I could feel something in my mouth, an uncomfortable taste. It started to make me cough and splutter. Some sort of gas or spray had been let off into the crowd, and panic began to set in at the Herzog rally at Town Hall Square.

They call it a square, but it really only has three sides you can leave from. Police had lined up shoulder to shoulder along George Street, another line across the steps down to Kent Street. Later, I saw footage of a police line literally chasing people down Bathurst Street. Those three streets are the three sides of this square.

So when the gas went off, a crowd of people who wanted nothing more than to get away from it found that the people supposedly there to keep them safe were holding them in place. I was lucky. I had my camera on my shoulder, and I passed the police line as ‘media’ without too much fuss. But most of the people inside had no idea what was happening or where they could go to get out safely.

I saw the police pulling people to the ground, punching people in the back of the head. One, two, three, five, nine times? Fists. Elbows. Knees. They pushed an elderly lady to the ground. She ended up in hospital that night with broken vertebrae…

The next morning, the premier stood in front of cameras and defended it all. He called it a “riot”. Said the short clips circulating online (of the police bashing his constituents) didn’t show the full context.

I was there. I had a camera. I saw the full context.

And then a few weeks ago, the NSW Court of Appeal struck down the laws used to justify that crackdown. Unanimously. Three judges found the laws were unconstitutional.

What. The. Fuck?

I shouldn’t swear; you’ve really got to be careful what you say these days. Some of us, at least. Because we have a media and a political class that will come down harder on an activist, an artist, an author for condemning state violence than they ever will on…say… a former prime minister who commends it.

A former prime minister who, as it happens, has been at this very festival, celebrating his latest work of fiction: Australia: A History.

He went on the radio the morning after the rally and said that the police deserved “a quiet commendation, not an investigation.” He wanted to see “tear gas and rubber bullets, if need be.” Because “these people”, he said, were “trying to intimidate the Australian community.”

We are the Australian community!

A few days after the rally, I was invited along to a healing ceremony at Addison Road Community Centre in Marrickville to try to shed some of the trauma that came from witnessing so much police brutality. We stood barefoot in a circle on the grass. There must have been more than a hundred of us. Strangers, mostly. Holding hands.

Auntie Lizzie, from the Blak Caucus, stood in the centre. Half joking, half not, she said something like: “Now you know what it’s like to be a Blackfulla. But for us, it’s every day.”

And she’s right. What we felt for one afternoon, the fists and the fear… for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been the rule, not the exception, since the earliest days of colonisation. Of invasion.

We might not always be the target of state violence, but that doesn’t mean the state is on our side. It just means it hasn’t needed to turn on us yet.

The reality is that the political system of Australia, the institutions we’ve built, are founded on dispossession. On genocide. On incalculable harm. In contravention of the sovereignty of hundreds of clans and nations. We have to be honest about this.

It is a system built on exploitation. One that seeks to concentrate power, resource and wealth in the hands of the few, to the increasing exclusion of everyone else. It doesn’t really matter how many well-intentioned, good people work inside of this system, because, as the saying goes, “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

A Prime Minister can come from public housing. He can carry that story all the way to the top job. But when he reaches that position of power, his job becomes to protect the system itself. Not the people he came from.

Power and profit. Not people and planet.

But a system built on endless growth cannot survive in a finite world. It’s really just a matter of physics! The collapse of this system isn’t the end of the world. The collapse of our ecosystems will be. And this system—the one we’re in—will collapse either way, because ultimately it is designed to destroy the very conditions it depends on to exist.

That doesn’t mean I think we should burn parliaments and institutions to the ground. But it does mean we have to come to terms with what they’re capable of.

So what do we do? I don’t have all the answers. But I know where I’ve stopped looking.

We won’t get honesty from leaders who can’t call what is clearly a genocide a genocide. Who continue to approve new coal and gas when the science screams “PLEASE, LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND!” Who co-opt the language of the working class, then celebrate the cops bashing them in the streets. Who take selfies with rapists and racists and fascists (usually in the form of one particular President), then have the nerve to tell survivors they’re on their side.

I’ve been to the halls of parliament, I’ve genuinely looked there for solutions. And I found far more lobbyists and burned-out staffers than good ideas. The answers won’t be found there. But we have no choice but to find them somewhere.

We have to build new systems. Democracies where the “common people” truly rule. Systems capable of surviving within the bounds of our physical, social, ecological, psychological, biological, atmospheric reality.

