There’s a particular kind of political figure who seems to exist outside the normal rules of consequence. Not untouchable exactly, more like teflon-coated by a combination of low expectations and regional loyalty. Barnaby Joyce is that figure.

This week he’s been on the telly again, making noises about abortion. Specifically, that women should not have easy access to it. That it represents a moral failure. That the nation needs to have a serious conversation about life and commitment and responsibility.

Someone shared a page from an IBM training manual from 1979 recently, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. The gist of it was simple: computers can process information, but a human being must always be accountable for the decisions made from that information. Seems reasonable, right? Almost obvious, even.

And yet here we are, 46 years later, and that principle feels more like a quaint relic than a guiding philosophy.

I’ve been reading about the rapid deployment of AI in military applications lately, and frankly, it’s keeping me up at night. Not in the melodramatic sense, but in that particular way where you’re scrolling through your phone at 2am and suddenly realize we might be sleepwalking into a future we’ll deeply regret.

The thing that really gets me is how we’re having this conversation after the technology has already been deployed. Someone mentioned that we passed the milestone of technology moving faster than regulation “a while ago,” and that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? We’re not having a preventative discussion here – we’re playing catch-up with systems that are already making life and death decisions.

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching evidence vanish in real-time. Yesterday, the US Department of Justice accidentally published documents from the Epstein files that were… let’s just say, significantly more revealing than they intended. Within hours, the document was gone from the government website. But here’s the thing about the internet in 2025 – nothing ever truly disappears, does it?

I’ve been working in IT for over two decades now, and one of the first things you learn is that data deletion is rarely absolute. There are backups, archives, and in this case, thousands of people who downloaded those PDFs the moment they appeared. The DOJ’s fumble – whether intentional or through sheer incompetence – has created a situation where the evidence is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It’s on hard drives around the world, but officially, according to the US government, it was never meant to exist in the public sphere.

The news about Deloitte’s $439,000 report for the federal government containing fabricated academic references and invented legal quotes has been doing my head in all week. Here we have one of the Big Four consulting firms, charging taxpayers nearly half a million dollars, and they can’t even be bothered to check if the sources they’re citing actually exist.

What really gets under my skin isn’t just the sloppiness – it’s what this represents about the entire consulting industry and how governments have become utterly dependent on these firms for basic policy work. Someone in the discussion threads hit the nail on the head when they described it as “decision insurance” – governments aren’t really buying expertise, they’re buying someone to blame when things go wrong.