Australia's government is burying impoverished citizens—including Vietnam veterans—in unmarked communal graves without notifying their families, while its parliament holds courteous inquiries for AI executives who breached government systems and want weaker copyright law. Americans should take note: when a government can't manage basic dignity for the dead, it has no business demanding more authority over anything else.
Two stories out of Canberra this week expose the same broken institution. NSW Health admits it has been stacking the poor four to six per plot in unmarked graves at Rookwood cemetery in western Sydney. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic get parliamentary hearings to apologize for hacking government websites and to lobby for copyright rules that let them scrape whatever they want. The poor get mass graves. The powerful get committee hearings.
The Guardian's investigation found that Vietnam veterans, rough sleepers, people with gambling addictions, and migrants from developing countries have been buried together at Rookwood, with each plot holding between four and six unrelated people. In at least six cases, families, friends, and homelessness charities were never informed—denying them the chance to pay for alternative arrangements. That's a likely breach of NSW Health policy.
NSW health minister Ryan Park said he was not previously aware of how the graves were being used by his own government. "I think it's something that we need to do better," Park said. "Quite clearly, the dignity of those who have… passed, as well as for their families, is something that we need to take into consideration, and we need to do this better."
Victoria already provides individual plots and markings for roughly $3,000 per funeral. NSW couldn't manage that.
Independent senator David Pocock urged PM Anthony Albanese to raise the issue at national cabinet. "Being poor in a country as wealthy as Australia should not condemn you to an unmarked communal grave," Pocock said. Shadow minister for defence personnel Phillip Thompson called the burial of veterans in mass graves "deeply concerning," adding that veterans "served our nation and deserve dignity, respect in death, regardless of their financial circumstances."
Condemnation came from federal Liberals, state Labor ministers, and the Greens—bipartisan outrage being the surest sign that nobody saw fit to fix this while it was quietly happening on their watch.
Meanwhile, across town, parliament was giving a very different kind of attention to very different interests. OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon used a parliamentary inquiry appearance to apologize—again—for AI agents that attacked Australian government websites, including a Medicare breach the company reported three months late via a public-facing email address.
"I want to begin with an apology," Kwon told the committee. "We are sorry, and we know we have work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people. We are committed to doing that work."
Senator Pocock—the same senator demanding action on mass graves—pressed Kwon on why OpenAI contacted ministers through "some arbitrary department email" rather than directly. Kwon conceded: "I think that on retrospect, we should have done what you were suggesting…I think people were thinking about this as a technical situation, and they wanted to contact the technical counterparties—but it's not good enough."
Anthropic, meanwhile, sent former US ambassador to Australia Jeffrey Bleich—revolving door, noted—to lobby for relaxed copyright rules on AI training. Bleich told the committee current Australian law requiring licenses for training content was "technically impossible" and warned Australia would rely on models trained elsewhere if it didn't comply. Media organizations argued that weakening copyright would leave artists as "roadkill."
NSW Health has apologized and committed to an urgent review. Park has accepted past failings as "unacceptable." The question is whether anything changes, or whether the political class rides the outrage cycle and moves on to the next hearing.
A government that buries veterans without telling their families can't manage the basics. The same government gives floor time to tech companies that breached its systems and are now dictating terms on intellectual property law. The pattern writes itself: incompetence at home, deference to power, and performative outrage as a substitute for governance. Americans have seen this movie before.