And if collapse came tomorrow, I think you know what you’d do. You’d get your people together. You’d grab your neighbours. You’d pool what you had, and you’d try to keep each other safe.

Or maybe you’d get into a punch on in Woolies over toilet paper.

It remains that the answer to avoiding collapse and surviving collapse is the same. We just have the extraordinary, rapidly closing luxury of being able to build those systems now, while the lights are still on.

But the current system has a ‘solve’ for this: its most powerful and perverse tool is disconnection. It disconnects us from each other, from the land. From the consequences of what it does in our name. Because a disconnected people can’t build something different, something better. Where extraction is replaced with reciprocity. Where exploitation is replaced with empathy. Where harm is replaced with healing.

Then again, this way of life is nothing new. On this very continent, people have been living this way for 65,000 years, in reciprocity with each other and with the land. That knowledge survives, and is carried and shared by First Nations people from north to south and east to west. And we need only to listen and to act on what we learn.

And we can act anywhere. In circles. In community centres, libraries, parks, pubs, universities and school halls. In rooms like this one.

A braver Australia already exists. It’s being built every day by communities who can’t afford to wait for permission. By people who will never be invited to speak on a stage like this.

Disconnection is how this system survives. Reconnection is how we survive beyond it.

So go on. Sit in a circle, hold hands with a stranger, tell the truth to yourself, to others, to power. And live.

I had a bad dream last night. There was Anthony Albanese in a smoking jacket, a cigar in one corner of his mouth and a smirk in the other, twirling a scotch on the rocks in his hand. “Difficult!” he declared, his word for women who refuse to stay silent in the face of abuse. The men in the room chuckled as the dulcet tones of my sleep tracker woke me. For a moment, I thought it was just a dream.

But then I remembered it was real. Only it wasn’t some smoke-filled gentlemen’s club, it was some equally stuffy Herald Sun event, and moments after describing former Australian of the Year, advocate for children and survivor of child sexual abuse, Grace Tame as “difficult,” he went on to describe a man found liable for rape by a court, and facing accusations of child sexual abuse himself, as “President.”

[Hold for laughter]

Anthony Albanese did indeed hold for laughter, and the room gave him what he so desperately craves, APPROVAL! (from his right). Gawd, he is so fucking desperate to be liked by people who despise him that he’ll go ahead and haze himself.

This is the world we live in. A former prince, accused of child sexual abuse, gets “Grub.” A felon rapist, also accused of child sexual abuse, gets “President.” The abusers get a wink, and the survivor gets the word misogynists have always used to describe women who won’t comply.

If there is one lesson any sane world leader should be drawing from the Epstein files, it’s that women should be believed. Everything the survivors alleged about Epstein and his cabal of powerful ‘associates’ is true. And when the history of this moment is written, it will be written by those of us who remember who kissed the ring of the Epstein class and who stood with the survivors. Albanese, on that stage, in his invisible smoking jacket, made it clear (yet again) which side he’s on.

Grace Tame didn’t choose to be sexually abused as a child by her school teacher. But she chose to do everything she could to ensure it didn’t happen to other children, too. That fight literally changed Australian law. It gave survivors a voice where they had been silenced before. Her defining strength is more than surviving; she survived and refused to be silenced.

Grace Tame wasn’t awarded Australian of the Year for being polite and agreeable. She is celebrated as one of the great Australians because she is ungovernable in the face of systems that depend on suppression. Which makes it all the more grotesque that the political and media class continue to attack her and attempt to do exactly that.

But they never wanted her to keep going. They wanted a neat little moment that showed they were listening. A cute little happy snap pinned to the national fridge for twelve months, then quietly replaced. Grace didn’t get that memo, although they did get a couple of great photos for the fridge:

Instead of complying, she kept connecting the dots. The systems protecting predators are the same systems silencing dissent. And if you actually care about children, you can’t carve out exceptions for the ones being bombed and starved because their suffering is geopolitically or culturally inconvenient.

As a wise woman once said:

“You can buy bombs. You can buy politicians. But you cannot buy the truth. You cannot buy our compassion or our love. That is what we have. Those are our weapons.”

