What do car-parks have to do with Australia's housing crisis? More than you'd think. Mandatory parking rules are adding as much as $137,000 to the price of a typical two-bedroom apartment. Grattan’s new report, ‘Wasted space’, says it's time to axe the rules: grattan.edu.au/report/waste...

✦ PARALLELS 2026 — THE CALL-OUT IS HERE ✦ Making a game, and wanna yap about it at Parallels 2026? Now is the time to let us know! Speaker submissions close on the 5th of June. That’s THREE WEEKS. Don't overthink it. Just apply here: forms.gle/j8NkrdqMnwoH...

Excellent demolition of “affordable housing”. It’s a muddled no man’s land between market and social housing, achieving the goals of neither. It functions as a modest benefit to a tiny fraction of middle class families. It’s costly, inefficient and impedes geographic and occupational mobility.

Do you love ✨ V I D E O G A M E S ✨? Do you want to 🦘 L I V E A U S T R A L I A N S T O R I E S 🌆 ? Do you live to 🛜 S E N D A N D R E C I E V E E M A I L S 📨 ? I have just the thing for you to do literally right now while you're reading this! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Ben Aaronovitch’s Winter’s Gift. FMV point-and-click mystery.

The Budget Lockup is an eldritch secret ceremony during which the life essence of young journalists is drained to maintain Ross Gittins. Like the Emperor from W40K but with inflation instead of the warp

By tying the new infrastructure fund to meaningful statewide planning and construction reform, the Feds are upping the stakes for states to do what’s right and make housing legal and easy to build where people want to live. This is the first real piece of Commonwealth housing leadership.

Three years ago, we started a grassroots campaign to get the federal government to (basically) bribe states to fix their outdated planning laws. Today we won.

To interrogate why the current 12% is different to the static 10% of 2006-2019, we need to find out why 1) the vote has shifted from a high churn (>50% change) to disciplined (<15% change) 2) 25% have voted Green at some level in the last 10 years — but are no longer shifting back at the same rate

Making claims about voter transfers (ie “left is up 6%, right is down 5%, centre is down 1%, that means right and left voters are the same”) doesn’t make sense in Australia where we have compulsory voting. It sure as hell doesn’t make sense at a UK local gov election with 40% turnout.

Open tickets are bad strategy, bad politics and disenfranchise voters by increasing accidental informality. They’re the electoral equivalent of having a toddler tantrum.

Who could have told you that the history of anti-Labor parties in Australia since the 1920s is of fractious coalitions constantly having to renegotiate their existence between establishment, far right, and rural interests? Oh my god is that Judith Brett’s music

Reflecting on this for Brisbane, I miss rundown old West End, where there’d be a new bar or experimental new restaurant pop up every other week cos rent was cheap, there were ten places doing live music every Friday and every second rotten sharehouse was an ARI with an open yard for shows.

Putting aside the usual suspects, Fair Growth Thornbury is the interesting one here. Their spokesperson is concerned about “demographic change” but middle class families ARE the demographic change. Over the last 15 years Thornbury’s become uniformly older, wealthier, whiter and less likely to rent.

The UK having their alcoholic politicians discourse now is interesting in comparison to ours five years ago. The UK discourse is all about whether it’s appropriate to drink before voting. But very little about employers being drunk around their employees at their workplace.

There "always" being "a non-tolled alternative available for Brisbane motorists" is the reasons these toll roads aren't meeting their usage targets and why congestion in Brisbane remains high.

I'm down in Melbourne all next week talking arts policy, fundraising and democracy. Hit me up for a coffee!

This is just wild speculation but sure is convenient timing for when the Centre for Future Work is set to announce their new CEO...

In another life, I was a government lawyer administering government boards in Victoria. Here's a few insights into this story that might give it some context.

I hated serial killers until I got that first rush of my hands squeezing tighter and tighter around a helpless delicate neck

Hi everyone - Do you have to use your car because there is no public transport in your area? Do you have to do mutual obligations right now? Would you feel comfortable chatting for a story? Please message me here or email: [email protected]

I’ve got three hours to kill around Marrickville with some luggage before i go to the airport. As much as I’m happy sitting at Valentina’s drinking their bottomless coffee, I think they’ll get annoyed after the fifth cup

Few “tips and tricks” have markedly improved my life than @lucyxiv.boontavista.com’s advice to book the cheapest flight and immediately make the minimum bid in their business class upgrade offer. I’ve flown business both ways to Sydney for a whopping $430.

