Achievements of the Coalition Government

Matthew Davis

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27 April 2022

The Morrison, Turnbull and Abbott government was in power for over 8 years. This page contains a list of most of what they accomplished.

1. Spent $5 million building a water pipeline underwater, to supply a privately owned golf course in a city, using funds that were supposed to be spent on sustainability and regional communities. Personal conflicts of interest were not declared, which violates the ministerial code of conduct.
2. Voted to prevent debate about creating a federal anti-corruption commission ('Federal ICAC').
3. Paid 8 times more than the market rate to conserve water in the Murray Darling Basin (overpayment of $112 million).
4. Proposed new laws which will allow the government to block capitalists from planting lots of trees to fight climate change, despite saying they plan to solve climate change with "‘can do’ capitalism, not ‘don’t do’ governments".
5. Spent $450 million on carbon capture and storage projects (CCS), resulting in every attempted project being cancelled or late, with no carbon actually being captured, mostly because the projects were found to be technically infeasible, financially infeasible, or there just isn't anywhere to store the carbon. The government did not attempt to monitor whether the program successfully captured carbon. Their only success criteria was number of projects funded, regardless of whether the projects work. Even by this measure it was a failure because the committed money ($2 billion) ended up mostly unspent due to project cancellations. The spending program had no conflict of interest safeguards. Coincidentally one of the main Liberal ministers pushing for this cash handout to the fossil fuel industry left parliament for a job as a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry.
6. Spent $1,400 per person per day to feed asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea. This $82 million contract was paid to a a high-risk shell company owned by PNG political figures, without any competitive tender process. The government did not ask any other company whether they can provide the food for a cheaper price or with less insolvency risk. The government spent far more money than it would have cost to feed the asylum seekers caviar and lobster from a high end restaurant.
7. Quadrupled government net debt.
8. Spent $105 million on grants for marginal and Coalition-held electorates which they are expected to deliver less value than other proposals. They then refused to release documents justifying the decisions. (This is separate to the sports grants and the car park grants.)
9. Allocated $44M from the Building Better Futures fund to marginal electorates, through a process that was clearly not merit based (a.k.a. 'pork barrelling'). Projects ranked last for merit were more likely to be funded than ones ranked first. Rejected applications were not told that they ranked higher than the ones that the minister chose. When the audit office asked for an explanation, the government refused.
10. Cut funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) by 4% per participant.
11. Burnt brown coal (the dirtiest kind of coal) and used the electricity to split water to make hydrogen, to export to Japan, then claimed this is green and reduces our emissions. The government contributed $50M to this project which cost $500M overall, to produce only 3 tonnes of hydrogen. The government said "we’re not going to get ideological about it" despite choosing to fund coal-powered hydrogen plants when solar and wind powered hydrogen plants are substantially cheaper.
12. Took children to court to argue that the environment minister is not required to consider the harm their decisions cause to young Australians via Climate Change when approving fossil fuel projects.
13. Broke a promise to close loopholes that allowed child abusers to keep their superannuation when they're running out of money to pay compensation to their victims.
14. Paid $300 million to landfill operators for carbon credits (ACCUs) to incentivise them to burn of methane which they would have burnt anyway. This is in addition to them already being paid green certificates (LGCs) and wholesale electricity revenue, and includes sites which are legally required to burn that methane.
15. Did not publish the text of the trilateral AUKUS treaty between Australia, the USA and the UK. (New Zealand was left out of the treaty.)
16. Agreed to procurement terms for new nuclear submarines which explicitly prohibit the Australian Navy from 'opening the bonnet' to look at the nuclear reactors to maintain or repair them. That must be outsourced to the US or UK.
17. Spent $5.5 billion on French submarines that were never built. (In addition to the undisclosed fee for early contract termination, which is approximately $400 million.)
18. Failed to achieve their own water efficiency targets for the Murray Darling off-farm efficiency program, achieving only 1% of what they said they would.
19. Refused to pay compensation to a man whose family was accidentally killed by Australian air strikes. The department claims they were killed by something other than Australian bombing, even though the department did not read the defence report about Australian bombing in that area that day, and they did not provide any alternative explanation for the 35 deaths.
20. Purchased 70,000 tonnes of coal to be shipped to the other side of the world to give to Ukraine. It would be cheaper and quicker to simply buy it from Ukraine's coal-producing neighbour (Poland). The government has not said how they will sneak a huge ship past the Russians, who control most nearby ports. The government did not attempt to shop around with other coal companies in Australia, and decided to give the money to this company prior to agreeing on the price. Coincidentally the company is a Liberal donor.
21. Secretly cancelled a $1.3 billion drone procurement contract.
22. Spent $18M on a new leadership program, given to an organisation with no staff, no track record in anything related to leadership, with an incorrect registered business address, without a normal tender process.
23. Chose not to publish a 5-yearly report about the official state of the environment for over 3 months, so that voters in the 2022 election won't know what the reports' findings are.
24. Did not follow cyber security best practice for COVID digital vaccines. They have no effective way to report vulnerabilities, let alone have bug bounties to discourage sale of vulnerabilities to criminals. When the government is eventually made aware of vulnerabilities in their app, they don't respond to or resolve them in a timely way.
25. Refused to publish numbers about how many COVID close contacts had been identified by the COVIDSafe app. They said it's the job of state governments to report how many contacts are identified by the federal government's app.
26. Kept secret the budgeting documents used to justify changing the NBN rollout from fibre to the premise to fibre to the node.
27. Introduced a bill which they called the "anti-trolling" bill, which doesn't even mention trolling. It does not make trolling illegal. It does not give social media companies the power to remove defamatory or troll content. The bill means that moderators of Facebook pages no longer have an obligation to take down troll content, which will help trolling, not hinder it. What this new red tape does do is make it easier to sue social media companies for defamation when their users post mean things. The main change is that social media companies need a way to name accused anonymous users, but the accused users will be allowed to just say 'no'. The powers can only be used if a defamation case is likely (i.e. only for people with a spare $20k lying around), which means this bill won't reduce school-age cyber bullying. The government themselves already hide behind anonymous online accounts to defame political opponents. These changes violate our existing free trade agreements.
28. Prevented the release of data relating to the effectiveness of carbon credit schemes to improve forest regeneration.
29. Refused to justify or breakdown the $400 million per year being spent running the Nauru immigration detention centre. The number of detainees has dropped by a factor of 10 but the total spending has remained the same. The cost is now $15,000 per person per day. It would be cheaper to house the detainees in any five star hotel.
30. Vetoed research grants for projects about climate activism and Chinese politics, thereby undermining the independence of the Australian Research Council.
31. Passed legislation for sharing data between law enforcement agencies in different countries, which means we may help countries known to persecute minorities, or help foreign prosecutors execute criminals, despite not having a death penalty in Australia.
32. Withheld the cost estimates of the legal defence costs for a class action against the commonwealth (about wage theft by a previous government).
33. Threatened media companies, saying they will have their access blocked if journalists report on a particular housing affordability policy from a new, competing political party.
34. Launched a defamation case against a citizen, charging him $35k because he tweeted something mean about a minister.
35. Blocked a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the report explaining why the Prime Minister was sacked from his last job.
36. Censored multiple valid Senate inquiry submissions if inconvenient, deleting all records of receiving them, and instructed citizens to not publish their submissions themselves. Even senators don't have visibility of those submissions.
37. Sat on a review of video game classifications for two years. They did nothing until weeks before the 2022 election, proposing a plan without consultation with video game makers, which won't be implemented until after the election (if they win).
38. Approved projects which will destroy 25,000 hectares of koala habitat.
39. Claimed that a corporate emissions baseline policy is a sneaky proposal by Labor, when actually it's their own policy that they already legislated.
40. Announced a $800 bonus for aged care workers, but then processed the applications slowly, paying only 3% of aged care workers after 2 months. The government asked aged care providers to pay the bonus out of their own pocket in the interim. This means the government is taking a loan from those providers, which increases government debt in reality, but not on paper.
41. Paid hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon credits to landowners for growing trees which were already there.
42. Waited 4 months between being told by the Therapeutic Goods Administration that a new treatment for cystic fibrosis should be allowed, before putting it on the normal Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
43. Snuck a controversial bill through parliament in the middle of the night, ending debate and voting on it at 4am.
44. Spent $675,000 travelling to investigate drought relief. When asked why nothing was produced from the trip, the government pointed to SMS messages, calling them "reports". When asked via a Freedom of Information request, and also by the Information Commissioner to publish these reports, the government refused, claiming it would take 50 hours of work to dig up a few SMS messages from a specific phone. The government refused to give a breakdown of those 50 hours.
45. Built no quarantine centers for COVID, leaving the responsibility for COVID response to the state governments, even though the constitution (clause V.51.ix) clearly states that it is a federal responsibility.
46. Blamed renewable power's intermittent nature for electricity outages caused by storms and cars hitting poles. On that day in particular there were generation capacity shortages due to outages from unreliable coal generators.
47. Did not sent any minister or representative to the opening ceremony of any solar farm, wind farm or large scale battery, in more than 8 years.
48. Spent $77.5M just to investigate whether to continue the train line to the new western Sydney airport by one station, to close the loop instead of a dead end. This expense is just to think about whether to do this build, not actually planning or designing it.
49. Criticised capitalist Mike Cannon-Brookes when he tried to transition AGL from coal to renewables, in the same month they claimed they'll solve climate change with "‘can do’ capitalism, not ‘don’t do’ governments".
50. Failed to mentioned in the COVIDSafe app privacy policy that information about the phone model and device name (e.g. "Mary's iPhone") is broadcast over Bluetooth. An example of this being exploited is that a domestic violence abuser can tell whether the victim is at home and their house-mates are not, without setting foot in the building.
51. Asked the electricity grid regulator to increase the notice period for coal plant closures from 3.5 years to 5. That is, the government wants investors to possibly lose money for 1.5 years running a plant even if is commercially irrational and economically suboptimal to do so.
52. Claimed "Alan Tudge is still in my cabinet", 4 months after standing down Alan Tudge over domestic abuse allegations.
53. Planned (if re-elected in 2022) to cut federal funding for Australian music to $0.
54. Showed evidence to a judge when prosecuting a case against an Australian whistle-blower in a secret way such that the defendant cannot see the evidence used against him, and therefore is unable to fairly defend himself.
55. Introduced new police powers to spy on and hack innocent Aussies, without a warrant, even if they're not suspected of committing any crime. Powers include snooping, modifying, deleting data and account takeover. The legislation was voted on only hours after giving it to the crossbenchers to review. The legislation was reviewed by intelligence groups, but no public interest privacy advocates. The legislation went against the government's own review into hacking powers. The government rejected a proposal to have a public interest advocate argue on behalf of the hacked person to balance privacy against safety. The argument is that if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide. Powers include removing two factor authentication on accounts, thereby making it easier for unrelated criminals to hack those Australians.
56. Refused to publish minutes from the national cabinet tackling COVID. After a judge ruled that it must be published, they introduced a new law to keep it secret. They argued that even though the cabinet has done nothing wrong, they should be able to keep discussion details secret.
57. Blocked a House of Representatives investigation into the source of a substantial donation to a minister's personal legal costs for a defamation prosecution, arguing that the anonymity and privacy of the rich donor must be protected. The procedure for blocking this investigation was unprecedented. The government has previously made the exact opposite argument when criticising a Greens minister who published only partial information about legal fee donors for her defamation case.
58. Proposed forced identification of all social media users, arguing that citizens should not be able to post comments on social media anonymously, and that ordinary, upstanding citizens have no need for anonymity. Citizens would have to upload passport and driver's license documents to OnlyFans before uploading or consuming content. Domestic violence victims would no longer be able to seek help on social media sites anonymously, without risking discovery by their abuser. Teens of conservative parents would no longer be able to ask questions about sex education and safe sex on social media anonymously, thereby deterring them from making safe, informed decisions. Closeted LGBT youth would no longer be able to seek support online anonymously without outing themselves. When this was tried in Korea the sensitive information was inevitably hacked.
59. Lied by claiming new unprecedented police hacking laws would only apply to terrorists, paedophiles and drug traffickers, when their actual legislation says they can be used for crimes as benign as illegal gambling and illegal importing of fauna.
60. Introduced legislation designed to make gig economy companies like Deliveroo report more tax information about their employees, which was so sloppily written that it means websites for booking doctor appointments would technically be required to ingest details about the patient such as their income, and then give that to the tax office.
61. Secretly pressured the United Nations to delete from their climate change report the claim that closing coal power plants is necessary to fight climate change, as well as deleting mentions of fossil fuel lobbyists successfully watering down climate change legislation and action in Australia.
62. Flew a mostly-empty plane home from Afghanistan as Kabul fell to the Taliban, leaving behind local translators who may be killed because they helped Australian soldiers.
63. Lied by claiming that $90 million worth of oil for Australia's stockpile in the USA was bought at "record low prices". The oil was bought at 40 USD per barrel, around the time when prices plummeted to negative 37 USD per barrel, because the markets thought all oil storage facilities were full. The Australian government actually had 23 million litres of empty storage space within a day's drive of the negatively priced oil. Had the Australian government actually bought at the record low, they would have been paid 90 million AUD to take oil off others' hands. The government tried to keep secret the actual price they overpaid (despite proclaiming it was a good price), and the volume. They have still kept secret the price of the daily lease fees, filling fees, draw down fees, withdrawal fees and fee escalation process, and the identity of the seller.
64. Handed free marketing opportunities to a private gas company by letting them take over some of Australia's stall at a global climate summit for world leaders.
65. Refused to sign a pledge to reduce methane emissions which was signed by 100 other countries.
66. Added red tape for business by forcing company directors to register for a special identifier through myGovID. This is supposed to make it easier for investors to track company directors as they move between companies. However the name, address, date and place of birth of directors is already recorded in a public database, which will be replaced with this new single 15-digit number. This attempt at transparency actually reduces the amount of information available to the public.
67. Slowed down visa processing for families from Afghanistan by years, resulting in the families of Australian being stuck in Kabul as it fell under Taliban rule, when they would have been safe if the government's paperwork was as fast as for Europe or America.
68. Ran an expensive marketing campaign promoting a target of net-zero emissions by 2050, but then voted against legislating a net-zero target for 2050. The new "plan" involved no new laws, no new taxes, and nothing binding. The plan included fanciful estimates of carbon capture with trees and soil twice as high as the most optimistic peer reviewed research.
69. Approved 3 new coal mines with record speed, and rejected new solar and wind farms with record speed.
70. Refused to release modelling to support the claim that their climate policy can achieve the targets they say it will.
71. Moved the role of Minister for Science and Technology to be held part-time by the Minister for Defence.
72. Proposed scrapping recovery plans for 200 endangered species, replacing them with documents that ministers are no longer legally bound to follow.
73. Refused to tell the public how much they're paying a private company to build the COVID vaccine passport system which is already 6 months behind schedule.
74. Repeatedly refused to publish legal advice they received before implementing the robo-debt scheme (which has since been ruled to be illegal)
75. Changed the role of ASIC (the corporate cop), moving them away from prosecuting law-breaking companies to focusing on removing regulatory burdens, economic growth, and removing ASIC's independence by expecting them to consult with the government when enforcing the law.
76. Broke their own law by not conducting a report into the privacy impacts and effectiveness of the COVIDSafe app every 6 months.
77. Obscured millions of dollars of funding to a think-tank co-funded by private arms manufacturers, which primarily just creates anti-China sentiment and stirs up fears of war (which is good for those arms manufacturers).
78. Failed to deliver any new assets or infrastructure 2 years on after a big announcement about drones patrolling our maritime border.
79. Approved the majority of weapon export requests to countries like Saudi Arabia and UAE, who are accused of multiple war crimes in Yemen. The government was unable to rule out the possibility that these war crimes are being committed with Australian weapons. Despite approving most exports to these authoritarian regimes, they claim they have strict controls preventing weapons exports to authoritarian regimes. The government is keeping secret the information about who is selling billions of dollars worth of weapons, who they're sold to, what weapons, how much, and for what purpose.
