Something goes wrong. Money disappears, or a project blows out, or a claim turns
out not to be true. And there is always a moment, somewhere back down the line,
where a person was supposed to be checking.
Audit This finds that moment.
One story an episode, followed all the way to the end of it. Frauds, collapses,
cost blowouts, contracts, cover ups, and the occasional thing that everybody
accepted as true because nobody went and looked.
Every episode is built from the record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks,
corruption commission findings, Hansard, auditor general reports, annual reports,
contracts, and the documents that were sitting in plain sight the whole time.
No speculation. No dramatisation. No guessing at what anyone was thinking. Just
the paperwork, read out loud, in the order it happened.
Send us Fan Mail A whiteboard with no record. A spreadsheet colour-coded by party. A briefing note that said to get the cash out the door "in the most politically advantageous way". For 33 years, auditors have found grant money leaning towards the seats that mattered, under governments of both sides. Billions of dollars. And not one person has ever been charged with pork barrelling, because federally there is no specific offence. This episode explains how pork barrelling works, walks throug...
19 Oct 2026
Nobody Said How Much
Send us Fan Mail Victoria paid out $11 billion in COVID-19 business grants, on the integrity commission's own count. In November 2021 the department's own integrity team put a number on how much of it had gone to businesses that should never have been eligible. The number was $251,965,500. The report that reached the Minister four months later said $18.31 million. At seven minutes past two on the afternoon of 30 November 2021, the line carrying the larger figure came out of the draft. The ...
11 Oct 2026
Subject to Government Approval
Send us Fan Mail Australia planned twelve submarines. By Defence's own count it spent $3.4 billion on the program, and it never got a submarine. Twenty days before the cancellation, the head of the program emailed the Secretary of Defence. The largest defence project the country had ever taken on was still inside its original cost estimate, though it would need some of its contingency. On the morning of 16 September 2021, Australia announced it would be getting nuclear-powered submarines. Th...
6 Oct 2026
NDIS Fraud: The Ten Worst Cases and Who Caught Them
Send us Fan Mail Last financial year, the NDIS paid out $51.5 billion. Before paying, the agency's staff checked about 0.4 per cent of the money by hand. Four dollars in every thousand. This episode follows the National Disability Insurance Scheme from the promise of 2013 to the reset of 2026: the open front door, the 280,000 providers paid in a single quarter, the price limits that became the price, and the agency's own description of its fraud controls, "catastrophically weak". Then it cou...
4 Oct 2026
The File Said So
Send us Fan Mail Two private colleges in Melbourne reported lessons that were never taught, and Victoria paid for every hour of them. On the 5th of July 2015, the timetable at one of them listed six classes. The footage from that day shows one person entering the building. He was there to clean it. This episode is about what happens when public money is released by a document rather than by a person who has seen the thing the document describes. The state paid on hours the provider reported...
29 Sept 2026
Taken To Be
Send us Fan Mail Under one line of federal law, a spare room in Canberra counts as a hotel. Not like a hotel. "Taken to be commercial accommodation", whether it is or not. This episode reads the rules that decide what federal politicians are paid and what public money they can spend: the salary, the electorate allowance, the car, the travel allowance, the office budget's shopping list, and the authority that was built in 2017 to watch over the expenses. In 2015 the government announced a re...
24 Sept 2026
The Vast Majority
Send us Fan Mail In 2008, a new shape appeared on a map of New South Wales. A coal exploration area called Mount Penny, in the Bylong Valley. Years later, the minister responsible was asked, at a public inquiry, how he knew where to put it. He said he was pretty good at geography. When Mount Penny was granted, its boundary covered, in the corruption commission's own words, "the vast majority" of a cattle property a politically connected family had bought the year before, to retire on. And a...
22 Sept 2026
Free Because It Should Be
Send us Fan Mail Go and find your last payslip. There is a line on it you have almost certainly never checked. It says tax. Between 2014 and 2017 a payroll company in Sydney collected $141,291,923 in tax withheld from ordinary workers' pay. It kept $105,625,304 of it. Plutus Payroll advertised itself as free. It was free because the fee came out of the tax. Every worker got a payslip saying the tax had been paid. Fifteen people were sentenced. As at the date of this recording, the convicti...
14 Sept 2026
Two Thousand Children, None of Them Real
Send us Fan Mail Between January and July 2017, two family day care services in western Sydney looked after 2,132 children. They claimed 398,936 sessions of care. That is more than two and a half thousand sessions of childcare every working day, for seven months. In one month alone they enrolled more than 1,600 children, about three quarters of their entire book, in about four weeks. Not one session happened. Not one child was ever there. The Commonwealth paid $9,274,016. Three years earli...
10 Sept 2026
27 Million Dollars, Nobody Asked
Send us Fan Mail In 2011 a finance officer at Queensland Health sat down to do the most boring job in government. He found a payment he did not recognise, typed the vendor's name into a free government website, and eight seconds later he had uncovered the largest fraud in the state's history. Two and a half thousand kilometres away, a senior public servant in Western Australia had already been doing the same thing for three years. He would keep going for another eight. By the time anyone st...
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