In that same speech, that same woman (Grace Tame ICYMI) also used the word “intifada.” A word that literally means ‘shaking off’ in Arabic. The call to “globalise the intifada” means to shake off colonial oppressors. But the people conducting that oppression apparently get to decide it is a call for violence against them, and the media just nods along. The people dropping the bombs get to define which words are violent. The people doing the colonising get to tell the colonised what words in their own language actually mean. And the Australian media gets to tell a woman who has spent her adult life fighting violence that she is, in fact, the violent one. Come off it.

And where was Albanese in all of this? Not defending her. Not correcting the record. Waiting. Reading the room (Murdoch’s room), then agreeing to their terms, as though they won’t plaster photos of him pulling a rude head on the front cover of their rags the moment he implements a policy they don’t like. He is so desperate for Newscorp’s approval that he’ll sit on their set and shit-talk an Australian of the Year on the off chance his bully might lay off giving him wedgies for a few days.

And the tragedy (in the Shakespearean sense) is that he was once one of us. He (as he likes to remind us, ad nauseam) grew up in public housing, after all. He joined the supposed party of the workers. He marched for a free Palestine. Once upon a time, Anthony Albanese was someone who broke the silence with a megaphone in hand. But as his proximity to power grew, his willingness to speak truth to it waned. He clambered his way to the top job and shed each value, each belief, each conviction on the way up. Now he presides over a country marred by such growing inequality that soon it will be impossible for a boy from public housing to become Prime Minister.

Mostly just because there will be no public housing to speak of.

He could have used his massive mandate to go down as a PM of great reform. In a few decades, people might have happily drunk a beer with his face on it. Instead, he’ll go down as a PM with the moral integrity of an empty tinny…

The world is run by abusers and the people who protect them. We have survivors to thank for proving that, for speaking up when it cost them everything, for speaking truth when every institution told them they were liars. The least we owe them is to heed their voices. The most we owe them is to raise ours alongside theirs and stop the abuse entirely.

Power requires silence > silence enables abuse > abuse concentrates power.

Survivors who speak up challenge that cycle. That’s what makes them dangerous, not to the public, but to the powerful, and that’s why their retaliation is so reliable. Sometimes it comes as a meek little word on a stage, “Difficult.” Sometimes it comes as legislation designed to criminalise the act of speaking up at all. Sometimes it comes as pepper spray in the eyes, or a baton across the spine, or a bullet to the head or a bomb raining from the sky. Silence is the condition on which their power depends, and every voice that speaks truth to that power is a threat.

Grace told us what our weapons are, and they’ve been coming for her ever since. But as she said, our weapons can’t be bought, and they don’t require permission. But they do require being courageous, the adjective Albanese should have used to describe Grace. Damn, imagine if we had a courageous PM for once…

To finish, I’ll borrow the words of a random TikTok comment I saw with 18.6k likes: “Grace deserves another Australian of the Year for always standing on business.”

She does.

The rest of us need to start standing on it too.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and we don’t even need a prescription or a number to get it. Just a few swipes on socials and you’ll get a hit for free. A quick little trip of longing for a time that never really existed.

Why is it so alluring? Is it the power we get to have over our fo…

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So, here’s the tea. A handful of trillion-dollar multinational corporations wrote algorithms using the same behavioural science as pokie machines to hook billions of us to pocket mirrors with more compute than the machines that landed men on the moon. Their lines of code learn what makes each of us angry, afraid, and addicted, then flood our feeds with …

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Buried well beneath the fold, under headlines about Tesla approving a $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk, Liberal party infighting, and sports drama, tucked under a tab marked “more news,” sat this headline: “Missing 1.5°C climate target is a moral failure, UN chief tells COP30 summit.”

It was just sitting there. The thing the world agreed would be ca…

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Last week, I (somewhat belatedly) launched Better Things Are Possible in Naarm/Melbourne at Think Forward Kiosk in Brunswick with comrades whose advocacy work I deeply respect: Tegan Lerm (co-founder of Project Planet and Build a Ballot) and Thomas Walker (CEO of Think Forward).

Tom pushed the desks aside, gathered whatever chairs he could find, and we a…

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Small…

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“I fight Tories, that’s what I do,” Albanese once proudly declared. Now he beams beside a man who makes Tories look like woke soy-boys. A rapist who shouldn’t be within 500 metres of a school assembly, let alone the UN General Assembly.

A fascist funding genocide and sending innocent people to foreign gulags, while building concentration camps in America…

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I wrote this chapter of Better Things Are Possible before Charlie Kirk’s murder. But the way his death is now being used to rally around Christo-fascist “traditional family values,” makes it feel particularly timely to share.

