Honi Soit: Week 6, Semester 1, 2025

Mehnaaz H., Imogen S., and Charlotte S.

Jack Glass Ellie Robertson

Acknowledgement of Country

Honi Soit operates and publishes on Gadigal land of the Eora nation. We work and produce this publication on stolen land where sovereignty was never ceded. The University of Sydney is a colonial institution. Honi Soit is a publication that prioritises the voices of those who challenge colonial rhetorics. We strive to continue its legacy as a radical left-wing newspaper providing students with a unique opportunity to express their diverse voices and counter the biases of mainstream media.

In This Edition...

Behind Closed Doors

Budget 2025-26

Eat the Rich

Pay Inequality

Sexy Serial Killers

In conversation with

Moz Azimitabar

Interviews

SRC Casework

Puzzles

‘Smooth criminal’ is the embodiment of all things politics, society, and the arts.

This edition covers a broad basis of issues in carceral systems: the lives devastated, the voices silenced, and importantly, how carceral and settler-colonial violence is resisted.

We hope you will take away reflections on how the current carceral systems must be dismantled and hope for a world that doesn’t lock children up.

In this week’s feature, Jack Glass investigates just how fucked up

our carceral system is here in socalled Australia.

Our editors are also back from the budget lockup in Canberra! In this edition our very own Charlotte, Imogen, and Mehnaaz break down the 2025 Federal Budget for you.

Within these pages, Ellie Robertson analyses our criminal justice system, Lilah Thurbon reasons why the age of criminal responsibility should be raised, Audhora Khalid urges us to listen to First Nations voices, Hamna Khan reflects on Eid and the Lakemba Night Markets,

Companion Piece, Dirsten Pornel

Dirsten is a third-year architecture student exploring how art and the built environment can give a voice to the unseen and unheard. Growing up in the Philippines, I was surrounded by art, music, dance, and performance — but rarely in architecture. It is my responsibility to design spaces that uplift the human experience rather than conform to the rigid concrete structures of capitalistic consumerism.

Emma Georgopoulos warns us of the danger of glamourising murderers, and Emilie GarciaDolnik and Annabel Li dive into the art of refugee Mostafa ‘Moz’ Azimitabar.

Enjoy this week’s edition of Honi!

Love and solidarity, Honi Soit

Follow on instagram for more: @dirawsten @tenjxd

Editor-in-Chief

Editors

Purny Ahmed, Emilie Garcia-Dolnik, Mehnaaz Hossain, Annabel Li, Ellie Robertson, Imogen Sabey, Charlotte Saker, Lotte Weber, William Winter, Victor Zhang

Martha Barlow, Calista Burrowes, Valerie Chidiac, Avin Dabiri, Ethan Floyd, Emma Georgopoulos, Jack Glass, Audhora Khalid, Hamna Khan, Emily O’Brien, Ilham Qadri, Phoebe Rosser, James Fitzgerald Sice, Jessica Louise Smith, Thea Swinfield, Lilah Thurbon

Crossley, Celina Di Veroli, Hamish Evans, Leanne Rook, Anu Khulan, and Norn Xiong.

Please direct all advertising inquiries to publications.manager@src.usyd.edu.au.

Letter to the Editor

To Will Thorpe and Honi Soit, I read Will’s letter to the editor in last week’s edition and felt as if I was finally breathing fresh air. The way that artificial intelligence has infiltrated academia is undeniably concerning.

In particular, the way it has seeped into the discipline of Digital Cultures is frightening. In almost every one of my ARIN1001 tutorials last semester, students were filling their Padlet submissions with ChatGPT outputs. I have seen students (who likely just don’t know better) citing ChatGPT as a source of information in presentations and formal assignments.

Worst of all, I believe that artificial intelligence has infiltrated Digital Cultures from the top down. For assignments in ARIN1010, the assessment guidelines appear to have been generated using a large language model. The spelling is Americanised, with z’s where there should be s’s.

The use of emojis is uncanny. They ‘strongly encourage’ the use of AI tools for assessments and suggest you read the ‘AI use guide’, which also appears to be AI generated. In contrast, the 2024 assessment guidelines for ARIN1001 had Australian English spelling, no use of emojis, and had the written tone of a human being.

If my suspicions are correct, where is the artificial intelligence declaration? Academic integrity, anyone?

The University must do better than this.

Evie Gawlas

Dear Honey

Dear Honey,

So I’ve noticed lately that when I try to involve myself in conversations with classmates and peers or even cause anyone random really... they have to weave into the conversation that “I have a girlfriend” or “My Girlfriend...” Huh???? Orrrr sometimes even I get “My Boyfriend...” too, When I’m straight!

What is that all about? Is that me? Do I do this to people? Or is it other external factors?

Do people think I’m getting the wrong idea and shut it down? Or Are guys feeling guilty talking to a girl if they have a girlfriend? Or am I not attractive at all? Am I that bad that people have to reject me subtly on the the spot?

And Hold up! Why can’t I just talk to people without them thinking I’m hitting on them? Like come on!!!! 99% of the time I don’t have those intentions anyways! Why on earth do people assume that I’m hitting on them? I’m just a really overly nice person! It’s just apart of my personality! I’m a ENFP on the 16 personalities test, deal with it! Yes, I message too much, I like stories too much, I’m too invented [sic] in people I talk to but I actually care! And if your [sic] really going to think that I’m hitting on you, just to put you into perspective... your [sic] not that special, everyone I meet is equally just as special! I give that same about of generous attention to literally everyone, ask my friends! they know me! And it’s kind of a problem if I’m honest! I’m too agreeable, and too nice and am a bit of a pushover!

Maybe I just want a lot of validation? Maybe people aren’t used to really nice people and are suspicious of them? Maybe I cant read social cues as well as I thought and maybe I am too nice and might suggest something more without realising it? But maybe this is all just my confirmation bias?

What do you think Honey?

With an Abundance of love, Miss Involuntary Pick Me

Dear Miss Involuntary Pick Me,

If your flirting skills were as good as your proofreading, you wouldn’t be having this issue.

It is not a weakness that people mistake your kindness for flirtation. You should weaponise that. Get free drinks at the bar, avoid paying your fine for not tapping your opal card, bat those little eyelashes, and get past security at the bank. One day, people will think you just want to be friends, and that will be the true sting. And, if you weren’t already [sic] of it, I’d suggest enjoy it. You’res [sic], Honi [sic]

Art by Ellie Robertson

SUDS Presents: Call of the Void 1st-5th of April at 7pm Flight Path Theatre Banana Farm EP Launch w/ Jude Pescal Friday 4th of April at 7pm Oxford Art Factory Gallery

Calliobel’s “Blue Eyed Dragons” Launch Saturday 5th of April at 6:30pm Lord Gladstone Hotel

USyd F1 Society: Japanese Grand Prix Watch Party Sunday 6th of April at 2:30pm Royal Hotel Darlington

Later in the year... Student Journalism Conference 15th–18th of August at USyd

More details coming soon!

Stop Killing Women Rally: A tribute to the 117 women killed in Australia

Martha Barlow reports.

CW: Images and discussions of femicide, deceased persons, and domestic and sexual violence.

Just three months into 2025, 14 women have been murdered. On Saturday 15th March, Sherele Moody, founder of Femicide Watch and the Red Heart Campaign, called a series of rallies around the country with a simple demand:

Stop killing women.

The rally was passionately and sensitively chaired by activist Ela Akyol. Between speakers she led chants, shared anecdotes, and highlighted the three demands of the rally: to educate young boys at the school level on how to treat and respect women, reform on Domestic Violence Orders, and abundant increases in funding for domestic violence services. The tone of the rally was sombre and intimate, with most attendees sitting down in order to truly listen to the words of each speaker. In front of the speakers was a spread of photos — each bearing the name and face of the 117 women killed in Australia in the last 14 months.

The first speaker was Lorna Munro, a Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi poet and artist. She began by emphasising how it is impossible to talk about violence against women without addressing the foundational violence against First Nations women that this country is built on. She shared that Aboriginal women are 64 times more likely to be victims of domestic violence than white women, and that the roots of this violence lies within colonial institutions. Illustrating this, she pointed to the work of Aunty Irene Watson, a professor at the University of South Australia, whose research traces the role of police and churches in destroying Blak matriarchies, and howthese institutions taught men to shame, abuse, and humiliate Aboriginal women. She ended with a call to action to stand in solidarity with Aboriginal women, because “the colony is afraid of solidarity.”

Next to speak was Hannah Thomas, the Greens candidate for Grayndler. She began by reiterating that one woman is killed every four days in this country, and that these never make headlines, especially when the victim is a woman of colour. Thomas noted that for every woman that is killed, far more are controlled, isolated, and abused. She shared the story of a woman she knew, Tabitha, whose abuser had recently been released on parole. Tabitha was repeatedly refused relocation by housing services and politicians, and turned away by the services she begged for help. Her story shows that the priorities of the government are all wrong, Thomas said. There is no reason why in a country as wealthy as Australia, victims should have to fight for scraps of safety. She urged the government to take further, meaningful action on violence against women instead of investing money in submarines and defence projects.

Azz Fahmi, a community organiser and

human rights advocate, spoke next. She opened by expressing a wish that we didn’t have to have these rallies, and emphasising that every woman killed is a person, not just a number. Expressing her frustration at the lack of attention given to the issue of domestic violence and femicide, she stated that men only care about this issue when it happens to their own sisters or mothers. Having worked in refugee services, she shared her experiences of overcrowded and underfunded shelters and services, and how the conditions or risk of being turned away from these often forces women back to their abusive partners. She spoke of this issue being exacerbated in Muslim communities, especially for recent immigrants and refugees who often do not speak English and lack the culturally sensitive services to help them. She spoke of the specific intersection between violence against women and Islamophobia, sharing that 79% of victims of Islamophobic violence in the last year were women and girls. She closed by noting that politicians only care about the economy, so perhaps framing the issue in terms of its economic impact will make them listen. To that end, she shared that the government spends around $26 billion a year on domestic violence, including services, health care, and lost work. There are also long term issues for children who witness or experience family violence, as they are more likely to suffer from mental health issues and be involved in crime. She thus reiterated the core demands of the rally, for better funded domestic violence services.

Akyol then took a moment to speak about the two ‘types’ of victims; ideal and cautionary. Ideal victims are typically white, professional, university educated, and far more likely to have her death reported in the media. The life of the cautionary victim, on the other hand, does not carry the same weight. She is poor, or a woman of colour, or a sex worker, and if her death is reported on, the media will dredge up bikini photos or irrelevant details of her life to suit whatever narrative they are trying to create. All forms of violence that women face need to stop, she concluded. Every woman killed should have their life honoured.

Next to speak was Meaghan Dolezal, an artist and domestic violence survivor. She spoke of the structural factors contributing to femicide, noting that it is not “random or inevitable,” but the direct result of a system that devalues women’s lives. She stated that the consequences of violence do not fall on all women equally, and that it is up to those who are privileged, white, and economically stable to speak up for the ‘imperfect’ victims. Our duty, she concluded, is not to take up space, but to create it.

Next to speak was Viv, a sex worker and community organiser. She shared that she was choosing to speak as herself, not her sex work persona, because she had experienced more violence in her personal life than she ever had as a sex worker. Viv emphasised how normal male violence has become, and that we need to disrupt this normalisation. It is not normal, she emphasised, to fear for your life, fear your partner, to plan escape routes, to feel unsafe in your home. She spoke about how

her experience as a sex worker helped her reclaim her life, teaching her boundaries, consent, and how to demand respect. She spoke to the need to destigmatise sex work, to value the lives of sex workers, and stop victim blaming. She encouraged everyone to start challenging the normalised violence against women by using the hashtag ‘#NOTNORMAL’. She ended with a powerful call to attendees that it is up to us to build the community that we want; that we all have something to offer, whether it’s cooking skills, graphic design, art, money, or simply time.

The final speaker was Eleyna Simich, a human rights advocate with a focus on First Nations rights. The microphone stopped working as she spoke, so she encouraged everyone to gather round closer, making the moment of silence she opened with all the more powerful. Eleyna spoke of the way the media handles femicide, and how this has conditioned us to blame victims. She stated that violence can happen in any home, and that every woman deserves to live in fear or violence, or be blamed for their own death. She emphasised that it is up to us, and we all have the power, to create a world where no woman’s death is ignored or twisted. She ended by sharing the details of an organisation called Escabags, who create escape bags for people fleeing domestic violence.

After the speeches, Akyol encouraged everyone to stick around, talk to each other, cry, and heal. Despite setbacks, including supermarkets refusing to donate supplies and the police saying that hosting the rally by the ANZAC memorial was ‘disrespectful’, the rally was a powerful and heartbreaking tribute to the women behind the statistics, and an important reminder to say their names.

NSW health crisis deepens as ambulance and emergency department delays worsen

Purny Ahmed reports.

The latest NSW Bureau of Health Information (BHI) Quarterly Health Report, for the October-December 2024 period, has revealed that NSW Ambulance is struggling under the pressure of increasing demand, resulting in worsening response times.

The latest numbers from the BHI are record-breaking, with data indicating that NSW Ambulance managed 291,463 incidents and 391,370 responses, the highest number of any quarter since 2010.

The data has also presented worsening response times for P1As (high acuity and priority incidents) with only 62.6 per cent receiving an ambulance response within the clinically recommended timeframe of 10 minutes.

The president of the Australian Paramedics Association NSW (APA

NSW), Mr. Brett Simpson, commented, “The Government loves to complain about the cost of healthcare but refuses to invest in community-based solutions that provide patients early access to the care they need, keeping them out of the back of Ambulances and out of Hospitals.”

Mr. Simpsons added: “What this shows is that increases in staffing are not a silver bullet. If we can’t get the right care to our patients at the right time, then they will get sicker and sicker until their only option for care is an emergency department.”

“We are calling on the State and Federal Government to stop buck passing and start working on solutions. It’s not just better for our patients, it’s better for your budgets.”

USyd among Australian universities facing potential U.S. research funding cuts

James Fitzgerald Sice reports.

The University of Sydney (USyd) is among several Australian universities at risk of losing crucial research funding due to recent policy changes introduced by the Trump administration.

The Australian National University (ANU) was the first to publicly acknowledge the termination of nearly $1 million in funding for its terrorism and targeted violence research, deemed misaligned with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s priorities.

This move is part of a broader initiative affecting institutions such as Monash University, the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Western Australia. Affected researchers have received a comprehensive 36-point questionnaire from U.S. federal agencies, probing their involvement in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, alignment with U.S. gender policies, and financial ties to countries such as China, Russia, Cuba, or Iran.

The administration’s focus on combating “woke gender ideology” has been cited as a rationale for these funding suspensions. Researchers have been informed that

projects perceived to promote such ideologies may not align with current U.S. government priorities, leading to temporary funding pauses.

Although no explicit funding cuts have been reported at USyd yet, growing concerns persist within the academic community about potential ramifications for ongoing and future research projects.

National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) USyd Branch President Dr. Peter Chen emphasised the union’s stance against political interference in research funding.

“The NTEU would like to hear from any researchers affected who have not yet reached out to us. The longstanding position of the NTEU is to reject political interference in research funding, especially where that funding has been allocated on the basis of expert assessment and review. We call on the leadership of the University to act to ensure research continuity in the case of any loss of funding support,” he said.

The Group of Eight (Go8), which represents Australia’s leading researchintensive universities, have expressed grave concerns about the implications of

these funding freezes. Go8 Chief Executive Vicki Thomson highlighted the potential impact on critical research areas.

“We are extremely concerned about the broader implications of the Trump administration’s policy, not only for the future of health and medical research, but especially regarding defence collaboration,” Thomson stated.

“Go8 universities are deeply engaged in collaborative activities with the US, especially through our defence initiatives and the AUKUS alliance.

“Our universities have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the US and for every one of our members, the US is the largest research partner by far.”

She noted that Go8 universities collectively received approximately US$161.6 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the 20202024 financial years, accounting for 88 percent of all NIH funding to Australian universities in that period.

She added, “Coming on the back of changes to Australia’s international education policy, which props up our university research effort, we are at a

critical juncture. Australia must double down on getting a seat at the table to access the world’s largest research fund, Horizon Europe. Associate membership to Horizon Europe – the EU’s €95.5 billion flagship research and innovation programme –will not only deliver important economic and social benefits, it will strengthen the Australian-European partnership.

“It’s now more important than ever that we get back to the negotiation table on the stalled Australian-European Free Trade Agreement” Thomson said.

A USyd spokesperson told Honi: “We’re carefully monitoring developments and working closely with the sector as we seek to understand potential implications for our research. We deeply value our international research collaborations and would manage any instances on a caseby-case basis in line with our codes and policies as required.”

As the situation unfolds, Australian universities are calling for urgent intervention from both the Australian and U.S. governments to clarify funding eligibility and safeguard research collaborations critical to national and global advancements.

Emergency rally held as Israel breaks ceasefire and resumes its genocide in Gaza

On Thursday 20th March, Palestine Action Group (PAG) held an emergency rally at Town Hall after Israel broke the ceasefire and massacred over 400 people in one night.

Chair Josh Lees began with chants calling out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Australian PM Anthony Albanese, and US President Donald Trump. Lees also chanted demands for Israel out of the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.

Lees acknowledged that the protest was occurring on stolen and unceded Aboriginal land through genocide and invasion by the same government which supports Israel’s genocide. He described Tuesday’s bombing as “one of the worst massacres in the 16 months of genocide”, additionally preceded by a weeks-long blockade on the Gaza strip.

Lees explained that Israel did not intend to honour phase two or three of the ceasefire deal, and that the White House meeting between Netanyahu and Trump fantasised about a Palestine without Palestinians.

“This is what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians since 1948… spelled out by Israeli leader after Israeli leader for decades [and] Zionist leaders before,” Lees said.

Lees denounced the complicity of world leaders who provide cover for Israel and send shipments of weapons and bombs.

He spoke to the University of Sydney (USyd) management’s attempt to suspend an transgender international student after accusing them of writing pro-Palestine slogans on a white board, which would

then result in their deportation.

Lees also explained that PAG is launching a constitutional challenge against the antiprotest laws being passed in NSW with their first appearance in court on the 8th of April. This is in addition to the Greens and a few independents repealing them in parliament.

Lees also criticised the law which would see police issue move-on orders for anyone protesting near a place of worship, and face arrest and criminal charges. He said that “no place in Sydney has no place of worship” including Town Hall, where St Andrew’s Cathedral is situated.

Lees reiterated the broad coalition of climate, LGBTQI+ activists, and union movements’ support, saying that “if we can’t defeat them in the court or parliament, we will in the streets” and that “we will defy if we have no choice.”

Greens Senator and Deputy Leader Mehreen Faruqi greeted the crowd with Ramadan Mubarak and spoke to protesting last Ramadan when Labor had failed to condemn Israel and frozen UNRWA funding. Faruqi added that this year, Albanese and Wong “could not even bring themselves to denounce Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.”

She continued, “I thought surely there would be a red line for Labor, where they would wake up from their morality stupor… Palestinians had a few weeks of respite and I’m sure Labor patted themselves on the back.”

With reference to Albanese and Wong’s statements dabbling in “both-sideism”, Faruqi said, “I know I’m not supposed to

swear when I’m fasting but I know Allah will forgive me — what the actual fuck.”

She also identified Islamophobia as rife in the community, given the recent threats of a Christchurch-like attack towards two mosques.

Faruqi concluded by saying that Labor and Liberal only understand the language of votes, reminding voters that “these two parties will never see us as equals unless they are forced to, and we will force them too”.

Students for Palestine organiser and USyd Education Officer Jasmine Al-Rawi began by asking, “how many videos of dead children have to be shared around… how many more protests do we have to have to make our government listen?”

As Israel continues to raid the West Bank, arrest and torture Palestinian prisoners, and continue the genocide, Al-Rawi reiterated that Israel is able to act with full impunity. She noted that “Israel’s bombing is accompanied by a repression of activists in the West”, speaking to Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University who “has been made an example of in the US”, as his arrest and possible deportation are due to “simply opposing US policy”.

Al-Rawi continued, “What we want is justice for Palestinians…they deserve to rebuild their homes in Gaza, the West Bank and across Palestine.”

Ahmad Abadla, a Palestinian from Gaza and activist at Palestine Justice Movement explained that the “Zionist regime never had any interest in ceasing fire” and it “does not attempt to hide its lust for more Palestinian blood and land.” He continued

by saying that Zionist ideology, “which our government and universities say should be protected from criticism” is “inspired by Nazism and Fascism”.

Abadla called out Albanese for saying Australia shares common values with Israel, arguing that the similarity lies in the “racism, Fascism and Zionism”, and that this is especially appalling coming from “someone who once rallied for Palestine”.

“These so-called politicians don’t even flinch when they see children massacred at the hands of their peers… Palestinians are not only being killed and genocided in Gaza but the truth has been killed there, here and everywhere,” Abadla concluded.

NSW police and riot squad were present, lining up between the protestors and the light rail platform. Police attempted to move the crowd to stand in the public square but due to a large turnout, the crowd spilled across George St.

The Adhan was also called and dates were offered to protestors breaking fast.

At the conclusion of speeches, Lees declared Palestine Action Group’s intent to return to more frequent protests, for which the crowd indicated its support. Lees said the next protest will not be on Sunday 30 March — which also marks Palestine Land Day — so as to not clash with Eid al-Fitr.

The next protest will be held on Saturday 29 March at Hyde Park, in addition to the Stop War on Palestine march from Sydenham Station to Albanese’s Marrickville office in Marrickville.

Photography by Valerie Chidiac

Valerie Chidiac reports.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following article contains the names and details of deceased people.

“I have not been given bottled water and have to drink the water from above the toilet. The water is warm or hot. This is disgusting and the sink is often filled with sick and other people’s saliva. The toilets are blocked and stink. (...) You can not get away from the smell.”

“When using my puffer I am meant to rinse my mouth after every use, I am sometimes not able to do this, as the only source of water [is] shared by up to 20 people between the three cell areas.”

These are the words of two Aboriginal women, Deanna and Simone, who submitted affidavits to the Alice Springs Local Court in February 2025. They were held as prisoners in the

To deal with prison overcrowding, new laws are being introduced to make it easier to contract private and interstate guards. New prisons and work camps in Holtze and Katherine are being planned. Reducing the number of people who are incarcerated is not on the political agenda, only increasing the capacity of the system is.

In Queensland, the number of children being held overnight in watch houses meant for adults increased by 50 per cent between 2022-3 and 2024-5. The New South Wales government has tightened bail laws for young people and limited the number of officials who can make bail decisions, meaning people will have to wait longer before they can be released. It appears to be the case that the competition to be the most ‘tough on crime’ will be an important feature of all Australian elections in the coming years.

Despite all this, many people forced to spend nights in conditions like those of the Alice Springs watch house have not been convicted of a crime at all; 40 per cent of prisoners in the country are awaiting a conviction or sentence. Increasingly, many of them, like Deanna and Simone, are women. Incarceration rates for women are at the highest that they have ever been,

watch house of the local police station for multiple months. The cells in the watch house are small, designed to hold people for only a few nights while they are under temporary arrest.

The prison system in the Northern Territory is broken: one in every hundred people in the Territory are in prison. Watch houses that are not fitfor-purpose are being used as overflow facilities. The newly elected Country Liberal Party’s policies will continue to worsen the crisis significantly. They have lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10, made it more difficult to be granted bail, and given police more wide-ranging powers to enforce court orders.

and are rising quickly. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety estimates that 7090 per cent of women in prisons are victim-survivors of family, domestic, or sexual violence.

As has been the case for more than half a century, Australian First Nations people are the most incarcerated group of people in the world. They are 17 times more likely than nonFirst Nations people to be in prison in Australia.

In many ways, our society is becoming fairer, more equal, and more humane. Our prison system is not; and that is despite the fact that it has been a

recurring issue in Australian politics for decades. Why have a litany of Royal Commissions and law reform reports gone unheeded? Why has a harrowing series of tragedies not prompted change? Why has extensive media reporting on the broken state of Australian prisons not led to a corollary policy response?

The extent of discrimination and frequency of abuse in prisons in Australia is staggering, even when compared to countries like the United States. However, this is not inevitable. Being ‘soft on crime’ may be politically unpopular, but protecting human rights — especially of people who are unwell, unconvicted, young, or themselves victims of crime — need not be. It is easy to avoid thinking about what it actually means to send someone to jail, but it is imperative that we do. Without deep reflection on the state of our prison system and the way in which it has evolved, it is difficult to imagine reform occurring.

Although punishment in Australia plays a prominent role in our historical and political imagination, we have a selective memory. Children in primary schools are taught, in detail, about our convict past. They are taught that convict labour fueled the development of Australia’s agrarian economy in the first half of the 19th century. Often, they are even taught about the mistreatment of white convicts. For example, government approved school textbooks describe the use of harsh physical punishments, like public flailings and whippings, for convicts who refused to work or tried to escape.

In the 20th century though, our collective memory goes dark. Public punishments and open air prisons were replaced with the high walls of the modern penitentiary. The depictions of criminals serving their punishment that populated much of early Australian written and visual media disappear. It is not by chance that this coincided with a rapid increase in the Indigenous prison population.

Since the publication of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in 1975, the way the modern prison system conceals physical, corporal punishment from the public eye has become well-studied. Visible punishments like public whippings created sympathy and admiration for convicts, and made the punisher, rather than the punished, appear as violent or primitive. Removing prisoners from populated areas and sequestering them in austere, walled environments created a scenario in which humanitarians and progressives supported horrific abuse as long as it was labelled as rehabilitation.

This is even more true in Australia,

where the prison system has always been highly segregated by race and class. Roebourne Gaol, in the Pilbara region in Western Australia, had separate cells for ‘Natives’, ‘Whites’ and ‘Coloureds.’ Women, who are often invisible in the history of imprisonment, were given more meagre rations than men. Cells that housed women at Fremantle prison in the 1970s were declared to be “much too small for accommodating any males.”

The records of prisoners’ experiences that do survive are nearly entirely white and male. As historian Mark Finnane put it, “there remains a long period (c 1900-1960) when the administration and the experience of Aboriginal imprisonment is little known.”

Even in general, there are very few popular historical works that renarrate Australian history from a First Nations perspective. Equivalent works from other countries, like the New York Times’s The 1619 Project, which centres slavery and racism as the dominant organising forces of American history, benefited from there being far more archival material to draw on in the United States than there is in Australia.

For example, the idea that the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States was driven by the attempts of Southern state governments and businesses to substitute the labour of enslaved peoples with that of prisoners is an increasingly popular and politically powerful one. Shane Bauer’s American Prison, a book that argues for this thesis, was bought widely, and was cited by both Barack Obama and the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2018.

Of course, it is true that slavery and forced labour played a comparatively more significant role in the history of the United States prison system than in Australia. However, the link between slavery and prison in Australia is important and rarely discussed. There is a reason that states with lower white convict populations like South and Western Australia imprisoned more Indigenous Australians earlier in time.

For example, Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, was the site of a prison and forced labour camp where Indigenous Australians were held. Over the period between 1838 and 1931, one in every ten prisoners that were imprisoned there died, some as a result of disease outbreaks, some as a result of torture or summary execution. Mostly, prisoners were sent to the island when they refused to partake in forced labour elsewhere in Western Australia. A series of “Protection” or “Welfare” acts in the state enslaved Aboriginal people in

Indigenous inmates in Roebourne Gaol, Credit: The Guardian (State Library WA)

Jack Glass wants to talk about prison.

the pearling industry, on farms, or as domestic servants. According to historian Neville Green, those who refused to work elsewhere were sent to Rottnest, forced to quarry salt and limestone, where the punishments for non-compliance were brutal. Western Australian Governor Arthur Kennedy himself explained that, partly, the logic of the island prison was that without it, people in Perth would see Indigenous prisoners “chained and manacled in the most inhumane manner.” The institutionalised racial segregation in the prison system had the convenient effect of foreclosing any sympathy that white, urban populations may have had for enslaved Aboriginal people.

The gratuitous, violent, and psychologically abusive treatment of Aboriginal people in custody has never stopped. It has been facilitated by enduring colonial logic and attitudes amongst those who organise and work in Australian prisons. John Roy Stephenson, a man who worked in Australian prisons between 1930 and 1970, wrote a memoir recounting his experiences. Many of the interactions described in the book reveal the satisfaction he felt in exercising unchecked power over Aboriginal prisoners at the Stuart Creek Prison in Townsville. Having unilaterally and summarily convicted a group of prisoners of their third minor offences committed in custody, Stephenson took delight in informing them that the punishment would be an additional fourteen months of hard labour, and that, under the Queensland Prisons Act, they had no right to appeal the decision that he had made. In his own words, the subsequent resentment the prisoners felt towards him “pleased [him] mightily.”

Why has our prison system been so unaffected by progressive thinking that has, in many other ways, changed our society for the better? It is true that much of the prison reform that is needed in Australia may not be politically palatable. However there exist many policy changes that would still be both popular, and make the lives of prisoners better. Ahead of both the 2008 and 2012 elections, Obama endorsed certain popular, reformist criminal justice policies, like reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offences. The so-called “smart on crime” policies that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice implemented in 2013 were widely supported. They included expanding compassionate releases and moderating sentencing guidelines for minor drug crimes. Perhaps an equivalent Australian policy would be abolishing our privately run prisons.

The largest prison in Australia is the Clarence Correctional Centre in Grafton. It is owned and operated by Serco, a British multinational defence, health, and criminal justice contractor, listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Private prisons have not been a political flashpoint in Australia, but polling suggests that a large majority of Americans oppose the privatisation of prisons. It is hard to imagine the same would not be true here, especially given that most of

our private prisons are run by foreign companies. Private prisons are also more expensive for the taxpayer: Serco has previously been embroiled in controversy for overcharging the British government for criminal justice services. In addition, private prison operators are shielded from public accountability. Large portions of the contracts between them and state governments are redacted. In the United States, many of those contracts include ‘occupancy guarantee’ clauses, whereby governments are required to pay fees to prison operators if the inmate population falls below a certain number. It is unlikely that arrangements like that exist in Australia; but even if they did, we would not know about them.

Most Australians consider private prisons to be a uniquely American phenomenon, however, it is Australia that has the most privatised prison system in the world. In 2018, 18 per cent of prisoners in Australia were held in private prisons, compared to only 8 per cent of prisoners in the US. What we do know, though, is that, according to a 2018 report produced by Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission, there is comparatively more violence and corruption in private prisons than public. Anecdotally, prisoners report that commissary goods are more expensive in private prisons, visiting hours or phone calls are harder to arrange, and complaints fall on deaf ears more often.

Governments taking control back from private prison operators would likely be both politically popular and meaningfully improve the lives of 18% of prisoners in Australia. Some states are starting to do this; the New South Wales government recently decided to not renew its contract with GEO Group Australia for the management of the Junee Correctional Centre. However, it needs to happen more quickly. There are other reforms of this nature, like giving prisoners basic workers’ rights or making the market for healthcare provision in prisons more competitive, that would not kill the election chances of a party supporting them.

The reason these reforms have not happened is a lack of empathy and consideration for prisoners. The history of prisons in Australia is one of turning a blind eye to the experiences and voices of those in them. Whether by entrapping them on an island or behind closed walls, the effect has been to dehumanise and abstract the lives of those we imprison. This problem continues today. Media reporting on prison usually takes the form of either: a) reporting on deaths in custody and serious incidents of abuse, which are often portrayed as aberrations; or b) reporting on high-level, abstracted policy issues like rising incarceration rates. These are both important and necessary forms of reporting that must continue. However, more attention should also be given to the frequent denial and violation of basic rights that happens daily in Australian prisons.

For many prisoners, chronic pain, thoughts of self harm, and the threat of sexual violence are facts of life. By not describing these issues in plain terms, we allow them to continue. We allow many Australians to conceive of imprisonment as mostly humane and justified; as fulfilling its function of taking away certain freedoms in a precise and orderly manner in order to rehabilitate criminals and protect the rest of society. Realising that a sentence of imprisonment is a sentence to unchecked and horrific abuse is the first step to reform.

A study conducted by advocate and lawyer David Heilpern in 1998 estimated that roughly a quarter of prisoners in the country had been sexually assaulted in prison. Young and gay prisoners are especially at risk, and many victims will contract sexually transmitted diseases. When people in Australia are sentenced to imprisonment, much of the time, they are being condemned to the lifelong trauma, paranoia, dissociation, and amnesia associated with being the victim of rape.

For example, 50 per cent of prisoners in Australia have a disability. According to a Human Rights Watch report, compared to prisoners without disabilities, they are more likely to be assaulted, and are more likely to be placed in solitary confinement. Many of them do not receive adequate healthcare. Their medications are often stolen by other prisoners, who sometimes force them to regurgitate tablets after they have taken them. Mentally ill prisoners are especially at risk. In Australia, forensic patients, who are deemed not fit to stand trial for criminal charges laid against them, are still often sent to prison. Other jurisdictions like New Zealand prohibit this, and rightly so: if someone is so unwell that we cannot hold their criminal actions against them, they are surely too unwell to be placed into one of the most distressing environments one could dream up. Often placed in solitary confinement for more than 22 hours a day, and faced with indeterminate wait times to access healthcare services outside of prison, many prisoners self harm or take their own life. Coronial inquests and royal commissions have regularly drawn attention to these problems, but little progress has been made. Prison guards are often former police, military, or security officers, and do not have remotely enough training to deal with mentally ill inmates. Prisoners speaking to Human Rights Watch recounted how they were ignored and abused by guards while in solitary confinement. “I was sobbing, they didn’t respond. They opened up the grate [in the cell door] and laughed at me. I swallowed batteries in front of them,” one said.

There is also a crisis of sexual assault and violence in Australian prisons. It is chronically underreported in the media, and difficult to research.

In 1991, then New South Wales Minister for Corrective Services Michael Yabsley commented that prison rape was both “inevitable” and a useful “detterant factor” against offending. Despite much public outrage over the comments at the time, no substantive reforms have been made since then to reduce sexual violence in prisons. In the United States there is the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which established a “National Prison Rape Reduction Commission” aimed at increasing support for prisoners, reporting of assaults, and awareness of the issue. There is no state or federal equivalent policy in Australia.

Our national ignorance of prison is shameful. State governments are in the process of sending even more people, including many children, to jail. In some places in Australia, more than one in every hundred people are in prison. We have an obligation to understand what that actually means, to listen to the stories of prisoners, and to broadcast their experiences.

We must reckon with the fact that human beings in prison are subjected to the most deplorable crimes every day and that most of the time, no one cares or intervenes. If voters and politicians are intent on incarceration being the panacea for our many social maladies, then they should at least be honest about its consequences.

Aboriginal prisoners on Rottnest Island, Credit: ABC (State Library of WA)

Labor “Addresses” Cost of Living Crisis.

Welcome back to another federal Budget! At the forefront of everyone’s minds and at the ‘front and centre’ of the Budget is the overwhelming cost of living crisis. Let’s take a deep dive into how the Labor government has aimed to mitigate the effects of increasingly expensive groceries, give renters some relief, combat energy bills, cheapen medicines, strengthen Medicare, and protect workers. This year’s budget has some positive elements, but is still underdelivering on Albanese’s promise of a “fair go for Australia”.

Australia has been under the Labor government for the better part of three years, up to their fourth budget. With the federal election coming up, Labor has only $1.5 billion allocated between 2025-2026 for “decisions made but not yet announced”; comparative to previous allocations of up to $10 billion, this suggests Labor has made the strategic decision to slow-rollout almost all their election policies before or during the Budget.

Tax Cuts

Labor plans for “all 14 million taxpayers” to receive another (tiny) tax cut in 2026 and 2027, on top of the tax cuts that have been rolling out since 1 July 2024.

Observing new personal tax rates, the main changes are in the $18, 201 - $45,000 wage bracket which experienced tax rates of 16 per cent from 2024-2025 and 2025-2026, which are to reduce by one percentage point to 15 per cent from 1 July 2026 and then 14 per cent from 1 July 2027.

The average tax cut is expected to be around $43 per week in 2026-2027 and around $50 per week in 2027-2028.

Labor aims to offset “dangerous bracket creep”. Bracket creep occurs when wages are adjusted to account for inflation. When people in lower thresholds move up, they end up in a higher tax bracket which is not offset by their new wage. Consequently, people end up having less purchasing power.

These new tax cuts mitigate this by lowering average tax rates for all taxpayers, namely low and middle income earners. With tax cuts, workers on average are expected to pay $30,000 less tax from 2024-2025 to 20352036, relative to 2023-2024 tax settings.

creep and skirted around the question. He repeated that although it is a “modest cut, in combination with other policies it will benefit Australians”. It is an absolute shame that Labor has latched on to marginal tax cuts and refused to deliver appropriate cost of living mitigation for the millions of vulnerable Australians on Centrelink.

Renters & Relief

The Government has not increased rates of Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) for renters. Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at the Australia Institute, tells Honi that “We still seem very much stuck in the 1980s and 1990s belief that renters aren’t a big part of the voting public.” This rings true in the face of the Budget’s lacklustre energy towards renters rights, which decrees that it is “moving towards limiting rental increases to once a year” through A Better Deal for Renters, with no concrete measures, performance indicators, or financial statistics to solidify neither the claim nor the process. Alongside no increase in financial assistance, there is also no proposed cap on excessive rent increases, with the ACT being the only jurisdiction in Australia which caps rent increases to a maximum of 10 per cent above the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Canberra.

This Budget severely lacks any proposed reform or financial alleviations for student accommodation, which is notably expensive and unstable as private companies hold a monopoly over the commercial student accommodation sphere and prices have increased significantly post-COVID.

As housing and renting prices continue to increase, renting is no longer a step towards home ownership but often a permanent housing situation for millions of Australians.

The Labor party should aspire to provide policy that ensures renter’s stability and quality of life, if they want to lock in the ‘renter vote’ this election.

Honi found it frustrating that the tax cuts are applying to all voters equally, instead of being scaled by income and targeted to low-income earners. When questioned by journalists as to why these tax cuts have been implemented when the budget is absent of any measures to increase Centrelink payments (such as JobSeeker and Youth Allowance) Chalmers stated that the tax cuts are to solve the problem of bracket

Energy

The Labor Government has promised $1.8 billion to extend energy bill relief to the end of the year for every household and small business, on top of the nearly $5 billion of bill relief being delivered so far. Households and small businesses will receive two $75 rebates off their electricity bills through to 31 December 2025.

The Labor Government will provide $2 billion to recapitalise the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to invest in renewable energy, energy efficiency and low emissions technologies. The Government has already provided funding for this measure starting from 14 February 2025.

Mehnaaz Hossain and Charlotte Saker report.

Let’s See How Well They’ve Done…

Our Beloved PBS

Labor has promised $1.8 billion to list more life-changing medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits scheme (PBS).

The Government will provide $784.6 million over four years from 2025-2026 with $236.4 million per year ongoing, to lower the (PBS) general patient co-payment from $31.60 to $25 starting 1 January 2026. This measure extends from their plan to secure cheaper medicines from 2023 and 2024.

Labor will also allocate $690 million to lower the cost of PBS-listed medicines from $31.60 to $25, which the Coalition has also agreed to uphold.

Does our Government Even Medi-care?

The Labor Government promises $7.9 billion to increase GP bulk-billing in Australia. They plan for 9/10 GP visits and 4,800 practices in Australia to be fully bulk-billed by 2030. This is the largest single investment in Medicare since its creation in 1984. The Coalition has promised to match the Budget spending on bulk billing, meaning this policy will benefit all Australians regardless of the federal election outcome.

The Government also aims to spend $657.9 million to open another 50 Medicare Urgent Care Clinics, bringing the total to 137 nationwide, with an additional $1.8 billion to fund public hospitals.

Starting on the 1st of July 2024, the Government will increase the Medicare levy low-income thresholds by 4.7% for singles, families, and seniors. This change will ensure that over one million Australians on lower incomes remain exempt from paying the full Medicare levy or are subject to a reduced levy rate.

Patient experience is still likely to be subpar; the critical GP shortage, which the Labor Government has failed to address on a structural reform level, has resulted in understaffed clinics and overworked GPs. Also in the realm of healthcare, dental remains completely inaccessible as it lies outside Medicare; this remains an urgent issue which Labor has yet to propose a concrete solution for. And despite critical psychiatrist shortages due to medical union strikes, this years Budget — to Honi’s severe disappointment, albeit not our surprise — was utterly absent on any policy to combat the mental health crisis.

A Fair Go for Families, Farmers, and… Students

The government aims to help consumers get a better deal at checkouts. Labor is boosting funding to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission by $38.8 million to challenge deceptive pricing practices in the supermarket and retail sector. Finally!

They are providing $2.9 million to support fresh produce suppliers to enforce their rights under the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct. The government has

mandated the code and introduced multi-million dollar penalties if supermarkets breach the code.

I feel a zap through my veins every time I tap my card and see those ridiculous surcharges. Society’s over-reliance on card transactions is costing us. I buy an $8 sandwich, and suddenly I’m being charged $8.34. Give me my 34 cents back, this stuff builds up! Seems like the government will do something about it, but at the moment it’s a promise of planning and preparation, as opposed to actual implementations.

The government is “prepared” to address excessive card surcharges by banning debit card surcharges, subject to further work by the Royal Bank of Australia (RBA) and safeguards to ensure both consumers and small businesses can benefit from lower costs.

The government will collaborate with state and territory governments to ban unfair trading practices and strengthen regulators’ ability to act against businesses that fail to uphold consumer guarantees under Australian Consumer Law.

Social Welfare

Beyond tax indexation, there is little change to welfare. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has claimed that “tax relief for working people, strengthening Medicare, cheaper medicines, energy rebates, and slashing student debt” are the government’s main avenues for boosting social support. However, it’s clear that while there is plenty on cheaper medicines and Medicare, information on Centrelink is scarce. The Budget notes that Services Australia is expected to grow in response to rising demand, driven by an ageing population, shifting demographics, and new support measures like paid parental leave, which has resulted in a 35% increase in Medicare and Centrelink claims since 2012. What we do know is that between 2023 and 2024, Services Australia staff completed 1.2 million Centrelink claims and Medicare-related activities — yet the detail beyond that is limited.

First Nations

To help close the gap amongst First Nations Australians, the government is investing $1.3 billion over six years from 20242025. This adds to previous investments that deliver services and infrastructure for First Nations Australians, including the Northern Territory remote housing agreement and the $706 million Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program. They are also giving $3.4 million over three years from 2025-2026 to establish a place-based business coaching and mentoring program for First Nations businesswomen and entrepreneurs.

Albanese’s government is also boosting Indigenous Business Australia’s Home Loan Capital Fund by $70.9 million over two years from 2025-2026 to increase home owning opportunities for First Nations people.

Additionally, the government is reducing the costs of 30 essential products, including milk, fruit, vegetables and nappies in stores in remote First Nations communities to improve food security and ease the cost-of-living crisis.

The government plans to provide $842.6 million over six years from 1 July 2025 towards Northern Territory Remote Aboriginal Investment. They aim to improve health, safety and education outcomes. 2024 had a similar budget of $4 billion to improve overcrowding in remote area housing in the Northern Territory and $2.4 billion toward education, health and jobs. Labor is simply continuing on from that.

Workers Rights: Non-Compete Clauses

Non-compete clauses are contractual terms which restrict employees from engaging in competing activities — such as pursuing higherpaying work in the same industry — after their employment ends, which restricts their financial mobility and autonomy. This Budget is removing non-compete clauses which more than 3 million Australian workers are covered under, in industries such as childcare and construction. It will apply to workers earning less than the high-income threshold in the Fair Work Act, which is $175,000. This is spurned by the Treasury’s Competition Review being informed of the misuse of noncompete clauses with vulnerable people, including minimum wage workers being sued by former employers for switching jobs.

Allowing workers to maximise their earnings will also result in a “4 per cent wages benefit” of approximately $2,500 per year for the average worker.

This is a proposal that is disappointingly most likely contingent on re-election; following consultation and passage of legislation, the reforms will take effect from 2027, “operating prospectively to give businesses and workers time to adjust”. Labor has had the political capacity to enact these changes — particularly given they are enforcement-related as opposed to strictly fiscal — in the last three years. The announcement of electioncontingent benefits for workers under the high-income threshold, many earning minimum wage, only towards the end of their term, reads as an electorally strategic move rather than a genuine economic solution for workers from a so-called workers rights party. Overall, Labor has promised some degree of relief for Australians. However, this Budget ignores crucial policy areas and staunch measures to significantly reform key issues — such as growing cost of living pressures on the working class, the GP shortage, mental health and excessive rental increases — are shamefully absent. This year’s budget is filled with incremental measures, leaving room for the Labor party to, in the lead up to the 2025 federal election, dangle policy in front of us like a carrot.

Read full article online.

Low-hanging fruit in the Budget’s Higher Ed Portfolio

In the 2025-26 budget, the Albanese government has taken vanishingly few measures to directly and effectively relieve students who are under stress due to the cost of living crisis, international student caps, and HECS-HELP debt. When it comes to education, Jim Chalmers seems to be in a creative drought; he’s used ctrl+C a few too many times in this year’s budget and it really shows.

The government has declared it will slash national collective student debt by 20 per cent with effect on the 1st of June 2025, before indexation is applied.

This is set to wipe $16 billion from outstanding student HECS-HELP loans. The government has not announced any measures to address the increased cost of tuition itself, an impact of the Liberal government’s Job Ready Graduates package and a direct cause of the current HECS debts which have ballooned to $74 billion dollars in outstanding national debt. However, this measure is not new: the government announced it in December 2024, and has not adjusted the measure in this budget from what had previously been released. The government has also decided to lift the repayment threshold for graduates from $54,000 to $67,000.

In a decision that Honi would call questionable, the government has announced that by 2050 it aims to have 80 per cent of the working population with a tertiary qualification. This is an increase from 77 per cent, the current rate: a spokesperson for Jason Clare, The Minister for Education told Honi that this increase was “ambitious target”. The budget aims for “a rise on the previous year” and was unchanged from Chalmers’ last budget. The measure seems counterproductive for the government given the crippling HECS debts that 3 million students have incurred as a result of degrees undertaken, which have led to the Labor government repeatedly wiping portions of student debts. In past years, the government cut indexation rates from 7.1% in 2023 to 4% in 2024, but this has clearly not had the desired effect on the student populace.

Rather than removing the changes to HECS fees that were introduced by Scott Morrison in the 2021 Job Ready Graduates program, Chalmers has decided to put a bandaid on the gaping wound of student debt as a substitute for making education affordable — or better yet, free. Chalmers, as someone who would have benefited from free university as enacted throughout the 1970s and 1980s, has a curious method of addressing affordability of tertiary education. This is only the latest in a series of attempts by both Labor and Liberal governments to fix the problem of students’ tuition fees. But to make up for it, Chalmers will do his best to make sure more and more students get sucked into the financial haemorrhage of HECS-HELP loans.

Thanks a lot!

Angus Fisher, the USyd Sydney Representative Council President, commented, “The 20 per cent cut to HECS debts is a huge win for students… What this shows is the power student unionism has in pushing the

current government to do good, as this was a result of the SRC and NUS being involved in the accords process.”

He added, “In future, student unionists can further push this government to do even better for students, for measures like free education, fully paid placements, and supporting student housing. What is certain is under a Dutton Liberal government we don’t get this policy and weaken the power of student unionists. Students should be putting the Liberals last.”

A spokesperson for Jason Clare said to Honi that “We have listened to students’ concerns and we have reduced HELP and other student debts by over $3 billion by changing the way that HELP and other student loans are indexed.”

They continued, “The Government will also provide additional Needs-based Funding for academic and wrap around supports to help students succeed, including scholarships, bursaries, mentoring, and peer learning. Universities will receive demand driven Needs-based Funding aligned with the number of students they enrol from under-represented backgrounds to deliver this.”

For international students, the Labor government has twisted itself in knots trying to exploit students for cash and simultaneously reduce their alleged pressure on Australian housing. While enforcing a strict student cap that will have significant effects on international students, who comprise 46 per cent of enrolments at the University of Sydney, the government has also announced a performance target to increase the number of students enrolled in offshore education and training delivered by Australian providers from the rate in 2024-2025. International students are encouraged to study with Australian tertiary institutions, boosting our economy, only so long as they do not take up limited housing resources.

Chalmers has introduced medical training opportunities for First Nations students, focusing on primary care, namely general practitioners. The government is using this measure to increase representation of First Nations individuals in the medical field, implementing $35.6 million over four years to introduce 100 new medical Commonwealth Supported Places (CSPs) for First Nations medical students. These places will be introduced from 2026 and continue annually, and will be raised to 150 CSPs from 2028. While this sounds like a good measure, it isn’t exactly new. The same measure had been previously introduced and targeted specifically at First Nations regional students, which then expanded to include First Nations students from metropolitan areas. These students will be allocated CSPs through a competitive process moderated by the Department of Health.

The government has also announced a measure to establish 100,000 permanent free places at TAFE, starting from 1st January 2027.

But the Treasury has grand plans for tertiary education. Firstly, they intend to establish a so-called Australian Tertiary Education Commission, which will apparently “guide tertiary education reform over the long-term.” The ATEC will start operating in an interim capacity from 1 July 2025,

and permanently from 1 January 2026, but performance measures have not been announced for this yet, which indicates that this shiny new measure has no real substance. The performance measures will not be developed until after ATEC has been permanently established, which would be a little unfortunate if ATEC did not run as smoothly as the Treasury hopes it will. Secondly, the government intends to create a new “Managed Growth Funding system” that will “guarantee a place” to low-SES and disadvantaged students. This system grants universities the ability to negotiate for a higher amount of funding through which to allocate CSPs. Comparatively, the current system has a ‘maximum basic grant amount’ (MBGA) which means that, although domestic students are entitled to CSPs, the university can choose to reject an enrolment application rather than exceed the MBGA. The MBGA is a specific amount of money that the Treasury distributes between universities which they then use to allocate CSPs. The MBGA will be ousted in favour of a system that theoretically awards grant money based on the number of students enrolled at a university. That grant money is now a negotiable figure, based on an over-enrolment buffer where “a small proportion of additional students” can receive CSPs in addition to the allocated figure. For a measure that is supposed to “reform” our education, it seems wholly unremarkable.

Meanwhile, Chalmers has copied many measures that were already mentioned in previous budgets, as well as completely overlooking issues of importance to the tertiary education sector. The National Student Ombudsman, which was announced in the 2024-25 Budget, has been re-declared in this year’s budget, for no apparent reason other than Chalmers’ deep desire to appear to create change while sticking with his old and familiar policies. The NSO’s role is to investigate student complaints regarding issues which include sexual assault, racism and homophobia. It began accepting these complaints in February 2025, so Chalmers has tried to pull the wool over our eyes by marketing it as something new. Nice try.

Last but not least, the Labor government has wiggled AUKUS into the tertiary education portfolio too. The government has propelled a Nuclear Powered Submarine Program, using “education pipelines” to “support the nuclear workforce.” In a continuation of policy from 2024-2025, the government aims to allocate CSP funding specifically so that students can “support sovereign workforce development” by studying in this program. In 2024 all of the CSP allocations for this program were achieved. While the USyd community have continuously condemned AUKUS, this program seems like a wildly ill-judged attempt to use students as resources for a program that many students vehemently oppose.

This year’s budget is by no means impressive, nor can it be called original. Chalmers has reiterated a host of measures that had already been announced in the vain hopes that his lacklustre treatment of the tertiary education sector, and introduced a few measures which might see some changes for students. Can we call it a good budget? Nope. But will we be here again in October for a second budget after the election? A solid maybe.

Scandinavian Exceptionalism: Homelessness and Western Prison Systems

Ellie Robertson is a reoffending hater of the system.

Disclaimer: The use of the word ‘offender’ is used in the assumption that the incarcerated people being discussed in this article were deemed guilty. Of course, this is not always true when it comes to our criminal justice systems. However, for the case of the article, I have used this word to ensure it reads well, and is streamlined in wording.

The criminal justice system (CJS) has been a system that has existed in many forms for thousands of years. The way in which both sentencing and punishment have changed throughout time begets much curiosity from criminologists. One place in particular that has caused debate amongst experts and amateurs alike is the prisons based on Scandinavian Exceptionalism. It has bred many discussions on the relationship between these styles of prisons and how they can be implemented into Western society for a less retributive space. It can safely be said that there are both benefits and limitations to implementing a Scandinavian-style form of justice into Australian prisons, but the main intersection of how the government deals with socio-economic problems, such as homelessness and poverty, is a crucial factor in the issues that would arise.

‘Scandinavian Exceptionalism’ is known to focus on reformative and positivist ideas surrounding punishment.

From its open-spaced architecture to personalised treatments for prisoners, these styles of prisons focus on the ways in which the incarcerated can get back on track to being integrated into society. The actual architecture of the prisons is able to adapt the experience of those criminalised and alter the effects of their punishment in many ways.

According to a study by Yvonne Jewkes, there are two types of architectures: of harm, and of hope. In Western society, retributive foundations of punishment are set at the forefront of priority when it comes to punishing offenders, and prisons are built on the basis of an ‘architecture of harm’. This design implements a space of dehumanisation and degradation, putting forward the ideology that offenders do not deserve to be treated like humans and don’t deserve a comfortable life. These spaces consist of characteristics such as no windows, concrete walls, uncomfortable surfaces, and constant surveillance, leading to an immense feeling of surveillance that provides offenders with enough fear of suffering to supposedly prevent them from reoffending. In contrast to this, the ‘architecture of hope’ is the creation of open-spaced rehabilitative punishment based on the equality of all.

Scandinavian Exceptionalism tends to create a space where offenders are able to express their hobbies and interests in much more hospitable and comfortable conditions. Focusing on the rehabilitation of the offenders theoretically provides them with the skills and experience to reintegrate back into society or their community. Because Scandinavian countries have some of the lowest recorded crime rates in the world, it gives rise to questions surrounding the implementation of those values into the Western world and how it would affect the CJS in that space.

Incorporating a humane prison system in Western society would be a very big process as our societal views collectively show a desire for more retributive punishment; people want offenders to be treated with the ideology of “an eye for an eye” to ensure there’s some form of justice for the victims. The factors between Western society and Scandinavian countries that differentiate the effectiveness of this Exceptionalism consists of issues like overpopulated prisons, the higher levels of offending and reoffending, overrepresentation of minority groups in prisons, and the relationship between homelessness and offending rates. These factors stem from systematic issues that are supported by the CJS in the Western world.

Specifically looking into the issue of homelessness, a widely debated issue amongst criminologists is the prominence of how poor living conditions and the lack of support for homeless people correlate with crime rates. As a general statement, a humane prison may assist in some aspects of the re-offending rates, however it would be a much more beneficial action to sort the issue from the root cause of the problem. A study regarding the relationship between accommodation and reoffending in 2012 showed that approximately 60% of the participants (offenders who have been incarcerated) said that having support in the aspect of accommodation or living situation would assist in the prevention of reoffending. This statistic proves that there is an underlying issue with which prisoners link their reoffending with the homelessness crisis.

When offenders leave their time in incarceration, it is on their record permanently; records that both landlords and workplaces have access to. With this criminal record, it becomes difficult to find a home to rent or a job to be able to assimilate with ease. This is a reflection on how Western societies, and their perspective on retributive justice, view

a person with previous involvement in the justice system. Found in a study consisting of reoffending incarcerated people in 2012, 64 per cent of the participants reported that the factor of safe and affordable accommodation and living support would be beneficial to ensure a decrease in reoffending rates. At a very low 20 per cent reoffending rate compared to Australia’s 53.1 per cent as of 2022, Scandinavian countries seem to have characteristics in their rehabilitative punishment that work in filtering out disparity and treating prisoners as equals, to allow them to continue living with basic human rights after their sentence.

The ideal situation when speaking of the Scandinavian Exceptionalist perspective is that the Western CJS would incorporate this approach to punishment to reflect the positive impact it’s had on places like Norway. Nevertheless, there are various issues that prevent the change from taking place. In 2022, the imprisonment rates in Australia were at a high number of 200.9 people per 100 thousand adults; this means approximately 330 thousand were incarcerated in 2022 alone. With huge-scale imprisonment, Australia’s overpopulation in prison is almost too overwhelming to alter or change wholly without complete abolishment of the policing and punishment system. Therefore, the problem of insufficient support for homeless people, specifically looking at ex-prisoners, needs to be funded and focused on by the Government as a measure to see progression in the decrease of reoffending rates.

The issue with Australia’s current measures is that instead of going down the route of subsuming some beneficial aspects of Scandinavian Exceptionalism, there has been a defunding and abolishing of support systems for homelessness after returning to society. A small-scale example of this can be seen in the termination of the Reintegration of ExOffenders (REO) program, subsidised by Housing Tasmania. With 19 per cent of male and 15 per cent of female prisoners having no accommodation arrangements within weeks of the run up to their release, it forces these ex-offenders to reoffend as a means of survival.

Many prisoners will reoffend simply to get some form of accommodation. To illustrate, Tony Bull (an ex-prisoner) who has been periodically in prison throughout his life, stated “It doesn’t take too long before, you know, you’re looking at prison as being a better option”. This idea of reoffending to have a roof over your head produces a speculation on the notion that having nicer and more humane prisons in a time of an economic crisis would do the opposite as the Scandinavian countries have seen. Norway in recent years has only seen six in ten thousand people per year homeless, compared to Australia’s 48. Accompanied by this very low figure of homelessness, it is understandable that Norway (and other Scandinavian countries) have lower reoffending rates as at least one issue surrounding the welfare of citizens has somewhat adequate policies and support surrounding it.

Incorporating the Scandinavian Exceptionalist characteristics into our Western CJS runs the risk of a potential increase in (re)offending. This is because the current retributive prison systems are used as a means of deterrence to those who are thinking about committing crimes. If the prisons were known to have open-spaced living, good food, time, and space to pursue hobbies and a means of living more comfortably in a place free of judgement, there is a possibility that people living in worse conditions — especially in the recent housing crisis — will commit crimes to be taken away from poor living conditions and poverty. The way to resolve this in prisons and the state of reoffending is not to avoid giving prisoners basic human rights, but to ensure that the greater population has better access to livable conditions to avoid reoffending in the first place. The problem we’re facing is not the offenders themselves, but the lack of care and support given by the government in the face of a cost-of-living crisis.

Clearly, the incorporation of Scandinavian Exceptionalist characteristics in Australian prisons would assist in decreasing reoffending rates, when it is accompanied by more adequate support for low socio-economic groups. Scandinavian Exceptionalism can be impactful in lowering Australia’s high reoffending rates, but this can only be achieved in a place where governments put heavy focus on funding and fixing the root causes of the high crime rates.

With more funding and a strong focus on ensuring that Australia’s prison systems are rehabilitative, the Australian government has to, first, approach new policies to fully support vulnerable groups, not only have knee-jerk reactions when crimes occur.

system.

Eat the Rich: The Glitz and Glory of Anti-Capitalist Rebellion

Not long after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when average-income Australians were still facing the concentrated economic repercussions of lockdown while millionaires almost doubled their income, American politician and activist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) wore a white gown with the red bold letters “tax the rich” to the Met Gala. After disrupting the annual event celebrating the elite and uber-wealthy, Ocasio-Cortez released a collection of “tax the rich” merchandise; tees, mugs, stickers and tote bags, all made by unionised workers yet ostensibly profiting her political campaign. It received both controversy and praise. Some criticised AOC for her distasteful hypocrisy. Others praised her for bringing awareness to such political issues in elitist spaces. She was critiqued and celebrated. To me, this signifies the inevitable contradictions of glorifying anticapitalist rebellion in our capitalist economy.

Mark Fisher, in his novel Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?, describes the process of absorbing activism into the system it critiques as circulatory. In Fisher’s Capitalist Realism theory, he explores capitalism as a totalising structure which commodifies rebellion, until activists feel as if there is no escape from the larger system at play. He quotes a phrase attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, which summarises the cynical disillusionment with the commodification of anticapitalism: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

This probes the question: can glorifying anti-capitalist rebellion prove to be transformative in an age of endless commercialisation?

When Luigi Mangione was arrested for allegedly shooting the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in late 2024, netizens were quick to sympathise with his struggles dealing with the American healthcare system, as news headlines labelled him the ‘anti-capitalist crusader’. Gen Z, in particular, heroise Mangione with the viralised hashtag ‘#FreeLuigi’.

So what was it about figures like Mangione which are so popularised in Gen Z online spaces? In comparison to criminalised climate change activists, who are often sidelined in the media as disruptive, crime cases that mix status and money are now more attractive than ever. Just look at Jordan Belfort, the Menendez Brothers, or The Bling Ring.

Meanwhile criminalised climate activists, who are fighting for similar political and social change as anti-capitalists remain overshadowed by the media’s preference for physically attractive figures whose rebellion is easily commodified. It’s unsurprising that these ‘icons’ who have spearheaded the aestheticising of anti-capitalist capitalism conform to our normative ideals of beauty and attraction.

Besides their good looks, the status frustration wielded by these criminals resonates with the financial anxieties of our generation. According to a 2024 YouGov Survey, 53% of Australians aged 18-24 favour a socialist economy over a capitalist one. With the rising cost of living and increased social immobility, it’s no wonder why ‘eat the rich’ narratives in true crime have been gaining traction. This sentiment has even been swallowed by pop culture. The White Lotus, Severance, and Succession are just a few of the productions that critique the elite(all while being run by some of Hollywood’s most wealthy showrunners).

Inevitably, this raises the paradox of dismantling capitalism through capitalist means. If, according to Fisher, there is no alternative, perhaps the only way out is to use the larger system to expose its own flaws.

In a similar vein, Anna Sorokin, a con artist who was charged with eight counts of theft against New York socialites, has built a following from controversially profiting off of the uber-rich. Kara Kennedy in The Spectator refers to her with a contradictory yet fitting label, an ‘anti-capitalist-capitalist’. The glamorisation of Sorokin’s crimes is only amplified as Sorokin seemingly utilises her crimes for her gain: rebranding herself as a fashion icon.

As Vogue Australia calls it, ‘Scammer Chic’.

In line with Fisher’s theory, the glamorisation of the ‘eat the rich’ movement ultimately diverts attention away from the systemic change that lies at the core of anti-capitalist rebellion. It instead aestheticises a political critique into a marketable and, by extension, consumable slogan.

It’s for this reason that true crime cases like Sorokin’s and Mangione’s are being adapted into biopics and documentaries, spread through merchandise, podcasts and utilised for entertainment. Just as Fisher predicts, these stories which seemingly critique capitalism fall back into the cycle of consumerism until they are sold back to us. While this perspective may feel pessimistic, acknowledging the limiting process of co-optation is the first step to finding an alternative where resistance can lead to genuine change.

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The ForgoTTen Lives Behind Trending Tragedies

Every day across the globe, despicable violations of human rights are quietly claiming helpless lives. Countless crimes are constantly committed with so many of them hidden in the shadows. Although these crimes may be invisible to us, the suffering of innocent individuals is anything but. In Australia, we live in a so-called progressive society that reacts to human rights violations with outrage. However, there is a bias to this outrage. Below the surface so many tragedies persist with no action taken against them; they are dismissed as distant problems. The impact of these horrors is far-reaching, and as a community it is so important for us to bring these acts of evil into the light — before more lives continue to be lost at the price of our indifference.

You might be thinking that you are well-informed regarding these tragedies because you watch the news and keep up to date on other platforms, but even when these crimes are reported it is in the face of illusion: the news reports global injustices when they are ‘trending’ but the next day, or week, or month they disappear. Once the headlines fade, these injustices are ignored without any action even though their victims continue to suffer.

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the Iranian government’s mortality police after she was arrested for wearing her hijab improperly. Her death sparked a massive protest movement with the name ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, a campaign with the goal of forcing an end to the Islamic Republic’s discrimination and oppression against the women of Iran in the name of Islam. Mahsa’s death caused global outrage, receiving mass media coverage, televised recordings of protests in Sydney and more. But it was not even a few months later that the movement completely disappeared from headlines. Thriving in systems that perpetuate injustice, the criminal leaders of Iran have continued to intensify their war on women. In 2024, nearly 1,000 individuals were executed in Iran. This included a rise in the number of women executed as well as a notable portion of these executions being identified as protestors. And the world hardly blinks.

It is also pertinent to realise that the citizens of Iran have been putting their lives at risk in the name of protest for the last 43 years since the Islamic Revolution — and yet 2022 was the first year that they were globally acknowledged.

Meanwhile, as of 2017, China has been under massive scrutiny, with accusations against the nation of committing genocide against their Uyghur and Muslim population. There have been countless investigations over recent years, attempting to bring forward the crimes against humanity, committed against the hundreds of thousands of Uyghur men and women. These are innocent individuals subject to persecution, mass surveillance, cultural assimilation, and torture. Nearly 400 detention camps were identified in 2020 alone. Institutions where individuals are forced to undergo ‘re-education’. This includes extreme punishment for Muslim individuals when they are found to own a Qur’an or abstain from eating pork, forcible mass sterilisation of Uyghur women to eliminate the population and removal of children from their families. A number of high-ranking individuals from countries such as the United States, United Kingdom and Canada have come forward to accuse China’s crimes against humanity as an act of genocide. And yet, the most recent credible article that I came across was written in 2022. Yet another disgusting, unremitting violation of innocent people.

A lot of the time, it is hard to bring ourselves to care about these issues because of how disconnected we are from them. When a terrible tragedy happens nearly 13,000 kilometres across the ocean it is harder to muster up empathy, but the reality is that these silent crimes are just as prevalent close to home.

Nauru is a small country located northeast of Australia. Its main features include the coral reef that surrounds the island, its beautiful white-sand beaches, and its refugee processing centre that is used by Australia as an offshore immigration facility. Initially established in 2001, Nauru is one of several islands in Oceania used by the Australian government as a refugee centre. The island itself has

housed an estimated 7,536 refugees since August 2012. The Australian government has labelled these refugee camps as a necessary response to the increased numbers of asylum seekers in Australia, a beneficial approach which allows for assistance towards these individuals as well as the deterrence of further arrivals to manage the asylum process. But in reality, our own leaders have generated a policy-driven crisis where these asylum seekers are subject to appalling conditions from which some never make it out alive — and their stories continue to remain unheard.

Women in these camps are routinely sexually harassed and face abuse by guards consistently. Children as young as seven-years-old have become catatonic and suicidal. Omid Masoumali, an Iranian refugee, doused himself in petrol and then on fire as a form of resistance against the conditions of the island. Dr Peter Young, the former chief psychiatrist within Nauru’s detention centre, has come forward to describe the camp’s toxic environments where individuals are subject to processes comparable to torture. These asylum seekers are stripped of their humanity and forced to live in an Australian-made zoo, their voices screaming out, yet our media turns a blind eye.

We must refuse to stay silent about these crimes.

We must look beyond the headlines, beyond the manipulated illusions and seek out the truths that are kept within the shadows. Awareness is not passive; it is the beginning of action — the start of change. And while your voice may feel insignificant in the face of global injustice, spreading the light of your knowledge will allow it to grow stronger. So continue to educate yourself. Discuss, resist and raise awareness. Advocating for these individuals who are treated as if they are invisible, as if they are replaceable, is the first step in bringing hidden crimes against humanity into the light of justice.

Analysis

Lilah Thurbon wants to raise the age.

CW: This piece contains mentions of forced child removals and police brutality.

If you pick up a newspaper on any stand in Queensland and flip through its pages, you will see bold, fear mongering headlines warning of a ‘youth crime epidemic’. The children that are the subjects of these stories are not afforded the empathy that is usually afforded to most children. Instead, these children, many of whom come from severely disadvantaged communities, are depicted as delinquent monsters deserving of harsh punishments for threatening social cohesion.

Conservatives claim to care deeply about children and their welfare. “What about the children?” they cry, as they spew homophobic opposition to drag queens reading story books in public libraries, transphobic opposition to gender affirming healthcare, and religious opposition to sex education being taught in schools.

This outrage is clearly manufactured. These are the same conservatives that are hellbent on sending children to prison.

