WTAF. An Afghan refugee, who is a permanent resident here in Australia, was asked to get an ID document from Afghanistan as part of his citizenship application. He did as they asked and now the Aus government is claiming he forged it, since Afghan ID documents aren’t exactly high-quality, and he faces loss of his PR status and potentially deportation 😡

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Australian citizens abroad are denied the right to return home because of caps on quarantine places and airlines price-gouging and not respecting people’s confirmed bookings, but now, Australia wants to make the right to leave conditional, as well.

This “Fortress Australia” approach might be popular, but is such a hardship on Australians with international connections… and we are, after all, a country where half the population was either born overseas or has at least one parent who was. I think quarantine is a necessity, and we can look abroad to see what we’ve been spared thanks to it, but the system we have is so obviously a kludge and combine that with airlines prioritising wealthy celebrity passengers, many of whom aren’t even Australian, ahead of ordinary dual nationals or expats who just want to see their families…

Great story that really sums up 1970s Sydney, encompassing organised crime, the property development industry, the total corruption of NSW Police, organised civil resistance, the BLF’s green bans, and of course, murder and kidnapping. You could hardly ask for more.

Good piece comparing the indifference of our government to the very high risk of catastrophic climate change to their panic over the 0.00044% chance of dying from an AstraZeneca blood clot… (Published a couple of weeks ago, but because I had the tab open on my phone, I forgot to save it until now.)

The Irish Times does a good job calling out those responsible for Australia’s current Covid mess. The only thing I would add is that not all Australians are even free to choose whether or not to “wait for Pfizer”; sure under-40s can ask their GP about getting AstraZeneca now, but the GP is still free to say no, and for the many small practices that aren’t doing vaccinations themselves, what can your GP do for you anyway – write you a letter? If under-40s could just walk up to a hub and get vaccinated on spec, taking their chances with a blood clot that’s probably less likely to happen than getting hit by a car on your way to the hub in the first place, I think we’d see a high take-up. I certainly would be more likely to do that than deal with the current obstacle course, considering I’m already making so many medical appointments with unfamiliar clinics for other issues right now. (And also, anecdotally, I’ve seen people wondering where the fuck these “surplus doses” even are because in their searches, appointment slots seem all booked up for weeks.)

This is a great piece, drawing together anti-capitalism, anger at racist policing, and criticism of our terrible fucking government that puts the wishes of our corporate donors ahead of scientific realities all the fucking time. There’s a lot of it I would quote, but really, you’d be better off just reading the full article because all of it is on-point.

Australia has been called out, along with Russia, China and Brazil for effectively not having climate change policies (as in, whatever policies these countries do have are so laughably weak that we would see a 5°C rise in temperatures if the rest of the world adopted the same).

To be fair, what I keep hearing from Brisbanites is that their current public transport services fucking suck, haha. Some may say it’s a little excessive to win an Olympic Games bid just to win an argument to improve them, but desperate times call for desperate measures