If last night's footage shocked you, you're not alone. Join your state Council of Civil Liberties who have been fighting police overreach and threats to our democracy for decades. More than anything, what the people in power fear most is an active citizenry. Posting isn't praxis. Joining is.

I'm taking psychic damage reading the abstracts for this week's Australasian Housing Researchers Conference.

As Tres Leches Summer comes to an end, everyone is getting ready for the Autumn of Baked Custards

PhD scholarship applications are open for a project investigating how public opinion is formed in online spaces, with a focus on the deliberative quality of discussions, social influence dynamics, and platform affordances and governance across major digital platforms. www.qut.edu.au/study/fees-a...

I'm sympathetic to the argument for not selling public land that can immediately be developed into public infrastructure or public housing (although I disagree where that's only a remote future congingency), but what public housing or amenity would you put an hour from Adelaide?

I'm trying to work out how a state government announcement today is getting a yield of only 400 homes out of a 6 hectare site with renders showing the development at 5 storeys. That seems remarkably low?

News came out today of serious security vulnerabilities in seven popular Australian ‘RentTech’ platforms, leaving millions of documents containing renter personal information exposed. Renters often have no choice but to use these apps in order to secure housing. I wrote about it for the Guardian:

A thought I had about people shifting to the far right electorally is that it can simultaneously true that the left and centre can lose voters over economic policy while the right won or retain them over social policy.

There’s a strange thinking loop — a delusion pessimism maybe or a desire for some kind of social conservative Marxism — where some leftists see the rise of the far right as a “wasted opportunity” for the left. There’s never any interrogation of who’s swinging or why.

Do applicants not realise its super obvious in the first two lines of a cover letter that they've used generative AI? Oh wow you've spat back our organisation's values as a three point list that's so original.

One of this year’s biggest elections that will fly under the radar is the United Workers Union elections. Union elections are pretty lowkey unless you’re a member, but UWU’s Queensland influence and their reputation as the laboratory of the union movement makes this important for everyone.

One Nation’s growth reminds me of a conversation I had with dad last week where he claimed that migrants were given free homes by the government. When I hit him with “no they’re not, I work in housing and here’s several websites agreeing with me” he countered with “that doesn’t matter I believe it”.

The news has been covering the attempting bombing at the Boorloo Invasion Day march responsibly imo — but what were all noticing is the lack of commentary that would usually bulk out the column inches and front pages after these events. The professional opinionhavers have distinctly no opinions.

I’m at a pub quiz where you physically cannot hear the host for the music and the speaker distortion and all the screens are broken. We’re all backwards engineering the questions from lip reading the teams standing physically next to the host.

There is a word for people who say ‘I’ve always been a Labor voter but now I’m voting One Nation’ and that word is liar

“Mouldy flats aren’t the only reason people leave. They leave because homes and rent are unaffordable. They leave because of long commutes. They leave because they can’t access the jobs and lifestyles they want.“

This might be a Certified Bubble Moment, but while this was shamefully the smallest Invasion Day rally I’ve been to, there’s also way way fewer ambient Australian flags or nationalist-flavoured events this weekend than I’ve seen before. Even driving through Logan today.

In what might be a grim portent of the economy or just some strange luck, someone pinched my prescription out of my shopping trolley while I was going through self checkout. I dunno if $20 worth of antiinflammatories is worth the effort.

Triple J Hottest 100 out tomorrow! Last year just 27 Aus songs made it. Lowest since 1994!! Why? – Streaming favours the USA Thankfully, DJ Albo is in the house and can turn this around! Thread on how.

Journalists covering local politics fall in this trap constantly. "Back to Basics" and even "The Three Rs: Roads Rates and Rubbish" are used by reactionary and far right actors because that's how they perceive of their own agenda.

The removal of a statue (to ‘pioneers’, say, or of a known perpetrator of massacre) is in the same order of ordinary heritage management and memory curation as the renaming of streets when the significance changes. There’s a reason there are so few streets in Eastern Europe named for Lenin and Marx.

Has anyone seen any good writing on the impact of generative AI tools on consultation processes - especially petitions?