Prison is the kind of place you would think vocal proponents of child welfare would be so disgusted by they would call for its abolition. It is cruel and unusual to rip children away from their communities and support networks.

In Queensland (and the majority of Australian states and territories), incarcerated children as young as ten are held in separation rooms with no toilets or running water, subjected to strip searches,

Raise the Age: The Necessity of Supporting the Movement

beaten by guards, strapped into restraint chairs and hooded. In 2020, prison guards at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre were lambasted by the High Court for tear gassing incarcerated Indigenous children.

It’s confusing then, given the political capital to be found in the optics of ‘child protection’, that conservatives vehemently oppose raising the age of criminal responsibility. If children are so easily impressionable and such malleable products of their surroundings, why is it simultaneously justifiable to hold them criminally responsible and send them to jail?

To answer this question, we need to talk about the explicitly racialised nature of youth crime in this country. First Nations children are hugely overrepresented in youth detention, with incarceration rates of Indigenous 10-17 year olds ranging from 3.5 times that of non-Indigenous children in Tasmania to 28 times that of non-Indigenous children in Queensland.

It’s no secret that a foundational pillar of conservatism is racism. The history to which conservatives so desire to return is that of an English penal colony, founded on genocide and sustained by child removal. The status quo they wish to conserve is marred by the violence of colonisation that the prison industrial complex reproduces.

First Nations children are not afforded the luxury of childhood in the way nonIndigenous children are. Child removals persist even after the formal end to the Stolen Generation. Some states are removing children from their families

at greater rates than that of the Stolen Generation.

In addition to this, cyclical poverty and other criminogenic social conditions manufactured along lines of race and class which perpetuate settler-colonial structures mean that Indigenous children are more likely to come into contact with the criminal ‘justice’ system.

Firstly, on the double standard. Responsibility is a key concept in criminal law. If a person is not responsible for their actions that would otherwise be a crime, then it is unjust to punish them as if they were criminally responsible.

There are frequent arguments between proponents and opponents of raising the age of criminal responsibility over whether children are truly ‘responsible’ for their actions in a way that can justify a finding of criminal guilt. Opponents of raising the age will point to the fact that most children can intuitively tell ‘right’ from ‘wrong’.

There are two problems with this claim. The first is that it’s at tension with the other beliefs held by the conservatives who want to send children to prison. Children evidently do not possess the same rational faculties as adults.

Criminal behaviour is socially coerced. Colonisation and state failure to distribute wealth and opportunity equitably create poverty, which coerces crimes of necessity. Dispossession and the forced breakdown of First Nations families and communities isolates children and coerces what the colony criminalises as antisocial behaviour. It seems an inaccurate

If Pay Inequality is Illegal, Why Does It Still Exist?

Since 1969, Australian women have been legally entitled to the same pay as men for the same work, but a report released in March found that every single industry in Australia has a pay gap that favours men. On average, women earned 21.8% less than men in 2024 — approximately 78 cents to every $1.

To understand why this is still happening, we need to examine how this data is collected. Since the institution of the 2012 Workplace Gender Equality Act, any business with more than 100 employees has to report their gender equality data to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) each year. This includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments for private sector employees, as well as annualised full-time equivalent salaries of casual and part-time workers.

Ironically, the worst offender in 2024 was Sydney Ultrasound for Women, which showed an 88% gender pay gap, making the average pay of female employees just 12 cents to every $1 earned by a male employee.

So if women legally have to be paid the same amount as men for the same work, where is the pay gap coming from?

In short, women and men are not doing the same jobs, for a variety of reasons. Women are far less likely to receive promotions

than men, creating a hierarchy where top-paying positions of power within an industry are held mostly by men. For instance only 19% of Australian CEOs are women, despite women being half the total workforce.

It’s easy to assume that women-led fields would escape the gender pay gap through sheer force of numbers, but fields like education (which has a gap of 11%) and healthcare (21%) repeat the same gendered hierarchy as every other industry in Australia.

Therefore, although these fields are sometimes referred to as “femaledominated” because of the number of female employees, in reality they are “dominated” by men in the higher-paying positions of power.

Even when women do achieve senior roles, the pay gap actually widens: the average gap for managerial roles is 23% (as opposed to 19% for non-managerial roles), presumably because men are more likely to receive discretionary payments such as bonuses.

distillation of what we commonly understand responsibility to mean to say that children can be responsible for criminogenic social conditions over which they have no semblance of control.

Juries, tasked with deciding matters of fact in criminal trials, do not make their decisions in vacuums. The people who sit on juries are overwhelmingly white due to biases in the jury selection process and requirements that exclude large portions of disenfranchised groups.

This racist over-assignment of criminal responsibility to First Nations children perpetuates cycles of colonial violence and is modern day child removal. Incarceration is antithetical to any rehabilitation the state may try to claim takes place in these institutions. Even the former director-general of Queensland Corrective Services had condemned the “tough on crime” approach taken by state governments across the country, calling for the phasing out of “inhumane” youth detention centres.

Finally, the acceptance and promulgation of racist narratives surrounding First Nations children is a huge roadblock to dismantling the youth “justice” system and replacing it with a holistic, rehabilitationcentred approach to resolving the social phenomena and state failure that create youth crime in the first place. Widespread support for raising the age is contingent on broader social, cultural, and institutional decolonisation.

Read full article online.

Thea Swinfield wants to close the gap.

valued less than traditionally masculine work such as trades or finance. We’re left with a chicken-and-egg question here: do women just naturally go into fields that pay less, or do fields pay less when women make up the majority of employees? Place your bets now.

“Female-dominated” fields generally pay less overall than “male-dominated” fields, for a few key reasons. The first is that work that’s seen as traditionally feminine (particularly care work, like nursing, childcare, and disability support work) is

The answer is disappointing, but unsurprising. A 2009 study found that as the population of women in a particular workforce increased, the pay decreased. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, women made up less than half of Australian teachers. As the proportion of female teachers increased through the 1920s and overtook male teachers in the 1930s, Australian educators took pay cuts of 8.3% and 25% from successive governments. The same devaluation phenomenon has been observed in every industry that has undergone this change. Short version: work is valued less when women are the ones doing it.

The second key reason “femaledominated” fields pay less is that women are more likely than men to work parttime or casual, in large part because women still take on the majority of unpaid domestic labour, including housework and childcare. This type of labour is unpaid and underappreciated for the same reason education and nursing salaries have plummeted in the last century.

When women do it, it’s viewed as less valuable.

I promise there is some good news.

We have seen an increase in the pay gap of 0.1% since last year, but this is likely because the salaries of chief executive roles were added to this year’s WGEA data for the first time. CEO roles are generally the highest-paying roles in a company and mostly held by men, so we would expect adding them to the report for the first time to widen the gender pay gap. But if we exclude CEO pay, we would actually see an improvement over the last year, from 21.7% down to 21.1%. More than half of Australian employers improved their pay gap in the last year.

It also seems that WGEA data being made public for the first time in 2023 helped motivate companies to improve their pay gaps, with more employers conducting pay gap analysis (68%) than ever before. Evidently, holding companies accountable is the first step to making actual improvements in achieving equal pay. To hold them accountable, we need to stay up to date on what the pay gap looks like in Australia, both by looking at annual data from the WGEA and Australian Bureau of Statistics. Most of all, we must listen to women when they share their experiences of workplace discrimination.

Art by Charlotte Saker

Audhora Khalid reflects once more.

When I had the idea to write this article, I was hesitant. I became more wary as I delved into my research, fully aware of my status as an outsider to the First Nations Peoples and Australia as a whole. So what can I say? I recommend that you read Indigenous authors: Amy McQuire, Veronica Gorrie, Stan Grant and more. I did my best to pull together some insights, and draw attention to a few issues that I hope makes you think and draws you to action, and serves as the gateway to understand and read Indigenous voices. Indigenous Australians experience disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system, particularly in youth justice (ages 10-17). In 2024, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare published their findings, revealing that Indigenous youth are 27 to 28 times more likely to be detained compared to their non-Indigenous peers, and are usually far younger too. In the adult group, one in three of the general adult prison population were First Nations people, and within the younger population (ages 18-39), First Nations people represented almost two in three. Between 2000 and 2009, the imprisonment rate of Indigenous Australians rose by 66 percent.

As of 2023, 54 percent of First Nations prison entrants had already experienced homelessness in the month before going to prison, and are more likely to endure it after release. Compared to that, 66 percent of non-Indigenous entrants did not face homelessness, and most have temporary or permanent accommodation planned after release.

In the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCADC), Commissioner Elliot Johnston wrote “the more fundamental causes of overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in custody are not to be found in the criminal justice system but those factors which bring Aboriginal people into conflict with the criminal justice system in the first place ... [and] the most significant contributing factor is the disadvantaged and unequal position in which Aboriginal people find themselves in society - socially, economically and culturally.” 34 years later, his words hold true — somewhat. It would be a gross conclusion to say that the criminal justice system is blameless.

The Voices We Don’t Hear

passenger before. An investigation found that his bias against Aboriginal people directly influenced his decision to call the police that day.

In 2020, a coronial inquest into the death of Tanya Day, a Yorta Yorta woman who died in custody in 2017, revealed that the train conductor had never removed a sleeping

Most Indigenous people are placed in custody for trivial offences such as offensive language, resisting offence and assaulting police; most are incarcerated for assault resulting in no actual bodily harm. Yet, they are less likely to be granted bail than non-Indigenous people. The history of police mistreatment is well documented. In the RCDAC, reports found that police shot and killed three unarmed mentally ill Aboriginal peoples. This commission itself was founded because of the murder of John Pat in 1983, only 16 years old, at the hands of off-duty police officers. The police were charged with manslaughter, but cleared by an all-white jury. To this day, John’s family have only been offered an apology. As the Australian Border Force plasters across their very welcoming arrivals section: “Don’t be sorry, just declare it” — to amend it I would say to the government, “Don’t be sorry, fucking do something about it”.

In Queensland, the release of secret police recordings in 2023 found outstanding evidence of violent racist language, one

He’s Going To Change This Time. He Swears.

Abuse comes knocking at the door, again. Abuse has a loving, familiar face and an Apprehended Domestic Violence Order (ADVO) against him. He swears that this time, he’s going to change.

The victim could let him in and face the cyclical abuse when he doesn’t fulfill his promise to change; reoffending is not an uncommon occurrence, and it takes on average seven attempts before a victim is able to leave her abuser. Or, she can trust her instinct, attempt to turn him away, and risk the consequences of his anger. In 58% of cases in the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network (ADFVDRN) focused dataset, where a male abuser killed his female intimate partner, one or both partners intended to separate at the time of the homicide, or were already separated. In 24% of these cases where women have been killed, the female partner initiated the separation. So, rather than being met with a fork in the road, the victim is instead met with a narrow, straight path to an unfortunate fate. An illusion of choice, her safety completely dependent on the anger and choices of a man.

Where are the protections that were promised to us against domestic or gendered violence? What is the effectiveness of so many court trials and ADVOs, when abuse comes crawling back to our doorstep? Many cases of domestic homicide have also involved a suspended sentence and an ADVO to supposedly protect the victim from domestic violence. Clearly, these aren’t enough to stop reoffending. In fact, there has been no

difference in the rate of reoffending in domestic violence cases between abusers who receive a suspended sentence and those who are imprisoned, with 20.3 per cent in both groups committing another domestic violence offence within 12 months. How many women have been killed in that time?

117 women in Australia have been killed from gendered and/or domestic violence between 2024-25. This data doesn’t even account for all the women who are still suffering at the hands of their abusers — whether that be their husbands, their boyfriends, their sons, or someone else terrifyingly close to them — due to a lack of ineffective action from governments and courts. Whilst there are policies and funds and emergency national cabinets, there are gaping holes in these protections. There are deep-rooted societal issues that are not adequately addressed: misogynistic teachings and values, limited support for vulnerable women, and limited mandated systems that actually encourage behavioural changes in boys and men. This system isn’t built to actually protect victims or victim-survivors. It’s performative — grand theatre shows depicting court trials, drawn-out dramas between intimate partners and families, and in the end, a murder mystery of a woman, a whodunit with all signs pointing back to an abuser who had been let off with too many slaps to his wrists and no actual change.

The system doesn’t account for the period between the initial offence and court sentencing, to the reoffence. They

even ‘joking’ to his colleague about a detained Aboriginal woman saying she “won’t give you a fucking blowjob here”. In response, Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll promised change, but no officers were held accountable to their actions.

In 2024, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) found that the Australian and Western Australian governments potentially breached the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. CERD found that they failed to seek free, prior, and informed consent from Indigenous peoples regarding changes to cultural heritage legislation and inadequate protection of Indigenous cultural heritage sites. In the meantime, the government had already been fiddling away with repealing Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, with world-class fool

George Brandis infamously saying “people have the right to be bigots”.

Read full article online.

Art by Purny Ahmed

Opinion

Purny Ahmed has had enough.

don’t account for the manipulation that victims face to take back their abusive partners, to lie to officials about the abuser meeting ADVO requirements, or to even refuse reporting when their partner does inevitably reoffend. They don’t account for the women of ethnic or First Nations identities, who are rightfully distrustful of a system that lacks cultural awareness or sensitivity and has consistently done more harm than good to their communities. They also, shockingly, don’t account for the fact that waiting for an abuser to reoffend before ensuring that he is “keeping his promises” leaves the victim open to further abuse, stalking, and homicide.

Suspended sentences won’t work if abusers are not thoroughly being checked for behavioural change, or if courts ignore patterns of violent and criminal behaviour on the abusers record. Asking for help is barely an option when police responses are often insensitive and poorly managed, with officers having very little training in domestic violence cases. Anecdotal experiences have also demonstrated patterns of response times increasingly getting slower, especially when a household has repeated cases of violence. There is no early intervention when it takes weeks upon months for a domestic violence case to actually go to trial. There are no means of prevention when boys are swallowing red-pill content like candy.

Change can only happen when we start looking towards changing society at its roots. What factors lead to violent behaviour towards women? What

structures are at play in enabling this behaviour? What supports exist to assist women out of these situations and educate men away from these behaviours?

Primarily, misogynistic values and patriarchal standards are the cornerstones of gender-based violence. This includes not only hateful attitudes towards women, but also isolating, patriarchal psychologies, and self-perceptions men hold to themselves. Abuse is a learned behaviour, so it is important to identify where exactly men are learning violent, misogynist behaviours from, and how to systematically encourage change in attitudes, values, and behaviours. Actually mandating actionable programs that manage anger, shifts views around gender, and provide alternative behaviours of coping, having process in place to ensure that men are actually attending sessions and growing as a result, and having alternative measures in place that simultaneously protect women from reoffenders — these are the ways that we can advocate for real change in the culture of abuse.

What it comes down to is, when the man with a familiar face shows up at your door, you can be sure that he has done the hard miles, put in the work, and has actually changed. It means ensuring that women are not put at the liberty of angry men anymore, that they are supported and protected. It’s time to cut the violence out at the root.

“Acting your wage” is not enough: The illusion of individual resistance

“go above and beyond”, an employer simply redistributes the workload, hires new employees, or automates tasks. The machine keeps running, rendering the worker’s resistance utterly ineffective.

job doesn’t pose a meaningful threat to capitalism. If anything, it creates an illusion of agency while leaving the underlying system completely intact.

Ethan Floyd is staunchly anti-anti-work. We’ve all seen the way work grinds people down. We’ve watched how capitalism can contort itself to absorb resistance. Lately, I’ve seen a new form of disengagement take hold — one that’s branded as rebellion, but feels more like resignation. Viral trends like “quiet quitting” and “acting your wage” have been framed as radical responses to workplace exploitation — a way to push back against employers who demand more while paying less. I get the appeal. But is this really resistance, or just another way capitalism tricks us into thinking we hold power?

At its core, capitalism is a system that relies on the extraction of surplus value. Employers pay workers less than the value their labor generates, pocketing the difference as profit. In this context, “acting your wage” — matching effort to pay — must feel like a clever way to resist exploitation. I’ve heard it from my own colleagues and friends who’ve felt burnt out by jobs that demand everything and give nothing. But in practice, withholding extra effort does little to change the workplace’s underlying power structures. If one worker refuses to

More importantly, capitalism has always been adept at co-opting and commodifying dissent. Corporate wellness programs, self-care rhetoric, and the endless cycle of productivity hacks quickly absorb critiques of work culture, repackage them, and sell them back to us. “Quiet quitting” is no different. The discourse around it has been transformed into thinkpieces, management strategies, and corporate policies that encourage “healthy boundaries” — all while ignoring the root issues of wage stagnation, insecure work, and the erosion of labor rights.

The analogy to climate change is instructive. Just as individual recycling efforts have been used to shift responsibility away from corporate polluters and systemic environmental destruction, “acting your wage” individualises what is fundamentally a collective problem. One worker disengaging from their

This is not to say that workers should willingly overextend themselves for exploitative employers — the pressure to be a “team player” undoubtedly leads to burnout and exploitation. But there is a crucial distinction between personal self-preservation and systemic resistance. The former is about surviving within the system; the latter is about transforming it.

