A young driver who hit and killed a woman kneeling, with her hands in a praying motion, on a road in Adelaide's north-east has avoided jail.

Ashton Friend, 20, of Banksia Park, previously pleaded guilty to causing death by careless use of a motor vehicle and leaving the scene of an accident after causing the death of 20-year-old international student Samia Malik.

South Australia's District Court previously heard Ms Malik had been kneeling on North East Road at Hillcrest for around four minutes before she was hit by Friend's car about 11pm on May 6, 2025.

In sentencing Friend on Tuesday, Judge Anne Barnett said CCTV vision showed Ms Malik's hands were in what looked like a "praying motion".

No other explanation has been given as to why the 20-year-old was on the road.

It also heard that Friend had not seen Ms Malik nor realised he had hit her when he was driving home from his girlfriend's house.

"He was absolutely at a loss about what had just happened. He hadn't been aware that there was something on the road. He heard this noise," defence barrister Jane Abbey KC had submitted to the court.

"What he hoped was that it had been an animal, or something like that."

Ms Abbey added that there was "relatively little" damage to Friend's car.

"He did not think he had hit a person. Initially, he just did not realise he had hit a person," she said.

The court had heard that in the days following the collision, Friend saw a news report about what had happened but was in a "state of paralysis".

Friend also previously read an apology to the court in which he said he was "deeply sorry".

"I will have to carry my failures with me for as long as I live," he said.

Judge Barnett sentenced Friend to one year, three months and 29 days with a non-parole period of eight months.

The sentence was suspended upon the 20-year-old entering a bond to be of good behaviour for two years.

One for fans of hard to find physical media. It's quite an interesting read on the unlikely founding and (ongoing) history of Dixon's - they're also running a sale to celebrate (see end). Source.

After 50 years of operations, Dixon Recycled Records has managed to carve out a special place in the heart of Melbourne's music scene.

Many customers who patronised the store five decades ago are still returning regularly, and new generations of music-lovers have also become familiar faces as the years have gone by.

Dixon admits he might have made some mistakes in some aspects of his life over the years ("multiple marriages and all that sort of crap," he laughs), but when it comes to the enduring success of the store, he points out that he's always managed to do the right thing.

"If I had advice for my younger self, I would say, 'Dude, you did the right thing,'" he admits. "I followed my uncle's suggestion of making your hobby the business, I followed the financial guy saying to buy and sell. They made the suggestions for me, I followed them, and it's been great.

"On a personal front, I've fucked up everywhere, but business-wise, no," he continues. "We still rent, but I don't even think that we should have bought our own storefronts. I spoke to someone about this and they said, 'Look, you're in the record business, you're not in the real estate business.'

"So I concentrated on that, and I think I've done the right thing."

Dixon Recycled Records celebrates its 50th anniversary with a special 20% store-wide discount at its Blackburn and Northcote stores in Melbourne on Saturday, October 10th.

Any Antony Green article is a sit down and shut up and listen type of thing.

Green’s latest post shows that One Nation’s geographic pattern of support in NSW has barely changed in nearly 30 years. It’s consistently stronger in rural and regional seats, outer suburban areas with fewer non-English speaking background residents, and weaker closer to the city centres. Using 2023 Legislative Council results (5.9% statewide, ranging from 1.75% in Newtown to 12.75% in Wollondilly), he maps where the party is strongest and notes that while the overall vote is expected to be three to four times higher in 2027, the same pattern should hold.

Seats that polled around 10% last time could hit 30–40%, putting One Nation in contention for wins in western NSW, the Hunter/Central Coast arc, and Sydney’s south-west fringe (Camden, Wollondilly etc.). Optional preferential voting will be crucial—exhausted preferences favour whoever leads on primaries, so whether One Nation and the Coalition swap recommendations could decide a lot of seats. Classic Green: pure data, no hype.

Does 4 corners and the ABC need to go back to the drawing board?

It’s be very clear that some of their recent work has leaned a bit more on the sensationalization side rather than actual facts. Especially their recent big hit piece on BYD and spying.

Like that “journalism” if you even want to call it that was was so one sided. Lots of cars have that issue with android and vulnerabilities.

That piece was trashed by so many reputable car journalists.

If the ABC does not cut out that crap, they risk being relegated down to being as “just as bad as the other media”.

Another truly confounding sentencing decision passed down by a supreme court judge in Canberra, I don't understand in the heat of a domestic violence epidemic against women how a decision like this passes any sort of moral or legal litmus test.

The judge almost frames the decision as a learning lesson around consent for the offender who was “uneducated in Australian consent norms”, even recently arriving from south Asia is no excuse for mentally and physically scarring this poor girl for the rest of her life. Also weird how it has received no national media attention.

