Senior investigative reporter at The Saturday Paper specializing in welfare policy, government accountability, and structural inequality. Morton combines data journalism with narrative storytelling to expose systemic failures in Australian public administration.
“Journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – but first it must understand how comfort is distributed.”
Morton’s career began at The Australian, where he pioneered coverage of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and aged care reforms. His 2018 memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt marked a turning point, blending personal narrative with structural critique of Australia’s class divides.
“The system isn’t broken – it was built this way. Our institutions calcify inequality through bureaucracy masquerading as benevolence.”
Since joining The Saturday Paper in 2019, Morton has focused on forensic examinations of public administration:
This 4,000-word investigation combined payroll data analysis with interviews from 43 casual academics across eight institutions. Morton revealed a 47:1 ratio between average vice-chancellor salaries and entry-level academic wages, while 78% of teaching staff worked without permanent contracts. The article prompted Senate inquiries into tertiary education funding models.
Morton’s ongoing coverage of the robodebt scandal has become the definitive account of this political failure. His 2024 piece traced the policy’s ideological origins to 1990s welfare reform debates, using cabinet documents obtained through five-year FOI battles. The work informed multiple class action lawsuits and earned Morton a Walkley Award nomination.
This international op-ed contrasted Australia’s welfare automation with Scandinavian models, arguing that means-testing algorithms inherently reproduce class biases. Morton drew parallels between Centrelink’s debt algorithms and predictive policing tools, sparking debates about ethical AI governance.
Morton prioritizes stories revealing how policy architectures – not individual failings – create societal harm. His 2023 series on aged care accreditation loopholes demonstrated how well-intentioned regulations enabled profit-driven neglect. Successful pitches should include:
- Internal government risk assessments
- Longitudinal data on policy outcomes
- First-person accounts from system designers
While Morton’s work relies on FOI documents and dataset analysis, he grounds findings in personal narratives. His award-winning NDIS coverage paired actuarial reports with disability advocates’ lived experiences. Pitches should identify:
- Statistical outliers in public datasets
- Communities developing grassroots policy alternatives
- Whistleblowers willing to contextualize bureaucratic documents
Morton’s work deliberately avoids simplistic “bad actor” framing. His robodebt reporting emphasized institutional cowardice over individual malice. Pitches focusing on personal corruption without systemic analysis will be rejected.
It’s business as usual in the university sector, where exorbitant executive pay, insecure jobs and exploitation of academic staff continue unabated
The Story of Robodebt: How Australia’s Government Weaponised Welfare
How Australia’s Welfare System Became a Tool of Punishment
At PressContact, we aim to help you discover the most relevant journalists for your PR efforts. If you're looking to pitch to more journalists who write on Politics, here are some other real estate journalist profiles you may find relevant:
