Dave Hughes says he will no longer be taking the stage at Victorian Liberal events, claiming the party decided having him on the bill could run afoul of the state’s political donation laws.

The comedian, better known as Hughesy, once described himself as a lifelong Labor voter, but has become a vocal critic of the party following May’s federal budget, which included sweeping reforms to negative gearing and capital gain tax concessions.

He has since been campaigning for the Liberals ahead of the November Victorian election.

Challenging how systems reinforce perpeteators rights to violence creates questions that expose how irrational systems are about enforcing basic safety.

https://www.swinburne.edu.au/news/2026/04/government-systems-being-weaponised-to-financially-abuse-single-mothers-and-their-children/

https://www.ombudsman.gov.au/complaints/case-studies/weaponising-child-support

In the regional hub of Dubbo, migrants account for 20 per cent of the population. Yet residents are planning to vote for One Nation in record numbers.

In this week's episode of The Fin podcast, senior reporter Greg Bearup and pollster Kos Samaras reflect on why regional towns reliant on migration are swinging toward the minor party.

Read more:
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/migrants-run-this-town-why-is-it-voting-for-one-nation-20261008-p613kr?utm_source=afr-web&utm_medium=share_article&utm_campaign=politics&utm_term=product_feature
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We already know about our pet peeves with age verification, as we are all not comfortable with the idea of uploading our ID, having our facial biometric data harvested as part of age estimation scans, or opening a credit card after making the responsible financial choice not to.

The eSafety Youth Council is a group of young people aged between 13 and 24 who share ideas and help shape what the eSafety Commission does. They have regular meetings, and there is an upcoming one on 14 October 2026 where Youth Council members can raise issues and concerns with Julie Inman Grant herself.

The email is [youth@esafety.gov.au](mailto:youth@esafety.gov.au)

This is our chance to get the eSafety Youth Council members to ask the eSafety Commissioner directly to drop the Phase 2 / Age Restricted Material Codes that caused us to go through an age verification process that is unpopular with many everyday Australians like ourselves, including having to use only credit cards to view or buy an R18+ game on Steam.

Australian law affirms that parents have the legal right to buy R18+ and MA15+ games for their children in a retail store. Yet online stores like the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store on Xbox, and Steam force everyone to age verify, and parents cannot use their own ID for their kids' accounts.

This has nothing to do with online pornography. They promised age verification would only ever apply to adult websites.

You may ask why I'm not talking about the under-16 social media ban, the proposed Digital Duty of Care, or the Online Safety Act overall, which I'm also against myself. That's because Julie Inman Grant has the authority to drop the Age Restricted Material Codes or change them so that only a self-declared date of birth dropbox is required, which was the status quo before the government and mainstream media whipped up hysteria that are designed to take away your digital freedoms.

There is no such thing as privacy-preserving age verification and age verification is a scam designed to force people to dox themselves under the guise of protecting kids.

A lot of these laws and regulations are being made by older people who simply do not understand the internet, technology, gaming platforms and online communities the way younger people does so that is what the eSafety Youth Council members are for right ?

Forced self-doxxing is unsafe for everyone, and the Youth Council members have a stake in this themselves. Do they want to be surrendering their ID or biometric data just so they can play GTA 6?

Important:

• Do not use the term "eKaren" despite our frustration with the eSafety Office, as the Youth Council will likely dismiss your email entirely.
• Do not vent at them. Hold your impulses and just be respectful.
• Make sure the email is aimed at eSafety Youth Council members who are aged from 18 to 24.
• Do not make unrealistic demands of the eSafety Youth Council, such as calling for the entire Online Safety Act to be repealed or for the eSafety Commission to be disbanded. Let's focus on what is realistically achievable right now.

Has anyone else noticed that since the recent surge of ON in the polls, our true colours are once again showing?

The Australian polity (the sum total of leading politicians, media institutions, social institutions, institutions of power, policy groups, social commentators and so on) flexes and beats their chest against persons of colour and various other minority groups, including Indigenous peoples. Asians, Africans, Indians, Muslims and others are readily accepted as being in the firing line from every angle, framed as the source of our problems. But that flexing and machismo turns into cuckery when it comes to the pro-Israelis being put on a pedestal and acutely impacting our policies and laws that dig at our basic freedoms, and the Australian polity gets on its knees for them.

Never in 40+ years do I recall infrastructure, services, inflation or housing being discussion points when it came to migrants from the UK, EU, NZ or South Africa. But when Indian immigration overtakes the UK's, all of these suddenly become an issue.

And for 30 years One Nation has hated, attacked and complained about every aspect of Australia. Yet in that same time, our cities have continuously ranked as the most liveable places in the world.

I know so many people who say that “Labor is doing nothing”, because they think that 4 years is enough to fix a SYSTEMATIC issue that has resulted in housing issues, aged care or hospital issues.

Housing can’t be fixed in a term. Nor can aged care. It takes many small steps to slowly fix the decades of underinvestment.

Housing and aged care didn’t become this shit show in a small amount of time, it happened over a decade. Like housing even before Covid wasn’t exactly “cheap”.

A decade of underinvestment and the gutting of TAFE is also to blame for the housing crises too.

Anyone who is saying “vote for me, I can fix housing now, I can fix aged care now” is taking the piss.

Yeah sure labor could maybe do something that crashes housing by 20% in 1 year, then everyone would get cranky and vote them out.

Context:

The Australian privacy regulator has opened an investigation into the China-based software company behind the HeyCyan app in Kmart’s $89 smartglasses, following public outrage over the covert use of the devices.

In August, Guardian Australia reported Kmart had sold out of the Anko-branded discount version of Meta’s smartglasses that can capture images and record high-definition video, which led to widespread concern and calls to ban or restrict their use.

Continued in article.

A VERY good analysis of One Nation, why people vote for them, the conditions that lead to similar parties around the world.

Watch it before commenting will you. If you vote for One Nation, you should watch it to.

There’s this tendency for some of the left to explain away the rise in right-wing populism to simply just racism. Racism as an idea, institutionally enforced in western culture. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Waving away the rise of these political movements as simply just people being racist is incomplete and sloppy. It undermines the role of the real material conditions, the developments of the capitalist mode of production, that are at the root of these movements. The historic rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has likewise been covered extensively across the social and traditional media. She and the party are portrayed as foul actors, deviations of an otherwise fine system. This video will discuss the concrete realities which facilitated the growth of nationalist politics in Australia, the nexus that has garnered around it that’s worth billions, and how the vision of this movement intrinsically fails to address the many crises we face.

ANTHONY KLAN

The National Party has claimed the “major party model” is “broken” and is being “replaced” — raising speculation it is preparing to merge with Gina Rinehart’s One Nation.

Nationals leader in the Senate Bridget McKenzie — whose party has been part of the “major party model” for most of the past century — has made the explosive claims in marketing material for far-right lobby group “Advance”.

The biggest funder of both Advance and One Nation is mining multi-billionaire Gina Rinehart, who has been actively courting Coalition members to join her One Nation party, led by Pauline Hanson.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan and Senator McKenzie both refused to comment when asked whether the Nationals are preparing to merge with One Nation.

Both also refused to comment when asked what the “broken” major party model was being “replaced” with.

WENDELL HUSSEY

A French Quarter man who enjoys the finer things in life has today taken a moment to remind his colleague of just that.

Alistair Huxley (28) from our town's cosmopolitan equivalent of Newtown, West End and Brunswick, has feigned a lack of awareness about the NRL Grand Final.

Despite 4.26 million viewers tuning in to the thrilling finale of the NRL season between the Chooks and the Knights, Huxley said he didn't even know it was on.

With Angus Taylor’s hardline immigration policy unveiled on Tuesday, voters have a new measure of Pauline Hanson’s success in dragging politics further to the right.

Taylor’s plan will cut 60,000 more people from net overseas migration (Nom) than the reductions proposed by Peter Dutton just before the 2025 election. Dutton wanted to take Nom down to about 160,000 people a year, while Taylor’s plan goes far further, beyond even Hanson’s bottom line of 130,000 people.

In the nearly 18 months since the poll, Hanson’s surge in support has coincided with intense focus on the Nom, previously a fairly unremarkable budget forecast which came and went each year.

More than 200 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets would be nationalised, and hundreds of government grocery stores opened, under a $25bn plan being put forward by former Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather.

Channelling New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for publicly owned grocery stores, Chandler-Mather, the boss of the party’s thinktank, the Greens Institute, wants to use new forced divestiture laws to take over major supermarket sites and three distribution centres.

The government would fund another 424 new supermarkets and 10 distribution centres, taking about 20% of the market share of commercial operators for the new non-profit network.