Real power lies in collective action: unionisation, strikes, and workplace organising. History has repeatedly shown that when workers band together, they can achieve substantial gains; the eight-hour workday, weekends, paid leave, and protections against unfair dismissal all came from organised labour movements, not from individuals quietly disengaging.

Yet, the current anti-work discourse largely sidesteps the necessity of organised resistance. Instead of mobilising workers to fight for higher wages, better conditions, and workplace democracy, it offers a form of passive defiance that is all

too easy for capitalism to co-opt. The popularity of “acting your wage” and similar trends reflect a deep frustration with the realities of modern work, but frustration alone does not create change. Without collective power, workers are left negotiating the terms of their own exploitation rather than challenging the system itself.

I don’t say this as someone theorising from the outside. Like so many students, I’ve spent my time at university in precarious positions when it comes to work, and I’ve seen how little individual resistance matters when it isn’t backed by collective action. If we truly want to reclaim our time, energy, and dignity, the answer is not “quiet quitting” but organised resistance. Capitalism isn’t toppled by individuals withdrawing their enthusiasm — it’s disrupted by collective action that demands structural change. Workers have power, but only when we act together. The lesson is clear: meaningful resistance isn’t about opting out; it’s about fighting back.

Reflections on Ramadan, the Lakemba Nights Festival, and Eid Celebrations

As I made my way through the crowds of people wandering down the food stalls on Haldon Street in Lakemba, I was filled with immense warmth and happiness. Festive lights decorated the street lamps, and families gathered by the footpaths: some crouching down, others seated on benches indulging in delicious street food. As I looked around there was an air of peace, love, and, most of all, a sense of belonging. There was so much multiculturalism — from the different faces of people of diverse cultural backgrounds to the various cuisines labelled on the stalls, from Malay, to Indian, to Bangladeshi, to Lebanese! I enjoyed the night there, well spent with my family. We indulged in sugarcane juice, BBQ kebab rolls, chocolate crepes, and satay chicken with peanut sauce.

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The annual observance of Ramadan is regarded as one of the Five Pillars of Islam and lasts twenty-nine to thirty days, from one sighting of the crescent moon to the next. Muslims fast from dawn to sunset. The pre-dawn meal is referred to as suhur, and the nightly feast that breaks the fast is called iftar. There are many reasons why this month is considered holy and sacred by Muslims. Most importantly, it is believed that the holy book, the Quran, was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) during this month. Muslims consider reading the Quran, praying, and giving charity in this month to be more virtuous than in

the rest of the year, which is why they often perform these activities more frequently during Ramadan. Breaking fast during iftar time is usually where all the fun happens. Traditionally, Muslims break their fast with dates, water, fruits, and small snacks. After which, Muslims quickly commence their sunset prayers, Maghrib, before returning to enjoy more food. Many Muslims dress up and engage in larger gatherings with family, friends, and the wider community as they enjoy their meal.

Revisiting the night in Lakemba where my family and I went to break our fast, one important thing that resonated with me was when I asked my father “What is the purpose of Ramadan?” I am sure many people would also be asking this. Therefore, I would like to share the purpose of Ramadan with all the onlookers of this spectacular month. There are two main points to answering this question: firstly, it is a holy month for Muslims around the world in which we focus on building a better and stronger connection with our creator whilst accumulating blessings and rewards. Secondly, a deeper message for all who do fast in this month is to contemplate how people in poverty may feel. This is why it is important for Muslims to simulate not having the basic needs of food and water. It is a matter of fact that delicious food and clean water are only luxuries for some people in third world countries. The act of abstaining from indulging in food also creates the

Hamna Khan celebrates Ramadan at Lakemba Nights.

patience and self-discipline we may need to grow in ourselves and better handle our relationships with respect, integrity, and love.

Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the next Islamic lunar month. It is a day of celebration. My family and I usually go to the Eid prayer, also known as Salat alEid, which is a special prayer that Muslims perform on the morning of Eid al-Fitr. The word ‘Eid’ means ‘feast’ or ‘festival’ — here, Muslims engage in a celebration of having completed Ramadan and many observe this holiday by visiting family and friends’ homes and exchanging gifts and sweets. I often look forward to receiving cash from my elder relatives, as it is custom for the elders to give money or Eidi to the younger generations in the family.

During the Eid celebration, Muslims greet each other by saying ‘Eid Mubarak’, which is Arabic for ‘Blessed Eid’. A mandatory charity called Zakat al-Fitr is also collected before the prayer and distributed to people in poverty to ensure that everyone can participate in the festivities. Muslims often wear new clothes on Eid as a symbol of renewal and celebration. An interesting fact is that the Islamic lunar calendar is approximately 11 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar, which is the standard calendar used in most of the world. This means that the dates for Ramadan and Eid change every year. Many Muslims use

the Islamic calendar and many others use moon-sighting to know when Ramadan and Eid will start.

I believe the Lakemba Nights festival is one of a kind; I would strongly recommend anyone looking to witness Australian multiculturalism to pay a visit! I am always intrigued by the many faces of Muslims in the world from diverse cultural backgrounds. Did you know that Islam is the second largest religion in the world? There are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims, which makes up about 23 per cent of the global population! I was also amazed while at Lakemba to see the many different faces representing Australian culture and heritage. The Lakemba Nights festival ran from Thursdays to Sundays every week during Ramadan. I frequently visited there during Ramadan and also invited many of my Australian friends to experience this special event with me.

Looking back on this blessed and holy month, I am deeply grateful for the love of my family and friends, a chance to get closer to my spiritual connection to God, and for feeling a greater sense of community and belonging. I find myself longing for those feelings till next Ramadan and Eid!

The Complicated Ethics of True Crime: the Netflix docu-series and sexy serial killers

Serial is a true crime podcast that prepares its audience for a story with “characters” and a “plot”. Plot and character are not things we usually expect when reading something non-fiction; what we expect to read are the stories and experiences of people. This is where most of the ethical dilemma lies in true crime — the contention between the experiences of people, and the plot of characters.

At this point, we are experiencing a renaissance of true crime narratives in popular culture. In 2014, when Serial released its first season, an investigation into the murder of Hae Min Lee rapidly rose to the top of the Apple podcast charts. I would like to credit this moment as the true catalyst for our modern obsession with true crime. With the increasing popularity of the genre comes a whole new range of mediums for these stories. Our popular media has been inundated by various forms of true crime, one of the most popular being the adaptation into movies or series. This genre has cultivated a vast and rapidly expanding fan base, drawing in millions of enthusiasts who actively engage in discussions, theories, and debates across various Reddit communities and social media platforms.

The growing fascination with true crime has sparked a wave of content creators, podcasters, and filmmakers dedicated to exploring real-life mysteries, criminal psychology, and the intricacies of the justice system. It has sparked many conversations about the muddy ethical implications of the genre. The popularity

of Netflix true crime docu-series and thrillers seem to be commodifying and sensationalising real-world tragedies. Is all true crime media made with the intent of bringing justice and attention to complicated cases, or do creators use the traumatic experiences of real people to benefit monetarily?

Emma Georgopoulos is not binge watching.

In September 2024, the second season of Ryan Murphy’s true crime anthology series Monsters was released. This season in particular focused on the case of the brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez and the 1989 murders of their parents. It was followed by a huge hype across various media platforms. This is what ultimately drew me to the question of investigating why a story about murder and crime gains such a ‘cult’ following. This season of Monsters joined the growing collection of true crime documentaries and movies on Netflix, a catalogue of the unparalleled growing market for true crime over the last decade. One of the most complex choices while making a true crime is the casting. So how do you cast a serial killer in a pool of Hollywood beauties, especially when sex sells? In the past decade, we’ve seen Zac Efron portray Ted Bundy; Evan Peters play Jeffrey Dahmer; and Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chaves take on the roles of Erik and Lyle Menendez.

Using celebrity actors in the roles of serial killers and criminals does a great deal to soften the reception of these people. It is likely that directors purposefully cast ‘hot’ actors to create the internet craze that we saw after The Lyle and Erik Menendez

Story. After the show was released, a trend emerged of creating edits of its actors, where one of the top edits is a ‘thirst trap’ style edit containing scenes of the brothers to the song Blame it on the Rain — this particular video has over 5 million likes. I believe this trend is largely a product of Ryan Murphy’s own inclusion of multiple half-nude and shirtless scenes of the brothers, flashing the glitz and glam of their life after the murder of their parents. This isn’t to discredit the acting performances of either actor, but their physical attraction seems to be a large contributing factor to their casting.

The first season of Monsters follows a similar trend. Humans tend to misconstrue physical attractiveness for ‘goodness’. A similar result came forth from the release of The Dahmer Story, starring American Horror Story’s ‘dreamboat’ Evan Peters. It seemed to trigger a wave of sympathy for cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Memes and internet discourse began focusing on empathising for Dahmer or expressing a secondary attraction to him. Disturbingly, you can find similar thirst trap edits of Evan Peters portraying Jeffrey Dahme with millions of likes. In casting these ‘sexy’ actors as morally complicated or murderous people, Netflix and true crime producers cultivate an environment where they surpass the gravity of the situations for virality and success.

Both seasons of Monster have received criticism from the people involved in the real cases. Erik Menendez, through a statement made by his wife on X,

She was Robbed! Realness and Reality on RuPaul’s Drag Race

Competitive reality TV, as much as it is supposedly nonfictional, is as much about competition and reality as it is about narratives and entertainment. Some of this looks like hyper-realistic stories of survival and perseverance like in Alone, or soapy scandals of love and lust like in any Netflix dating show. Regardless, from the casting to filming to editing of these shows, producers, and showrunners work hard to take these ‘truths’ and spin them into a consumable story.

Reality TV is therefore bound in this meta-narrative of how to create a show that honours the life and experience of its contestants, whilst also squeezing their truth out for entertainment like an orange being pulped for juice. What better world to absorb this dissonance than that of RuPaul’s Drag Race? Now on its seventeenth season, Drag Race began as a parody of the fashion and design reality shows of the 2000s (think Project Runway or America’s Next Top Model) with a reverence for camp, stupidity, and genuine awe at the art of drag.

What Drag Race does wonderfully is navigate the messiness of ‘reality’, whilst maintaining a fundamental belief in platforming and legitimising queer community and queer art

If you’ve ever wandered into the world of

reality TV analysis, you’ll be familiar with terms like ‘villain edit’ or ‘rattlesnakes’. The idea is that, whilst the footage used for the show is clearly real, the way it is stitched together (often using snippets or quotes from multiple days of filming) can create narratives that simplify the story of each contestant. This is necessary for a show with a set amount of air time, sure, but also fundamentally a convenient way to steer towards the plot the producers aim to craft.

This ambiguity is built into key metrics Drag Race uses for contestants: Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent (CUNT). It’s a funny euphemism for that it factor which is so indescribable but so clear when you look at a line-up of the queens who find success after the show. It’s also a great way for Drag Race to blur the lines of what a queen needs to do to be “good” according to the rules of the show.

Apart from te relatively straightforward expectations of design challenges (make a garment which looks good, is technically interesting, and honours the often unconventional materials used), the most fundamental part of every challenge is ‘make RuPaul laugh’.

Whether it’s performing a scripted scene, directing a fake commercial, or delivering a roast, almost all challenges

states that “Murphy shapes his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander”. While making the Dahmer season, Netflix was not required to consult the families of any of the victims of Jeffrey Dahmer. Shirley Hughs, mother of victim Tony Hughes, said to The Guardian in regards to scenes of her son in the show, “I shed tears. [...]. The tears [are] tears of hurt because it hurts. It hurts real bad”, “I don’t see how they can use our names and put stuff out like that out there.”

Neither victim nor perpetrator deserves to have their narrative misconstrued and projected in a dramatised form. If creators are not required to consult the individuals involved in an event, is it ethical for them to tell their story? In my opinion, no.

The culture’s obsession with true crime media has grown into a genre that capitalises off of the struggles of individuals, selling a ‘character’ narrative while harming those involved. Mediums like the Netflix docu-series capitalise off an impressionable audience to benefit the creators, operating under the guise of information. While many of you may be entertained by true crime, and I cannot say I exclude myself from this statement, there is a deep ethical implication to these stories and the ways they are being told. The edits of Nicholas Alexander Chaves to ‘Dirty Cash’ which flooded our ‘for you’ pages have a much more sinister meaning than we see on the surface.

Read full article online.

Will Winter serves Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent.

are bound up in whether a contestant can make RuPaul laugh. It’s why queens like Jimbo charge their way to the end of the show: her looks on All Stars 8 were exquisite and conceptually aligned with her drag persona, but she also made Ru cackle ferociously every scene she was in, beginning with her talent show performance where she threw “Mama Ru” slices of ham while wearing head-totoe white latex with a pregnancy belly. The queens who win are the ones who serve “CUNT” and understand this unspoken rule.

The problem for the audience, though, is when this tension between the produced narrative and the ‘true’ narrative becomes concrete. Stories like that of Yvie Oddly and Sasha Velour, kooky underdogs with incredibly conceptual drag and astonishing last-minute triumphs in the show’s lip sync format, are only successful because they’re plausible. We see enough of them and their journey to understand why they deserve to win. It’s an uncomfortable viewing experience when the decisions made by the show do not map the emotional journey we’ve taken as viewers, watching these episodic

tales of heroes and villains unfold. Fans only start to cry ‘robbery!’ when the show spoon-feeds us a narrative which is clearly not true with clear authorial intent.

So what do we do in this paradox? We can start movements online seeking righteous justice for the queens who we believe were ‘robbed’. This, of course, should only be directed at the show itself, and not at, as is often the case, the queens who were inadvertently favoured. We can choose to ignore these slight narrative bumps like you would the slightly bitter taste of milk just past its best before. As much as people may seek ‘purity’ from the show, it is still a fundamental good in our society that we have a platform as recognised and funded as Drag Race to uplift drag queens and tell queer stories. Is it worth bringing it down to fulfill this sense of ‘justice’ for a reality show?

Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t always trust that the story we’re told about the people in wigs is the true one. Maybe it’s enough that it’s an entertaining one.

Art by Oscar Lawrence

“I sued the government because of my humanity”: In conversation with Moz Azimitabar at Verge Gallery

CW: This article mentions torture, detention, and self-harm.

For many, a toothbrush, a hot cup of coffee and a bit of chaos are essential parts of a daily morning routine. But for Mostafa ‘Moz’ Azimitabar, these everyday items became tools for creativity, used to express the trauma and turmoil he endured as a Kurdish refugee seeking asylum in Australia. After spending over 8 years in detention centres — first on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea and then two Melbourne hotels thereafter, Moz found expression in the toothbrushes and coffee he used as makeshift pens and ink instead.

Moz’s artworks have been shortlisted twice for the Archibald Prize, Australia’s most prestigious portraiture award. His first, KNS088, was a selfportrait titled after the identification number he was assigned in detention, while his second featured Angus McDonald, a dear friend, refugee advocate, and artist nominated seven times for the Archibald Prize himself. Moz has selected works displayed at the Verge Gallery as part of the gallery’s You’re Welcome? exhibition.

In conversation with the curator of the exhibition, Billy Bain, Moz spoke about his journey to freedom as an artist and refugee on Thursday, 6th March. Billy and Moz first came into contact at the Art Gallery of NSW as finalists for major prizes. Billy said that “Mum came home raving about Moz,” and after learning about his story, he knew he wanted to “champion [his resilience] in the exhibition.”

“I didn’t look at myself as an artist or have any experience with painting and drawing…I just wanted to keep myself occupied,” Moz said. He noted that detention guards did not allow detained asylum seekers to access traditional artistic materials, oil or acrylic paint, “because it might kill.”

For Moz, the refugee experience is at the crux of his pieces: “I highlight the story of refugees in every work… to show refugees can be artists as all of us can.” His technique and artistic expression

are deeply reflective of his time and suffering in the detention centre. Though Moz now paints in vibrant colour, he continues to use coffee and a toothbrush in many of his works. In his words, “This is a technique that comes from suffering. I will paint with a toothbrush until I die.”

Moz is one of thousands stuck in a seemingly endless six-month cycle of visa renewal. He is allowed to work but does not have the right to study, effectively trapped in limbo without a permanent resettlement solution. His situation is indicative of a larger system failure and the complete disregard of human rights by the Australian Government and legal system.

In 2022, Moz launched legal action against the Commonwealth to challenge the Migration Act, and the legality of his detention in hotels as “alternative places of detention” (APODs). In mid2023, the Federal court found that the process was legal and within the legislative power of the Australian Government, though wholly inhumane. Justice Bernard Murphy said, “I can only wonder at the lack of thought, indeed the lack of care and humanity, in detaining a person with psychiatric and psychological problems in the hotels for over 14 months.” Amnesty International, as well as many other Human Rights organisations, slammed the decision in the context of Australia’s carceral immigration policy.

“I sued the government because of my humanity and the right of refugees, because we were punished for six and a half years on Manus. I was transferred for medical treatment to a so-called hotel. It was a torture centre.”

Moz attempted to further appeal the decision to the High Court, however, it was found “insufficient to be read in the High Court.” As such, the case remains permanently closed.

