Angus Taylor has accused Labor of going soft on ISIS-affiliated Australians wanting to return home, calling for the government to block a notorious Perth-born Islamic State fighter from entering the country

Tareq Kamleh, also known as “Dr Jihad”, previously thought to be dead was in fact alive in an Iraqi jail and expects to return to Australia as part of a cohort of 13 men linked to the ISIS terror group.

I don't want to make this about anyone but this is in response to the current royal Commission.

There are calls over and over again to bring in armed guards and assault rifles to Australian streets.

We should take findings seriously and try and make our society safer.

But militarising and adding deadly firepower to our streets is not a solution. I think we all abhor a middle easternising of our society, regardless of which middle eastern power you support. Not here. People come here to escape that. No assault rifles on our streets.

Another important report from journalist Ben Smee who has covered a lot of QLD police/gov failings towards DV.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/21/the-queensland-government-promised-to-put-victims-first-instead-it-buried-a-report-from-domestic-violence-survivors

In the 2024/25 year:

Child murders:

• 11 children were killed by women
• 9 children were killed by men

Of the 20 children killed:

- 15 were non indigenous and 5 were indigenous

- 13 were boys and 7 were girls

Intimate partner homicide:

• 14 men were killed by women
• 31 women were killed by men
• 1 woman was killed by a woman

Of the 31 women killed in intimate partner homicide by men:

• 18 were non indigenous women
• 13 were indigenous women

Refer pages 22 and 23

https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/sr/sr58

'When gangs take over the highway, pray that he arrives soon.'

Mad Max

Highway savages

On Monday night, Anthony Albanese’s prime ministerial limo rolled through the gates of Mandalay, one of Point Piper’s most expensive and well-known residences.

He was there to attend an intimate dinner organised by Felix Lee, the son of a Chinese developer. Attendees included Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn, former Victorian premier Dan Andrews, ex-ASIC chairman James Shipton and David Murray, the onetime chairman of the Future Fund.

The Point Piper mansion that hosted Anthony Albanese, CBA boss Matt Comyn and former CEO David Murray on Monday night.

Lee had promised to donate about $1 million to the Labor Party, according to a source familiar with the premise of the event. It secured the prime minister’s attendance at the Point Piper mansion, which, in turn, attracted the other senior businessmen to join. Another source said there were around eight people at the harbourside dinner.

Exactly what was discussed in the sandstone surrounds is a mystery. “We don’t comment on private meetings,” a prime minister’s spokeswoman said in a statement. “Donations are a matter for the Labor Party and will be disclosed in the usual way, as is appropriate.”

But the 25-year-old Lee has been trying to put distance between himself and his father Phillip Dong Fang Lee’s various activities.

Phillip is the Chinese-born high roller who put $2.2 billion through Sydney’s Star casino over 15 years. He became a central figure in the 2022 inquiry into the basket case casino, which heard how he used prohibited Chinese debit cards to gamble. His son Felix has been running the privately held Lee Family Office, whose chairman is former treasurer Joe Hockey.

Last year, Felix’s investment in digital bank In1Bank raised red flags with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, which was concerned about how the bank ran the ruler over his financing of the start-up. He’d invested $4 million to suddenly become the company’s largest shareholder.

The Australian Financial Review revealed APRA was not satisfied with In1Bank’s checks and that an external due diligence report delivered to the bank’s board mentioned an “adverse finding on Felix Lee’s father, which increases the risk on source of wealth”.

One way for Felix to burnish his own credentials would be to dine with the prime minister. The others know about being regulated by the authority – before Murray oversaw the Future Fund, he was CEO of CBA from 1992 to 2005. He also had a short stint as AMP chairman. The Lee family is also a client of CBA. Meanwhile, Andrews’ activities since leaving politics involve a consultancy for corporate clients who are keen to do business in Victoria.

However, it is hardly reassuring that he apparently dangled a cheque in front of Albanese. The structure of the rumoured donation was interesting, too. The source said it could either be a direct $1 million donation to Labor’s party political coffers, or come as a smaller amount from Felix and then financial commitments from others connected to him.

Any future donation may well be clean as a whistle. But how about the look? The prime minister caught taking time from his busy schedule to attend one of the country’s most expensive homes, for a dinner with the promise of a political donation.

Labor sells access to Albanese and his cabinet ministers through its business forum network. The Liberal Party also does this with their own senior figures. Labor’s highest tier of so-called “subscription” slugs corporates and lobbyists around $110,000 for one-on-one time over lunches and dinners. The rumoured donation from Felix is 10 times that.