80. Increased marketing spend for weapons exports from $1 million per year to $20 million.
81. Allocated $660 million in funding for new car parks based on which electorates were marginal for the upcoming election instead of which areas most needed car parks. (i.e. pork barrelling) The National Audit Office found that the funding allocation was "not demonstrably merit-based" and "not designed to be open or transparent". The federal government did not talk to state governments or local governments to determine which areas were most in need of new car parks. 3 years after the announcement, the government had only managed to complete or start building 11% of the car parks. (This was uncovered by the same Audit Office who uncovered the sports funding pork barrelling and then had their audit funding cut.)
82. Paid hundreds of millions of dollars to for-profit private companies to oversee and deliver COVID vaccine distribution, instead of using the existing, proven public pharmaceutical distribution system they already pay for. Many of these chosen companies are Liberal party donors, and the details of the contracts are kept secret. Rollout advice paid for by the government is being kept secret, so the public cannot tell whether it was worth paying for.
83. Tabled law amendments which would result in charities losing their tax deductible status if they tweet in support of public protests, or display their logo at a protest where the commissioner suspects an unaffiliated protester has or might commit a minor offence such as blocking a sidewalk.
84. Spent $600 million building a new gas power plant after the private sector decided it made no commercial sense to do so.
85. Paid $2 billion to help keep private for-profit oil refineries open, which they claim will save consumers only 1 cent per litre when filling up their vehicle.
86. Paid $6.7 million in JobKeeper subsidies to a private company whose profits quadrupled during 2020, and which is half-owned by a foreigner via a shell company in the Bahamas.
87. Handed $1.34 billion to Qantas (a private company) for the purpose of creating jobs, but Qantas spent most of that paying redundancy packages while culling their workforce.
88. Handed $38 billion in JobKeeper payments to companies who did not suffer significant downturn during COVID, and refused to ask for the money back once this became clear.
89. Underwrote surge costs on popular airline routes. That is, risk is being shouldered by the taxpayer, whilst profit is privatised. This increases off-book government liabilities, while making it look on paper like debt hasn't actually increased.
90. Kept secret the arguments made by the government during an appeal for a whether a court case against a journalist should be secret. That is, the government does not even want people to know why their trial against truthful public-interest journalism will be secret. The government officials who committed the crimes reported by the journalist have not been charged. The original articles about the government's crimes are still public, despite the government claiming their publication somehow harmed national security.
91. Went over far budget and overdue for construction of new government owned Snowy Hydro pumped storage. They said it would cost $2 billion and take 4 years, but now that's blown out to $10 billion and 10 years.
92. Removed 3 out of 4 recommendations from a report investigating a blank-cheque payment to a private consultant which was made without even verifying that the service was delivered.
93. Spent $250,000 per month developing an NDIS app. They have no data about how many users wanted the app.
94. Illegally appointed a Liberal Party Senator to a high-ranking high-paying role at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The candidate was not eligible because she was not an enrolled legal practitioner. She has no experience in the field (social services and child support law). She will be paid $500,000 per year. The government lied by claiming she was appointed on merit, but the interviewers did not interview her, and did not recommend her.
95. Spent $10 million per month maintaining an offshore oil rig that is not producing any oil, after private owners profited for many years for costs of only $4 million per month. There is no planned end date for when this plant will be decommissioned to stop these costs.
96. Proposed a robo-debt style program to claw back money from disabled people under the NDIS, waving away all concerns about accuracy and ethics by tacking a blockchain onto the new app. Blockchains do not make it easier to solve the Oracle Problem, such as determining whether a taxi ride was to a medical practitioner or the pub next door to it.
97. Gave $2.7 million to a private company for a buzzword-rich trial about blockchain and distributed energy.
98. Illegally mislead voters by creating dozens of Facebook pages for fictional institutes and pages with deceptively similar names to real organisations, to attack a Labor minister, without any of the legally required notices stating that the message really comes from the government.
99. Spent $3.7 million making a video to teach 16 year-olds about sexual consent without talking about sex. The video was pulled within days due to it being ineffective and poorly targeted to the late-teenage age group. The cost of the videos was more than the budget for the first Mad Max movie, or Napoleon Dynamite.
100. Sued the ABC for defamation, after they published sexual assault allegations about a unnamed senior politician without identifying him. Private news companies who published the same story were not sued. The accused Attorney General asked the court to keep secret the evidence which the ABC provided to support their claim that the allegations were true.
101. Banned public servants from wearing clothes that expose bare shoulders.
102. Paid $1.6 billion to house only 115 asylum seekers offshore, at a daily price about 10 times higher than the most expensive room at Sydney's Four Seasons Hotel, through a closed tender. The company's parent company is coincidentally a Liberal party donor. The company had no assets and no other revenue, worth only $8 at the time. Despite this risk, the government chose this company anyway, without conducting due diligence checks on their financial health. The government eventually paid KPMG to do due diligence checks, but on the wrong company.
103. Charged taxpayers for a domestic flight to a personal lunch.
104. Ignored urgent requests from the commissioner of the Disability Royal Commission, providing neither a yes nor a no answer to a simple extension request.
105. Claimed that the federal environment minister is not responsible for climate change efforts and policy.
106. Modified an infrastructure funding scheme to bypass state governments, to allow investment in fossil fuels without being blocked by the Northern Territory government for environmental reasons. These changes allow the fund to trade in derivatives other than as a hedge to existing risk, and without a requirement for expected financial return.
107. Introduced laws which are supposed to combat the rise in unconsentual sharing of nudes ("revenge porn"), but do not include any punishment for people who upload nudes on people without their consent. The new punishments only apply to platforms, even if the platforms remove almost all reported content within 24 hours.
108. Granted an unelected official the power to delete online posts by politicians and ban them from platforms for expressing controversial political opinions.
109. Lied by claiming that new legislation could not result in dating apps such as Tinder being banned in Australia, when their legislation clearly states in section 6.128.1.d that the relevant commissioner will be granted the power to ban those apps for a broad range of reasons.
110. Granted an unelected person investigative powers to force people to provide documents and answer questions or face imprisonment, without any of the usual protections and oversight that apply to police investigations. i.e. it takes away the right to remain silent.
111. Granted an unelected official the power to mandate facial-recognition scans for adults who want to look at porn. They are not required to consider the privacy or security implications of such a scheme.
112. Introduced 194 pages of complex, globally unprecedented, controversial legislation into parliament only 10 days after public consultation closed.
113. Withheld the report from the Aged Care Royal Commission for 2 days, releasing it only half an hour before the relevant press conference, which meant journalists were not able to ask meaningful questions.
114. Used a meme to successfully distract the media and populace from the government's lack of action after a report revealed dozens of horrific war crimes were committed by Australian special forces soldiers due to systemic cultural issues which the government is making no attempt to fix.
115. Prevented Australians stranded overseas during the pandemic from boarding existing chartered flights, resulting in empty planes flying into Australia.
116. Lied by claiming they had implemented the majority of recommendations from the Banking Royal Commission, when they had only completed a minority.
117. Removed the names of many Australians stranded overseas during the pandemic from the register of stranded Australians, while they were still stranded.
118. Deleted warnings of dangerous right-wing extremism in a senate motion about extremism, despite advice from ASIO that it is a serious and growing threat.
119. Paid $39 million to a naval boat manufacturer when not required to because the company failed to fulfil the relevant contract clauses, and they coincidentally donated to the Liberal party.
120. Offered foreign gas companies $50 million to extract gas from the Northern Territory.
121. Offered for-profit gas companies $50M in free money to build gas plants in Victoria and Queensland. Coincidentally the main recipient is a Liberal party donor.
122. Extended exemptions for political donation transparency, which are 25 years old and were only supposed to be temporary.
123. Appointed a failed Liberal candidate to the SBS board instead of any of the ones recommended by the independent nominations panel.
124. Wound back consumer protections introduced as a result of the banking royal commission.
125. Illegally failed to respond to freedom of information (FOI) requests within the statutory 30 day deadline in 92.5% of cases.
126. Voted against hanging the aboriginal flag in parliament during NAIDOC week.
127. Loosened enterprise bargaining laws to allow employers to introduce new agreements which are not "better off overall" for employees, in ordinary circumstances not just exceptional ones.
128. Bought water rights for 50 times more than many valuations, and double the price of the seller's valuation.
129. Spent money chartering a RAAF flight from Sydney to Canberra, even though Qantas services that route frequently at price that is 17 times cheaper.
130. Voted against an inquiry into the privatisation and corporatisation of essential public services.
131. Invented new non-standard metrics to measure NBN performance, which make Australia appear to rank higher than otherwise.
132. Refused to publish a $2.5 million evaluation of the cashless welfare card system because the evaluation found that the $80 million program was not clearly effective.
133. Lied by claiming that Kevin Rudd had travelled overseas and back during COVID while many Australians are still stranded overseas, when Mr Rudd had actually never left Queensland.
134. Merged the Family Court with the Federal Circuit Court. This was done prior to hearing the recommendations of the Family Law Enquiry due one week later.
135. Introduced a scheme to pay community broadcasters to give up spectrum rights, and possibly force the SBS and ABC to give up their spectrum rights, without any plan for alternate uses for those frequencies.
136. Cut $14 million from the national audit office, after that office discovered substantial improprieties and wasteful spending (such as the sports rorts, and paying 10 times too much for land for the new Sydney airport).
137. Refused to release a report into COVID policy communication strategies, which cost over $500,000.
138. Spent $256 million just to add facial recognition as a login option for government services.
139. Cut funding for Homelessness Australia by $41 million, during a recession.
140. Introduced instant asset write off tax breaks for businesses during COVID, which will cost over $30 billion, to boost the economy by only $10 billion.
141. Hid a record-breaking number of expenses from the public in an annual budget, including cash handed to a private rail project, maintaining an abandoned oil rig, and legal action relating to military bases which leaked toxic chemicals.
142. Introduced a new benchmark system for superannuation funds, to penalise funds that perform relatively poorly in the short term without considering risk. This means that if some funds make high risk, high return investments (e.g. Enron), everyone else is incentivised to follow, like lemmings running off a cliff.
143. Added new rules to force superannuation funds to maximise returns regardless of anything else, which is a step towards disallowing super funds from having ethical and environmental screening, such as not investing in weapons manufacturing, or companies with slavery in their supply lines etc. It's unclear how any fund can comply with this requirement without choosing maximum-risk investments.
144. Lied by claiming that a maritime union strike at a port was delaying medical supplies, when the strikers were still processing medical and perishable supplies.
145. Increased administrative payments to job finding agencies, totalling $300 million during the pandemic.
146. Abandoned the prominent goal of a government surplus after repeatedly failing to deliver one 6 years in a row, eventually printing several hundred billion dollars during the pandemic (through bond sales), converting to policy that aligns more with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
147. Introduced the Underwriting New Generation Investment Program, which is specifically designed to deliver new electricity generators whose business cases don't add up (even when ignoring negative externalities from climate change), by pushing the risk onto taxpayers whilst keeping the profit privatised (i.e. corporate socialism). Underwriting is a way of increasing off-book government liabilities without making debt look bigger on paper.
148. Tried to spend $3.3 million on a feasibility study grant for subsidising a new coal generator. The company who would build it have no relevant experience. The grant criteria was written after the government decided that they would give the money to this company. Previous feasibility studies have shown that the project is too risky and unprofitable for the private sector. It's also not eligible for the government's own Underwriting New Generation Investment program. The government claimed this new generator will reduce power prices for regional Queenslanders specifically, but there is only one wholesale electricity price for all of Queensland, and it's already 50% cheaper than the cost of new coal generation.
149. Introduced a mandatory code of conduct to force companies like Google to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to large private news companies (but not ABC news nor independent news). Google currently drives over 3 billion clicks per year to Australian news companies. So this is like a local plumber demanding that the Yellow Pages pay the plumber for the act of directing plumber-seeking customers to the plumber. This will also undermine the fundamental principles of the web itself, according to its inventor. The laws are written based on the incorrect assumption that news makes up 10% of Google searches when it's only 1%.
150. Introduced red tape and distorted the free market by forcing Google to give special insider knowledge of proprietary search algorithm changes to large news companies but not small, independent journalists. It includes ambiguously written clauses about giving news companies access to Google users' private data.
151. Introduced a bill to allow the government to cancel any international agreements between universities, councils or sports institutions and other countries.
152. Wound back consumer protections and responsible lending obligations for mortgage brokers which were introduced in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
153. Cut $2 billion in funding for university research, including funding for medical research during the pandemic.
154. Prevented Australian universities from receiving JobKeeper payments, whilst paying JobSeeker money to a foreign university. (University education is Australia's third largest export.)
155. Loosened corporate financial disclosure rules during the pandemic, preventing investors from lodging class actions against companies who mislead the market through omission of important information.
156. Committed a crime by ignoring a ruling of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
157. Paid 10 times higher than market rate to buy some land new the new Western Sydney Airport several decades earlier than necessary, after getting a valuation done only by a valuer suggested by the seller.
158. Introduced protections for company executives who trade while insolvent during the pandemic. This is only for cases where the debts are incurred "the ordinary course of business". Those who try to adapt to the challenging circumstances will not be exempt. In this way the government is incentivising executives to not adapt to the unique circumstances.
159. Defined the eligibility criteria for the JobKeeper scheme so loosely that millions of dollars from the government which were supposed to subsidise employees' jobs were funnelled straight out as dividends and bonuses to company shareholders and executives. The details of these payments were then illegally kept secret from the senate.
160. Loosened political donation laws.
161. Chose to ignore and not fix a security vulnerability in myGovID, which arose because the chosen authentication protocol is bespoke and does not match standard practice.
162. Refused to release the minutes from an important meeting of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee giving COVID advice to the Prime Minister.
163. Tried to use money allocated for renewable power on new fossil fuel generators. A parliamentary oversight committee found this unlawful, but that hasn't stopped the government from doing it anyway.
164. Paid $200k to a former media advisor of the Nationals party, to take photos and videos of bushfire recovery, without an open tender process.
165. Gave $10 million worth of bushfire recovery funds to a privately owned paper mill which was not impacted by the bushfire. The parent company pays an effective tax rate of only 6%, and has other child companies registered in tax havens like Bermuda.
166. Tried to redefine what "investment" means in legislation to include things where you expect to lose money. This is to allow the government to hand cash to fossil fuel companies, even when expected to be unprofitable and uneconomic.
167. Created red tape which will make it harder for individuals to take class actions against companies which have broken the law. This goes directly against the Coalition's stated values, which include slashing red tape, and relying on free market solutions (such as class actions) to minimise bad corporate behaviour (as opposed to direct regulation).
168. Spent $2 million on legal fees trying to prosecute a whistleblower who leaked truthful information about serious corruption and crime, which was clearly in the public's interest.
169. Voted against a binding code of conduct to ensure politicians act with integrity.
170. Blocked a research-backed design change to increase the effectiveness of beverage warnings about drinking during pregnancy, recommended by an independent body, after meeting with lobbyists from alcohol companies who have donated over $300,000 to the Coalition.
171. Proposed cutting HECS support for TAFE and university students who fail too many courses, which will give institutions a strong financial incentive to pass students who don't deserve their qualification, whilst also disproportionately disincentivising disadvantaged students from enrolling, such as students from families with no history of tertiary qualifications.
172. Opposed a United Nations inquiry into racism and police brutality in the USA. This is in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, when American law enforcement officials wearing no insignia were kidnapping random protesters from the street without due process, and American cops were assaulting journalists, and breaking into multiple innocent people's homes then shooting them in their sleep. The Coalition government doesn't want the United Nations to make a big deal out of these systemic incidents.
173. More than doubled the cost of some university degrees, decreasing the government's contribution to exactly $0.
174. Wasted $10 million on developing a new "made in Australia" logo to replace the well-known kangaroo in a green triangle, only to discard the new, generic looking logo because it looks like the COVID-19 virus.