Yet, immigration policy continues to descend into increasingly draconian territory. In late 2024, Labor passed the Migration Amendment Bill and Migration Amendment (Bridging Visa Conditions) Regulations, allowing the Government to enter “third country reception agreements” with other nations. The Human Rights Law Centre conceptualises this as “new ways for the government to remove people from Australia,” directly targeting those with Bridging Visas, such as Moz. It further expands ministerial power to eliminate barriers to refugee and asylum seeker removal while providing legal immunity to the immigration officials responsible. The legislation introduces severe penalties, those

being up to five years imprisonment for non-citizens who fail to comply with deportation orders.

When asked about Australian politics, Moz noted the confluence of both parties that “don’t care about consequences” and only care about “driving votes and mining fear,” calling it a “competitive race to the bottom.” He isn’t afraid to challenge the system and fight for Refugee Rights, even if it means facing the very same confinements he found himself in when he first arrived in Australia 8 years ago: “I would go to detention proudly. I will go back to detention to embarrass the government.” In past, Moz has been outspoken about the process of disillusionment he felt when Labor was elected, only to double down on anti-refugee policy.

Notably, Moz stresses the ability of individuals to challenge the system: “There is democracy in this country.” He said, “Democracy helped me to be here. It shows that there is respect…we can challenge the system [by finding] each other.” To Moz, there is no room for disregarding each other or meaningful dialogue: “If one of your family members voted liberal, the best campaign is to invite everyone [to] share our stories together.” His call was strong and persistent to “let survivors share their stories” because “the power of people is much bigger than the power of politicians.”

Moz also stresses the ability of students to transcend and change these draconian policies:

“You are campaigners. You shouldn’t be reduced. You should be a rebel.”

He encourages all students to find and create art outside of the classroom, to move beyond theoretical conceptualisation of human rights and put course content into practice. If nothing else, heed Moz’s advice and vote with intention in this upcoming federal election: “12,000 refugees. My life depends on this election.”

Emilie Garcia-Dolnik and Annabel Li talk with Mostafa Azimitabar.

Calista Burrowes explores.

When thinking of people who do truly evil acts, we like to position ourselves as far away from them as possible. “Monster.” “Devil.” We do not view ourselves as being like them in any way. We are human and they are not. Sufjan Stevens does not think in this way. In fact, he makes it a point to remind us that we are all just as good, and just as evil, as the person next to us.

No one expected he would ever do something so heinous as taking the life of another human being. In 1994, he was executed by lethal injection.

‘John Wayne Gacy, Jr.’ is the fourth song on Stevens’ fifth studio album Illinois, released in 2005. A concept album, he traverses the great expanse of the state of Illinois, singing and whispering about its inhabitants and histories, people hidden in apartment buildings and laneways. He does not shy away from the state’s darker stories and individuals. Through ‘John Wayne Gacy Jr.’ Stevens explores these dark corridors of the mind and the soul, wearing his heart upon his sleeve.

John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer, who over the course of the 1970s murdered 33 boys — the oldest 21 and the youngest just 14. He tormented and tortured them before taking their lives, and burying his victims in his house. He was not a recluse, in fact, he was celebrated in his community for his charisma and the fact that he would perform at parties as a clown.

“I am really just like him”: Sufjan Stevens on John Wayne Gacy

The final lines, like the rest of the song, are blunt, and hauntingly honest.

‘Original sin’ is a theological concept that all people emerge into the world as sinners. That all of humanity, not only a select few, are born with the capacity to be bad or wicked, not only to others, but to ourselves. Perhaps the “Jr.” in the title of the song is more about Stevens and ourselves than it is about Gacy. We are his successors, in a sense. The struggle between good and bad is constant and raging. Though in a lighter sense, he also recognises, in his exhausted yet hopeful breaths at the conclusion of the song, that we are all born with a capacity to be better.

“And in my best behaviour / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid.”

Stevens’ song takes us through his early childhood with low self-esteem and an abusive father. He takes us through the crawlspace to “find the few living things, rotting fast in their sleep”, reminding us that Gacy’s victims are more than numbers and spectacles in this song, but they were human beings. He details the gruesome assault and murder that each boy went through, with Gacy taking their lives, their ambitions, their community, and their ability to grow old away from them.

So often we hear songs about bad things that have happened to singers. Heartbreak, death, loss. Rarely, do we hear the singer admitting so openly and willingly, that they inherit that sinfulness. Stevens’ songwriting is a revelation in a world so consumed with looking outwards, obsessing over how people have wronged us. This is not an excuse for Gacy. These are Stevens’ confessions, his admission to his humanity.

Ultimately, the song is not about Gacy, but about his victims and the remembrance of their humanity. It is a call to us all to recognise their humanity and that of all victims of heinous crimes, big and small. It is a call to remember our responsibility to do good in the world and to admit to our mistakes, even when it is unbearably painful.

yours (un)faithfully: chocolate, criminals, and me

Emily O’Brien unwraps her relationship with her faith.

When I was eight, I begged my parents for a necklace with the icon of a criminal. Perhaps even the world’s most famous criminal. I was eight when I received a delicate gold crucifix necklace for my birthday. I had a secret envy of the Greek girls in my class and, to me, it was the accessory du jour. If Jesus were around today, I think we would be wearing a t-shirt with his mug shot on it.

Despite Jesus’ austere existence, most of my religious memory, particularly Easter, is associated with consumerism and defining personal events.

I was 10 when I first heard that “it is easy to give something up during Lent, but it is harder to take something up”. I thought I was a child wonder for giving up chocolate, just to celebrate with inordinate amounts of it when Easter Sunday arrived.

I was 13 when I first was introduced to Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice’s camp masterpiece Jesus Christ Superstar in music lessons. It would reignite my passion for musicals and revolutionise the way I conceptualised Jesus: as a man and historical figure rather than the Son of God.

I was 15 when my childhood dog Bacchus, seventeen at the time, was put down on Easter Saturday. The irony was not lost on me as I sobbed endless tides onto my Grandma’s pillows.

I was 16 when I had what I like to describe as my ‘“religious calling’ during a routine water polo game at PLC Croydon. Thrashing towards the goal with a defender gnawing at my failing feet, I was blinded by a vision of the Altar and Tabernacle at my local childhood parish and a burning desire to attend Church. My Mum thought there was something wrong with me when I insisted we go to Church that night after fervently avoiding Saturday night mass growing up. I became completely engrossed by the Gospel and the homily. My mind wandered not once, not even to read the death announcements in the Parish newsletter.

Call that a modern day miracle! It was a short lived revelation (maybe my blood sugar was low) and I am no closer to sainthood today.

I was 17 when Cadbury stopped producing Chocolate bilbies, a staple confectionary of Easter. It was the death of childhood nostalgia and entrance into Adulthood when I graduated to Darrell Lea’s nougat Easter Eggs.

I was 19 when I developed a hot cross bun obsession. In the midst of covid, when I worked at the local supermarket, I would buy all the discounted chocolate hot cross buns and sit in my car at 10:30 pm at night and pick them apart on a quest for the pockets that weren’t completely devoid of moisture.

Now at 23, Easter has not been a defining personal event in many years. My relationship with institutional religion has changed. I cannot marcate where I stand on a line of religious and non-religious. I get disproportionately stressed when Census time rolls around.

Even though I cannot remember the last time I went to Mass (sorry Mum) and do not feel ‘religious’ most of the time, whenever Easter approaches I am struck with a sense of piousness — or maybe it’s a bubbling feeling of superiority as a death sentence abolitionist. I find myself to be quite emotional around this time. Maybe it has to do with the focus on the idea of death and rebirth, as well as the beauty and mystery of life — a reminder of my middle name Anastasia’s Greek meaning of ‘resurrection’. Maybe it has to do with the power of the moon. After all, Easter is decided based on a lunar calendar and the spring equinox.

Maybe it’s not my faith I return to, but the weight of tradition, melting slowly like a chocolate egg in my pocket. No longer neatly wrapped, way past its best before date, but still there. It’s impossible to ignore, melted into the fabric of your pants. Sticky, bittersweet, and lingering long after Easter Sunday has passed.

2025-2026 Budget Forecast with Greg Jericho

Imogen Sabey interviews Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at Australia Institute, on the federal budget.

Imogen Sabey: What major decisions do you expect will come from this budget?

Greg Jericho: It’s a really weird budget because you get the feeling that Labor probably doesn’t want to do it. I think they were expecting to have already called the election by now, and then the cyclone in Brisbane/South East Queensland got in the way, so they had to put off calling the elections so they had to actually do the budget.

It’s a tricky one, similar to what Morrison and Frydenberg struggled with in 2022. Basically, it was the type of budget that looked 12 months ahead and no further. It was clear to everyone looking at the budget that there would have to be another budget after the election — which there was in October, because it was a placeholder. But regardless of whatever is in there, it’s all going to be about cost of living.

IS: How do you expect the government to deal with HECSHELP debt? Do you think they’ll change the indexation rate or do any policies around that?

GJ: They’ve already wiped out a bit of debt for those who already had a HECS debt. But the policy was [beneficial for students] if you had one but not if you were about to get one. What they should be doing is getting rid of the changes to the fees

that Scott Morrison brought in. There was no economics behind it, and yet we’re still stuck with them. They went overboard talking about how much debt they had wiped off and it certainly wasn’t helping future students or current students. Unless you’re going to change the fees, all you’re doing is cleaning up a mess that’s going to accrue again and you’re going to have to do it again.

The only reason you worry about the debt is the size of the fees; if the fees aren’t so big you don’t worry about the size of your debt. So they need to tackle the actual reasons for needing the policy, not giving a painkiller for the symptoms.

IS: For international students, regarding the caps that they’ve recently introduced, how do you think that will affect the budget outlook and how do you expect Chalmers will address that?

GJ: It’s probably not going to have a huge effect on the budget, it might have some impact – they’re going to be very careful about population growth and migration figures, so that’s where it’ll be interesting to see the forecast for migration for the next 4 years, because certainly we did have a surge of migration for the last few years, since we had about two years of almost no migration because of the pandemic. I don’t think they’re going to be making any changes to the caps, I think they’re pretty much wedded to them.

IS: What effect do you think the recent Cyclone Alfred will have?

GJ: There could be a relief package where they’re doing big spending on recovery and repairing infrastructure, especially road damage and various things around South East Queensland.

Back in 2010/2011 during the Queensland floods, we had a flood levy to help pay for it. I don’t think they’ll do something like that, that would be very courageous. Given the importance of Queensland in the election, we’re going to see some targeted spending under the umbrella of a cyclone relief package.

If the budget deficit is a bit bigger than was predicted in December, they can certainly blame the cyclone. Not only does the cyclone cost money to repair, there’s also a drop in turnover and revenue as a result of lower company taxes. So they might be pointing to that as an excuse, but they want to show that they’re actually helping those people.

IS: Are there any other recent events that you think might also affect the budget outlook?

GJ: There might be some impact from the Trump tariffs which might revise down some expectations of growth figures, especially related to China and our exports, that might affect overall revenue.

So if the budget deficit is bigger, I would suggest a lot of it would come

Imogen Sabey interviews.

from what we call parameter changes, where the government and treasury respond to what’s happening in the US. They look like they’re headed for a Musk-driven recession, and that impacts their modelling.

IS: In terms of the 2024 budget, what lessons do you think Chalmer will have learned and what do you think he’ll be keeping in mind for this budget?

GJ: Oh god, I can’t even remember the last budget. It was such a nothing budget. I’ve gone into about fifteen budget lockups now, and I think I’d written a column beforehand and I really didn’t have to change much. You don’t want that just before an election, you want to have a bang.

But I don’t think he really wanted to do this budget, I think he wanted all of the big bangs to be coming in the election campaign.

Maybe they’ll run an election campaign off this, or they’ll look sensible and not do anything too drastic, have a couple of nice things and then hope most people have forgotten it by the time the election rolls around — which, to be honest, most people will have.

If he’s learned anything from the last budget, it’s that it gets quickly forgotten if it’s a milquetoast budget. If he wants it to be remembered in six weeks time, it’s got to be big and it’s got to be bold.

Read full article online.

An Interview with SNAKEFACE’s Aliyah Knight

Will Winter interviews.

CW: Homophobic slurs that have been reclaimed, discussions of sexual violence.

Will Winter interviews Aliyah Knight, writer/performer of Fruit Box Theatre’s newest production SNAKEFACE.

Will: Thanks for joining us today Aliyah! Can you start us off with a little bit about the show SNAKEFACE?

Aliyah: SNAKEFACE is a reimagining of the myth of Medusa. There are lots of different versions of the mythology, but the one I was inspired by is the story in which Medusa is a beautiful maiden, and everyone loves her, and then she is sexually assaulted by Poseidon in the Temple of Athena. Athena finds out about this, and as a means of punishing Poseidon, curses Medusa to live her life as this monster with snake hair and eyes that turn people to stone.

I’ve interpreted it through a Black queer lens, with this version of Medusa existing as a Black queer working-class woman, and placed it in modern time between queer

clubs and art studios. I’ve used that as a base to talk about modern rape culture and how it affects different people of different walks of life and levels of privilege.

W: When you were writing the show, did you imagine yourself as the performer for it?

A: I did, which isn’t always the case with things I write. I never write anything to perform it, it’s just a weird thing the events and characters and relationships in this story are vastly different from my own, but a lot of the emotional truths do connect to me.

I think it’s also a level of protectiveness over this character, who is so nuanced and so messy. I had been with her for such a long time and I understood all that. I guess I wanted the first person to bring her to the stage to get all that stickiness and gooeyness without taking it too far either way. An important thing about this play is that it’s about not having to be the perfect victim, or the perfect anything, and still getting to exist and mess up and try again. There are so many ways a character like this could

escape empathy, so it was really important that it was treated with a lot of care.

W: The show has an underbelly of rage and rebellion with current systems. How do you approach platforming these feelings, especially in a theatrical context?

A: One of the big questions in the play is ‘who gets to be angry?’ And ‘who gets to be rageful?’ I think there are ways to depict these emotions that are palatable for theatre, and it was important to me that all of the emotions of this show were depicted in a way that felt truthful to me.There are certain art forms that are really accessible both to make and to bear witness to, but the reality is that theatre is not necessarily one of those. There’s this sense of classiness and holding things together that comes with theatre, when, in reality, its roots are in accessibility and storytelling. I think it’s important to shed those layers and that pretence of it being this high art form that you have to engage in in a really sophisticated way, and let it be about the emotions

and the authenticity, and let it be messy and dirty and visceral rather than having this kind of barrier between the people watching it and that world.

W: I find it really interesting that in the content warnings for the show you’ve included “homophobic slurs that are reclaimed”. It’s an addendum I haven’t really seen before. What are your thoughts around the idea of “reclaimed” slurs, especially as someone performing with a sort of layer between a character and yourself?

A: People have lots of different views around this, especially in different communities, and I don’t think there’s any right or wrong views. I will always respect people’s approaches and how they feel. Within the queer community specifically, there has been a history of reclaiming slurs and reclaiming insults, and it’s one that I personally continue, and it essentially goes back to the conversation of existing as ‘the other’, existing outside of

Let Your Freak Flag Fly:

The Renaissance of the ‘Silly Girl’

Being weird is back, sing hallelujah! The super-graphic-ultra-modern-hypermanic-pixie-dream-girl is the new fantasy. Boo to basic. Someone alert Zooey Deschanel as we don our overpriced coloured tights and regrettably-cut thick bangs. Don’t get too excited though, being a ‘silly’ girl is quite exclusive — ‘silliness’ may be the least important factor contributing to the coveted title. Before you let your freak flag fly, here are the T&Cs of rocking a little mustache tattoo on your finger.

The fine line between ‘Weird’ and ‘weird’ is seemingly drawn by everyone’s favourite artist, the male gaze. This line follows the curvature of the feminine figure. Shave that buzzcut (if your jawline is defined enough)! Cop a kitsch tramp stamp (if your ass is devoid of stretch marks)! Pierce those nipples (unless you have bologna boobs)! There’s always a genetic clause to our ability to be acceptably unique. Being a ‘Weird Girl’ is less about being yourself and more about being a manufactured product of elitist culture — you can only be ‘Weird’ inside of certain parameters.

Be silly! But don’t be unattractive. There’s always a but.

This current idea of ‘silly’ girls is so deeply rooted in the classics; fatphobia and pretty privilege. A flat stomach ensures the graphic of your ironic tee isn’t distorted in any way, the canvas must be firm and toned to get your girls guffawing. Aligning with societal conventions of beauty doesn’t just mean free drinks at the bar, it means you can get away with a lot more than us ‘normies’. We’re all victims and perpetrators of this – myself included. My Letterboxd review of Anora unfortunately contained the line “fear I would not survive Vanya’s lethal face card”. Girl… that’s all you gleaned from the film?

constant false declaration of them as untalented and underqualified… but Gal Gadot is not one of these situations (sorry, the Lasso of Hestia compelled me to reveal the truth).

This all comes back to a central point – women aren’t allowed to have interests unless they interest others. Personalities are simply reserved for those we deem good enough. “Be yourself” is a rudimentary term used to lull us into a false sense of security. Hip dips make us the butt of every joke – we’re not ‘Weird’, we’re just ‘weird’. Us silly, ‘unattractive’ girls have no choice but to be annoying or be quiet to not provoke disillusionment in others – see I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore by Lucy Dacus for further wallowing.