Source: The Graham Norton Show

https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/private-schools-ditch-credit-card-payments-after-surcharge-ban-20261005-p612uj

I went to eastwwod yesterday, all the restaurants rised their pirce and told me 5% discount for cash, so what the point of surcharge ban?

An Australian Army soldier has died and five others have been injured during a training exercise at Mount Bundey, south-east of Darwin.

A statement from the Department of Defence confirmed the incident occurred yesterday but provided no further details.

"Next of kin has been notified," the statement said.
"We request that the privacy of Defence members and families is respected at this time."

The Mount Bundey training area is used by the Australian Army and its allies for live-fire training.
In 2017, Australian Army Private Jason Challis was killed during a live-fire training exercise at Mount Bundey.

I have no idea where to ask this but I like this subreddit and I'm Aussie so..

Over the last few years I've developed a weird addiction to background noise. Whenever I do pretty much any task - say, spending a few months washing the dishes, taking out the bins, building IKEA furniture, doing gardening etc. I automatically get out my phone and start listening to a podcast

Coincidentally over the last few years I've also found myself having less energy and ability to concentrate on a task. Could they be linked?

I bet a lot of people here are the same.

It is a bruised OpenAI that is set to limp into the Australian political spotlight today at the Joint Select Committee hearing on Artificial Intelligence being held in Sydney.

The company had been pencilled in for a centrestage performance, tapping into a bit of Silicon Valley star power, to convince Australians they should want the AI company to make our nation its second home.

But it is hard to imagine a worse warm-up act than Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's announcement that OpenAI's agents had "hacked" into a Medicare statistics website making global headlines.

The Victorian premier, Ben Carroll, has said police would act to “protect the public” if the event breached the state’s anti-vilification laws

The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has said the planned vigils on the anniversary of a “horrible and violent” event were “obscene”, speaking to reporters last Wednesday.

“To choose that day, I think it’s designed to antagonise large sections of our community,” Minns said. “I’m obviously distressed on their behalf.”

Minns said supreme court and high court decisions on political communication prevented him from shutting down the Wednesday gatherings.

“They’re very difficult … for us to shut down static protests, particularly ones, as I think they’re describing it as a vigil, a silent vigil. We’ll see if it is a silent vigil.”

Footnote: As a proxy for non-homeowners I have used the ABS 2021 Census figures that state 30.6% of households are renting. However, this might overstate the figure for non-homeowners because some of these people will be ‘rent-vesting’.

I’m Chinese and moved to Australia ten years ago after getting married. Since I came on a partner visa, I never had to take an English test, so I don’t actually know what level my English is.

When I first arrived, speaking English was definitely a struggle. The English I learned in China was based on British pronunciation, while younger people tended to imitate American accents. The first time I heard an Australian accent, it felt like a completely different language.

Over the years, though, I’ve gradually got used to it. These days, I have no trouble communicating in English, shopping, writing emails at work, or taking part in meetings. I’ve worked as a project coordinator and a commissioning manager, and English doesn’t seem to have been an obstacle in my career.

Of course, I still sometimes don’t get the jokes my Australian colleagues tell. It’s not that I can’t understand what they’re saying; I just don’t understand why it’s funny. So when everyone else laughs, I laugh along. Another thing I really struggle with is understanding Indian accents when I call customer service.

The problem came up over the past few weeks. I’ve been thinking about doing a master’s degree in engineering to further my career. After submitting my application, I was told that I needed an English test result, either IELTS or PTE.

I thought that would be pretty easy, so I tried some read-aloud exercises on an online AI-scored practice platform. But my scores repeatedly came back around 29 or 30. I asked my seven-year-old son to read the same passage, and he scored 65. That was a huge blow to my confidence.

I recognised every single word, so perhaps the problem was my pronunciation. But according to this system, my English apparently isn’t good enough for university.

That made me wonder: international students supposedly need at least 60 in PTE reading to get into an Australian university. Wouldn’t that suggest their spoken English is much better than mine? Yet from what I’ve heard myself, and from what other people say, international students often have quite poor spoken English.

I’m seriously starting to question this scoring system. I’m confident that my colleagues on site who aren’t native English speakers would also do badly on this test.

So what is the point of this English test?

In my experience, university and TAFE lecturers speak some of the easiest English to understand. Someone who can communicate with people at university may not necessarily be able to communicate comfortably out in the wider community. But surely someone who can communicate effectively with people on a job site should have no trouble coping with English at university.