There’s also the timing of it. Albanese and his colleagues have attacked Pauline Hanson for the financial patronage that comes from Gina Rinehart. In April, Jim Chalmers took a swipe at the $2 million plane that was gifted to Hanson, saying the One Nation leader was “a wholly owned subsidiary of” the mining billionaire.

It’s also understandable that Felix is desperate to step out on his own. In 2021, his father and mother Xiaobei Shi had their assets frozen by the Australian Taxation Office, which sought to recoup $272.9 million in unpaid tax. The ATO briefly froze more than 20 accounts, including Philip’s gambling account at The Star, before there was a settlement.

Felix’s parents bought the Mandalay on Wolseley Road for $39.9 million back in 2015. The sole person on the residential title is Felix’s mother. There is also a mortgage on the property held by CBA. Away from the main event, maybe Comyn even got an inspection in.

This is after already being given $66 million but apparently that wasn’t enough yet a WA hospital was only given 10 million for upgrades to a run down hospital.

Now for some context, I'm not a parent, but I will be soon. I swear to God every parent I know complains endlessly about their kids annihilating berries.

Explain this to me. Is this a thing I'll have to deal with? I don't really remember eating a truckload of berries as a child, but at least in my circles I'm lead to believe it's common practice. Will I have to buy thousands of dollars of berries per month as a parent? Fill me in. Let me know if I need to get a loan.

https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/australian-doctor-who-joined-isis-found-alive-in-iraq-20260722-p60he6.html

https://7news.com.au/news/australias-doctor-jihad-found-alive-in-iraqi-prison-years-after-suspected-death-alongside-isis-troops-c-22610560

Tareq Badawi Kamleh (born 1985) is an Australian citizen and medical doctor who went to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. After joining ISIL, he worked in paediatrics in their Syrian capital of Raqqa, in the Islamic State Health Service. He appeared in two ISIL propaganda videos, in April 2015 and July 2017. Kamleh is currently wanted by the Australian Federal Police for terrorism offenses. Kamleh was believed to have been killed in the final battle for Raqqa in September or October 2017 . In 2026, it was just reported that Kamleh is in fact alive and imprisoned in Baghdad, Iraq.

Kamleh was born in 1985 in Perth, Western Australia. His father was born and raised in Palestine), before migrating to Australia. His mother was born in Germany, before migrating to Australia. She was Catholic, prior to converting to Islam. He attended the Al-Hidayah Islamic School and Lynwood Senior High School

At 20, Kamleh travelled to New Zealand to attend the University of Otago. Kamleh's goal was to get into the medical school there. After a year, he failed and left the country. Damn you, NZ!

He went back Australia where he was admitted to the University of Adelaide, graduating with a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery in 2010.

After graduating, Kamleh was assigned to paediatric unit in the Women and Children's Hospital in Adelaide in February 2011. After two years, Kamleh transferred to Mackay Base Hospital in Queensland from January 2013. During this time, Kamleh also worked at Alice Springs Hospital. His co-workers called him "lazy".^\)He was a registered doctor in Western Australia prior to 2015. Consequent to Kamleh's appearance in an ISIL recruitment video, the Medical Board of Australia confirmed on 21 June 2015 that it would be suspending his medical registration to "manage serious risk to public health and safety".

According to media reports, Kamleh’s peers saw him as somewhat of a playboy. He said he was a practicing Muslim, he had multiple romantic affairs and drank alcohol regularly. As an intern, he won Royal Adelaide Hospital's "Golden Speculum", a joke award for the intern who sleeps with the most members of staff.According to people who knew him, he was a "sexually manipulative fraud" who slept with other doctors, nurses and even patients. He was also forced to leave a shared house he was living in, due to "improper conduct" with a female housemate.

Starting in 2014, Kamleh told friends he had reconnected to his faith and given up alcohol and women. He became increasingly religious.^\)He stopped drinking, avoided his friends and began growing a beard; one acquaintance said he turned into a "straight hard-line fundamentalist".

^{The Australian government said it will not provide any assistance to this lovely chap to come back to Australia, which basically means they won't stop him either so we will see him soon. He might even be able to work in an Islamic hospital in Australia - what was the name of that hospital where those two outstanding nurses boasting about killing Australian jewish patients were from?}

^{Let us all hope he renounced his terrorist ideologies and revert back to just being a sexually manipulative fraud and a valued member of his community.}

Is there any reason why claire O’Neil has said this doctor can “rot in jail” whilst labor have reintegrated isis brides into our communities?

