Divisions in the House are performances. The function they serve is to create vision for social media and TV. The problem with inefficiency on one hand and ensuring voters' know the outcomes of votes on the other isn't to reform divisions – it's to have mandatory electronic voting on all motions.

JSCEM's interim report into the 2025 Federal Election is out and mainly deals with safety and voter experience at polling booths – recommending mandatory codes of conduct and volunteer registration systems and new political signage restrictions – but this is the one that jumped out. ABOUT TIME!

If the federal government actually wanted to help kids from low-SES backgrounds go to uni, they'd expand access to Youth Allowance to kids over 15 in low-income families and significantly increase the rate so kids didn't have to work to pay rent or support their family while they study.

Despite being our leanest year for public funding, gamemakers came through and helped Freeplay raise a RECORD amount of money for Parallels this year. Because of that, we've slashed ticket prices bigly and we're going to livestream the event for free to everyone!

I’m insanely late to the party but damn For All Mankind is stellar television.

I got my mum reassessed for MyAgedCare for the first time in five years and she got assessed for the highest tier of Support At Home and a bunch of other services. But the medium term outcome is me being out of pocket an extra $500 a month for her care – to a total of $7,500 a year.

I don't know how it happened by I've started doing the Nixon from Futurama "awoo" noise

Forty PATRIOTS joining us to wage WAR on the housing CRISIS by SACRIFICING their lunch break.

The Lead Paint Theory of Anti Gentrification holds that activists can prevent displacement and preserve housing affordability by preserving neighborhood disamenities and blocking investment in quality of life improvements like parks, bike lanes, and libraries. It does not work.

I’m used to Con Funk from nerd events but I’m at RACQ MotorFest today and there’s a whole distinct new funk for car nerds. I can only describe it as smoking a pack of black market cigarettes, soaked in mushroom soup made with the mould scraped off an armchair that hasn’t been cleaned in a decade.

🐸🔫 put the money in the bag

The Tele out today with a bold “ban election campaigning” stance

A common political archetype that’s critical to understanding the world today is the guy who gets so incensed at the idea of someone else getting something they don’t deserve that they think everyone’s scamming, so they should scam it too — then gets angry when their unfair benefit gets taken away.

I just wanted a bagel and found myself in the middle of the Brisbane Marathon. There’s a whole other world out there hey

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been posting much the last three months: My paper on the future of Australia’s games industry — and what the government can do to avoid another Crash wiping — is out today. drive.google.com/file/d/1Hnr_...

I was BULLIED into smiling in my new headshots I hope you’re all HAPPY

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...

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.

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’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.

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.

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)

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?

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.