Was hiking solo off-track and was looking at the valley when I seen something with stripes, was very faint but very recognizable. It wasn't a dog, wasn't a fox...

Then again, I could just be crazy.

An ad for the upcoming Australian Census, from the ABS. (I low-key appreciate what they did here.)

Artificial intelligence company Firmus plans to use state-owned agricultural irrigation water

"Origin investigating potential security incident

22 July 2026"

"Origin Energy Limited (Origin) is currently investigating a potential security incident which may involve unauthorised access to some customers’ data. We do not believe the impacted data includes customer credit card or bank details."

"We understand an incident like this may raise concerns and acknowledge the impact of this uncertainty on Origin customers."

"Our investigations into this matter are occurring as a matter of urgency, and Origin will provide further updates as appropriate."

"We have engaged the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Federal Police about this potential incident. We have also engaged with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner."

It was a poor show with the hosts having the chemistry of oil and water.

Bring back reruns of The Simpsons.

The Twelve Apostles in Victoria, Australia, left a lasting impression on me.

(Posted with mod approval - nothing for sale here, it's a free hobby project.)

Census night is 11 August, and it sent me down a rabbit hole in the last three (2011 / 2016 / 2021). The ABS publishes everything, but it's buried in spreadsheets most people will never open - so as a hobby project I've been turning it into interactive maps and charts covering every suburb, postcode and council in the country.

Some of what jumps out when you can actually see it:

• Collingwood, Vic - median rent went $278 → $400 → $425/wk across the three censuses while household incomes rose 67%. The whole gentrification arc in two charts.
• Hobart - rent barely moved from 2011 to 2016 ($270 → $286/wk), then jumped a third in the next five years ($380/wk by 2021). The rental crisis, visible in one chart.
• Fortitude Valley, Qld - the counter-example: median rent was $400/wk in 2011 and still $400/wk in 2021, with incomes barely moving either.
• Fitzroy's religion breakdown - 59% "no religion" vs 20% Christian, denominations and all. The no-religion climb since 2011 is steep almost everywhere, but the inner cities are something else.
• The median rent map and the walkability map - flip between census years and the whole country re-colours. There are ~95 indicators you can map the same way.

Every suburb in the country has a profile like those - trend charts back to 2011, housing, income, commute and ancestry breakdowns, and how it ranks nationally: censusatlas.au. The data has been there the whole time, it's just needed better packaging to make it usable. I'm quite keen to be able to add 2026 data when it becomes available.

Curious what your suburb's charts show - and what you reckon will have changed when the 2026 numbers come back.

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.

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

The titles pretty self-explanatory but for some context I grew up in Coffs Harbour, travelled a lot as a kid to Gold Coast, Illuka, went on a family holiday to Cairns and saw Great Barrier Reed, Daintree Rainforest. I’ve been to Canberra and Melbourne. Lived in Wollongong for a few years so seen Sydney and it’s my favourite city. But I’ve never been outside these three states.

Some of my favourite places I’ve been include Dorrigo, the three sisters, Bondi area and Wollongong. In general I just love the water and feeling so close to nature and any places with amazing food and drink.

I want to broaden my horizons and try and see more of this beautiful country so I’m open to any suggestions outside of NSW, VIC or QLD whether it be itineraries, must-see stops or even just niche towns or things to do in TAS, NT, SA or WA.

These could be photos you have taken, or something from the Internet, that are uniquely Australian.

Examples are Australian scenery, wildlife or tourist attractions.

You can either post them as comments here or make a standalone post with the tag [Wonderful Wednesday].

And on the lords rdo he made caramello koala for his children and he saw this was good🙏

I’ve fucked my internals and I don’t expect HSC and trials to save my atar. biomed has poor employment rates and i did want to be a doctor but my parnets told me to give it up looked into nursing and the harsh truth hours and work load isnt suitable for me imo.

any suggestions bcs im lost and UAC is due soon

In a task scam, scammers ask you to do simple, repetitive tasks, such as liking videos or rating product images online. The supposed “job” is to complete tasks in an app or online platform for which you’ll “earn money” from a “commission” on each click. But those promises are fake: there aren’t any commissions and nobody but the scammers make any money.

From https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/11/task-scams-create-illusion-making-money

After being scammed through this way earlier in the year, I have realised there's dozens of fake online 'Australian 'remote job websites that appear on the first page of the google search. Other than reporting each one individually to ScamWatch, how else can these websites be effectively removed?

Apologies if this violates the rules of the subreddit.

I feel like my life is over and it hasn't even started, my friends don't really respect me, my family is distant from me, and I'm stuck working a job I dread and I cannot get a new one because I’m absolutely unqualified and useless. I cannot access therapy because I was groomed by a counsellor when I was a teenager, so please do not recommend that I seek one out. I am absolutely alone, and everything would be better if I was never born.

A council just north of Brisbane is about to trial the country's first AI-controlled traffic lights. What do you think about this?

This. This fucking bullshit right here. I bought these because it’s winter, they’re relatively cheap, and it’s a nice hot carb hit if I’m still hungry after a meal. 

Laksa, I thought, how bad could it be? A miscalculation on my part. 

The bar was already low and yet here’s Continental doing limbo with the devil. The giveaway should’ve been “Asian Style” – they’re offending so many cuisines at once I assume legal suggested they stop naming one. “Asian Style” is for people who’ve never eaten Southeast Asian food in their lives and think this makes them cultured. 

I understand the limitations of packet powdered soup so I can forgive the 1cm long, thin noodles. But the flavour they’ve managed to produce here is like someone who smelled laksa once describing it to the flavour chemists at Continental and they just said “fucken say no more fam”.

There is absolutely no aromatic base, it may as well have been "vaguely coconuty cream of noodle soup". I don’t know what variation of laksa this is pretending to be but none of the traditional bases come through in its flavour profile. 

If you served this to an Asian auntie of ANY culture and called it laksa you’d have a slipper thrown at you. I suppose it fulfilled the goal of “quick warming carbs” but a laksa it is abso-fucking-lutely not, the only laksa this is is laksadaisical.

I had an initial consultation with an orthodontist to explore Invisalign treatment and I'm gobsmacked that the quote has come back at ~$11k?!

I am far from the most complex cases out there (see pic taken from consult) and from everything they said there's minor adjustments needing to be made.

The quote includes:

- 3D scan to create aligners

- regular appointments throughout treatment for review/adjustments

- all repairs/replacements of aligners and attachments if needed

- one retainer (fixed or removable)

- 24 months of guided aftercare

Are these inclusions standard or additional to what you would usually get elsewhere?

I'm strongly considering getting quotes elsewhere but I really don't want to be disheartened if this is the standard going rate, especially in this economy 🫠 I genuinely expected maybe $6k-$8k tops but maybe that's more realistic with a dentist and not an orthodontist?

P.s. if you have any recs in Western Sydney or Sydney CBD shoot them through!