Why the double standards? What’s the deal here!

Does anyone have any great stories about nicknames and how people came to get them.

I was recently golfing with 2 guys I had never played with before and one of the had the nickname of "shipper", I was marking his card and his surname was Barnes, so I asked his mate why they called him shipper, was his business logistics?.

His response "Nah mate, he's got dentures and a replacement hip and replacement knee. He is like the ship of Theseus, none of the original left".

Tickled me a bit.

Phillip Coorey

Political editor

Jul 21, 2026 – 8.00pm

Labor luminary and former ACTU boss Bill Kelty has slammed the quality of economic management in Australia, saying taxes and spending are too high, and there is “something really wrong” when living standards are falling at the same time commodity prices are booming.

Kelty let fly in a written submission to a parliamentary inquiry into legislation to manage the nationwide distribution of cash, which has been the subject of a lengthy row between the banks and Armaguard, which is two-thirds owned by Linfox.

Former ACTU boss Bill Kelty: “We have a bureaucracy that is too interested in looking at the symptoms and ignoring the cause.”  Ben Rushton

Kelty, who works with Linfox Armaguard Group as a non-executive director, slammed a provision in the bill that sets aside $400 million of taxpayers’ money as a safety net should Armaguard run into crisis and need to be taken over.

The company’s view is that banks should “pay a fair price” rather than taxpayers being on the hook.

Kelty said the $400 million “crisis powers” contingency was effectively a subsidy for the big banks and retailers. He said it was a “totally entirely inappropriate public policy” and “a policy of lunacy and stupidity”.

Moreover, it was a metaphor for the shoddy standard of economic management.

“The reason we are here today is that we have a bureaucracy that is too interested in looking at the symptoms and ignoring the cause,” said Kelty.

“A government that is apparently prepared to fund another $400 million of the public’s money to take over the problems but without repairing the model.

“Our taxes are increasing, government expenditure is rising faster than prices. It does say something is wrong with this place.”

“It is just part of a bucket where we pay for quarantine centres that are never used, Commonwealth Games that are not held in the country, infrastructure costs that are the highest in the world or at least approach those levels, where [the cost of] some tunnels are now the highest in the history of humanity.

“Where we simply cannot build enough houses because we did not train enough workers.”

Kelty, who with former prime minister Paul Keating was a co-architect of Labor’s greatest era of reforms, went further in decrying the economic state of the nation.

He said this month’s OECD annual review, which showed Australia second only to Italy in having the biggest reduction in real wages since 2021, was both “hard to comprehend” and a “sad reflection in this nation”.

“But commodity prices have been rising and our terms of trade have significantly improved. We know that it is not just the terms of trade, but volumes have increased,” he said.

“But we know the underlying malaise. Our productivity has fallen and is the third lowest in the OECD. Investment is too low. Our growth per capita is non-existent.

“But our taxes are increasing, government expenditure is rising faster than prices. It does say something is wrong with this place.”

He said the situation had been “years in the making” and was “not just about the government of today”.

Persistent high inflation: OECD

The OECD’s annual employment outlook found persistent high inflation had contributed to a 5.1 per cent decline in Australians’ real wages since March 2021.

In contrast, the average OECD member country enjoyed a 5 per cent improvement in its workers’ living standards over that time.

“This sustained erosion of purchasing power points to persistent pressures on household incomes, even as the labour market has remained broadly solid,” the OECD said of Australia.

“These pressures are compounded by a decline in the real minimum wage between April 2025 and April 2026, placing Australia among only 11 OECD countries where this occurred and further weighing on the incomes of the lowest-paid workers.”

Kelty said the Armaguard cash distribution negotiation had been more difficult than any of the renowned reforms of which he was a part, including superannuation and waterfront reform, because “there has been no clear national objective” in terms of fair pricing, investment, safety and security or a fair adjustment process.

https://nswdvreport.web.app/

before anyone reaches for the downvote: this is not DV denial. Domestic violence in NSW is real, serious, and still under-reported. Around 47,500 adults self-reported experiencing DFV assault in the most recent pooled ABS survey window. Nothing below argues the problem is fake. It argues something worse: the problem is real, and the policy we've pointed at it produces arrests instead of safety. If you care about victims, these numbers should make you angry at the policy, not at the person posting them.

Before

I spent a few months pulling BOCSAR data (the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, the gold-standard independent source), AIC cohort data, court outcome data and police staffing numbers, and built it into a full report with interactive charts. Link at the bottom. Here's what the data says.