Better Things Are Possible, Chapter 15

While ‘not all men’ actively perpetuate the harmful behaviours it [patriarchy] breeds, we do…

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[An edit of a comment on an X post I found, which complained about “leftists creators” calling people fascists]

For as long as I've had a public profile (and long before Charlie Kirk's murder), I've received threats of violence, death threats, and messages telling me to kill myself. Violent rhetoric has always been the rule, not the exception, for anyone…

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And sure …

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It's been a big week of pinching. First, it was a pinch and a punch for the first of the month, and on the second, I was pinching myself. Yesterday was a day I've been dreaming about for almost two years. I spent the day visiting local Sydney bookstores, meeting the incredible staff, and signing copies of "Better Things Are Possible." Seeing my book sit…

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That 2% figure comes from the CIA World Factbook, which isn’t based on an actual headcount. The US Census Bureau made the projections in Aug 2023.

Their model assumed Gaza would keep growing at its normal pace of around 2% annually. No one plugged in "mass killing," "starvation," or "complete infrastructure collapse" as variables into the spreadsheet. Th…

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If migration really drove house prices, the two lines would move together.

During COVID, our population shrank by 88,000 people (↓ demand) while construction stayed relatively high (↑ supply). By basic supply and demand logic, homes should have gotten cheaper or at least stabilised. Instead, prices increased by 25%.

Then a few years later, migration hit r…

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Andrew Hastie (former SAS soldier, now Liberal MP) stood in front of a camera this week and said that Australians marching to stop a genocide were "importing hatred." That if we really want to "contest this stuff" we should "do it in the Middle East." This stuff? A genocide perpetrated by our so-called ally.

This, from a loyal servant of the military-ind…

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“Better Things Are Possible is a beacon of light in a dark political landscape.”

— Hannah Ferguson, author of Bite Back

📗 Better Things Are Possible is available here for pre-order.

What started as me condensing big issues into little videos quickly snowballed into something I never expected. My suddenly viral reels (20 million views and almost 1 million likes wtaf) took me from editing my bedroom to the couches of morning TV, the halls of Parliament, and (inevitably) into the rags of The Daily Mail.

In the decade prior, I had built a business and a career as a Creative Director, making short-form content for international brands. But as I got older, I started learning more about the injustices in the world. About the climate crisis. About how poorly our economic system was delivering for everyday people.

And I began to feel increasingly guilty about the role I was playing, effectively using my skills to help market a system I knew was doing immense harm. I had a growing urge to use what I’d learnt throughout my career for some kind of social good. And I genuinely relished the challenge of condensing big issues into little videos.

These little videos opened doors I could have never imagined, and one of them was the chance to write a book with Allen & Unwin. I’d always wanted to write a kids’ book! They had something a little longer in mind, and after a very long coffee meeting it was clear I had plenty to say.

Writing Better Things Are Possible has been one of the hardest, most rewarding things I've ever done. My book (still doesn't feel real to say that) delves into the housing crisis, neoliberal economics, consent education, gender identity, mental health, climate change, and the state of media and politics. It's been nearly two years in the making, and I've had the privilege of travelling the country, speaking with experts, activists, community leaders, politicians, farmers and everyday people to put it together.

Some stories need more space and depth than a 90-second video can offer.

Plus, I kind of hate social media

I’ve been creating content for social media, pretty much since it came into existence. I’ve always loved connecting with communities and being creative online. But it’s pretty clear these apps are doing more harm than good.

The way algorithms now decide what we think and feel every day is f*cked up. Add to that the fact that they’re owned by billionaire megalomaniacs who care only about profit, once again, I started questioning my involvement in a system doing so much harm.

During my time at Teach Us Consent, where I led creative and production for hundreds of education social media assets aimed at young Aussies, I once again got to see both sides of the coin.

Our content reached over 2 million young Australians organically (and counting), with hundreds of thousands of interactions, and millions more views through strategic boosting. It proved that when you speak to young people with clarity, care, and honesty, they show up. But at the same time, our content is one hose on a raging fire of algorithmic misogyny. Rape culture is being amplified by these social media giants, who show no sign of changing without widespread public pressure and government intervention.

When the opportunity arose to write this book, I knew it was a chance to create something that couldn’t be buried by the algorithm. Something that would last longer than the 24-hour news cycle. Something that exists in the real world — as a real thing.