175. Created the ABCC ostensibly for reducing corruption, but the ABCC boss himself violated rules and endangered people by ignoring COVID flight restrictions, travelling across the country to interview workers about a rally that happened 8 months prior.
176. Prevented parliament from debating whether to set up a National Integrity Commission.
177. Prevented the Senate from discussing whether to implement the remaining recommendations from the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
178. Failed to stop the only boat that has posed a real and substantial risk to Australia's national security. The government chose to grant an exemption to the Ruby Princess cruise ship, resulting in a hundreds of new COVID cases around the country.
179. Hurt barley farmers by antagonising the Chinese government, who retaliated by slapping an 80% tariff on barley exports.
180. Suspended requirements that commercial television stations produce at least some content in Australia to create Australian jobs.
181. Announced $50 million in funding to help the Australian film industry cope during the pandemic, but did not publish any instructions on how eligible, impacted workers or companies can access these funds.
182. Spent $5k on a private jet to fly ministers from Canberra to Sydney in the evening, then they attended a party, and flew back the next morning. The ministers refused to explain what parliamentary business they allegedly had in between the party and flights during their overnight 14 hour stay.
183. Spent $5k on a private jet to fly a minister and his wife to Melbourne on the weekend of the Melbourne cup, which they attended using free tickets given to them by a company. The government claims this is allowed because while in the area they re-announced a $4 million funding grant, which had been first been announced 3 years prior, and at the time was stuck due to legal challenges.
184. Increased military spending by $270 billion over 10 years, when the economy and our society were struggling to cope with the pandemic and the worst recession since The Great Depression.
185. Wasted $20.8 billion by investing $29.5 billion in the NBN so poorly that the end result is valued by the Parliamentary Budget Office at only $8.7 billion.
186. Drafted the Religious Discrimination Bill which would allow employers religious schools to fire staff for being gay. They claim that making it possible to sack people for such a reason is a move to prevent "cancel culture". The bill would allow vendors to make statements of belief, such as a baker telling a same sex couple requesting a wedding cake that they believe the couple will burn in hell, or telling a job interviewee that their religious belief is like a mental disorder. (The bill was abandoned after the Christian Lobby disapproved of the bill.)
187. Introduced a new online service for helping allocated assets during a divorce, which uses a proprietary, immature, inscrutable black-box technology just because it's a popular buzz word these days.
188. Set up the COVID-19 National Co-ordination Committee with no terms of reference, no register of conflicts of interest, and then stacked it with gas company executives who unsurprisingly ended up recommending irrationally pro-gas policies. 690 documents about potential conflicts of interests were deliberately kept hidden.
189. Blocked parliament from debating significant environmental protection repeals, rushing through the legislation without allowing anyone to discuss it first.
190. Broke an election promise about providing a trading system to help dairy farmers be more fairly compensated for milk production.
191. Falsely attributed COVID infection rate success to the COVIDSafe app, even though the only cases detected by the app at the time had already been detected by more traditional contact tracing methods, which are faster and more effective.
192. Took 21 days to fix a known security vulnerability in the COVIDSafe app.
193. Reduced the competitiveness of Australia's technology industry by passing laws which allow the government to force back doors into Australian software products, which makes foreign customers less likely to buy them. The same drop in sales that decimated Huawei is now hurting Australian companies.
194. Released the COVIDSafe app with a known bug that makes it useless on iPhones when the phone is locked.
195. Ignored security best practices when deploying the COVIDSafe app, choosing not to run a bug bounty, and choosing not to publish the source code promptly, despite promises to do so, which lead to multiple vulnerabilities being discovered by researchers far later than they should have been.
196. Refused to release the text of a multilateral trade agreement with China, which involves spending government money on infrastructure in other countries. The lack of transparency exacerbates existing concerns about burdening these other developing nations with unsustainable debt.
197. Kept secret legal advice about whether the USA government can view sensitive COVIDSafe data (stored in an American company's data center), claiming that it is in the public interest for us to not know what lawyers told our government.
198. Lied when claiming that the USA government cannot view sensitive COVIDSafe data, even though the American encryption back-door laws that allow the US government to force Amazon to hand over the data are the exact same laws which inspired the Australian government's recent encryption back-door legislation.
199. Cancelled The Rule of Law by preventing journalists from reporting on a case against a whistleblower who leaked truthful information in the public interest about senior politicians and law enforcement officials who flagrantly violated serious international laws. The court case is held in secret. The whistleblower's name is illegal to publish. The witness and lawyers' residences were raided, and the evidence against the government was confiscated. The judges explanation of why the case must be secret is itself secret.
200. Spent $96 million on administration costs for a single tender, to decide who to sell our own immigration visa system to. The government labelled this core function of a sovereign government as a "business" which should be "commercial" and "profitable". Then after spending the money they cancelled the plan because commercialising an essential service which can only ever be a monopoly is obviously a bad idea.
201. Introduced a new tax, to incentivise non-NBN users to migrate to the expensive NBN.
202. Deleted records of a $165,000 political donation from a political consultancy with stakeholders who stand to benefit from the government's $1 billion visa privatisation plan, and refused requests for further explanation.
203. Proposed issuing fines of up to $50,000 to innocent people not suspected of a crime if they don't hand over passwords for their personal devices to law enforcement. When law enforcement unlock a device after demanding a password, they typically don't let the user see what was done, don't tell them what was done, and don't allow them to call a lawyer to find out their rights. In one case a Border Force officer looked through a series of nude photographs of someone's partner, without the consent of the user or person in the photo, made inappropriate comments, and possibly made nonconsentual copies of the photos. If a citizen not suspected of a crime withholds a password to prevent this, they'll be fined.
204. Introduced new laws which allow ASIO officers to spy on Australian citizens without getting approval from a judge or anyone independent, and without filing paperwork anywhere.
205. Introduced new laws which prevent someone suspected of a crime from choosing their own lawyer.
206. Lied by claiming that only a small range of law enforcement agencies will be able to access data under the metadata retention laws, but actually allowed Centrelink, local councils, education councils and the RSPCA to access it.
207. Repeatedly approved requests by BHP to increase their greenhouse emissions limits.
208. Kept secret a government-funded report that showed less than 1 in 3 Australians trust our public service sector. The justification was that the government believed that the report which they wrote would mislead and confuse people.
209. Gave $345,000 to News Corp to build a spelling bee website, discarding any pretence of propriety or fairness by skipping the usual parliamentary checks and tender process, instead just choosing to hand the excessive amount of cash to a company whose primary industry is neither website building nor education.
210. Ceased payments to the United Nations climate change fund.
211. Rejected a request for increasing aerial firefighting funding in the months prior to one of the most lethal bushfire seasons in history. The government claimed "other priorities" in the Department of Home Affairs were more important. The fires killed 34 people and destroyed almost 10,000 homes.
212. Blamed an unusually bad bushfire season on unprecedented arson, when the evidence suggests most fires were started by lightening.
213. Lied by claiming that all grants issued under the controversial $100M sports grant program were eligible for funding, when only 57% were.
214. Committed crimes against humanity according to the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
215. Failed to declare a property worth $1 million in a minister's declaration of interests.
216. Failed to declare 2 properties worth more than $1 million in another minister's declaration of interests.
217. Lied during an election ad, claiming 6 councils would be eligible for $1 million drought relief grants, when they weren't.
218. Asked gay asylum seekers whether they could simply stay in the closet in their home country to avoid persecution, in a legally unsound attempt to find grounds for asylum rejection.
219. Approved a $36,000 grant to a shooting club without declaring that the approving minister was a member of that club.
220. Lied by claiming that cops who abuse data retention powers will be punished, when hundreds of instances of abuse have gone unpunished.
221. Claimed that their data retention laws would be used mostly for terrorism and child abuse cases, when it actually is used mostly for drug offences.
222. Proposed expanding the scope of data retention laws to include MAC addresses. Since MAC addresses are hard coded into each device's hardware, this would enable continuous location tracking of everyone's mobile phone.
223. Lied by claiming that tax cuts would be paid sooner than the passing of the relevant legislation.
224. Ceased assessing and listing key threats to native species.
225. Closed down a bushfire research centre, weeks after Australia's worst ever bushfire season, which killed 34 people and destroyed over 9000 homes.
226. Allocated sports grant funding based on which candidate projects were in marginal seats, rather than which were the most worthy. Then refused to release legal advice about whether such pork barrelling is illegal, and destroyed evidence about the funding choices.
227. Mislead the public by claiming they achieved a surplus, when they were referring to a prediction of a surplus in the future based on overly optimistic assumptions and ignoring reasonably predictable risks such as bushfire and drought.
228. Tried to count oil owned by Australia stored in the US towards the 90 day emergency stockpile we're required to hold. The US government describes this overseas oil stockpile as "mostly an accounting matter".
229. Lied by claiming the MyGov website was taken down by a DDOS attack, admitting only hours later that it was due to the more obvious reason, which was a sudden, drastic and entirely predictable increase in legitimate load.
230. Lied by claiming they appointed a Liberal party staffer to a job paying half a million dollars per year through an "open merit-driven, competitive process". It was actually a limited tender not open to all, exempt from procurement rules which guarantee fairness and impartiality.
231. Paid a reality TV star $260k per year to be a "career ambassador". This is to promote vocational training as a career choice for young Australians, after they repeatedly cut TAFE and apprenticeship funding.
232. Tried to get parliament to vote on new legislation without giving copies of the bill to the people voting on it, and used unprecedented methods to prevent any politician to speak against it.
233. Removed the Department for arts, rolling those functions into the department that handles telcos and roads.
234. Cut all foreign aid to Pakistan, and cut aid to Nepal by 42%.
235. Refused to provide any information when questioned in parliament about an Australian who was secretly imprisoned in Australia, for a secret crime, after a secret trial, and even the prisoner's name is a secret. They lied by claiming the prisoner consented to the secrecy.
236. Voted down legislation to increase the Newstart allowance.
237. Paid tens of thousands of dollars to a company which was known to be corrupt, through a tender that was not opened up to all competitors.
238. Removes all mentions of "consent" from new legislation about sharing of personal data in the public sector.
239. Proposed reversing the onus of proof, so that citizens may be considered guilty until proven innocent, for tax fraud and money laundering crimes.
240. Lied about their new anti-union legislation, claiming unions can't be deregistered as punishment for any single wrongdoing, when the legislation does permit that.
241. Illegally forged a document to publicly criticise a political opponent.
242. Granted ministers to power to use the military to quell domestic protests and industrial action, including shoot-to-kill powers when infrastructure is at risk (such as an environmental protest threatening a coal generator).
243. Spent $30 million detaining a single asylum seeker family for a few months. It would have been cheaper to house them in a penthouse suite at the Four Seasons Hotel.
244. Lied about the nation's oil reserve, claiming it is 90 days when it their own figures say 58 days.
245. Voted down a parliamentary declaration that we're facing a climate emergency.
246. Lied by claiming their religious discrimination bill was not intended to override states' anti-discrimination laws. The actual documents they tabled in parliament explicitly say it is.
247. Appointed someone in their sixties as Minister for Youth.
248. Paid $9 million for a contractor to do literally nothing, because the government abruptly cancelled the contract and instead gave it to a less experienced and less qualified company.
249. Forecast an increase in wage growth despite simultaneously forecasting no decrease in unemployment. (So employers would pay more for no economically rational reason.) Each year they consistently forecast optimistic wage growth which repeatedly fails to actually happen.
250. Simultaneously proposed plans to support electric vehicles and ridiculed plans to support electric vehicles, within the same week.
251. Lied about the budget being "in the black".
252. Lied by claiming to have introduced and passed non-existent legislation to prevent the mass extinction of threatened species.
253. Approved construction of a mine even though the company said they cannot promise that they won't make the local rare species extinct, and that they cannot be bothered checking to see whether any member of those species does eventually survive the mine's operation.
254. Introduced a law which allows the government to revoke the citizenship of whistleblowers, minor vandals and people who provide humanitarian assistance in conflict zones.
255. Lied about Australia's emissions, claiming they had decreased when they had actually increased to an record high.
256. Promised the creation of 1.25 million jobs without doing any calculation or modelling to arrive at that number.
257. Blocked the construction of Australia's first offshore wind farm for years, which would create 12,000 jobs and meet 20% of Victoria's electricity demand.
258. Merged the Australian Federal Police into the Home Affairs department, allowing the minister to exert political influence on investigations.
259. Voted against a United Nations motion for increased sexual education about women's health, opposition to female genital mutilation, and access to safe abortion.
260. Cut funding for financial support for asylum seekers by $87 million.
261. Housed refugees close to large volumes of potentially deadly asbestos.
262. Spent $1 million from their Emissions Reduction Fund on a fossil fuel generator which would have been built anyway.
263. Spent $21.5 million over 10 months with an unsigned contract on a health contractor known to have a fatal lack of "necessary clinical skills".
264. Charged taxpayers $1700 for the Roads Minister and his spouse to attend a fancy dinner party for the agriculture industry.
265. Spent $200,000 on chartered flights for ministers to travel between parliament and their electorate.
266. Spent $400 million on a problem plagued automated "robodebt" system which recovered only $500 million of unpaid debt, through an illegal "guilty until proven innocent" approach.
267. Ignored a Royal Commission report which found the government's Murray-Darling Basin Plan is illegal, whilst refusing to publish their own report which they claim provides a valid rebuttal.
268. Abandoned standard tender processes when awarding a $423 million contract to a company with $50k in funds, little experience, no phone number, no mail address, housed in a shack.
269. Refused to publish a report used to justify a $53 million contract to outsource Centrelink call handling.
270. Broke an election promise to establish a register of shell company ownership, to fight corporate tax dodging.
271. Shared personal information about petition signatories with a private company, without those people's consent, so that the company can send those people spam.
272. Prevented a vote for a royal commission into abuse in the disability sector, with a filibuster. Question time was extended to the longest session ever.
273. Abused loopholes in anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws through clearly unethical revolving door 'jobs for the boys'. The government increased defence spending to $200 billion, including giving $148 million to EY. Then the Defence minister met with EY while still working as the Minister for Defence, so EY could talk about giving him a high paying job. Then within days of leaving the defence ministry he was granted a cushy job by EY because of his experience as Minister for Defence.
274. Declared that they will violate a new law, because they don't like it.
275. Gave lawyers only 36 hours to respond to a proposal for legislation for a sex offender register. Under existing laws, consenting 16 year-olds sending nudes to each other are technically sex offenders, who may be named and shamed on the proposed register, despite the law allowing them to have sex. We do not have a murderer or burglar register.
276. Exempted the Adani coal mine from a normal water impact assessment because they believe 12.5 billion litres is not "significant", and because the water pipeline built solely to support the mining project is a non-mining project on paper.
277. Cut $1.2 billion from aged care, and then denied doing so.
278. Cut TAFE funding again, this time by $270 million.
279. Spent $87,000 fighting against a Freedom of Information request about back-room deals, and then lied about the cost.
280. Lied about the Assistance and Access bill not forcing software developers to make their code less secure. The first item in the bill's list of "acts or things" is "removing one or more forms of electronic protection".
281. Spent $37,000 for flights for one minister for one day, to attend meetings which could have probably been made via a video call.
282. Drastically increased the amount of government money spent without a proper tender process, up to $34 billion per month.
283. Handed out $17.1M to private TV stations for a grant they didn't ask for, without offering the money to the public broadcaster.
284. Refused a Senate Order to release details about expensive contracts for security, health and infrastructure in their detention camps in PNG.
285. Rejected recommendations from the Productivity Commission that the government add a "fair use" exemption to copyright law, and to change the law to explicitly protect Australians who circumvent geoblocking barriers to access paid content (e.g. VPNs to access Netflix).
286. Spent $400,000 to help train the Myanmar military, who were known at the time to be guilty of ongoing genocide against the Rohingya people, and were later responsible for a literal coup to overthrow their government, including shooting and killing hundreds of peaceful anti-coup protesters.
287. Punished an asylum seeker for reporting sexual assault committed by a government contractor, and lied about forwarding the complaint to the police.