Some advice from a certified hyper-manic-girl (hoping to unlock pixie and dream soon) – find your place. Easier said than done, right? If I’m honest, I’m still looking, but every so often you’ll fit nicely into a nook or cranny. For every fun fact you give, dance you do, or tune you sing, a new silly girl is freed from the chains of ‘normalcy’. I love and hate being silly. It’s joyous and painful. But, I’d rather suffer from my authenticity than from hiding myself away – the pessimistic truth of the human experience.

I’m letting my freak flag fly, because why the hell not? I might not be the ‘silly girl’ you want me to be, but I am absolutely silly, absolutely a girl, and absolutely unapologetic… okay, maybe I’m slightly apologetic, but we’re working on it!

Point stands, we have this learned habit of giving grace to those who are considered attractive – how do you think Gal Gadot still has an acting career? Of course, it would be wrong to not acknowledge the misogynistic hate directed towards conventionally attractive women in any and all industries, with

the binary and the standard and being okay with that.

As a person and an artist I’m not interested in colouring within the lines. For me, being able to get on stage and refer to myself as a dyke, which is the slur used within the show, is really powerful and important.. There’s such a strength in identifying as this thing which people find scary and confronting and don’t know what to do with. I think it gives you this power over people.

W: I feel like I should end with something lighter, so I’m gonna ask: what has been your favourite part of developing the show so far?

A: Something I didn’t anticipate is that I would be featuring poetry and spoken word in this show, which is something that’s been part of my life and creative identity since I was very young. I haven’t performed poetry in a while. I’ve always written it, and I used to perform slam poetry in school, and there’s obviously such a consensus of cringe that I was like “spoken word is out, it’s so over”.

Now with the show I’ve gotten to get back into it and realise how genuinely beautiful and moving and strengthening that artform is. There’s so many dark themes in this show, and poetry is almost used as a balm to a lot of these conversations and things going on. Being able to use poetry as this healing thing has been super fun.

W: I love how the show has the list of things you’ve reclaimed as slurs, being able to be angry, and slam poetry. Thank you so much for joining me Aliyah, did you have any last thoughts you wanted to share?

A: Everyone involved in this show is so incredibly talented and brings so much to it. If you’re interested in anything I’m saying in this interview, know that all of these conversations are made a million times more interesting by everyone else’s work. I hope everyone who is reading this has a beautiful rest of their life.

Read full article online.

Jessica Louise Smith gets silly.

Art by Will Winter

President

Angus Fisher

My fellow students, I hope week 5 treated you well and that week 6 is even better. The Federal election has been called for May 3rd. That means there is just over a month left to tell everyone you know to Don’t Risk Dutton and Put the Liberals Last. The SRC will be ramping up its efforts in informing undergraduate students about the election through our fortnightly stalls, social media, and other events TBA. The Liberals won’t slash 20% off our HECS debt or properly fund universities, and will cut 40,000 public jobs while spending billions on long lunches for bosses. The choice of putting the Liberals last is obvious for students. I’ve spoken at two rallies over the past period. Last Wednesday, I gave a speech at the National Day of Action for Palestine, which was attended by the SRC, UTSSA, NTEU, and members of the community. I spoke about what actions we can take to fight repression and show solidarity in our organisations and institutions. On Saturday, March 22nd, I attended the CARR rally pushing back against the rise of the far right, where I reflected on the USA’s influence over Australian universities’

research and that we risk our own Trump with Dutton. I submitted the SRC’s second round of policy consultation for the 5 draft policies that could restrict free speech and political expression. I highlighted how such policies should not limit the work of the SRC and other student bodies, not limit freedom of speech, and not out students through unfair misconduct proceedings. I will let you know about the final policies when they are announced. The SRC is currently taking input for our submission to the People’s Inquiry into University Restrictions on Free Speech on Palestine. See the Instagram for more details.

In other news, the SRC is moving office! We are working with the university to find a space that is visible, works for SRC staff, and works for our student reps. More to come.

In solidarity, Angus

General Secretary

We are currently working through the SSAF Acquittal for 2024 with Angus and checking off our expenditure and audit. This is a tedious but necessary task to make sure we are meeting our obligations and that we can receive more SSAF funding from the university in years to come.

The federal election has just been called for May 3! We and the SRC will be working on getting out informative materials about enrolling to vote, the policies of each party, and which ones are best for students. Under SSAF legislation, we cannot endorse any political parties but we sure can evaluate them and disendorse any particularly bad ones - see the National Union of Students’ campaign to “put Dutton last.”

As always, on the side we have been working on bolstering the collectives. Anu has been assisting with the first events and great social media of the new and improved International Student Collective, while also recruiting new designers for the collective. Grace has been working towards the Disabilities Collective’s autonomous edition of Honi Soit coming up soon. A shoutout also to the cross-collective events for Israeli Apartheid Week that took place from 2130 March, including a great National Day of Action across students and staff on Wednesday 26 March.

Ethno-Cultural Officers

Hello comrades,

We have been busy organising for Israeli Apartheid Week from May 21-30th. We had a film screening of the 2002 documentary, Jenin, Jenin with an attendance of 20 people — alongside a community iftar to kick off Israeli Apartheid Week. We also held a bake sale to raise funds for the West Bank, raising $130 to send to Human Rights Defenders, a documentary crew in Al Khalil (Hebron), who use funds to acquire cameras to document settler violence on Palestinians in Hebron. On Wednesday 26th, we were proud to have a contingent at and support Students Against War’s National Day of Action for Palestine, in what was undoubtedly the biggest rally we’ve had all year on campus for Palestine – big thanks to SAW. We also organised an ACAR contingent to the Palestine Action Group rally on the 29th of March. Weekly rallies for Palestine are back on — it is imperative that we all continue to show up and escalate the struggle for a free Palestine, a permanent ceasefire, and an arms embargo on Israel now.

Sexual Violence Officers

Ishbel Dunsmore, Saskia Morgan, Grace Street, Lucy Sullivan

Welcome back to the back page! We’ve been keeping busy in the last few weeks, here’s a snippet of what we’ve been up to and what you should keep your eye out for.

Unfortunately, we had to delay our film screening due to clashes, but will still be showing Persepolis, the autobiographical story of life as a woman growing up against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution of 1979. The film will follow with a guided discussion, snacks and drinks provided!

With WoCo’s Reclaim and Resist week coming up in Week 10 (for which we will be planning an event!), we are tentatively planning the screening for then, so keep an eye out on @usydwoco on instagram!

Last week, we attended rally against the socalled “day of the unborn child” held every year at St. Mary’s cathedral. Safe, free, and

accessible abortions are a human right that people should have the incontrovertible right to choose. With the rise of the religious far right, and the backing of the state in sneaking in a whole slew of anti-protest laws that prohibit protest outside religious institutions, we were proud to protest this event in defiance of these laws, and continue the proud tradition of the USyd Women’s Collective in fighting back for reproductive rights, rights that aren’t even guaranteed in Australia. Finally, we have put a motion to the next SRC council to rename the Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault office bearer portfolio to the Sexual Violence portfolio to better reflect the seriousness and reality of those experiencing or having survived sexual violence, so keep an eye out for that.

Intercampus Officers

Hugo Naea Ceran Jerusalemy, Cassidy Newman, Jessica Smith, Sihan Zhad

Hi everyone! Our names are Cassidy, Jessica and Hugo and we are three of your Intercampus Officers for 2025.

It’s been a busy start of the year for the Conservatorium Students’ Association, which represents undergraduate students studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music campus. The Conservatorium of Music Open Day saw lots of interest, with around 200 first-year attendees and CSAgoodie tote bags distributed. The event was an important occasion to welcome new members into the CSA and make them aware of SRC & main-campus student services.

We bade farewell to our old CSA executive and welcomed new members on-board at the Start of Semester of drinks. The first Representative Council and Executive

Council meetings have now been held, with many new initiatives for 2025. Key goals for the year include planning the annual Con Ball and revival of last year’s Con Revue, Priscilla Rides Again, which unfortunately had to be cancelled. We hope to replicate the success of last year’s Con Ball, which saw many attendees at the Fullerton Hotel. We also aim to focus on increased access to Inclusion and Disability services at the Conservatorium, working with staff to accommodate for all students and make information about the IDS and academic plan process much more accessible. There are lots of fun social events in the works for Con students including new CSA ensembles, events and potential pub crawls. Looking forward to the amazing year ahead!

Last week, Hossam Shabat was murdered by an Israeli airstrike, becoming one of 208 Palestinian journalists murdered by the occupation. This censorship has grown against activists as well: in a terrifying escalation of fascism, students across Turtle Island are being kidnapped and disappeared for their pro-Palestine activism, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk. With very similar threats being leveraged against students through the CAP, we must fight to end the repression of students - we will not be silenced. We are preparing a submission for the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech. If you have any submissions you’d like to make, please get in contact with us! The deadline has been extended to April 15th.

Speak up and stand strong for Palestine. Dana and Kayla

Anu Khulan, Grace Street

Kayla Hill, Dana Kafina

Photo by Remy Lebreton

Photos by Grace Street

Taking Care of Student Carers

Unpaid caring duties can be incredibly rewarding, however without the right level of support, can have a negative impact on various aspects of your life, including your studies.

You may be an unpaid carer if you spend time regularly providing a level of practical or emotional support to a family member or friend who has a disability, a medical condition, mental illness, or someone who is fail due to age. This could look like many things, such as, undertaking chores for family members who cannot do them themselves, looking after your siblings because your parents are at medical appointments, or helping provide personal care to a loved one with a disability.

Caring duties are unique and varied. Each carer will have a different relationship to the person they care for, and their identity as a carer. Even if you find your caring role rewarding, it can still take a toll on you, and may impact the time you have available to work or engage in your studies. It may even sometimes be difficult to manage emotionally.

For many unpaid carers the tasks they undertake as part of their caring role are not seen as something out of the ordinary, as they are used to the responsibility. Many carers may have grown up with the responsibility of undertaking caring duties. Caring for family is often a cultural responsibility, and therefore it is difficult to see as something that would negatively impact your life.

No matter the level of care you

provide, or your relationship to the person you care for, if you identify as a carer and find that you could use some extra support, you are able to access it.

The Carer Gateway is a national government funded service that supports unpaid carers.

They define their eligibility as, “You may be an unpaid carer if you are providing care and support to a family member or friend with disability, a medical condition, mental illness, or someone who is frail due to age.”

Carer Gateway provides services such as in person and phone counselling, financial support for young carers engaging in study, access to emergency respite, and individual coaching support. You can find a full list of available services on the Carer Gateway website.

You don’t need a Medicare card to access Carer Gateway, so student visa holders are able to access their services.

Carer Gateway can be contacted via their website; carergateway.gov.au or can be called on: 1800 422 737.

If you need assistance applying for special considerations or other arrangements due to the impact of caring duties on your studies, you can contact the SRC caseworks via our contact form (bit.ly/contact-acaseworker, or call 9660 5222.

Ask Abe

SRC Caseworker Help Q&A Centrelink Dropped Subject

Dear Abe, I get Youth Allowance. I’m currently doing 4 subjects but I want to drop to 3. Do I need to tell Centrelink? Will they cut me off?

Thanks, YA Cut Off.

Dear YA Cut Off,

Yes, it is always a good idea to tell Centrelink whenever your circumstances have changed. For example, if you drop a subject, move house, or get a new job. You will still be full time so it will not change your payment. If you were dropping to part time you would no longer be eligible for that payment and you would need to talk to a caseworker to see what your options were. Thanks, Abe

For more information about dealing with Centrelink, read our “Navigating Centrelink” Article. Scan the QR

If you need help from an SRC Caseworker start an enquiry on our Caseworker Contact Form: bit.ly/contact-a-caseworker or scan the QR

Make sure you know the rules for discontinuing a subject. Contact an SRC Caseworker if you need help

QUICK CROSSWORD

ACROSS

2 HELP! (3)

4 Gives money to politicians (5)

6 Like dice (7)

8 Online VIPs (4)

9 Like some Korean cars (4)

DOWN

1 Yours truly (4)

2 Goes through a box of tissues (4)

3 ____ puppet (4)

4 “Bruh” (4)

5 Incursion (4)

Week 5 Crossword Answers

11 While away (4)

13 Pair (4)

15 “I’m in the ____” (4)

16 Cops (3)

17 Last week’s Honi theme (4)

18 Where most people live (4)

6 Opiate no longer OTC (7)

7 Response to 996 (7)

8 Capital of Belarus (5)

10 Companion to “Word” or “Caesar” (5)

11 ____ constrictor (3)

12 Deposed Gough Whitlam (3)

20 Cellar or Seymour event, say (4)

21 Found on a door or radio (4)

23 Unlike Lady Godiva (4)

24 Barely manages (7)

26 Shelves, say (5)

27 Unwell (3)

14 1 in 365/366 (3)

19 Affirmative (4)

20 Positive sign (4)

22 Test version (4)

23 Hood (4)

25 Yours truly part 2 (4)

Across (by individual row): Slob, Alma, Edict, Tara, Fair, Rinse, Apar, Acne, Resin, Buttered toast, Spear, Hon, AAA, Bacon and Eggs, Ayr, Solo, Strep, Beet, Weigh, Cane, Caper, Spun, MTN, Three Weetbix, VSO, Bam, Ciaos, Bircher Muesli, Brake, Odie, Xmas, Or Tea, FNMA, Ians, Break, Fast, Eddy

Down (by individual column): Stabs, ABC TV, Bob, Lap up, Yeahs, RRR, Bar Tab, Tee, Ikea, Eras, Rebreak, Afar, Cow, Wac, Lace, Ole, Emhoff, Mind, Noise, Edna, Aretha, GPT, Rims, Oon, Hub, Meat, Errands, NICU, Dies, Etc, Xie Xie, Instagram, As mad, CSI, Agent, Oland, Ten, Aspen, Sissy

CRYPTIC

Credit: Phoebe Rosser

ACROSS

4 Appalling but lawful if you lose your head? (5)

7 In short, grill half of unofficial 2023 double feature (6)

9 Young Aussie soap opera (9)

12 Break malice again (7)

13 More surrounds frivolous activity, revealing a monster (9)

14 Godzilla’s a big one for Minelli debut record deal (6)

16 Reconstituted tripe dish (5)

19 Craven in Woolley returns, nothing lost (6)

21 Students’ dread found in Essex, Amsterdam (5)

24 Rural Christian communities fed outside—they’re starving! (8)

26 French scores set right in game played with sticks (8)

27 Either no one, or, poetically, the open air (5)

1 Disclose to friend, colloquially (10)

2 Widespread Catholic ritual (4)

3 Tiny resort I’m in (4)

5 Crazy slut flop on Brit’s period (4, 4)

6 Said fib skill is a burden (9)

8 Asking for a retrial seems attractive (9)

10 Former Abbot subordinate (5)

11 Inexperienced find meagre enrichment (5)

15 United comeback might wet your feet (3)

17 Could kill you lately, maybe (6)

18 Crazy grandma nickname discovered (5)

20 Bemoan mental disorder (6)

22 Said urban department of King Uther starts number puzzle (6)

23 Wickedly crushed by house in German essay (5)

28 ‘80s slang for cool type of bell (7) DOWN

25 Saxophone emptied of sound, mind (4)

Honi in the ‘60s: The Great Honi Thievery

Lotte Weber delves into the archives.

In 1967, an article titled ‘Union President a Criminal?’ detailed the campus transgressions of Bob Porter: Honi Soit robbery. At a Union board meeting, Porter flourished “several thousand” stolen copies of an Honi edition, snatched in total from the campus distribution boxes due to their politically threatening content. The edition’s front page story was “an effort to disrupt the anti-democratic “ticket” system” of Union elections. Allegedly, “The edition was put in the Honi distribution boxes

around the university at 9am on the morning of the Union elections, but two hours later all the copies were missing.” This followed a pattern of other edition snatchings in 1967, which the editors (Robert Trebor and Hall Greenland) understood to be committed by “engineers” and “a self-professed Australian Nazi” named Royce. According to the article, Honi planned to seek legal advice and press charges for the equivalent $400 loss to the student body.

A close friendship between student Presidents

Trouble in paradise? Maybe it’s time to invest in a friendship in which you’ll feel truly supported.

Special Buys Bad. Same.

A really big swing

It’s like really big. Relive those childhood memories of hitting the pavement really hard when you slip.

Pick-up in store at any Aldi, just ask for the “special swing”.

Studio Bibli AI Art

It’s not copyright if we’re not pretending to be Studio Ghibli.

Cheap

Political Staffers

So that those pesky journalists don’t keep leaking those pesky war plans which you keep hand delivering them. But it’s only cool if you’re hot.

after May 3rd!!!

on clearance!!

Live your dreams of seeing Barney the Dinosaur having an intimate tea party with Albanese. Pictures not included cause we’re scared. Out of context Honi editorial team quote of the week: “My thing is I wouldn’t date a guy who was running another girl’s OnlyFans.”

close Monday April 14!

2025 theme

• WIN cash prizes - $6000 prize pool!

• Fiction & Non-fiction 1st place prize $2000

• All Sydney Uni students are invited to enter a written piece on the 2025 theme ‘ARTIFICIAL’

• Get published and kick start a career!