Keen to protect the “unique Queenslander” house style, the state government will not remove blanket character zoning – despite calls by its own productivity commission to cut red tape and overhaul planning regulations to ease housing affordability.

Ten years ago if I'd have tweeted this, there'd be a non-zero chance some Gallery hack would ask this at a stand-up. I miss the Monoculture.

Like ur mate who's ok when he's on the sobes you just don't want to run into a seppo who's hitting the ballots

The Coalition fundamentally about Ministries or voting blocs in Parliament, it’s about the non-compete agreement. Until someone has one of the parties on the record promising to compete in each other’s allocated seats, the Coalition hasn’t “split”.

The Greens really should be putting up posters in the Australian capital cities saying "For a Home You Can Afford to Move Back To".

The Commission recommended 8 sensible fixes to our land use and planning system that would have massively boosted productivity and reduced housing costs. It's hard not to read the Government rejecting those as them only wanting to talk about the housing crisis when it's a cudgel to beat up unions.

Big Brisbane news! The Lactalis Pauls milk processing facility in South Brisbane has announced its closure in June this year, hot on the heels of the redevelopment of the Visy Glass and Heidelberg Hanson sites announced last year. These are the last big brownfield sites in Brisbane's inner city!

I posted some longer thoughts about @free-play.bsky.social, its future, and my seven year tenure on the board on LinkedIn.

So remember the other week when I was talking about arts funding..? Anyway, help us make the tough calls we're all putting off.

I've been working up a Theory that microblogging like this, Twitter and even Reddit is the midpoint between discoverability vs interactability and broadcast vs narrowcast which is why they've never been super popular but also why they're hard to live without for certain people/careers.

would honestly prefer it if the anti-upzoning people would just come out and say the sight of a townhouse makes them sick rather than gabbling on nonsensically about the lack of infrastructure in the most infrastructure-dense parts of the city thespinoff.co.nz/politics/19-...

Ban them. Crush their toys. Throw the whinging lot in jail. But enough about golf.

There’s never been a better time to rewatch the X-Files for the fifth time.

For fans of detective games and spooks, I just finished the Seance of Blake Manor and it might be a contender for my favourite game last year.

Like clockwork.

I just saw a brand new Lamborghini with the custom number plate STUNCH and green P plates

Extraordinary the Australian did this entire article about increasing risks of climate change while not mentioning climate change. #auspol #localgovernment

I'm super late to the party as usual but I've been listening to a lot of Amyl and the Sniffers and King Gizz this week. Please clap.

Not to make spurious predictions, but it seems likely that the Federal Government’s anti-extremism bill will be split into two or three component parts, with the Greens passing the firearms regulations and Labor then being able to negotiate even-handedly with Greens and the Coalition on the rest.

Creative Victoria announced their latest round of recurrent funding last month — and the only major funding opportunity for arts industry service organisations for the coming few years. And practically no money was awarded to experimental, digital or games arts.

I don't know how the new board — appointed by the SA Government who by all accounts have tripled down on this issue — will be committed or even able to rebuild trust with artists. No incumbent director. No ongoing board members. Appointees will be decided by those determined not to rebuild trust.

Infinite warfare on news sites that don't have a chronological feed page.

Having not reviewed the bill, I can’t speak for details. Having a civil libertarian streak, I’m usually pretty sceptical of more discretionary powers. But from a pure public policy perspective, a three week public window and a one week inquiry? Does no one remember needles in strawberries?

As a long term public servant, I sympathised Graeber's Utopia of Rules and I still think some of his critiques are really useful as a way to unpick the uniquely bureaucratic form of allocating resources. But Graeber's prescriptions always rubbed me the wrong way. And this essay articulates why.

I remember working in the bunker during the Black Summer Bushfires. Every moment was a new horror story filtering up from the firelines. Forest firefighters, most of whom are volunteers pulled off their day jobs to put their lives on the line, are some of the bravest people alive.

Turns out you can just like put malted milk powder in practically any dessert and it makes it better

God I love Carrd. This whole website was like four hours work.

Pray for me. I’m trying to make whipped ganache again.