"The long-delayed imperative for tax reform has arrived and will be pivotal in making or breaking the Albanese government. Chalmers has spelled out the news – NDIS spending is growing by 12.1 per cent yearly, hospital funding by 6.1 per cent, aged care by 5 per cent, defence spending by 4.4 per cent, while higher interest rates mean interest payments will grow about 14 per cent a year over the next four years. The nation’s social and security contract has expanded – but the policy consequences and financing have not been addressed. That is going to be Labor’s destiny."

The Australian federal government seeks to break a firm commitment made multiple times before the election, deceitfully claiming that conditions differ from when the commitment was made.This political "bait and switch" is all too common among our political parties and has resulted in low trust in our politicians and government processes.Australia urgently needs to match public spending to the community's willingness to be taxed. We also need to change our tax mix to lower the burden placed on everyday wage and salary earners.Citizens must be broadly and transparently included in this process for a successful outcome. 

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has created a new platform - Beyond the Screen, to develop educational training regimens for people building social media tools. “We need a world where we have 10 million people who can have a meaningful conversation on how you design social media.”...READ THE ARTICLEhttps://bit.ly/3Cqoegj...HAUGEN'S TESTIMONYhttps://bit.ly/3LZ0hzS...ACCC PLATFORMS INQUIRYhttps://bit.ly/3dTl8Is

“Major political parties operate sophisticated voter-tracking software without the consent of voters and their databases contain enormous amounts of personal information about all of us…. While our politicians might think it’s no big deal to build profiles of voters without their consent and without accountability and accuracy safeguards, the fact such databases are routinely consulted before appointments are made to government boards, for example, highlights another part of the problem: an effective hollowing out of the principle of the secret ballot.” Professor Peter van Onselen, The Australian 1/10/22

The Optus hack reminds us that we all need to be more cyber vigilant. David Thodey provides practical suggestions including:> adding to risk register> running exercises > inspect to make sure defences are there> references work done by the AICD Article > https://bit.ly/3UN1E8FDr Maria Milosavljevic suggests > IDCare > https://bit.ly/3ftkTnyKate Carruthers provides practical steps for individuals >https://bit.ly/3fsUNkx Collin Penman reminds me that  Kyndryl #CloudSecurityAssessment - Detects Open and Public Exposed API's of customers. There's also a Monthly Service Monitoring that picks up the anomaly of large amount of data going out the door.