I still believe social media can be a force for good, but there's a lot of bad that algorithms and their architects must answer for.

Writing a book is like really hard but…

It gave me the privilege of travelling the country, speaking with experts, activists, community leaders, politicians, farmers, and everyday people to put this together.

The book features conversations with Professor David Karoly (The Climate Council), Dr Kate Charlesworth (The Climate Council), Dr Richard Denniss (The Australia Institute), Adam Bandt (Former Greens Leader), Zali Steggall(Independent MP), Max Chandler-Mather (Former Greens MP), David Pocock (Independent Senator), Rose Jackson(NSW Labor MP), Chanel Contos (Teach Us Consent), Damon Gameau (Filmmaker, 2040), Thomas Walker (Think Forward), Tarang Chawla (Activist, Not One More Niki), Anjali Sharma (Climate activist, Duty of Care), Leo Puglisi(Journalist, 6 News Australia), and many more.

It’s also deeply shaped by hundreds of other conversations with everyday people across the country. Each one reinforced something I truly believe: better things are possible.

Today, a majority of young people don’t believe that. That's who I wrote this book for, young people who feel disconnected and disaffected from our social, political and economic systems. Who are shut out from the housing market and see their natural world crumbling around them. Who are struggling with their sense of self and a lack of community. Who choose apathy over hope, when hope is exactly what we need to create a fairer, kinder, safer world where all life has the opportunity to thrive.

It's so easy to sink into apathy and to feel like none of us can do anything to change the world we're living in. But I truly believe that we can, and this book is my argument for that. It outlines the problems, but importantly, it outlines solutions. It just takes us coming together with a willingness to face our challenges, armed with a belief that we can fix them.

We created these systems, and so we can re-create them.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world but aren't ready to give up on making it better, this book is for you. And if you have friends and family that might need a little nudge of hope, this book is for them too (so please share!)

📗 Better Things Are Possible is available here for pre-order.

You have a name. You have a face.

In an era where the most powerful brands aren’t companies but people, what are you using yours for?

You don’t have to be an ~influencer~ to be a brand. If you post on socials, whether you have two million followers, two hundred, or twenty on your finsta. You’re participating in a system that turns your profile into a prod…

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These leaders consistently fail to address rising poverty, stagnant wages, or crumbling infrastructure. They double down on corporate handouts, let billionaires extract every last drop of profit from workers and the planet, and then blame migrants, minorities, and activists for the continued decline.

Neoliberalism made life unaffordable. Fascism weaponises that hardship.

Instead of questioning who truly benefits from economic collapse, people are directed to blame asylum seekers, trans youth, or "woke culture." It's deceptive, it's ridiculous, it's a scam that keeps working. Meanwhile, those who caused the crisis—the mining magnates, corporate landlords, the lobbyists, the media barons, the broligarchs and the uber-rich—keep getting richer.

No matter who wins, their wealth & power remain untouched. The only change? More division, more policing, more control. As society slides into fascism, we face three responses: The apathetic masses who never engage, the centrists who claim being "less bad" than the bad guys is a valid policy agenda, and the left offering genuine solutions. Both apathy and centrism serve the right's agenda—one through silence, the other through "pragmatic" compromise with forces of destruction.

Centrists refuse to take responsibility. Instead of fighting for better, they blame the left and accept declining conditions as "what's possible." They'd rather be deadweights in this struggle than support meaningful change. Meanwhile, the apathetic majority watch democracy erode, convinced nothing can improve.

Better things are possible! But no one is coming to save us but us.

We've done it before—stronger public services, fairer wealth distribution, environmental protection. But that requires breaking free from both centrist paralysis and mass resignation. These "radical" solutions are our best hope for survival. We have to stop dismissing better futures as unrealistic and start demanding a world that works for everyone—not just the privileged few. That begins with naming what's happening and choosing to resist.

(It's fascism xoxo)

These musings are brought to you by news of the AfD (Germany's far-right neonazi party) getting more votes than the Greens and the Left combined in the German election. A cautionary tale? 🤪

We wouldn't silently pass by someone shouting racist or sexist abuse in a physical town square, Twitter twists our natural instinct to confront bigotry against us. Algorithms turn our outrage into engagement and engagement into amplification. Every tweet denouncing hatred inadvertently fuels its spread. Every well-meaning reply becomes another boost to …

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