288. Spent $320,000 on legal fights denying asylum seekers urgent medical transfers to the mainland to treat life-threatening conditions.
289. Secretly blocked funding for $4 million in humanities research projects, which were already approved by the government's research approval body (ARC).
290. Introduced a new reason for rejecting government funding of research proposals. Research which doesn't advance the national interest will be rejected. Historically important yet socially controversial research such as evolution and the sun-centric solar system would have been rejected under this model.
291. Spent $16,880 on personal stationary for just one minister for one year.
292. Spent $20k making custom phone apps for a single senator. A website would have sufficed.
293. Ignored advice from 3 government bodies, choosing to instead allow a private company to build environmentally damaging infrastructure in a World Heritage Area, in violation of zoning rules.
294. Handcuffed a child not suspected of any crimes whilst preventing her from receiving urgently needed medical treatment.
295. Doubled government net debt (even before COVID)
296. Gave corporate welfare to fund coal generators, through a grant which they claim is "technology neutral", despite it specifying a narrow range of technologies.
297. Excused the conflict of interest arising when the head of the My Health Record (appointed by the government) privately received money for consultations about the My Health Record.
298. Rolled out the My Health Record to the whole country as an opt-out system, despite safety concerns about how abusive stalkers can use it, and despite the trial involving 9 security breaches. 42 more security breaches happened within weeks of the system being rolled out nationally.
299. Cut funding for the Foodbank charity for a third time. This time $323,000 was cut just before Christmas.
300. Spent half a billion dollars on an upgrade for the Australian War Memorial. The upgrade was opposed by multiple former directors of the memorial, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, and 80% of respondents to the relevant parliamentary enquiries. The 20 year-old award winning hall will be demolished and replaced, contrary to Charles Bean's vision that the memorial be "not colossal in scale".
301. Gave money from a fund for Indigenous advancement to a fishing corporation to help it fight Indigenous land claims.
302. Spent 2 years trying to hide documents from Freedom of Information requests, about a serious breach of top secret documents, and mishandling of those documents by a minister.
303. Cancelled the citizenship of someone who's citizenship application was approved 18 years ago, who has lived in Australia for 41 years.
304. Doubled the amount spent on external consultants, after cutting public sector staff.
305. Cut one third of jobs from the Department of Environment.
306. Charged taxpayers for VIP plane flights to fly the Prime Minister between destinations on his "bus tour".
307. Spent $9000 buying hundreds of hard copies of a book which is available online for free.
308. Hid a report by the Governor General showing that the government paid twice as much as necessary for new combat vehicles, because such publicity would be bad for the private manufacturer's future profitability. The company is not even Australian.
309. Charged taxpayers $2000 per month for one minister's home Internet connection.
310. Reduced the income threshold at which graduates start paying back HECS debt, down to $45,000.
311. Lied about the Immigration Minister having no personal connection to someone who benefited from the direct intervention by the Immigration Minister in a visa case.
312. Removed emissions reduction targets from the National Energy Guarantee.
313. Outsourced top-level security clearance vetting to private contractors who transport sensitive documents via private courier, occasionally to the wrong address.
314. Refused a visa application on character grounds for a whistleblower who disclosed war crimes.
315. Refused a temporary visa application for a 10 year-old boy to visit his father because the boy did not have a full time job.
316. Sent $440 million of Reef research funds to an obscure private organisation, instead of one of the many relevant public agencies (e.g. CSIRO), and without any application process. The foundation only had 6 staff at the time, and had not asked for any money.
317. Spent an undisclosed amount of public money on legal defence for a minister who broken the law for political gain.
318. Spent $48.7 million on a single Captain Cook memorial. There are already 35 Captain Cook memorials in Australia. The money was taken from the ABC budget.
319. Cut $84 million from the ABC (again).
320. Exempted a facial recognition system storing data of innocent citizens from standard procurement policy disclosure rules. The excuse is a reliance on security through obscurity rather than actual security. Accuracy figures are also not published.
321. Threw $700k at blockchain buzzword projects.
322. Spent $3.6 billion to keep an old, dirty coal power station running for a few more years, when the alternative renewable generation plan would be $1.4 billion cheaper.
323. Increased the difficulty of the citizenship English test, so that applicants who are able to speak "basic" English will be rejected.
324. Deliberately destroyed water supplies at a Manus Island detention centre, to force refugees out of the camp and into unfinished alternative sites.
325. Chose not to take back money given to an exploitative coffee chain who violated the terms of the payment which was part of the PaTH program.
326. Spent $300k on 60 seconds of advertising to spruik new energy policies designed to reduce power bills. That amount of money could have been spent to pay the annual energy bills of 5000 typical houses.
327. Increased the jail time for journalists who report on whistleblower's truthful allegations by a factor of 10.
328. Cut university funding again, this time by $2.1 billion.
329. Banned the Eureka flag and all union symbols and slogans from personal equipment on federal construction sites, no matter how small or subtle they are.
330. Spent $2.2 million on giant fans to protect the Great Barrier Reef from global warming.
331. Refused to publish the percentage of calls to the veterans' suicide help line which go unanswered, because that might negatively impact the brand of the private call centre operator.
332. Accidentally exposed the personal health records of millions of Australians, including whether they have had abortions or are on HIV medication.
333. Proposed selling biometric data of citizens to private corporations.
334. Proposed a law to introduce 2 year jail sentences for anyone who uses the Australian Coat of Arms without authorisation, including satirical websites who do not intend to deceive, and including when no harm comes from the unauthorised use.
335. Tried to reduce the number of tertiary courses eligible for Austudy report.
336. Proposed a law which would give police the power to imprison people for 14 days without arrest.
337. Introduced a national facial recognition surveillance program, which will collate faces from CCTV cameras and other sources and share them with private companies, and claimed such a program "doesn't involve surveillance" and will increase citizen's privacy.
338. Told tender applicants for a $90B ship-building project that they don't need to spend any of that construction money in Australia.
339. Prohibited public servants from liking social media posts critical of the government, even if anonymous.
340. Introduced new procurement rules which will cost telcos $184k per year in paperwork and compliance.
341. Failed to declare multiple $1600 Foxtel subscriptions gifted to ministers by a lobby group.
342. Spent $7000 in one month for wine for one minister, and fought against a Freedom of Information request into the spend.
343. Kicked 100 asylum seekers into the street, taking their income away with no notice, after preventing them from working.
344. Gave $30 million to Foxtel to boost "under represented sports", and was unable to explain why free-to-air channels didn't get the money, because the decision was made without any emails, letter, or supporting documentation.
345. Kept secret government data showing higher than expected emissions increases.
346. Illegally detained Australian citizens on Christmas Island because they failed a character test.
347. Cut all funding for the 40 year-old Haymarket health clinic for the homeless, resulting in its closure.
348. Lied about when they found out about the sale of Medicare data on the black market.
349. Claimed to have not suffered a cybersecurity breach after the systems storing sensitive Medicare information had their security breached, and then that sensitive information was put up for sale on the black market.
350. Added politically weighted questions about coal to the citizenship test.
351. Paid companies to hire young people for entry level jobs at far less than the minimum wage. There is evidence that companies replace real jobs with these underpaid ones. One such company killed a person by not avoiding obvious and easily foreseeable risks. They were fined only $70k.
352. Chose not to appoint any climate scientists to the Climate Change Authority.
353. Tried to allow the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to invest in coal.
354. Blocked the construction of a wind farm because of the 'visual impact', even though 92% of locals wanted it.
355. Failed to comply with the mandatory 'Top 4' cyber security strategies, in multiple departments.
356. Loosened protections for indigenous land owner rights.
357. Paid a minister $273 per night to stay in his own home.
358. Lent $100M to a foreign company which does not operate in Australia, for construction of a coal mine which won't employ any Australians or contribute to the Australian economy at all. This mine so bad for the environment that if it goes ahead, it will guarantee that we will not stay under 2 degrees of global warming.
359. Spent $12M per year on flights for NBN staff.
360. Prevented university newspapers from attending the release of multiple annual budgets like all other newspapers. These particular budgets contained multiple changes which negatively impact university students.
361. Introduced a new tax, of at least $7.10 per month per NBN fixed line user.
362. Cut the foreign aid budget again, this time by $300 million.
363. Voted against changes which would reduce the wait times for medicinal cannabis from months down to hours. It currently takes up to 19 months to get approval for 3 months worth of medication.
364. Started drug testing welfare recipients without consulting legal, medical or drug experts. They simultaneously claim people will be selected randomly and also based on data driven profiling tools (i.e. not random).
365. Introduced a policy very similar to the First Home Buyer's Account policy they scrapped a few years earlier, with the main difference being that it involves using Superannuation for something other than retirement savings.
366. Spent around $10k per person per year for a cashless welfare card trial, for welfare payments worth $14k per person per year. That's a 70% overhead. The money was given to a private company without a proper tender process, with the contracts signed prior to the completion of the trial. Almost half of the participants claimed the trial made their lives worse.
367. Broke a promise to put in safeguards to prevent their data retention scheme from being abused. (Police illegally accessed the data within 2 weeks of retention commencing.)
368. Cut university funding again, this time by 2.5%.
369. Approved the sale of weapons to a country accused of committing war crimes and killing 10,000 innocent civilians.
370. Rejected advice from a taskforce it set up, which provided recommendations to reduce foreign visa abuse, and then they claimed the 457 visa is too prone to abuse.
371. Refused to release the results for the trial of a national health register.
372. Narrowly avoided 3 contempt of court charges, after criticising jail terms for specific court cases as too lenient, in a way that violates the principle of separation of court and parliament.
373. Claimed many 'community leaders' support the cashless welfare card, but refused to list such supporters when asked.
374. Claimed that using more wind power and less coal power will increase emissions.
375. Prohibited the Aboriginal Legal Service from giving evidence at a legal enquiry into the loosening of racial hate-speech laws.
376. Re-established the construction industry watchdog, which spent $100,000 investigating two mates for having a cup of tea on site.
377. Spent over $3,000 to send the minister for Immigration to a monarchist fundraiser.
378. Forced public servants to move from Canberra to Armidale, prior to establishing new office facilities. They now do their work in the local Macca's.
379. Introduced NBN 'Fibre to the curb', which is almost identical to the 'Fibre to the premise' approach they criticised.
380. Introduced a bill which would allow the government to publicly release veteran's personal information (such as medical records) without their consent.
381. Refused to release a report into the death of a person on the government's Work for the Dole program.
382. Skipped the normal assessment process for large infrastructure projects when deciding to proceed with the WestConnex project.
383. Paid the first $500 million for the WestConnex project well before the funding was needed.
384. Voted against a motion to extend the privacy act to cover political parties.
385. Changed Newstart eligibility so that 22 to 24 year-olds get Youth Allowance instead, which is $90 less per fortnight.
386. Excluded offshore detention centres when ratifying the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture.
387. Appointed a mining lobbyist as the PM's climate change advisor.
388. Increased the number of IT contractors for the government, even though they cost $80,000 more per person per year than having actual IT staff.
389. Cut $180,000 from children's dental care funding, and almost $300 million for adult dental care.
390. Spent over $3,500 to send a minister to watch the AFL with his wife.
391. Spent over $2,700 on a trip to watch polo.
392. Fined welfare recipients for not attending 'hygiene' and tie-dying classes.
393. Spent $10,000 per day to send a single minister to the USA.
394. Changed public servant super laws to reduce the retirement payout of long-term teachers, police and nurses by tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
395. Conducted an inquiry into housing affordability which gave no recommendations on how to help fix housing affordability.
396. Spent $26 million and laid off 93 scientists to move the location of the agricultural chemicals and veterinary medicines regulator.
397. Made an 'action plan' to deal with record level bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, which lacked any new actions or funding.
398. Broke a promise to scrap free lifetime travel for former ministers. The excuse is that the government is to busy to pass legislation through parliament.
399. Indefinitely detained someone based on information obtained through torture.
400. Axed 900 jobs in the national flight control agency, despite concerns that losing so many staff will compromise safety.
401. Spent $83,000 on a baggage lift at The Lodge.
402. Flew 23 staff to the Australian embassy in Paris to discuss saving money. The government does not know how much the flights and accommodation cost. Others estimate it was $200,000.
403. Falsely advertised the closure of the Child Dental Benefits Schedule, despite Parliament rejecting the closure attempt.
404. Increased the cost of a Visa for bands touring to Australia by 600%.
405. Gave $4 billion in tax cuts to the richest fifth of the population.
406. Put the 000 call service out to tender, despite their own review saying not to.
407. Cut $68 million from the Bureau of Statistics' funding.
408. Introduced a second internet filter. Internet consumers will be forced pay their telcos to block websites which foreign film companies dislike. The Liberals have accepted millions of dollars of donations from those foreign companies.
409. Spent $400 million more than budgeted on operational costs for the Tiger helicopters, then $500 million to close out "critical" issues after the helicopters were deemed operationally ready. The problem plagued helicopters are planned to be replaced at a cost of $5.5 billion
410. Refused to publish the cost benefit analysis on the agriculture minister's decision to move a federal agency from Canberra to his own electorate.
411. Personally appointed George Brandis' son's lawyer to a $370,000 job, without making a conflict of interest declaration.
412. Wasted over $98,000 buying and then cancelling flights.
413. Proposed charging 9% interest on all debts owed to Centrelink.
414. Cut $50 million from dental healthcare funding.
415. Tried to privatise the database of ASIC (the corporate watchdog). Under private hands the cost journalists must pay to obtain information about potentially corrupt companies would increase.
416. Chose not to add HIV prevention medication PrEP to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which would have brought down the cost from $1000 per month to $30 per month.
417. Handed out $9 million to a foreign coal mining company.
418. Spent over $200,000 sending Border Force staff to a luxury hotel which specialises in corporate team building through circus lessons and Segway tours.
419. Proposed a law which will allow Australians to be sentenced to life in prison, without being charged for a crime.
420. Spent over $140,000 for 5 ministers to travel to a country we have no substantial trade or diplomatic ties with, visiting tourist sites and dining in 5 star restaurants.
421. Spent over $100 million per year on military operations in Afghanistan, despite the alleged budget emergency.
422. Removed subsidies for blood sugar test strips. Now 600,000 diabetics will be forced to pay $60 per box instead of $1.20.
423. Did not implement recommendations from their own paper, about reducing the permissible level of sulfur in our petrol to align with European standards, even though the paper said it would improve Australians' health.
424. Decided that foreign born, adopted Australians can no longer use their Australian birth certificate as proof of Australian citizenship.
425. Had UNESCO censor a report on climate change to remove all mentions of Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. Large sections of the reef have already been bleached because of climate change.
426. Sacked 74 scientists in Antartica.
427. Locked up a dying New Zealander who wants to go to New Zealand. The man has had 20 heart attacks, and is close to death. He has finished serving a jail sentence, yet remains imprisoned.
428. Refused to release taxi receipts to assist in a fraud case, on the grounds that terrorists could use travel information from 5 years ago to help plan an attack against the minister in question.
429. Accidentally leaked the contact information of thousands of women in a confidential database.
430. Changed the operation of Australia's rape and domestic violence hotline so that counsellors no longer need three years of experience and a tertiary qualification in psychology or social work, and so that victims must now disclose their abuse story to twice as many people before getting help.
431. Cut all funding for Australia's only eating disorder helpline.
432. Claimed that refugees simultaneously are taking our jobs whilst also taking our welfare.
433. Cut $20 million from the National Library, resulting in 28 job losses and the halting of all document digitisation.
434. Provided no workers compensation for Australian staff injured in offshore detention centres.
435. Refused to publicly release a video of illegal whaling.
436. Claimed that Australia's largest coal mine (which will export more coal than our entire nation consumes) will not contribute to climate change.
437. Proposed a government funded internship scheme where companies are paid lots of money to hire short term interns for $4 per hour with no award protections.
438. Gave permission to a shipping company operating only in Australian waters to sack their Australian crew and hire foreigners for $2 an hour.
439. Proposed blocking students from going to university if their ATAR is too low, even if the university has spare spaces and is happy with their ATAR.
