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 former selves? Hah! We know what happens next, and they don’t. Or perhaps it's less power and more jealousy? We carry more pain than they do after all.

When I look at photos from 2016, I don’t feel powerful nor do I feel jealous. I just feel a strange sense of grief.

I wrote about this feeling in 2024:

“Today, I look at photos from a time before therapy and grieve that man as a loved one I’ve lost—not because I wish I was still him, nor to escape accountability, but because I see his pain, knowing that pain would carry him to the very edge.”

To understand what I meant, we do actually need to take a trip back to 2016. I was 23 when I wrote (somewhat clumsily) my first public post about my mental health. At the time, it felt enormous. Like a breakthrough, like bravery.

This is what I posted to Facebook:

“For much of my adult life I’ve toiled with issues surrounding depression and anxiety. Why? I don’t really know. That’s the most frustrating thing. Even though I’m surrounded by loving family and friends, have had opportunities and experiences most of the world could only dream of — I still felt down, really fucking down. It’s compounding, an infuriatingly vicious cycle. The guilt drives the sadness and the sadness drives the guilt.”

There I was listing my privileges as if to say: “I know, I shouldn’t feel this way but I do and I’m sorry”. Trying to model vulnerability while apologising for needing to be vulnerable in the first place.

“Undoubtedly one of the hardest things has been not knowing when or if I could share certain thoughts or feelings with my friends and family. Not wanting to appear weak or worse become a burden or a nuisance. A dampener or a wet blanket. Then the absolute heartbreak when these thoughts and feelings finally do come spilling out… and it’s met with classic lines such as ‘first world problems’, ‘man up’ or ‘I can’t deal with this right now’.”

I could name the fear without actually noting the feeling. I was more worried about the consequences of admitting I wasn’t okay, than the not being okay.

Not long after I wrote that post, I was hospitalised for self-harm for the first time.

After that, I went to therapy. Once. Maybe twice? I didn’t like the therapist, I felt judged rather than helped, and reached the dangerously common conclusion: I should be able to handle this myself.

Without even knowing it, a complex system had been built inside me, by an even more complex system outside of me. Patriarchy (you may have heard of it?). It taught me to arrest my own tenderness before anyone else got the chance.

A year later, in October 2017, I wrote another post to announce that I was cured!

“The other day a friend of mine described me as a ‘happy person’. It hit me like a tonne of bricks — not because they were wrong — but because they were right.”

Then I told the story of what had happened:

“A little over a year ago I found myself in a place I never suspected to be found, for reasons I never thought possible. It was hands down the scariest moment of my life. For no real, quantifiable reason I began to slip into a mental space where the slightest breeze might knock me over.

Logically, of course, I looked to drinking and partying to balance the scales. Drinking myself into inconsolable stupors and saying and doing things that hurt people I love and care about, I became a supremely unfair burden to those around me. Behaviour which ultimately cultivated in a trip to North Shore Hospital emergency in the wee hours. While at the time I saw no way forward, it marked an undeniable new fork in the road for me. This wasn’t me, and it was never going to be me again.”

Oh boy.

“Positivity is a choice. Pick it and keep picking it.”

At the time, that probably felt like wisdom. Like a promise I could keep. What I couldn’t have known was that it was still me. And it would happen again. And again. And again.

From 2017 until 2020, I didn’t do the work. While I stayed away from hospital, I also stayed away from therapy. I was still using the same harmful coping mechanisms, just better hidden. Who can blame me? I was playing by the rules patriarchy had taught me: recover alone, project strength, #positivity my way out of pain. And it nearly killed me.

In 2020, I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act after coming extremely close to harming myself so badly, so finally, that I would never have the chance to heal.

Years later, I’d write about the worst days of my life:

“But my story didn’t end, like the stories of so many men did, in that dark place. Late one night, after a particularly severe panic attack, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. During the episode, I gazed at my parents properly for the first time in months and saw that they both looked like they had aged a decade in a few weeks. For the first time, I truly understood that while I was suffering, I was also causing immense pain to those around me. I realised then that I had to break the destructive cycle. No one could fix me. They could help me, but only if I was willing to help myself.”

Six months of DBT and years of therapy later I finally took form. I reverse-faded into existence like that family photo at the end of Back to the Future.

But DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, a type of group therapy) wasn’t enough on its own. Yes, I learned to regulate my emotions. To improve my interpersonal skills. To sit with distress. To understand and respect myself and my needs. Skills I use every day of my life now, some days better than others. But what actually allowed me to truly form was learning to see the system that had shaped my suffering in the first place.

I couldn’t begin to heal from my undeserved pain without understanding my unearned power. They came from the same place.

After these years of this exploration, I wrote in my book:

“For me, this recognition has meant doing the messy work of scrutinising my own blemished history, mapping my behaviours, my entitlement and my shame. It’s meant mourning the boy I once was, before I learned to see my softness as weakness, my sensitivity as a flaw. But I’ve also laid to rest the man that boy became.

Unlearning the programming of our lifetime, stepping outside the confines of traditional masculinity, is a life journey. To be ‘real men’, to be good men, we have to write a different story of manhood altogether. One where strength is not about domination but kindness and openness, where protection is not about ownership but allyship with women’s liberation.

At the end of the day, this is about reclaiming our full humanity as men. Refusing to settle for some hollow, performative ‘strength’ that comes at the cost of subjugating others. We didn’t earn the corrosive power we have in the first place, so it shouldn’t be an issue for us to use it to lose it.”

Today, I read my own book the same way I read those 2016 and 2017 posts — with distance. In the year and a half since I wrote that passage, I’ve changed. My understanding of both my mental health and patriarchy has shifted. And while I cringe at some of what I said, I think there’s value in having said it.

The ghost I was in 2016 didn’t know what he couldn’t see yet. Just as I can’t see today what will one day be obvious to me. That’s the human condition. We can’t wait until we’re perfectly formed to speak or act, because that day never comes.

We're all messy concoctions of nature and nurture, culture and conditioning, harm and privilege. We’re all evolving, all the time, in different directions and at different speeds.

Some of us don’t realise we’re caged. Others are just beginning to see the bars. Some have been shouting about it for decades. If we’re serious about dismantling the systems that hurt us all, we have to accept two things at once: not everyone is harmed in the same way, and not everyone can see the systems of harm in the same way…yet.

We can't unfuck the present by escaping to the past, trying to fit the minds we have now into the bodies we had then. We unfuck it by learning from the versions of ourselves who were doing their best with worse information, and applying those lessons, however imperfectly, in the present.

The only future we can predict with certainty is that the system will keep doing what it does.

Longing for the past won’t change that but learning from it will.

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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Mental health should never be used to diminish …

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