1. Enforcement exploded. Violence didn't move.

Police-recorded DV assault rose 29% from 2018 to 2024 (29,717 to 38,325 incidents). A record 45,984 people faced DV legal action in 2025. That's the number you see in headlines, reported as a violence surge.

But BOCSAR publishes five community prevalence measures that don't depend on police activity, and in its July 2025 release every single one was flat or falling over the same period:

Women and children murdered in DFV: BOCSAR's assessment is "relatively stable in NSW between 2018 and 2024". The 2024 spike was driven by 10 child deaths in a series so small it's inherently volatile.

Female hospitalisations for interpersonal violence (NSW Health data): "relatively stable", 37.2 down to 35.6 per 100,000.

Women self-reporting violent victimisation (ABS survey): "did not change significantly", 4.1% down to 3.2%.

Adults self-reporting DFV assault (3-year pooled ABS): the only measure that moved, and it improved: a significant decline from 0.92% to 0.72%, roughly 56,800 victims down to 47,500.

Police-recorded DV grievous bodily harm, the serious injuries that reliably get reported regardless of policy: "did not change significantly from 2018 to 2024". It bounced in a narrow band of 334 to 405 per year with no trend. 343 in 2018, 334 in 2024.

And the stat that kills the standard rebuttal before it arrives: the share of self-reported victims who said they went to police was unchanged at ~51%. The recorded surge is not "more victims finally coming forward". It's more policing of the same underlying level of violence.

Don't take my word for it. BOCSAR's Executive Director, Jackie Fitzgerald, July 2025:

"The rise in domestic violence legal actions does not appear to reflect increased prevalence, but rather increased police enforcement and proactive detection."

Sit with that. Seven years of escalating enforcement. Deaths flat. Hospitalisations flat. GBH flat. Self-reported victimisation flat to falling. The only line going up is the one police activity itself generates.

1. How the machine works

NSW runs what's effectively a mandatory-action framework. Under LEPRA, arrest requires only "reasonable suspicion", and in practice a complainant's account alone meets that threshold. The DV operating procedures direct officers to take action, so attendance typically means: record a DVEC video statement from the complainant, issue a provisional ADVO on the spot, remove the accused from their home, and charge.

You have a right to silence, and declining a police interview is the only sensible legal advice you'll ever get. Exercising it changes nothing. The charge proceeds on the accusation, the DVEC video becomes the prosecution's evidence in chief, and you're out of your house before any independent person has looked at the allegation.

1. The ADVO trap

Every ADVO carries mandatory condition 1: no assaulting, threatening, stalking, harassing or intimidating the protected person. That last pair means a text message calling your ex a name can be charged as a criminal breach carrying up to two years imprisonment. Not violence. Not threats. A mean text.

Then there's condition 6, the standard no-contact order. It prohibits approaching or contacting the protected person except through a lawyer, at approved counselling, under a court order about children, or "as agreed in writing" about child contact. Spot the problem: to get that written agreement, you have to contact them, and that contact is itself a breach. Text "can we sort out Saturday pickup?" without a pre-existing written agreement and you've committed a criminal offence. The protected person can't waive it either; even contact they invite is still a breach by the defendant, because only a court can vary the order.

We've built a system where the offence and the attempt to comply with the offence's exception are the same act.

1. What the courts do with 46,000 cases a year

Of 33,811 recorded DV assault incidents in 2022, 72% resulted in charges but only 39% ended in conviction end to end, down from over 50%.

27% of DV assault charges are withdrawn, more than double the non-DV rate. The proven rate in court fell from 71% to 60% in five years.

83% of the remainder plead guilty, and Legal Aid NSW itself acknowledges convenience pleas. Look at the choice on offer: contest and spend 254+ days excluded from your home and kids with a ~$34k trial bill, or plead, take the 25% discount, and be done in 92 days. Innocent people pleading guilty isn't a bug here, it's the rational move the system engineers.

The DV remand population hit a record 1,943 in 2025, up ~77% in four years, and most of those people will never be convicted of anything.

BOCSAR's own attrition study puts it dryly: "Police have a strong inclination to take enforcement action against domestic violence suspects, yet the court conviction rate remains lower than for many other offence types."

1. We're policing the wrong people

The AIC's NSW birth cohort study found 1.2% of people born in NSW were responsible for over 50% of all recorded FDV offences. It also found 9.6% of men, nearly 1 in 10, had been charged or served an AVO by age 37.