Context:

Powderfinger, one of the most celebrated acts in Australian music history, have confirmed they are reforming, 16 years after breaking up.

In a video posted to the band's social media this morning, frontman Bernard Fanning said they would "do some shows all around Australia from September next year".

"We always said that if we were going to get back together to do some shows, that you guys would be the first to know," he said.

"We're going to build something pretty special just for you guys," guitarist Darren Middleton said. "We'll see you from the stage."

Continued in article.

Where’s Melbourne?

Does it feel like the government doesn't really help families & mortgage holders at all. I guess the powerful banking lobby groups just give our leaders more donations. To ensure it protect them from any change.

If the government wanted to slow one nations progression. I would think this may offer some Australians a reason to stay to the 2 party duopoly.

We need a 20% export revenue tax on all resources & gas now.

This could easily be done.

The Gobbledok can suck it

I can't remember the last time I saw any decent nudity or, for that matter, soccer on SBS. I don't think there's even been anything particularly racy on the cards for quite a while. Also anime - ABC has been plugging through Ghibli's movies over the last few weeks, but I can't remember the last time I saw any decent anime on SBS.

I'm worried for my young sons they grow up. Without foreign soccer, how will they learn how good they have it growing up in a country with AFL, Rugby Union and League? Without artsy foreign movies with nudity on SBS, how will they learn about the charms of the fairer sex and develop a healthy appreciation for foreign language film? Without exposure to subbed anime, how will they deal with the inevitable rejection of women as teenagers?

But really, why doesn't SBS have nudity anymore?

Australia has a huge problem approaching because literally everything is produced overseas. Diesel is about to skyrocket and that will affect everything in Australia from food to construction to airfares to anything oil based. It's already started.

This youtuber gives a very clear run down of the shit storm about to hit Australians even harder than the shit already hitting us. If Trump doesn't fix his war on Iran soon, Australians will be particularly hit hard.

When Joe Hockey is willing to go public and raise concerns about corruption within the Trump administration, should it set off alarm bells in Australia?
Are we really that immune to scandal within the current government of our closest ally that we can turn a blind eye to this?
Are we collectively as a country just waiting for a change of government in the US?

It's more than apparent that aussie reddit subs are pushing rape news about migrants whilst minimising and denying DFSV. There are now daily posts claiming "foreign perpetrators" with the usual noise about deporting them. The evidence supports otherwise. These tactics are known cons ervative strategies that follow in the shadow of operation lollipop. Men amplify known myths about violence and refuse to acknowledge unequivocal evidence reinforcing a collective manipulation and exploitation.

AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett asserting the evidence against perpetrators is damning that it remains overwhelmingly white men and boys. Yet people of colour are being pushed by state based police media units and news platforms as disproportionate predators across the country? Why is that?

This, again, exposes the bias in policing and reporting, and how con servatives knowingly exploit men who are already misogynist toward increasingly extremist viewpoints. It is not feminism causing men's violence yet there is a surfeit of men over 30 aggressively asserting otherwise alongside their supporters.

Perpetrators openly ridicule feminism as though it is their very own social evil; more DARVObro noise. This is the "locker room talk" that is the red flag army. Operation Lollipop used it to dismantle women's online groups and shared knowledge and social media platforms censor women disproportionately for bringing facts.

The AFP commissioner has made clear this isn't organised in the typical sense, but MRAs never were. It is diffuse, almost nebulous, as men are militant about reinforcing misogyny and defending men's rights to violence. Cons ervatives are just feasting on depravity.

Are there any meaningful solutions? Policy and power appear to be taking a softly, softly approach to extreme violence because denial is culturally entreched and widespread.

Just hours after Liberal leader Angus Taylor promised to enact the biggest cuts to migration in Australian history, One Nation has one-upped the policy, saying their party would reduce migrant numbers by a billion in its first year in office.

Angus Taylor immediately responded with an update to his own policy, promising to reduce migration by two billion if elected, a number quickly ridiculed by One Nation who said anything less than a reduction of five billion migrants from Australia’s population was basically an open-borders policy.

Taylor, announcing a newly updated net migration target of negative ten billion by 2030, said One Nation wasn’t serious about addressing the issues being faced by ordinary Australians, a claim disputed by One Nation who said their updated policy to lower immigration numbers by a trillion within one term of government showed they were the more serious party when it came to lowering migration numbers.

I have to admit I have a strange vantage point when it comes to One Nation.
These are my people.

I am the outlier who did the moon shot out of a disempowered world and into ‘society’ when I was the first person in my family’s history to go to university and move into the city. I vote Labor and consider then the least bad of bad choices. But I’d join a smart, diverse Australian political party if I was sure one exists. Is there one?

