Politics & Society

Read the influence problem to understand how exposure, repetition and suppression can be used to manufacture your consent and norms.

Image from The Sydney Morning Herald For a generation of constitutional republicans, 1999 marks a ‘sliding doors’ moment many of us weren’t even alive to see. Of course, I am referencing the Australian ‘republic referendum’, a blueprint forged from enduring, 19th-century ambition, yet nonetheless foiled at the hands of perceived obligation. As we approach nearly thirty years since the referendum’s failure on the grandest stage, surveying the recent coups calling to further un

Image from Pinterest I. The Chasm In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the team behind AlphaFold—an AI system that predicts protein structures with near-experimental accuracy, solving a problem that had resisted fifty years of scientific effort.¹ What previously took years of laboratory work now takes seconds at negligible marginal cost. Drug candidates that once required billions of dollars and more than a decade of human research are being generated in months at a

Victoria occupies a unique position in Australian civil litigation. It is said to be the only Australian jurisdiction that retains regular civil jury trials.[1] This procedural distinction has assumed particular significance in the context of institutional abuse claims, where, in late 2023, two Victorian Supreme Court juries returned what were regarded as the largest awards in this area: $5.94 million[2] and $3.3 million,[3] respectively. While both awards were later reduced

Retrofuturism mourns the deprivation of an “enchanted world” with crystalline aims and conviction in human consciousness (Svetlana Boym). Algorithms have obscured the law into a “black box” that needs to be interpreted. Should algorithms assume a new life as an “invention” under patent protection today? Or, does this erode the fundamental principle of “manner of manufacture” from its chain novel? Do Algorithms Dream of Economic Endeavour? ‘The question is not, ‘Can they reas

Art by Oli Wiencke Anyone who's been strolling around campus recently will no doubt have seen the numerous posters for the upcoming edition of the Trotsky-ite drum circle. Our campus’ favourite vanguards of the revolution feel that ‘Liberalism can’t defeat the far right but the left can’. I read this poster as I sat on the slowly regrowing Kambri lawns before class, sipping my favourite brew, and got to pondering. I then had a thought, a thought that every man has every day:

In the 2019-2020 financial year, international tourists visiting Australia spent more than $78 million on Indigenous-style artwork [1]. A draft report on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Visual Arts and Crafts, developed in response to the 2018 Report on the Impact of Inauthentic Art and Craft in the Style of First Nations Peoples, found that up to 75% of Indigenous-style products sold in Australia are fake[2]. Inauthentic Indigenous-style arts, imagery and consumer prod