Read those together. A tiny, identifiable group of chronic offenders drives most of the harm, and instead of concentrating on them we run a net so wide it drags in a tenth of the male population, consuming court capacity on low-risk cases while the dangerous 1.2% cycle through on repeat.

1. The map of "DV prevalence" is mostly a map of police staffing

This is the part I built myself. I ran HDBSCAN clustering on ten years of LGA-level DV data and then regressed recorded DV rates against police officers per capita by command.

Raw result: officers per 100k and recorded DV per 100k correlate at r = 0.80. The areas the press calls "DV hotspots" are the areas with the most police per head.

Now, correlation isn't causation, so I tested it. Control for population size and metro/regional status and the R² collapses from 0.637 to 0.150 (p = 0.092, borderline non-significant). 77% of the correlation is confounded. And within metro LGAs, where staffing varies but demographics are comparable, the correlation between officer density and DV rate is r = 0.008. Zero.

Think about what zero means. If police presence reduced DV, high-density metro areas should show lower rates. They don't. If actual violence attracted police, high-rate areas should show more officers. They don't. The relationship only exists between regions and cities, because small regional LGAs get lots of officers per head and those officers, under the mandatory-action framework, attend more incidents, record more DVEC statements, lay more charges and seek more ADVOs. Exactly the mechanism BOCSAR identified at state level, reproduced in the geography. The data doesn't show regional NSW is more violent. It shows regional NSW is more intensively policed per head, and the output of that policing gets reported as prevalence, which justifies more policing. A perfect feedback loop with no victim safety anywhere in it.

1. The media problem

Every "DV surges 29%" headline you've read is built on police activity data: the one series BOCSAR's own director says reflects enforcement, not prevalence. BOCSAR maintains a whole page of independent prevalence measures. It's public. It says flat. Yet police recorded-incident numbers keep getting quoted as if they measured violence, when they measure the policy's own output. Citing the system's activity as proof of the problem the system exists to fix is circular, and both the media and NSW Police lean on it constantly.

1. What actually works, because we know

The meta-analytic evidence on mandatory arrest is now decisive: Hoppe et al. (2020) found a null effect across 11 trials. A 2025 systematic review (Connor et al.) concluded "arrest does not consistently reduce repeat violence" and told policymakers to evaluate alternatives.

Worse than null: Sherman's 23-year follow-up of the Milwaukee arrest experiment found victims were 64% more likely to have died of all causes when their partner was arrested rather than warned.

South Korea cut past-year female IPV victimisation from 39.1% in 2010 to 12.1% in 2016, a 69% reduction in six years, through multi-dimensional legal reform, counselling infrastructure and protection centres. Not mass charging.

High Point's focused deterrence model: 6% recidivism and near-elimination of DV homicide. The DVHRT high-risk-team model: zero DV homicides in a decade. Arrest-only approaches: 34% recidivism.

Every jurisdiction that measurably reduced DV shares the same features: target the small chronic-offender group, multi-agency coordination beyond police, embedded behaviour change, genuine victim agency, and upstream prevention. NSW's model has none of them.

The objections I know are coming

"It's under-reporting, the real numbers are worse." Under-reporting is real, but it can't explain the divergence: the police-reporting rate among victims was stable at ~51% while recorded incidents surged 29%, and GBH (which always gets reported) is flat.

"Maybe enforcement is preventing an increase." Then the within-metro correlation wouldn't be zero, and the mandatory-arrest RCT literature wouldn't be null. Deterrence that produces no measurable effect across 11 trials isn't deterrence.

"You just want abusers left alone." The opposite. The AIC data says 1.2% of people commit over half the offences. I want the full weight of the state on those people, instead of diluted across 46,000 cases where 6 in 10 produce no conviction.

The point

NSW has a real domestic violence problem and roughly 47,500 real victims a year. They deserve a policy that reduces violence. What they've got is a machine that charges everyone, protects no one, criminalises text messages, manufactures guilty pleas, mistakes its own activity for the problem it's meant to solve, and has not shifted deaths, hospitalisations or serious injury one measurable inch in seven years. We have a genuine crisis and quite possibly the stupidest policing policy you could design for it, and the data to prove better models exist has been sitting in plain sight the whole time.

Full report with interactive charts, the LGA cluster map, methodology and every source linked: https://nswdvreport.web.app/

Key sources: BOCSAR DV prevalence measures | BOCSAR BB176 attrition study | AIC birth cohort study TI-701 | Korea IPV study | Hoppe et al. 2020 | Connor et al. 2025 | Sherman Milwaukee follow-up

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