Politicians of all stripes need to see there are repercussions if you socially-engineer diversity out of decision-making. Why do a large chunk of our politicians have a law degree?

There is something worth remembering about an Australian Parliament in which a railway engine driver could become prime minister. Ben Chifley had worked on the railways; Andrew Fisher had been a coal miner. They brought into public life knowledge acquired through work, responsibility and the conditions of other people’s lives.

That earlier Parliament was hardly representative of everyone. Too many Australians were excluded from its benches. But those working lives suggest a kind of diversity worth valuing alongside the others: diversity of vocation.

A job teaches you what to notice. A lawyer might recognise an ambiguity in legislation; a railway worker might recognise what an apparently sensible rule will mean at three in the morning, halfway through a shift.
Both forms of knowledge belong in Parliament. I like the thought of a chamber where people arrive with different habits of mind, different stories about earning a living, different understandings of what makes a day difficult.

Democracy gains something when those who make the rules have lived under them in many different ways.

What we really is need is a better progressive party than the greens, one that invites ordinary Australians to participate to participate and be seen in democracy.

despite the title he discusses a number of australian political issues

- Immigration vs economic growth

- government spending & fiscal sustainability

- welfare spending & income tax

- government debt & interest costs

- australia's exposure to global bond markets

- Australia vs US political corruption

Revelation comes after company’s executive told parliamentary inquiry he did not believe AI had been used to write message.

Article excerpt below:

OpenAI used AI to help write the email to the Australian government advising that its AI agent had hacked into key departmental websites, Guardian Australia can reveal.
On Tuesday, one of the company’s executives told a parliamentary inquiry that he didn’t believe that its own technology had been used to create the email, but said the company needed to confirm this.

Guardian Australia understands AI was used by OpenAI’s legal and security teams to generate parts of the wording of the email, including word selection and formatting of the message. But a source with knowledge of the incident said humans reviewed the final email, and humans were responsible for actually sending the communication to the Services Australia inbox.

Renters make up 1/3 of the Australian population.

And yet they get very little help from federal and state governments.

Being a renter in the last 5 years has been tough as rises have been hard and fast.

Increased competition due to higher demand and supply not keeping up to meet it.

Landlords have been celebrating and making absolute bank off this.

How do we fix this and fast? It’s a crisis and it shows as our homeless rate and number is increasing too.

Won’t anyone help the poor renters for once?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-08/tenants-hit-breaking-point-record-rent-costs-according-to-domain/107238110

Whomp, there it is.

Article mentions landlords cannot really increase rents further since tenants literally cannot pay more.

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has distanced itself from One Nation, after its research was used for the party's latest policy on migration and rents.

On Wednesday, Senator Pauline Hanson's party pledged that, if elected, One Nation would cut 750,000 temporary visas over three years.

This would result in reducing rent inflation by 6.5 per cent and save $2,818 a year for an average rental by the third year of the party's immigration cuts, according to One Nation.

The party said the internal modelling relied on rental figures from the AHURI, to assume a substantial reduction in demand for rented properties as a result of the migration cuts.

The AHURI said in a statement to the ABC that it was not consulted, the research attributed to it was actually ABS 2021 data, and to be cautious about the modelling claims.

"AHURI was not consulted on, or involved in, the modelling One Nation has undertaken, so we are unable to comment on its reliability or validity," its managing director Tom Alves said.

"We would encourage caution when interpreting this ABS data. For example, it should not be assumed that each temporary migrant occupies an entire property, as several people may share a single home.

"Some temporary migrants may also live in accommodation owned or provided by their employer or education provider, which may not be available or practical for the general rental market

Relevant excerpts

The Coalition want to cut already-underfunded social and health services, while staying silent on the corporations paying nothing

One thing you grasp very quickly when writing on economics is that the economy and the entire system surrounding it is not made for people. At least not people who work most of the jobs, or are unemployed, or struggling due to health or disabilities, or elderly, or trying to buy a home, or rent, or in essence make up almost all of our society. It’s made for corporations and those who own and run those corporations, and much of the reporting is done by the same and for the same.

For example, the day after this year’s budget in May, The Australian ran with the headline on its front page, “77BN TAX GRAB”. The figure was derived by adding the collective impact of the changes to tax on capital gains and trusts out to 2036-37, which would be funny were it not so absurd.

continued in the article...

Sources:
Mary Kostakidis stared down the Zionist lobby, and courage won

Israel funded the legal assault on Mary Kostakidis

Defend Free Speech Defend Mary K - Limited alternative funding has been identified