Someone posted online recently, and I’ve been sitting with it for a few days. They’re an international student, studying engineering and robotics here in Australia. They came out to one person they trusted. That person exposed them. Their family cut off their money. Their visa got cancelled. Three years of their life went sideways.

They wrote the post not to complain, but to warn others. The core message: please stabilise yourself before you come out. Make sure you have savings, housing, a backup plan. Don’t assume that because Australia is accepting, your situation is safe.

I didn’t want to write about this. I sat with it for a couple of days first, which is about as long as I can manage before the pressure of having thoughts about something forces me to put them somewhere.

Jodi Knott. A woman in mental health crisis, off her medication, trying to get help. What she got instead was an hour of sustained, deliberate cruelty from two NSW police officers who then sent the footage around to laugh about it. The family has now asked the public to see what happened. That takes a particular kind of courage. To take the worst thing that happened to your person and hand it to strangers, because you believe the truth of it matters more than protecting yourself from having to relive it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about priorities lately. You know that feeling when you’re scrolling through endless debates about ChatGPT writing essays or AI-generated Instagram ads, while somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s this nagging sense that we’re missing something far more urgent? Well, turns out that nagging feeling might be onto something.

Someone recently brought up Israel’s Lavender and Gospel systems - AI-powered tools that can identify targets from CCTV footage and autonomously coordinate drone strikes with minimal human oversight. The casual way this was mentioned, almost as an afterthought while discussing Model UN research, really struck me. Here’s a technology that represents one of the most significant shifts in warfare since the invention of gunpowder, and it’s being discussed like it’s yesterday’s news.

The latest revelations about Scott Morrison’s tenure as Prime Minister continue to paint an increasingly disturbing picture of his leadership. Documents have emerged showing he sought advice to prevent asylum seekers on Nauru from accessing abortions - a move that perfectly encapsulates the troubling intersection of personal religious beliefs and public policy that defined his time in office.

Reading through these documents, I’m struck by the calculated cruelty of it all. Here was a leader who wasn’t content with merely maintaining the already harsh offshore detention system - he actively sought ways to make life more difficult for some of the most vulnerable people under his government’s care.