. Give me real highway range in summer vs. winter, boot room for kids' footy bags, and tell me if a novated lease actually saves me tax."

The Result:

No marketing jargon. No salesman pitch. Just straight facts on what fits your family and what it'll actually cost to run.

2. Slash Phone & Wi-Fi Bills in 3 Clicks
Telcos count on one thing: you hate calling them. They slowly creep your plan up, betting you won’t sit through 45 minutes of awful hold music to complain. Even visiting their 'flagship' stores is infuriating - you feel like you're being upsold to the largest plan.

Don’t call or visit them again. Make AI negotiate for you while you eat lunch.

Step 1: Find the bargain.

Paste in your bill:

"I pay $69/month for an 80GB data and calls to the UK USA and NZ. Find me 3 current Aussie SIM-only deals on major networks under $45 that include calls to UK, USA and NZ."

Step 2: Fire the bullet.

"Write a polite 3-sentence message I can paste into my provider's online chat asking them to match the $49 deal or close my account today."

Copy >Paste into webchat. Watch those Telco's suddenly offer you a sweet discount they "couldn't offer before."

3. Spot the traps buried in Fine Print"
About to drop cash on solar panels, home insurance, or a new laptop? The sting is always buried in page four of the terms and conditions.

Don't read it. Snap a photo or paste the quote into AI:

What to type:

"Check this quote. Point out any sneaky price hikes after 12 months, hidden fees, or catches that void the warranty. Bullet points only."

It flags the nasties in 10 seconds flat. Your Legal angel.

The Golden Secret
Don’t ask vague questions like "What's a good phone plan?" You'll get generic junk.

Tell it what you spend, what you need, and where you live. Treat it like a ruthless personal assistant, and stop paying companies for simply being busy.

4. Sneaky renewals
Finally - my favourite...that $0 introduction to TV Service or Magazine or AI tool online - you are enticed to only pay in 3 months time and hand over your credit card now. Then those 3 months roll around - and you notice you have a recurring $19.99 for a service you barely used. Arghhh!

Here's a a simple fix - Make your present-self put a reminder a week out (from the renewal date) for your future-self (aka the "first payment" date)

When the day you set as a reminder (to cancel) rolls around - log in, to X Service, head to your account details - and Hit Cancel and destroy that $0 intro deal that turns into the equivalent of a financial vampire if not banished for good.

A win for you, and your credit card.

The term enshittification was coined in 2022 by Canadian-British writer Cory Doctorow and officially included in the Macquarie Dictionary a couple of years later.

Although you may not be familiar with the term, you have most likely experienced it. Platform decay. Products or services that start off useful and somehow become less useful, even exploitative over time.

Many of us remember the internet before Google. AltaVista, Yahoo and Lycos offered internet searches with simple algorithms, that prioritised keywords and tended to return pages of little or no relevance.

Google appeared on the scene with a more advanced algorithm and it was amazing, it seemed to find whatever you searched for. It was free, so understandably it relied on advertising revenue. But ads were modest, the first three links on the page had a yellow background indicating clearly that they were sponsored links.

It didn't take long for Google to overtake the other search engines. It literally left them in the dust. With its competition disappearing in the rear view mirror it was time for Google to play the monopoly game, maximising ad revenue at the expense of user experience. That's enshittification.

Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Uber and many others all followed the same game plan, first make it useful then make it shitty. It seems to be the Silicon Valley business script.

Why is this happening?

I believe it comes from a culture where startups are funded by venture capital.

Governments or wealthy individuals who are prepared to lose large amounts of money during the startup phase eventually want their capital returned.

Take the recent example of Uber, a ride share platform that offered incredibly low introductory rates. One could literally hop in a car with a stranger and travel halfway across town for little more than the cost of a bus ticket.

Traditional taxi owners who had invested hundreds of thousands in a taxi plate suffered badly and in Sydney NSW the government decided to compensate taxi plate owners with up to $150,000 which I believe was funded by a levy on ride sharing.

But now several years later, the honeymoon ride share rates are over and the cost of an Uber is only marginally less than a taxi.

The enshittification process is essentially complete.

• Attracting new users with a low-cost convenient service or product.
• Disrupting traditional suppliers and gaining market share.
• Exploiting the customer who now has less choice
• Extracting maximum value for shareholders and initial investors.

It all seems pretty obvious in hindsight; Businesses change the terms once consumers depend on their product or service.

Little by little venture capital finds ways of disrupting traditional business and removing the individual's autonomy and choice.

When your car no longer has a steering wheel, expect you will be driven to the store that bid the most for customers.


Amusing video produced by the Norwegian Consumer Council, Forbruker Rådet.
A day in the life of an enshittificator

Cory Doctorow Interview