Today I walked from Campsie to Newtown, had a big lunch, rode a bike from Newtown to the CBD, went to fancy clothes shops were not allowed to have in Brisbane, bought some nice perfume, walked to Circular Quay, caught the ferry to Ryde, then walked to Parramatta. This is the perfect holiday 2 me.

Who gets a say? It’s one of the core questions in any democratic process. In our recent report on Australia’s democratic resilience, we make the case for broadening whose voices count in elections for our lowest level of government. A short thread 🧵 1/

For decades, Brisbane’s draw card was we were cheap, unpretentious and willing to take risks. But now we’re expensive, full of real estate agents and build things that appeal to real estate agents. I regret to inform you that Sydney is catching up. We cannot allow the Fuckwit Gap to close.

I regret to inform you I have become addicted to gilda.

Honestly outrageous Newtown doesn’t have any parfumeries [posts from 1890]

Sydney’s pretty nice. Could do with a couple million more apartments I reckon.

I’m written up twice in this report! Once for my paper arguing that political parties are central to social cohesion and trust in politics. And a second secret time from me constantly badgering Matt about low turnout among renters in local government elections.

The mid-10s proliferation of opeds and rageclicks had its issues, but I liked it more than now not being a single outlet someone with an interesting idea can spin out 800 words unless you already have hundreds of thousands of followers or happened to be hired as a staff columnists in the 90s.

I see how people end up with red string spidering around their apartment.

Hello I will be at ALT GAMES to discover what exactly IS a video game.

1. One of my biggest frustrations is the #auspol discourse about tax & spending ignores that regardless of what we do costs are going to increase because of structural factors (geopolitics, climate change & demography). The choice is how we distribute the cost, not whether we can avoid paying for it

I was doing some reseach for a project and came across a new campaign to oppose Brisbane's minimal More Homes Sooner reforms that would make it marginally easier to build townhouses and granny flats in about 14% of Brisbane's residential land. Note that noone's put their name to it.

When you have a Toyota as old as mine, you don’t necessarily have mechanical problems but things do get… strange. Right now a colony of ants and a family of spiders are fighting for control of my dash cluster.

While I tend to err on the side of strong action in emergencies, I think Albanese’s message was — while a bit odd — appropriate, well calibrated and delivered using a tool we, frankly, don’t use enough.

This story misses that the Liberals opposed the 1948 and 1984 increases – albeit for less populist reasons. It's interesting that the Teals are opposing for the same reasons the Liberals opposed in 1948 and 1984 (unelected staff are cheaper, democracy should be better not bigger, etc)

The Victorian Electoral Commission has responded to the Electoral Matters report on the upper house electoral system. They say they can implement removing GTV if removing GTV is passed by August. #springst

One can make a case that the emergence of age as the main predictor of partisan slant in the Anglosphere also means there is no base for right wing deliverism anymore in a demographic that disproportionately does not engage in labour and housing markets etc in a day to day way

My read is there's three things going on (putting aside the question of "do people like what we're selling" and "is what we're selling good")

Watching: Deadwood. (finally)

Turns out you can kinda just add malted milk powder to anything and instantly make it better.

There aren’t enough politicians.

I used to be a “positive rights” guy — but I soured on it was a political narrative because of how it flattens everything into a kind of unambitious utopianism, and precedes a slide into slopulism if you aren’t careful.

I’m going to Sydney for a week this month for the first time in like four years. What’s new? What’s good?

the good folks at @drwaus.bsky.social have launched an AI harms register! they're collecting stories from people in Australia who have experienced AI-related harms to track the way AI is causing harm, and to pressure the govt to act. submit here: digitalrightswatch.org.au/ai-harms-reg...

Good reporting from NPR on how U.S. federal agencies are simply buying people's private information and location data to use in investigations — without getting warrants.

Hot on the heels of the electoral commission removing First Nations electorate names and the government passing emergency legislation to change JCU's governing council to stop them renaming the university, the Courier Mail is now mounting a full-throated attack on First Nations naming and language.

Every political correspondent is breathlessly writing stories about the rise of Australian populism and the breakdown of every political norm, every party breaking, all that is solid melting into air, meanwhile the Greens are getting their twelve percent every time like an 808 beat