440. Proposed forcing students to pay back HECS earlier if they have parents or a long term partner with an income over a threshold.
441. Waited 22 hours before air-lifting a critically ill refugee to an adequately equipped hospital. He died the next day.
442. Rejected an offer from New Zealand to take 150 asylum seekers who are currently being illegally held in Australian detention centres.
443. Spent $300,000 on a single lunch, for business mates.
444. Cut $650 million in bulk billing incentives for pathology.
445. Proposed new powers for job agencies so that they can fine unemployed people, without any oversight, and with minimal avenues for recourse.
446. Offered an indigenous organisation half the pay rise offered to most other public sector organisations. The pay rise is below inflation, so amounts to a pay cut.
447. Proposed the abolition of the independent organisation that sets the minimum wage for truck drivers.
448. Cut all funding to Australia's only youth-led sexual health organisation.
449. Ran out of money to pay Army Reserves.
450. Proposed using government funds allocated for climate change action to build a 1.2GW coal plant.
451. Lied about releasing all children from immigration detention.
452. Spent $3.3 million on another study into 'wind turbine syndrome', even though their own senate inquiries have shown there's no such thing. The committee had all articles rejected by scientific papers, and provided no advice to the government in its first 2 years.
453. Prohibited people who owe money to Centrelink from leaving the country, regardless of how small the debt is or how soon they will return.
454. Spent $45,000 replacing lost and stolen devices for just one department.
455. Reneged on their promise to accept 12,000 refugees from Syria, instead accepting 26.
456. Spent $55 million to resettle just two refugees in Cambodia.
457. Cut domestic violence leave for public servants.
458. Scrapped the "Safe Schools" anti-bullying program, on the National Day of Action Against Bullying.
459. Spent $10,000 to fly the family of 2 ministers to a tropical island for a weekend holiday.
460. Claimed that scrapping negative gearing would simultaneously increase and decrease house prices.
461. Spent $15.4 million on research into fossil fuels.
462. Requested in inquiry into an anti-bullying program which focused on fostering tolerance for queer youth.
463. Spent $1.3 million on CCTV surveillance for an impoverished indigenous community who are desperately in need of more funding for education, health, housing and welfare.
464. Cut funding for research missions by a world class marine science ship, instead renting out the ship to foreign fossil fuel companies looking for oil and gas in Australian waters.
465. Voted against a motion asking the Housing Affordability Inquiry to update the senate on how they are progressing with the recommendations the government supported.
466. Proposed new broad powers for the Attorney-General so that the government can demand that telcos do unspecified "things", which could include filtering the internet, tracking everyone's browsing history and more.
467. Attempted to exempt telcos and law enforcement agencies from laws requiring users to be notified if their personal information has been breached.
468. Rejected an inquiry which recommended that citizens accused of tax fraud be treated as innocent until proven guilty.
469. Cut the pension for 35,000 public service retirees.
470. Spent $1.3 million on medals for Border Force staff
471. Increased the cost of pap smears.
472. Told myGov users to downgrade the security on their account when travelling overseas, which is when security risks are highest.
473. Refused to allow the family of a terminally ill man to temporarily enter Australia to see their son one last time before he died.
474. Paid Telstra $80 million to fix the copper network which Telstra sold to the government.
475. Spent almost $6000 to fly a minister's family to a coastal holiday.
476. Violated international law by illegally conducting war in Syria.
477. Refused to give citizenship to eligible permanent residents, years after their refugee claims were accepted.
478. Spent $1770 on 3 bean bags.
479. Paid $1.5 billion for the East West Link far earlier than necessary, so that it would fall into Labor's financial year, to make them look worse.
480. Started regularly strip searching innocent females on Nauru, with only male staff present.
481. Spent $30,000 on a private jet to fly one minister and their partner from Perth to Canberra (instead of catching a normal plane) because a non-business event ran overtime.
482. Banned zoo visits for children in detention, deeming them "inappropriate", and ruling that they must remain imprisoned instead.
483. Made refugees work with deadly friable asbestos without any training and almost no equipment.
484. Appointed a Windfarm Commissioner, who is paid $205,000 per year for the part-time job, who received only 2 valid complaints in its first year.
485. Refused to investigate, prosecute or do anything to a foreign company who built a large port and cut down large areas of forest home to endangered species, without environmental approval.
486. Introduced cashless welfare cards to reduce the autonomy and control that support recipients have over their spending.
487. Removed the requirements that crews on ships operating for months between Australian ports get paid Australian-level wages.
488. Voted against increasing transparency about how much tax large corporations pay.
489. Spent $1.3 billion on replacements for Defence Force Land Rovers, despite the alleged budget emergency.
490. Funded ethnic cleansing and war crimes in PNG.
491. Tried to remove exclusion zones around abortion clinics which are designed to protect patients from harassment.
492. Voted against a motion which called for independent investigation of the bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan by the USA, which is a war crime.
493. Refused to give counselling to a pregnant woman prior to an abortion. The woman was raped whilst in our asylum seeker prisons.
494. Spent $18.5 million on a facial recognition program to log and spy on every Australian, store social media photos and potentially conduct live tracking of all citizens.
495. Spent $80,000 on catering for a week long trip to Cape York and Torres Strait.
496. Forced an asylum seeker to pay for medicine to treat an injury they got when a government employee physically assaulted them.
497. Laughed and joked about the pacific islands because their very existence is threatened by climate change sea rises.
498. Scrapped the requirement that the board members of the National Disability Insurance Scheme have actual experience with disabilities (either personally, or through someone close).
499. Started advertising the jobs of the National Disability Insurance Scheme board without notifying the current board.
500. Lied about how many refugees we accept.
501. Spent $21,000 of government money to fly a minister somewhere to give a speech about the need to stop wasteful government spending.
502. Cited 'the boats have stopped' as evidence that the economy is doing well.
503. Told an Australian company to sack their Australian employees and hire foreigners, in order to remain competitive under the government's new shipping deregulation rules.
504. Spent $24,000 on koala hire for a G20 photo opportunity.
505. Spent over $100,000 on flags for the G20 summit.
506. Broke an election promise to cut the company tax rate by 1.5%.
507. Broke an election promise to introduce a new paid parental scheme.
508. Broke an election promise to conduct and publish a cost benefit analysis for all infrastructure projects over $100 million.
509. Broke an election promise to not change GST, by removing the exemption for online purchases.
510. Did not attempt to conduct privacy impact assessments for 90% of their terror bills.
511. Lifted a ban on the import of a particular shotgun which has a fast firing rate and seven shot magazine capacity.
512. Spent $24.6 million on an advertising campaign to spruik the benefits of a trade deal (whose content is secret).
513. Illegally gave approval to an environmentally damaging mine. They then criticised those who pointed out the crime, and tried to change the law so that environmentalists cannot take legal action against illegal mines.
514. Illegally refused to offer treatment and support to an asylum seeker who was raped on Nauru. Minister Peter Dutton claimed the rape case was not exceptional.
515. Banned certain muesli bars on Manus Island which have 'Freedom' in the brand name, then lied about doing it.
516. Proposed a plan to prioritise the applications of refugees who pay the government large sums of money over less fortunate refugees.
517. Spent over $20,000 in a legal fight in order to hide modelling for the impact of university fee deregulation.
518. Spent $14.4 million to get support for outdated and insecure software, instead of using current versions.
519. Waited 3 months before giving medication to a toddler with tuberculosis (a potentially fatal illness).
520. Spent thousands of government dollars on taxi rides to the Opera in just 8 days. The government claims that the expenditure is reasonable because the minister didn't pay for the tickets either.
521. Spent thousands of government dollars on limousine rides, and fudged the declaration paperwork to say they were taxi rides.
522. Spent $10,000 trying to chase down someone who leaked information to the media about how the Prime Minister deliberately and knowingly used false information to justify opposition to a defence force pay rise.
523. Held innocent asylum seekers in the same facilities as convicted rapists and murderers.
524. Spent $90,000 to send The Speaker to Europe for a fortnight so that she could apply for a job.
525. Spent $5,000 on a helicopter so that Bronwyn Bishop wouldn't have to travel 1 hour by car to get to a Liberal fundraising event.
526. Spent $27,000 on travel expenses for politicians to attend free sports events.
527. Spent $500,000 on Australian flags in just 6 months.
528. Banned the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) from investing in wind power and small scale solar power.
529. Banned telcos from seeing warrants for metadata access requests issued to chase down journalists sources, thereby undermining the purpose of the warrant system.
530. Removed the requirement for skills assessments of foreign electricians working under a Temporary Work visa.
531. Voted against a royal commission into corruption and misconduct in the financial service industry, following a series of scandals.
532. Used classified ASIO documents as props during a photo shoot.
533. Broke an election promise by scrapping Medicare locals.
534. Denied asylum seekers the right to make Freedom of Information requests for information the government has about them.
535. Admitted that an innocent senator was spied on by government employees whilst performing her job. The government initially labelled the senator an "embarrassment to this country" because they said the claims were "complete nonsense", despite knowing they were actually true.
536. Incorrectly claimed that the Lindt Cafe gunman was linked with ISIS.
537. Paid Joe Hockey $1,000 per month to stay in his wife's house.
538. Illegally paid people smugglers money to turn boats around, in order to disrupt their business model.
539. Cut $13 million from the Australia Council and Screen Australia.
540. Cut $105 million from the Australian Council for the Arts without consulting anyone in the arts industry.
541. Introduced 2 year jail sentences for doctors who disclose government wrongdoing and the high rates of health problems in immigration detention centers, even if the disclosures are in the public interest.
542. Proposed an exemption so that Australia's richest companies no longer have to publish basic information about how much tax they are paying.
543. Refused to offer any assistance to thousands of innocent refugees stranded offshore in our region trying to flee literal genocide.
544. Proposed new powers to banish Australians suspected of terrorism, possessing a "thing" related to terrorism, downloading a single file related to terrorism, vandalising commonwealth property or entering a 'no-go zone' country even for innocent purposes. Each guilty verdict would be made by a minister, not a jury. The government does not have to prove the suspects are guilty. The new laws may contravene the 1961 United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.
545. Cut funding for an anti deaths in custody service, the creation of which was recommended by the 1991 Deaths in Custody Royal Commission.
546. Granted the Immigration Department and local councils the power to search through the stored metadata of all citizens (and they won't need a warrant).
547. Tried to pass off all responsibility for "matters of national environmental significance" to the states, who have weaker environmental protections.
548. Proposed 'ag-gag' laws, under which activists who expose illegal animal cruelty can be imprisoned if they take more than 48 hours to go to the police.
549. Chose to leave the Minister’s Council on Asylum Seekers and Detention empty.
550. Asked the Nauru government to block access to Facebook.
551. Cut all funding for The Conversation, a website which allows academics to promote and explain their research to a broader audience.
552. Censored data revealing shockingly high rates of mental illness amongst immigration detainees.
553. Spent $200,000 per year on gardening at Kirribilli House.
554. Spent $700,000 to rebrand "NBN Co" to "nbn TM".
555. Lied about the cost of the price on Carbon.
556. Scrapped the domestic violence education program in schools.
557. Failed to name the leader of ISIS on the day they sent 330 troops to a war against ISIS.
558. Spent $4 million for the ‘Australian Consensus Centre’, a climate denial center to be run by someone with no qualifications in science or economics. The government had already cut all funding for the Australian Climate Commission, citing a lack of funds.
559. Withdrew from Australia's commitment to limit global temperature rises to two degrees.
560. Granted immigration detention centre staff greater immunity against repercussions for inappropriate uses of force. They now have greater immunity than police officers.
561. Scrapped a public inquiry into law enforcement agencies access to journalists' telecommunications data, for the purposes of identifying journalists' sources.
562. Spent $6 million on a movie which is supposed to deter people from fleeing genocide, war crimes, torture and other persecution. No English dubs or subtitles are available.
563. Prevented the release of a 'name and shame' list of multinational tax dodging corporations.
564. Closed the school inside the Nauru detention centre, so that the space can be converted into offices, a staff gym and a staff recreational area.
565. Prohibited detention centre workers from joining certain political parties, churches and protests even when not identifiable as employees. They can also be fired if an asylum seeker follows them on Twitter without their knowledge.
566. Accidentally leaked the personal details of 31 world leaders, and chose not to notify them. They still claim your metadata will be safe though.
567. Proposed taxing all bank deposits.
568. Scrapped the National Produce Monitoring System, which monitors domestic food for dangerous chemicals.
569. Breached the criminal code of conduct by offering the independently appointed Human Rights Commissioner a new job if she resigned.
570. Tried to pass multiple bills to halve the backpay of intellectually disabled workers who earned only $1 per hour in wages.
571. Kicked 10 Save The Children workers off Nauru, despite the government having no evidence to support their allegations of sexual and physical assault by the workers against detainees.
572. Flew across the country on a taxpayer funded private jet to attend the private birthday party of a millionaire who has made large donations to the Liberal party.
573. Rejected the crowdfunded offer of free solar panels with free installation for Kirribilli House.
574. Stripped 8000 public servants of their rights against unfair dismissal.
575. Prosecuted a white hat hacker who exposed serious security vulnerabilities of some of the ISPs who store the sensitive data of all Australians under the government's data retention policy.
576. Closed 150 remote Indigenous communities.
577. Breached the international convention against torture.
578. Proposed scrapping the census.
579. Defended the use of the War Memorial to hold corporate events for foreign arms manufacturers.
580. Cut funding to Blind Citizens Australia, Deaf Australia and Down Syndrome Australia.
581. Refused to publish cost estimates for the data-retention policy which were provided by the industry.
582. Exempted Gmail, Skype and Facebook from their data-retention scheme, thereby significantly reducing its effectiveness. They are exempted because they are not Australian. Hence, Australian email providers will be forced to pay for data retention servers, while competing with non-Australian companies who don't.
583. Accused the Human Rights Commissioner of bias, because she published a report into children in detention, finding 233 incidents of assault against children, inside the government's immigration camps.
584. Voted to keep the text of the China Free Trade deal secret from the public.
585. Abolished the $10,000 limit on political donations.
586. Spent $17 million on a social media internet filter, allegedly to stop terrorist propaganda. The government believes that peaceful environmental protesters can be "terrorists".
587. Claimed "good government starts today", after 18 months of governing.
588. Referred journalists to the police after they reported on immigration matters, including the illegal breaches of Indonesia's borders.
589. Lied about the use of weapons by peaceful protesters on Manus Island, when their camp was flooded with armed guards in riot gear.
590. Chose not to do any modelling whatsoever to determine whether the Emissions Reduction Fund will reduce emissions by the amount they claim it will.
591. Spent over $80,000 on kitchen appliances.
592. Knighted Prince Phillip, a non-Australian who asked Indigenous leaders "Do you still throw spears at each other?".
593. Broke the law by missing the deadline for publishing the Intergenerational Report, as stipulated by the Charter of Budget Honesty Act.
594. Applied to withdraw from a UN convention to protect migratory sharks, 2 months after agreeing to the convention.
595. Awarded a $6.3 million contract for armoured cars for politicians to a foreign company, even though the company did not bid for the tender and an Australian company did.
596. Criminalised some discussions about cryptography by crytographic academics.
597. Spent more money per student on homeopathy, flower essence therapy and naturopathy tertiary courses than law, economics, languages and humanities.
598. Proposed the loosening of 457 work visas, allowing foreigners to work in Australia for 12 months, without passing English tests, without the need to look for local workers first.
599. Spent $88,000 on yoga workshops to improve the emotional intelligence of Immigration Department workers.
600. Used veto powers to block a UN resolution calling to the end of Israel's occupation of Palestine.
601. Spent over $15 million on an advertisement campaign to make university fee deregulation more palatable.
602. Violated the principle of non-refoulement again, by sending a refugee back to Afghanistan, where he was subsequently tortured for trying to escape.
603. Scrapped a plan to make coursework masters students eligible for income support.
604. Cut $44 million over 4 years from the Skills for Education and Employment program which helps job seekers improve their reading, writing and maths.
