What's under this stone.

wuts.press is a small, independent publication for accountability journalism, written by one person. It takes one article at a time, in plain language, and traces every claim back to a primary source you can check for yourself.

Author

wuts.press is written and built by Macdara Ó Murchú, a software engineer based in Perth, Western Australia.

Why this exists

A lot of how public money gets spent is already on the public record: committee transcripts, audit appendices, statutory schedules. The trouble is that the material tends to be long, technical, and scattered across documents most of us never have a reason to open.

The idea here is to take a single example at a time, write it up in plain language, and link every figure back to where it came from, so anyone can follow it to the source and check it for themselves.

The homepage carries the current article. The archive keeps the earlier ones.

Sourcing standard

Every substantive claim links to a primary source. Submissions to parliamentary committees, audit office reports, Hansard transcripts, court filings, and regulator filings are preferred. Press reporting is treated as a pointer to the primary source, not as the source itself.

The sources block at the foot of every article is a standalone document. Any reader who copies a paragraph into their own work can copy the corresponding ledger row alongside it and the citation context will travel with it.

Confidence tiers

Three tiers calibrate any specific claim against its evidence. The tier is visually unambiguous within an article. A reader can scan a paragraph and know whether they are reading a documented fact, a calculation, or a scenario.

Tooling, honestly

Software assists the research: spreadsheets, document indexing, full-text search across PDF corpora, automated cross-referencing of figures across submissions. AI tools are used in the research stage to surface candidate passages and to draft summaries that are then verified line by line against the primary source. No claim appears in a published article on the strength of an AI summary alone. The byline is human. The accountability for any error is human.

Funding

wuts.press is independent. There's no advertising, and nothing here is paid for or placed.

Corrections

Errors are corrected at the foot of the article in a dated correction line and, where the error is material, in the body of the article with the original wording struck through. The ledger is updated to reflect any source change. No correction is silently retconned.

Tip-offs

If you have something worth looking into, encrypted tip-offs are welcome at the address on the contact page. Source confidentiality is guaranteed.