605. Cut $66 million over 3 years from a program which supplements the income of adult apprentices earning less than minimum wage.
606. Introduced a $900 NBN fee for all new houses.
607. Cut all funding of homelessness and community housing programs, except the ones they are legally required to fund.
608. Refused to give visas to refugees who were found to have a well founded fear of persecution, came by plane, passed health checks and passed security checks.
609. Appointed a climate change denier as parliamentary secretary to the minister of the environment.
610. Appointed who said he has "no interest in defence issues" as Minister for Defence.
611. Cut foreign aid a third time, this time by $3.7 billion.
612. Spent $120,000 monitoring the media for mentions of the Immigration Department.
613. Legislated to override all non-refoulement obligations. The government can now send refugees back to countries even if they know for certain that the refugees will be tortured or killed upon return.
614. Withdrew from the UN Refugee Convention.
615. Gave millions of dollars to subsidise the training of priests and other religious workers, using the money cut from public, secular universities.
616. Forced indigenous welfare recipients to work for full time, for 52 weeks a year, to get $5 per hour.
617. Spent $10,000 trying to identify a whistleblower who told the media that the Prime Minister knowingly mislead the public using information he knew was incorrect.
618. Claimed that virtual private networks (VPNs) would be exempt from their internet filter, then voted against an amendment to exempt VPNs from their internet filter.
619. Introduced an internet filter. Consumers and rights groups will not be able to contest blockages. The filter will cost customers $130,000 per year. The main proponent (Village Roadshow Studios) donate over $300,000 to the Liberals each year, as do many other studios.
620. Gave the Immigration Minister the power to deny or revoke citizenship because someone has a mental illness.
621. Refused to grant asylum to anyone waiting in refugee camps in Indonesia.
622. Started another senate inquiry into wind farms, to look at the effect of wind power on power bills, even though the government's own reviews have already shown that wind power reduces power bills.
623. Started an online petition to stop job losses at the ABC, just 36 hours after cutting ABC funding by 5%.
624. Gave permission to Chinese companies to sue the Australian government if it implements laws which reduce the corporation's profits. Australian companies can't even do the same to the Chinese government. The actual text of the legislation is being kept secret.
625. Perpetuated the lie of 'Terra Nullius', claiming that Australia was "nothing but bush" before white settlement.
626. Chose to not investigate claims of torture and rape by staff in the Manus Island detention centre, because the accused corporation investigated the claims themselves and concluded that they were not guilty. The investigation was done completely internally by Transfield, without any involvement with the Immigration Department.
627. Contracted out the managing of the Do Not Call Register to a marketing company.
628. Tried to remove the requirement that telecommunications companies disclose how many times they voluntarily handed customer's data to law enforcement agencies without a warrant.
629. Bribed murder witnesses with the offer of the rights that they are currently being denied, to make them withdraw their statements about the death of someone who was murdered by the government's contractors.
630. Disobeyed Commonwealth value-for-money rules by forcing the Australian Tax Office to spend millions on new offices without making a business case for it or doing a cost benefit analysis.
631. Secretly and retrospectively changed the official record of what was said in parliament.
632. Refused to fulfil a senate order to explain the reasons behind a ban on accepting any refugees from Ebola infected countries. No such ban exists for normal immigrants.
633. Tried to remove the requirement that all free to air TV stations have captions from 6am to midnight.
634. Illegally refused to grant permanent visas to people found to be genuine refugees, despite their own department and the United Nations Human Rights Council telling them it is illegal.
635. Appointed 2 Liberal mates to the Migration Review Tribunal even though they were not shortlisted by the selection committee.
636. Chose not to tell asylum seekers that sensitive information about their asylum claims, mental health problems and more was stolen again. The data was left on a hard-drive without password protection, outside of the lockable store-rooms.
637. Reduced the number of charities and aid organisations allowed into the G20 summit from 75 to 3.
638. Reduced leave allowances for defence force personnel and reduced wage increases to below the inflation rate, just a few days after declaring war.
639. Introduced laws to allow ASIO to secretly detain people without charge, without any contact to the outside world, and allow them to conduct "coercive questioning" even when less extreme measures are available. Refusal to answer ASIO's questions would be a crime punishable by imprisonment. i.e. This takes away your right to remain silent.
640. Gave ASIO the power to read, delete and modify anything and everything on the entire internet, with only one warrant. No one can sue them if they use that information or power illegally. If a journalist reports such abuse, they will be jailed for 10 years.
641. Broke an election promise by cutting ABC funding again ($120 million this time).
642. Refused to send the Prime Minister to a UN climate summit with 125 other heads of state, even though the Prime Minister was attending another UN summit in the same city the next day.
643. Joined the Iraq war 3.0 without a clear, public and testable objective, without a proposed timeline, without any explanation of why we won't fail just like the last time and without debating the matter in parliament. The government is calling the war a "humanitarian mission", even though they cut all foreign aid to Iraq just a few months prior.
644. Spent $12 million trying to convince Sri Lanka to accept 2 boatloads of asylum seekers.
645. Spent $900,000 in just 2 months on private jet flights for ministers.
646. Forced all community TV stations off the air, claiming that moving online will be better for stations and viewers. Meanwhile they continue to fervently defend foreign corporate stations like HBO, who stubbornly refuse to make content accessible online.
647. Raised the terror threat level to "high", despite receiving no specific intelligence since claiming that the threat level "has not changed".
648. Refused to give medical treatment to an asylum seeker with a cut on his foot, who later died because of an infection.
649. Rejected visa applications for unionists who wanted to attend a conference, because they didn't have enough "personal wealth".
650. Tried to introduce WorkChoices again. The changes will make it legal for employers to pay workers in pizza instead of money. Some workers will get less pay while taking annual leave. Employers will be able to veto industrial action. Unions will be stripped of their right to enter a workplace to discuss things will employees during unpaid breaks. Workers will no longer be paid extra for weekend work and overnight work.
651. Scrapped funding for the Red Cross asylum seeker support program. 500 jobs were lost.
652. Removed the requirement for ASIO to get a warrant before using tracking devices.
653. Legislated to permit ASIO operatives and associates to commit torture, and any other crime aside from murder, serious injury infliction, sexual assault and property damage.
654. Legislated so that courts must accept illegally obtained evidence.
655. Privatised Australian Hearing.
656. Increased intelligence agency funding by $630 million, and fought for the power to stop Australians from travelling to Middle Eastern countries, even though the risk of terrorism "has not changed" at the time. Australians who travel to those countries will be guilty until proven innocent. They will face up to 10 years of imprisonment.
657. Scrapped the Countering Violent Extremists Program, which involved grants to community programs.
658. Censored doctors' reports showing that 1/3 of all detainees suffer from mental illness, and that self harm amongst children is common.
659. Axed the Schools Business Community Partnership Brokers program, which has saved thousands of students from dropping out of school.
660. Introduced Work-For-The-Dole despite their own data showing that such programs are the least effective way of helping people find jobs.
661. Cut the $16 per patient per day supplement for aged care providers.
662. Rewrote counterterrorism laws so that Australian tourists returning from Syria and Iraq will be guilty of terrorism until they prove they are innocent.
663. Broke an election promise by allowing the new multi-billion dollar batch of Navy submarines to be built overseas, despite high levels of unemployment amongst our manufacturing sector.
664. Spent $330,000 renovating a single room which has never been used. Including $800 on a single door knob. The cost of leaving it unused but on standby comes to $100,000 per year.
665. Forced the unemployed to apply for 40 jobs per month. This will bombard businesses with over 1,000,000 applications per day. There's currently about 1 job availability for every 10 unemployed people, so a lack of job applications is not the problem.
666. Introduced mandatory metadata retention schemes for all internet providers. The government admits the changes are not necessary, and that there is no evidence to show that it will improve law enforcement. Warrants will not be required to access the data. The cost of implementing the schemes will come to about another $100 per customer per year. It will be used to punish illegal downloaders.
667. Finally admitted that "There's no crisis at all in the Australian economy", despite centering their election campaign on the alleged budget emergency.
668. Introduced new laws which mean Edward Snowden type leaks are punishable by up to 10 years of prison. No exemptions are made for anti-corruption leaks. If journalists report on anyone (including innocent bystanders) being killed accidentally or deliberately by security personnel, they will be jailed for up to 10 years.
669. Spent $50,000 on upgrades of curtains and upholstery for the Prime Minister's office.
670. Falsely claimed that nations around the world are scrapping emissions trading schemes, even though there is currently a net increase in adoption of such schemes.
671. Remained unapologetic about 10 mothers trying to commit suicide. The mothers hoped that their orphan children would be freed from torturous asylum seeker prisons and cared for.
672. Forcefully handed over 41 innocent asylum seekers to a genocidal government, despite being aware that many had already been tortured before fleeing. This violates international laws and our own domestic laws.
673. Incorrectly explained the mechanics of their own Carbon Price repeal.
674. Committed maritime piracy by storming boats in international waters at gunpoint, kidnapping and then imprisoning innocent passengers. Maritime piracy constitutes crimes against humanity.
675. Claimed pre-First Fleet Australia was "unsettled or, um, scarcely settled", and called British colonisation a form of foreign investment.
676. Cut $44 million from homelessness services.
677. Removed all mentions of climate change from their extreme weather website.
678. Moved to strip environmental organisations from charity status.
679. Refused to refer to East Jerusalem as "occupied", even though the Israeli military has met the specific criteria which constitute the legal definition of occupation, and even though Israel's own highest court ruled that the region is occupied, and even though the Israelis have built a wall twice as tall as the Berlin Wall to separate the region from the rest of Palestine.
680. Introduced legislation to allow the government to send asylum seekers back to the country they fled from, even if there is up to a 49% chance that they will be killed or tortured upon return. This violates the principle of non-refoulement, which constitutes human rights abuse.
681. Moved to abolish the role of freedom of information commissioner, abolish the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and charge $800 for reviews of Freedom of Information Request denials.
682. Refused to publish any submissions it received for or against the proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act, even though the government says the changes are to protect free speech. They refused to state what proportion of submissions supported the changes. The government defended this secrecy by claiming that all submissions were made with the expectation of confidentiality. This is false. The Senate Inquiry Submission Guidelines state that to make a Senate Inquiry Submission confidential, you must explicitly justify a request for confidentiality, and that such requests are generally denied.
683. Tried to remove the laws that require financial advisors to act in the best interest of their clients, and the requirement that they provide clients with a statement of the fees they'll be charged each year.
684. Refused to let Leo Seemanpillai's parents come to Australia temporarily for his funeral. He burned himself to death because the Australian Government wanted to send him back to proven genocide in Sri Lanka. His parents have been living in a refugee camp for 2 decades. 2 other people tried to commit suicide the same way within a month of Leo's death, to avoid being sent back to Sri Lanka.
685. Scrapped the annual $5 million grant to the Red Cross.
686. Defended the $4.8 million salary of the head of Australia Post, immediately after he cut 900 postal worker jobs to save money.
687. Lied by claiming asylum claims were being processed in the lead up to the Manus Island riots.
688. Cancelled meetings with the head of the International Monetary Fund and the president of the World Bank because Mr. Abbott would be told that the government's support for fossil fuels will heavily damage our economy in the long run.
689. Failed to model the impact on hospital emergency room waiting times due to the proposed GP fee.
690. Cut a further $600 million from Indigenous programs, in addition to the $534 million cuts in the 2014 budget.
691. Claimed that removing the upper limit on university fees will cause fees to decrease.
692. Lied about the Australian Federal Police advising Tony Abbott not to visit Deakin University for safety reasons.
693. Blamed everyone but themselves for the murder of an innocent person during the Manus Island riots. Contractors, locals and even the victims were blamed. The report identified at least one of the murderers, but he has not been charged with murder.
694. Slashed $560,000 from the Refugee Council of Australia.
695. Supported Japan's moves to remove the pacifist parts of their constitution, claiming that the creation of an offensive Japanese military force will help regional stability and peace. (Japan only has a self defence force.)
696. Offered money to Manus Island detainees if they voluntarily returned to the war crimes, genocide, torture and persecution that they originally fled from. When in opposition the government opposed these same payments.
697. Refused to comment about American drone strikes which killed 2 Australians.
698. Funded PNG's defence against a legal challenge to the Manus Island detention centre.
699. Redirected $4 million from the Child Sex Abuse Royal Commission to the Home Insulation Inquiry.
700. Gave the Minister for Infrastructure the power to silence Infrastructure Australia (an independent body) without justification. (See section 5A.2 of the link.)
701. Tried to scrap the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency.
702. Confiscated medication from asylum seeker detainees. A 3 year-old consequently suffered repeated seizures.
703. Deliberately hid the cost of the $4.45 million renovations on The Lodge.
704. Tried to introduce a $7 fee for each time you go to see a GP. They claimed $7 is simultaneously large enough to act as a deterrent (thereby saving money), and small enough that it won't deter poor, sick people from getting help.
705. Spent $50,000 on one dinner for 60 G20 guests, including food specially flown to Washington from all over Australia.
706. Lied about the presence of a full time psychiatrist on Manus Island.
707. Cut over $900 million from local council funding.
708. Scrapped tax breaks for people with a dependent spouse.
709. Voted against the creation of a federal anti-corruption watchdog.
710. Scrapped The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership.
711. Cut $170 million from the Research Training Scheme, which supported research students.
712. Spent $12 million to investigate whether to sell off a department for $6 billion, when it makes $0.538 billion per year.
713. Cut $15 million from Charles Sturt University's dental health program and oral clinic.
714. Cut $2.5 billion from aged care programs, such as Meals On Wheels.
715. Removed financial rewards which encouraged Universities to enrol disadvantaged students.
716. Scrapped the National Rental Affordability Scheme.
717. Cut Sunday penalty rates for casual restaurant workers.
718. Cut $16 million from ANSTO, Australia's only nuclear research facility, and our only source of medical isotopes.
719. Slashed $1.1 million used to fight against animal abuse.
720. Made $110 million of broad-sweeping cuts to the Arts. The only organisation to receive more funding ($1 million more) is coincidentally chaired by the daughter of Rupert Murdoch.
721. Cut $28.2 million from the Australia Council, which provides grants for the arts.
722. Cut $38 million from Australian television and film funding.
723. Scrapped the National Water Commission.
724. Scrapped the National Preventive Health Agency’s $2.9 million National Tobacco Campaign.
725. Broke an election promise to have over one million roofs with solar panels.
726. Broke an election promise by cutting billions from school funding and committing to even less of the Gonski reforms than they did at the election.
727. Scrapped a program to encourage graduates to take up work in places of need.
728. Cut $1.3 billion from seniors concessions funding.
729. Scrapped the Community Food Safety campaign.
730. Cut $2.3 million from contributions to the World Health Organization.
731. Scrapped a program which encouraged Australian video game development.
732. Tried to deregulate university fees, thereby allowing Universities to charge what they want. Students would end up with American levels of crippling debt. Many of the politicians behind this policy received their degrees for free. Average student debt is expected to rise to $100,000, even though Abbott himself said "it is irresponsible to saddle Australians with $25,000 of debt". OECD figures show that the public benefits from tertiary qualifications twice as much as the individual.
733. Scrapped the Women's leadership program.
734. Broke an election promise by cutting well over $15 billion per year from health funding.
735. Scrapped the Australian Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation Authority, which has helped increase organ donation rates.
736. Tightened eligibility and lowered indexation for support for injured Veterans.
737. Scrapped the Commonwealth Human Rights Education Program.
738. Scrapped the Education Department’s Online Diagnostic Tools Program, which helped improve teachers' productivity.
739. Cut $4.4 million from job interview workshop programs.
740. Scrapped the Office of Water Science research program.
741. Reduced the Medicare optometry rebate.
742. Spent $480 million merging the Department of Immigration and Customs into Border Force, which won't have to follow public service or Defence Force laws and protocols of conduct.
743. Simultaneously increased the cost of petrol and cut funding for public transport. The government argued that disadvantaged people can't afford cars anyway, so they won't be hurt by the changes.
744. Scrapped Youth Connections, a program which helped disengaged youth reconnect with work and education.
745. Removed family tax benefits for children older than 6, and drastically reduced the income threshold for its eligibility and froze it below interest rates.
746. Cut $845.6 million from programs which fund innovative start-ups.
747. Stopped giving under 25s Newstart. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said that this will violate our human rights obligations.
748. Spent $218 million upgrading Christmas Island's asylum seeker operations,
749. Halved the $2.55 billion emissions reduction fund.
750. Cut $2 billion from Australian Renewable Energy Agency, Landcare and other environmental agencies.
751. Cut over half a billion from Indigenous spending.
752. Cut 16,500 public service jobs.
753. Cut all funding for the Exotic Diseases Preparedness Programme, 5 years prior to COVID.
754. Ended the Get Reading! program.
755. Scrapped the Centre for Quality Teaching.
756. Cut $111 million from the CSIRO.
757. Cut $120 million from ethanol and biofuel programs.
758. Cut all funding to NICTA, a peak ICT technology research company. Coincidentally, NICTA publicly criticised the Coalition's NBN only a few weeks earlier, claiming fibre-to-node is an inferior option.
759. Cut welfare for young people, so they have to survive on $0 per week for 6 months, before being put on a welfare scheme which is below the poverty line anyway. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said that this breaches our human rights obligations.
760. Spent $245 million for religious chaplains in schools. Secular schools were stripped of the option of hiring a secular equivalent. No guarantees have been made about preventing sexist teachings that will make queer students feel sinful and ashamed. (Queer students are 6 times more likely to commit suicide than their peers.) Hundreds of secular social workers will lose their jobs.
761. Scrapped the First Home Buyer's Account scheme, which provided sorely needed assistance for young people to buy homes.
762. Broke an election promise by tightening disability pension eligibility and financially penalising anyone who spends at least 4 weeks overseas.
763. Broke an election promise by changing age pension indexation, and eligibility age, and the threshold.
764. Abolished the position of disability commissioner.
765. Cut all funding to the government's only dedicated disability website.
766. Broke an election promise by cutting $40 million from the SBS and ABC.
767. Cut foreign aid, again. This time by $7.6 billion.
768. Started charging interest on HECS.
769. Reduced the income threshold where graduates start to pay back HECS.
770. Cut $138 million from the Australian Federal Police, resulting in 335 job losses.
771. Scrapped a loan scheme which helped apprentices buy the tools they need to learn and work.
772. Claimed asylum seekers are safe on Nauru, even after an unexploded wartime shell was found inside the compound.
773. Claimed asylum seekers are safe on Nauru, even after it was leaked that some guards physically and verbally assault children regularly.
774. Failed to provide adequate medical treatment to asylum seekers on Manus Island who were shot and bashed by locals that invaded the camp and rioted.
775. Went $1 million (67%) over budget on the Commision of Audit, an investigation into how taxpayer money can be spent more prudently.
776. Cut $15 million from Flinders Hospital, then spent $10 million upgrading the field for the Manly Rugby League team.
777. Broke an election promise to not cut ABC funding, by cutting all funding to the Australia Network (part of the ABC).
778. Described wind farms as "utterly offensive" and "a blight on the landscape".
779. Spent $20 million on an international campaign to discourage people from fleeing war crimes, genocide and other persecution.
780. Broke an election promise by proposing a deficit tax.
781. Chose not to debrief any Manus Island detention centre staff after the riots by PNG locals which resulted in the death of one asylum seeker and the hospitalisation of dozens more.
782. Paid people $1500 per person per day to recommend spending cuts.
783. Deliberately ignored desperate and repeated pleas by security personnel on Manus Island and the commander of Operation Sovereign Borders requesting stronger fencing, CCTV cameras and better lighting. These requests were made months before locals broke down the fences, shot, stabbed and bashed detainees, none of which was caught on CCTV footage.
784. Tried to abolish the independent national charity regulation body, which would mean the government would regulate charities, possibly resulting in less impartial regulation. For example, environmental groups could be stripped of charity status because they oppose government policies.
785. Removed climate change from the agenda of the 2014 international G20 summit.
786. Spent about $2 million for Prince William and Kate's 14 day royal visit
787. Spent $3 billion on new drones to patrol our borders.
788. Spent $7.5 million on life boats to send back asylum seekers in. Allegedly the motivation behind the government's asylum seeker policy is to stop people drowning when travelling from neighbouring countries to Australia in unsafe vessels. Despite this, much of the safety equipment was removed from the boats before sending asylum seekers back into the ocean.
789. Prevented internet supplier TPG from installing fibre all the way to customers. The arbitrary bureaucratic hurdles have increased the cost of fibre to premise by 15%.
790. Broke an election promise by no longer guaranteeing NBN speeds higher than what ADSL can provide.
791. Retroactively introduced legislation to classify someone born in Australia as an "unauthorised maritime arrival" because their parents haven't had their asylum claims processed yet.
792. Scrapped a body which provides advice on over $1 billion in tax breaks that are designed to encourage Research and Development, despite promising during the election to improve incentives for Research and Development investment.
793. Claimed a 2.5% reduction in funding every year for the ABC is not a funding cut.
794. Cut over 300 jobs (about 1 in 3) in the Treasury department.
795. Cut 400 jobs in the Department of Industry.
796. Removed anti-sweatshop laws and cut all funding to Ethical Clothing Australia.
797. Closed all Medicare offices on Saturdays.
798. Ceased legal assistance for people exercising their right to make a claim for asylum.
799. Cut 250 jobs from the Federal Environment Department.
800. Increased the eligibility age for the pension.
801. Claimed that the average electricity bill will be $200 per year lower without the price on carbon, despite relevant power companies rejecting the magnitude of this figure.
802. Implemented a policy which dictates that public servants should be sacked if they criticise the government in social media, even if their profile does not mention the their employment, and even if the profile is completely anonymous.
803. Chose not to give 300 children almost any schooling during 9 months of detention.
804. Threatened staff against speaking out about the mismanagement of the Manus Island detention centre and the attacks against it's inmates by locals and staff.
805. Detained people in conditions so inhumane and horrid that three pregnant women asked for abortions, to stop their children suffering in detention indefinitely. The Government has refused to comment.
806. Chose not to process any claims for asylum from people detained on Manus Island.
807. Claimed that all social media is anonymous.
808. Chose to keep secret the interim report into the riots inside the Manus Island detention centre.
809. Paid a public relations company $97,000 for 3 weeks of work to help improve the Education Department's image, then refused to release the report that came of it.
810. Claimed the government will be $13.7 billion better off if the Mining Tax is scrapped, even though the scrapping the tax itself would actually result in a net loss If $3.7 billion. The only savings would be through other cuts hidden in the repeal bill. The biggest of which is the Schoolkids Bonus (an initiative which was never associated with the Mining Tax). The government claims the average household will be better off, but the average household will be $3500 worse off due to repealed subsidies and tax breaks.
811. Interfered with the judicial process by transferring asylum seekers to a remote detention centre the day before they started a court case against the Australian Government. The case was about how the government endangered them and their families by accidentally publishing personal details about their asylum claims online.
812. Spent more money on detention centres than it would cost to house asylum seekers in Sydney's most expensive 5 star hotels (per asylum seeker per day).
813. Started charging people who put in bankruptcy applications, and increased the levy on money earned post-bankruptcy.
814. Broke international laws by arbitrarily imprisoning children.
815. Scrapped a program to give asylum seekers free advice on how to navigate Australia's immigration bureaucracy when exercising their right to seek asylum. The justification for this scrapping was based on the false claim that asylum seekers are illegal.
816. Tried to reintroduce temporary protection visas.
817. Ignored an order from the United Nations Human Rights Committee to release some asylum seekers who are being illegally held without proof or judicial protection, in cruel, inhumane or degrading circumstance.
818. Reintroduced the British system of knights and dames, only 3 months after saying they would not do so.
819. Spent $211,000 on public relations staff to make the Medibank Private sale more palatable to the public.
820. Sold Medibank Private for $4 billion, even though that means the government will lose up to $500 million per year of income from dividends.
821. Claimed that all Australians have the "right to be a bigot".
822. Refused to grant a human rights lawyer access to the Manus Island detention centre.
823. Backed PNG's decision to cancel a human rights inquiry into the Manus Island detention centre.
824. Issued Manus island detention centre guards with knives designed for noose cutting, because they frequently need to cut down people who try to hang themselves thanks to of the horrid conditions.
825. Tried to exempt loggers in Tasmania's World Heritage forests from the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, so they won't have to worry about killing threatened species.
826. Claimed that the majority of asylum seekers on Manus island won't be given refugee status, even though more than 90% of all asylum seekers who've come to Australia since mid 2009 were eventually found to be genuine refugees, fleeing torture, rape, genocide and persecution.
827. Vowed to revive a part of WorkChoices which means construction Industry Enterprise Bargaining Agreements don't apply to subcontractors doing Commonwealth work.
828. Refused to support a UN proposal to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka. If such crimes been committed, the Australian government will be guilty of crimes against humanity for forcefully sending refugees back to Sri Lanka, and for actively helping the Sri Lankan military stop people from fleeing their rape, torture and genocide. A Sri Lankan Tribunal has already proven that the Sri Lankan government is guilty of genocide.
829. Failed to provide running water to some toilets in the detention centre on Manus Island.
830. Spent $25 million extending the contracts of the crew on just one ship so they could be part of Operation Sovereign Borders.
831. Provided no soap in the Manus Island detention centre and regularly gave asylum seekers worm infested food.
832. Proposed amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act so that people who "offend" or "insult" someone because of their "race, colour or national or ethnic origin" will not be legally required to pay compensation.
833. Gave $100 million to Australia's 2 most profitable mining companies, to build a mine which isn't even in Australia, despite claiming "the age of entitlement is over", and despite refusing to give corporate welfare to struggling companies who have to sack hundreds of workers.
834. Prevented journalists from interviewing asylum seekers injured in the Manus Island riots.
835. Lied three times in one BBC interview by claiming that the Abbott government is considering settling asylum seekers in Australia, and claiming that children in detention go to school, and claiming that asylum seekers on Manus Island are having their claims processed. None of these claims are true.
836. Cut all welfare ($260,000) for orphans of defence force casualties.
837. Gave state governments an ultimatum: sell off government assets before a certain deadline, (regardless of whether the people or the state government want to) or miss out on billions of dollars of funding. The states would not be allowed to use the money from the sales to pay off debt. Reluctant states were told they could still access federal funds through environmental programs that the Federal Government is trying to scrap.
838. Justified the logging of forests currently on the world heritage list because Christianity supposedly tells us "the environment is meant for man".
839. Took $140 billion out of Australians' superannuation accounts through loosening of consumer protection rules regarding financial planning.
840. Deported the mother of a 4 year-old Australian citizen, thereby separating the child permanently from her only remaining guardian.
841. Stopped collecting data on gender equality in the workplace.
842. Threatened to block government funding from arts groups who refuse sponsorship from corporations the artists deem unethical.
843. Lied to the United Nations about the quality of the Tasmanian forests they want removed from the world heritage list.
844. Claimed no Sri Lankan asylum seekers have been sent back into danger, despite being in possession of documents which prove at least one asylum seeker was tortured after being forcefully sent back. A Sri Lankan tribunal recently proved that the Sri Lankan government was guilty of genocide. The United Nations Human Rights Commission is currently investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka.
845. Suggested most existing major roads should introduce tolls.
846. Spent $24 billion on new, buggy, spontaneously combusting fighter jets, already years behind schedule, which aren't going to be built in Australia. The jets can't run off warm fuel from a truck which has been sitting in the sun (since the fuel tank is used as a heat sink). The software for firing the guns won't be ready until 3 years after deployment. The software has not passed a security audit. Each plane holds less than 3 seconds of ammunition for the guns.
847. Failed to supply enough food to asylum seekers inside the detention centre on Manus Island.
848. Secretly defeated an international nuclear disarmament treaty, arguing against a sentence in the treaty which stated that it is in the interests of humanity that nuclear weapons never be used again "under any circumstances". Australia argued that a disarmament treaty would be less effective at reducing proliferation than having no disarmament treaty.
849. Kept secret the taxpayer funded 900 page Audit commission report which recommended tightening eligibility for seniors health cards.
850. Removed the price on carbon, even though the emissions of relevant companies have dropped by 7% due to the price.
851. Declined an offer from the Uniting Church to care for unaccompanied refugee children currently in detention centres. The church offered to feed house and clothe them free of charge.
852. Ridiculed the notion that the minister for women should identify as a feminist.
853. Started 5 audits of the NBN within the first 7 months of being in power.
854. Proposed the scrapping of regulation which prevents media monopolies and duopolies.
855. Claimed that loggers are "the ultimate conservationists" during a speech about why the government will not create more national parks.
856. Blamed Qantas job losses on the carbon price, even though a Qantas spokesman said "Qantas' current issues are not related to carbon pricing".
857. Finally admitted that "Operation Sovereign Borders" is a civilian operation not a military one.
858. Spent over $15,000 on a custom made bookcase to replace a $7,000 custom bookcase which holds $13,000 worth of taxpayer funded books and magazines in senator Brandis' office.
859. Spent $22,000 taxpayer dollars buying new cutlery and crockery for the ministerial wing of parliament.
860. Spent over $8 million each year on salaries alone for 95 media staff for the department of Immigration, despite the fact that the department tells the media almost nothing. Those same staff spent over $9,000 in just 2 months monitoring the media for transcripts of their own minister's press conferences.
861. Proposed a "green army" comprised of young people paid less than half of minimum wage without normal workplace protections.
862. Cut $3 million in funding for a program to save an endangered rhino species of which there are only 100 left.
863. Referred to our humanitarian immigration program as "Operation Sovereign Murders".
864. Spent $3.5 million on a tent kitchen on Manus Island.
865. Sent asylum seekers back to Indonesia, 3 of which later died trying to cross a river in the jungle they landed next to.
866. Defended the Manus Island scheme during a press conference about the man who was shot dead in our detention centres by claiming the government is "ending the deaths" of asylum seekers. More refugees have died on Manus island than have been settled.
867. Chose not to send any representatives to the Partnership for Market Readiness assembly, a conference which Australia helped fund which is about market mechanisms to curb emissions.
868. Appointed someone to head the investigation into the Manus Island riots who claimed that rape victims in Manus Island detention centres receive better treatment than Australians.
869. Doubled the defence force's annual budget, increasing it by $24 billion, despite the supposed budget emergency and after the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
870. Defied legislation by not appointing the Climate Change Authority to run the investigation into the Renewable Energy Target.
871. Blamed electricity price rises on the renewable energy target, despite their own modelling predicting that it will reduce electricity prices in the long term, and despite Energy Australia stating that it has suppressed prices since it was created.
872. Forced Manus Island staffers to lie to detainees.
873. Placed an ex-officer of the Sri Lanka army in charge of the Manus Island detention centre, which holds people fleeing the Sri Lanka army's war crimes and genocide.
874. Spent $13.3 million on floating hotels for detention centre staff on Manus island.
875. Admitted the information given about the Manus detention centre riots was drastically wrong.
876. Convinced Cambodia (one of the poorest countries in our region) to take in some of the refugees currently in our detention centres. Serious human rights abuse continue to be committed regularly under the Cambodian government and military.
877. Purchased 8 new Poseidon aircraft totalling $4 billion despite the "budget emergency".
878. Guarded the body of a dead asylum seeker using guards who were possibly the ones that shot him. Those same guards confiscated a camera from a journalist on site then deleted all his photos.
879. Blamed the carbon price for job losses at Alcoa's aluminium smelter, despite Alcoa being 94.5% exempt from the tax, and despite Alcoa explicitly stating that "the carbon tax was not a factor in the decision".
880. Accidentally published personal details about almost 10,000 asylum seekers and their claims. Regardless of whether the original asylum claims were genuine, if those asylum seekers are returned to their country of origin, they and their family may be imprisoned, tortured or killed because governments and militias in their country of origin will know they sought asylum. After discovering the blunder, the government took 13 days to remove the information from public view. As part of a press release about the accidental leak the government made public further information about where to find the still life threatening document.
881. Eventually admitted that Navy ships "inadvertently" crossed into Indonesian waters despite using high tech GPS navigation, then they made the exact same mistake again 5 times. The government chose to not even interview any crew members of one such ship when writing a report on the matter.
882. Removed poverty reduction from the goals of the foreign affairs department, which manages foreign aid.
883. Paid their own indigenous employees substantially less than non-indigenous co-workers despite promising to help "close the gap".
884. Deleted negative comments on the Department of Immigration's Facebook page, but left objectively false comments, such as claims that asylum seeking is illegal.
885. Denied responsibility after Manus Island detention centre guards let in a mob of locals, resulting in an asylum seeker being shot and dozens more injured. Injuries included slit throats, machete wounds and eyes hanging from sockets.
886. Chose not to mention a $882 million payout to News Corp. when outlining a $16.8 billion budget black hole. The payout was the single biggest item in the black hole.
887. Annoyed the Navy by having the immigration minister tour naval bases like a defence minister would.
888. Promised to continue with their NBN plan even if a cost-benefit analysis (which is yet to be done) shows it does not give a worthwhile return on investment.
889. Chose a climate change denier to lead a review of the renewable energy target.
890. Denied any link between droughts and climate change.
891. Spent $4.3 million on market research to gauge public opinion on social media and other outlets about government policies.
892. Proposed greater government control over the internet, including the power to order ISPs to block specific sites.
893. Granted the Environment Minister retrospective legal immunity against court challenges alleging he failed to consider expert environmental advice before approving damaging mining projects. i.e. They are undermining the Rule of Law and legislating to allow the Environment Minister to literally ignore the environment.
894. Exempted Western Australia from federal laws protecting endangered species to allow a shark cull, despite evidence culls do not reduce the frequency of attacks on humans.
895. Spread propaganda to potential asylum seekers which deliberately make Australia look like a villainous, incompassionate country. The propaganda completely ignores the violence, torture, rape and persecution that causes people to seek asylum.
896. Disbanded an asylum seeker health panel of 12 experts from a range of fields, replacing it with one military surgeon. The government has refused to comment on the matter.
897. Alleged that Edward Snowden endangered lives and claimed that Australia does not need any surveillance reform.
898. Denied any wrongdoing after a government aid married to the head of a junk food lobby pulled down a government website providing simplified nutritional information within hours of its launch.
899. Cut 500 jobs from the Australian Tax Office.
900. Violated Youtube's policies regarding deceptive content, resulting in the suspension of Abbott's whole channel.
901. Lied about NSW signing on with their independent schools deal.
902. Proposed the conversion of one quarter of public schools to independent schools.
903. Claimed "the age of entitlement is over" whilst continuing to give mining companies billions of dollars of subsidies and tax concessions.
904. Lied about the working conditions at SPC factories to justify declining financial assistance.
905. Arbitrarily denied many asylum seekers the right to a lawyer during the interviews where they make their asylum claim.
906. Withheld asylum seeker arrival numbers to avoid being a "shipping news service for people smugglers", despite literally advertising those same numbers on a billboard while in opposition.
907. Dismissed out of hand serious allegations that navy personnel assaulted asylum seekers, without interviewing the asylum seekers who made the claims.
908. Embarrassed Australia on the world stage by oversimplifying the Syrian conflict as "goodies vs baddies".
909. Called Edward Snowden a traitor.
910. Criticised the ABC because they are not biased towards the Government.
911. Accepted a claim for asylum not because of the merit of the claim but because Cricket Australia wanted the man in their team.
912. Violated international conventions by criticising Labor on the Global stage.
913. Stole crucial evidence from an Australian lawyer representing East Timor in an international tribunal against Australia relating to our illegal spying on East Timor's oil deal.
914. Shut down the 113 year-old Australian Valuation Office, thereby making 200 jobs disappear.
915. Provoked Indonesia so much that they put their air force on standby at the border.
916. Crossed into Indonesian waters without authorisation again, then abandoned a boat without enough fuel to get to shore, forcing asylum seekers to swim for an hour to get to shore.
917. Defeated moves to cease the recital of the (Christian) Lord's prayer at the start of each sitting day of (secular) federal parliament.
918. Voted against changing superannuation laws to require fund chairpersons and at least one third of directors to be independent (from the licensee) and would require them to disclose conflicts of interest.
919. Cut all funding from all international environmental programs.
920. Closed mainland detention centres and moves detainees offshore, citing budget savings as the motivation, even though offshore processing costing almost twice as much as onshore processing.
921. Authorised the Navy to fire over the bows of asylum seeker boats.
922. Refused to comment on 4 attempted suicides, hunger strikes and many self harm attempts happening simultaneously in detention centres.
923. Exempted Navy personnel of workplace safety obligations to treat asylum seekers safely, and gave them legal immunity for criminal acts which are committed by order of the government.
924. Rewrote the school curriculum to make it more right wing. The previous curriculum was developed over many years with extensive consultation. The new curriculum is being written by two people. One thinks "abos" are "human rubbish tips", called a sexual assault victim a "worthless slut", and laments that Australia has too many "mussies" and "chinky-poos". The other has questioned whether migrants and women are disadvantaged, and suggested homosexuality is "unnatural".
925. Refused to respond to questions from the United Nations about boat tow-backs.
926. Likened our humanitarian immigration program to war.
927. Directed that asylum seeker families shall be given the lowest priority for processing, even those who've lived in Australia for years.
928. Spent over $120,000 on Kirribilli House, including $13,000 on an imported luxury rug, paid for by the taxpayer.
929. Endangered lives, committed maritime piracy and broke other international laws by turning around a boat whose passengers have the right to seek asylum in Australia. The government refused to comment on the matter. Lives were endangered as a result of this move, because the boat ran out of fuel and became stranded.
930. Tried to deport a gay refugee to Pakistan, where he would be imprisoned for life for his sexuality. In doing so the government would have committed human rights abuse by violating the principle of non-refoulement. The man has never even lived in Pakistan before.
931. Threatened to withhold food from families if children don't stand still for 6 hours per day queuing for food. The food is sometimes served with hands not utensils.
932. Forced women to queue for a whole day just to get a tampon or pad, only to queue again when they need a fresh one, because they are supposedly a fire hazard. The government refused to comment.
933. Scrapped the Building Multicultural Communities Program. 400 community organizations will now miss out on the promised funding they have already budgeted for.
934. Cut all funding to Jewish Holocaust Centre ($7,700).
935. Tried to silence the media to stop them criticising the upcoming private jet deal for politicians.
936. Quietly reduced instant asset write-off tax breaks for small businesses despite championing themselves as pro-small-business.
937. Criticised the ABC for not "advancing Australia's broad and enduring interests in the Asian region", without actually accusing the ABC of any specific wrongdoing or poor judgement.
938. Scrapped the National Intercountry Adoption advisory Group then 2 months later created the interdepartmental working group on overseas adoption, a body which serves an identical purpose.
939. Stopped weekly press conferences on asylum seekers. Declined further comment on the matter.
940. Approved a 6.2% increase in health insurance premiums.
941. Deliberately omitted 23 questions asked of the immigration minister in a press conference. They have refused to comment further on why those questions were omitted.
942. Refused requests for medical treatment from a pregnant women in detention who subsequently had a miscarriage. She probably would have had a normal birth had she received the treatment she asked for. The government declined to comment further.
943. Broke an election promise to send a boat to monitor whaling by instead promising to only send an aircraft. The government subsequently broke that second promise too, allowing whalers to kill endangered whales without any Australian monitoring.
944. Broke an election promise by renaming the NDIS, making it "DisablityCare" and renaming the "launch" a "trial", thereby casting doubt on whether they will even commit to the scheme fully.
945. Scrapped the AusAid graduate program, requiring the sacking of the newest batch of graduates.
946. Axed the position of coordinator-general for remote indigenous services.
947. Approved the construction of gargantuan coal mines in the Galilee Basin, including one in the habitat of an endangered species. If all projects go ahead the emissions released from that coal annually will amount to 130% of what our entire nation currently emits annually.
948. Appointed Tim Wilson as human rights commissioner. He has personally advocated for the abolition of the human rights commission, and his new 6 figure salary is so large that the commission will have to cut education and anti-bullying programs to fund it.
949. Scrapped the Biodiversity fund.
950. Cut funding for the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples, a body of elected representatives of the indigenous people.
951. Handed $16 million to Cadbury, but refused to give subsidies to Holden, Qantas and SPC Ardmona. Cadbury is owned by a multinational firm whose profits rose by 64% to $74.9 million the year before. Coincidentally the Cadbury factory is located in a marginal electorate.
952. Axed the home energy saver scheme, which successfully helped struggling households cut down high electricity bills.
953. Dismantled the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Low Carbon Communities Program and the Caring for our Country Program.
954. Cut $43.1 Million in legal aid funding, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services, community legal services, the UNSW Indigenous Legal Centre and the Family Violence Prevention Legal Services.
955. Cut funding for the Energy Efficiency Program (which was compulsory for large electricity consumers).
956. Slashed all funding (over $10 million) from the Environmental Defender's Offices.
957. Broke an election promise by cutting $150 million from NSW hospitals.
958. Axed a scheme to improve the wages of aged care workers.
959. Scrapped the Wage Connect Program (a scheme which encouraged employers to hire long-term unemployed people).
960. Broke an election promise for a 25MBi/s National Broadband Network, and announced that it will cost more than they promised.
961. Broke an election promise to return to surplus by 2016-2017.
962. Proposed a special "code of conduct" for refugees living in Australia, despite the fact refugees commit fewer crimes per person than the national average.
963. Failed to take any action in response to Snowden's leaks showing that the Australian Government is helping the USA spy on all Australians.
964. Repealed poker machine laws designed to address gambling addiction.
965. Planned the unwinding of the World Heritage protection of Tasmanian forests despite opposition from the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania.
966. Changed the ministerial code of conduct so ministers no longer have to sell shares which create a conflict of interest.
967. Threatened queer detainees in PNG by saying they will be reported to local police if they engage in homosexual acts. Homosexuality is illegal in PNG. Such threats mean refugees fleeing persecution because of their sexual orientation are not able to make their asylum claim without fear of arrest. This counts as human rights abuse because it violates the principle of non-refoulement and strips people of their right to safely make a claim for asylum. The government has refused to comment further.
968. Terminated their deal with the Salvation Army to provide humanitarian assistance with those on Manus Island and Nauru. Consequently 300 people lost their job. The government has refused to comment further.
969. Disbanded IHAG, a group that provides advice about the health of asylum seeker detainees, which helps combat the rising rates of mental illness and self harm. The government has refused to comment further.
970. Approved the expansions for Abbott Point coal port, which requires dumping 3 million tonnes of dredge spoil onto the Great Barrier Reef, thereby threatening the Queensland's entire tourism industry and hospitality industry, and the reef's heritage status.
971. Removed the Murray Darling from the list of threatened ecological communities.
972. Signed a trade agreement with South Korea that allows foreign companies to sue the Australian government if it implements policies which adversely affect their business (e.g. for environmental or anti-sweatshop reasons).
973. Removed the requirement for the government to consider advice about the protection of endangered species when approving projects.
974. Detained innocent asylum seekers in conditions so horrible they amount to torture according to Amnesty International. 500ml of water per person per day, in a shadeless tropical island, with mental illness rates of over 30% and no soap despite rampant gastro.
975. Made Orwellian threats about cutting ABC funding because the government didn't like one of their stories, and because their quality of journalism is too high, thereby creating competition which threatens the corporate newspaper duopoly (who are now floundering because they didn't see the internet coming).
976. Incorrectly defined metadata as billing data only, when it actually includes email subject headings, location data, financial transaction details and more.
977. Called for privatisation of electricity networks, despite evidence showing it does not lower power bills.
978. Cut $3 billion in welfare for students, the elderly and families.
979. Scrapped the Advisory Panel on Positive Ageing, despite the fact our population is aging.
980. Secretly changed voting position at the UN regarding the Israel and Palestine issue without telling anyone.
981. Abandoned Gonski agreements with states and committed to 3 fewer years of Gonski than their pre-election promise.
982. Broke an election promise by scrapping the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia. The government spent $1 million on administrative costs to do so, even though the council only received $1.6 million in funding per year.
983. Cut $4.5 billion in foreign aid.
984. Tried to scrap the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corp, even though it provides $110 million per year in net revenue to the government.
985. Disbanded AusAid (the foreign aid body), merging the remainder into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
986. Ceased reporting births and clinical depression in detention centers. Downgraded self harm reports.
987. Forcefully separated a mother and her newborn child.
988. Cut $300 million from child care staff subsidies.
989. Introduced a bill which allows for unpaid union officials in elected roles to be jailed for up to 5 years and fined up to $340,000.
990. Cut $2.3 billion from higher education, and removed start-up scholarships (thereby significantly increasing the debt of the poorest students) and removed the 10% HECS discount for paying up-front.
991. Increased superannuation tax for the poor, and decreased it for the rich.
992. Tried to scrap the school kids tax concession (thereby increasing the cost of living for families by $16,000 per school child over their education).
993. Withdrawn all Commonwealth funding for Commonwealth supported places at University.
994. Scrapped the Australian Animals Welfare Advisory Committee, Commonwealth Firearms Advisory Council, International Legal Services Advisory Council, National Steering Committee on Corporate Wrongdoing, Antarctic Animal Ethics Committee, Advisory Panel on the Marketing in Australia of Infant Formula, High Speed Rail Advisory Group, Maritime Workforce Development Forum, Advisory Panel on Positive Ageing, Insurance Reform Advisory Group and National Housing Supply Council (all in one day).
995. Provided $2.2 million for miners and farmers to fight against native title claims.
996. Cut $435 million from the Renewable Energy Agency.
997. Overruled the ACT government when they legalised same sex marriage.
998. Scrapped the Social Inclusion Board (an anti-poverty advisory group).
999. Used Wikipedia as a source to support a claim which was actually contradicted by Wikipedia.
1000. Declared bushfires unrelated to climate change.
1001. Mandated that all public servants should incorrectly refer to boat arrivals as "illegal".
1002. Sent no one important to the international climate summit. The people who did go went in tee-shirts, giggled and were so insensitive and disrespectful that there was a walkout by other countries.
1003. Proposed privatising HECS.
1004. Tried to raise the debt ceiling by $200 billion.
1005. Moved to protect companies from boycotts against them (e.g. for using slave labour or destroying the environment) thereby undermining the foundation of capitalism by reducing consumer power and impeding a (little 'l') liberal free market.
1006. Kept Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations secret, even though it threatens the very foundations of our democracy. The leaked agreement would allow international companies to sue governments if their profits are diminished by environmental, indigenous land rights or anti-child-sweatshop laws. The TPP would give corporations many of the same rights that individuals have.
1007. Spent $10 million redeveloping the home ground of Australia's most profitable private sports club (the Eagles).
1008. Handed $5 million to an NRL team, which is already profitable, and happens to be owned by News Corp.
1009. Broke an election promise by trying to scrap the 2020 emissions target.
1010. Scrapped the Climate coalition.
1011. Cut 600 CSIRO staff.
1012. Donated $2 million worth of patrol boats to help Sri Lanka stop people fleeing proven genocide, human rights abuse, war crimes and extra judicial killings.
1013. Excused torture in Sri Lanka.
1014. Chose not to appoint a minister for science, for the first time in half a century.
1015. Appointed a man as minister for women who said "I don't support womens' causes".
1016. Chose a cabinet with 18 men and only 1 woman.

“I think you'd be best off voting Green.”

- Tony Abbott (election day, 2013)

There is an inflammatory image going viral currently titled "a clear choice", which links to this page. I did not create that image. I do not endorse that image. I don't know who created it, but it was not me. Most of the claims in that image do not appear on this page.

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