Linkage

The ULEZ restrictions are actually not all that strict, especially from the perspective of us here at an electric vehicle publication – most diesel and petrol (gasoline)-powered cars made within the last 10 and 20 years respectively qualify, despite that they still create significant tailpipe pollution.

Also, there are exemptions available for delivery vehicles, buses and so on.

Nevertheless, despite these exemptions, a recent report released by the city of London shows how well the ULEZ has worked at lowering pollution in London and making everyone healthier.

The report points out that two of the most dangerous aspects of vehicle emissions – nitrogen oxides, which are responsible for smog formation, and PM2.5, which are tiny particles that irritate the lungs – have dropped by almost a third compared to if ULEZ hadn’t been implemented, in only the few years that the policy has been in place.

Specifically, NO2 is 27% lower and PM2.5 is 31% lower in outer London. Nitrogen oxides (which includes both NO and NO2) as a whole are down 14%.

Some areas have seen even more significant declines, like Central London, the most densely populated area. It has seen a drop in NO2 levels of 54%.

All in all, 99% of air quality monitors around London have showed a reduction in pollution, so the new rules have benefitted everyone.

Cory and Jon both on top form:

Splendid overview of RBA counter-productivity from my friend and colleague Martha:

In November 2024, The Reserve Bank Act was ammended. The changes now required the RBA’s monetary policy board to determine the monetary policy of the bank to stabilise prices in Australia, to maintain full employment in Australia and stabilise Australia’s financial system.  The Reserve Bank’s role was to prevent banks from destabilising the financial system to prevent credit crashes. The Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy-Reserve Bank was an agreement between the Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the Reserve Bank Board on the 10th July 2025. The agreement provided full operational autonomy to the RBA’s Monetary Policy Board, underlining the RBA’s goals of price and inflation control.

Somehow the ‘economic prosperity and welfare of all Australians’, got swapped out for keeping the banking sector stable. Now whilst the concepts might be related, stabilisation of Australia’s financial system is no guarantee of either economic prosperity or welfare for all the people of Australia. The RBA has also completely reinterpreted the term ‘full employment.’

Specifically the RBA’s statement of monetary policy explains ‘to achieve its statutory objectives, the Bank sets monetary policy to keep inflation in the economy to 2%-3%, and employment at the desired level that is consistent with maintaining low and stable inflation. In other words, there always has to be a level of ‘natural’ unemployment to avoid inflation.  Dr Kelly notes that even when inflation is within the RBA’s desired target range of 2-3%, the RBA does nothing to stop unemployment rising by lowering interest rates.

(Thanks for the name check, Martha.)

Governor Michelle Bullock has admitted that the RBA is basing its actions on the expectations of inflation, rather than direct observation of inflation. The RBA relies on the NAIRU (the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). The NAIRU cannot be directly observed or measured, it can only be inferred. My colleague, economist Katy Swain, hilariously calls the NAIRU, the RBA’s ‘invisible friend.’

Australia's growing reliance on temporary migrant labour has fuelled a booming labour hire industry, with contractors sitting between growers and workers, often recruiting, transporting and housing them.

While some operate legally, others prey on vulnerable migrant workers, paying them cash, well below the minimum wage.

[…]

The Modern Slavery Act, introduced in 2018, requires companies with annual revenue above $100 million to file a report each year, identifying the modern slavery risks in their operations and supply chains and what they're doing to address them.

It was designed to encourage transparency and improve corporate behaviour.

Four Corners used data analysis tools to analyse hundreds of annual modern slavery statements from 50 food companies between 2020 and 2025.

One in four contained sections that were more than 80 per cent identical to previous reports.

[…]

Former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Allan Fels has dedicated a lot of time to the plight of migrant workers. […]

He describes the Modern Slavery Act as a symbolic and tokenistic law. "It's the sort of law you pass when you want to look as if you're concerned about something, but you don't intend anything to happen," he says.

An independent review of the Modern Slavery Act handed to the federal government in 2023 concluded Australia's framework should be strengthened.

"The report spells out what's obvious to regulators like me — that the law was never intended to be associated with any real action. It was just a law you put on the books as a sign of concern, but with no intent to take serious action," he says.

Another brilliant rant from Girl on the Net. [Standard disclaimer: She's a sex blogger, so some of the ads on her site may not be the sort you want your boss to see over your shoulder. Assuming you read blogs during working hours. And if not, why not?]

Wiki isn’t the only site concerned about censorship, though, and early implementation of age verification in the UK shows that it – like any attempt to regulate ‘porn’ – ends up catching a lot of other content too. Reddit users have already begun documenting subreddits that have been age-gated, including support forums for sexual assault survivors and help on how to quit smoking. On top of this, a tonne of LGBTQ+ content and sex education has already been caught in the net. Expect much much more of this to happen going forward.

This isn’t a question of just getting the government to write in exemptions, either. Although Wikipedia may earn an exemption through the court case (I hope it does), one of the core problems with the Online Safety Act in implementation is that the definitions are incredibly broad and the penalties are potentially extremely harsh. Websites need to assess whether they have a ‘significant number’ of UK users – what’s significant? 10% of total traffic? 10 people? 10,000 visitors per month? They also need to consider whether it’s likely to be accessed by children. What does that mean – ‘likely’? Sites which aren’t marketed to children or shared in any spaces where children are likely to be browsing… are they exempt? We don’t know. What we do know, however, is that sites which do not comply will be investigated by Ofcom, and potentially fined up to 10% of their annual revenue or £18 million – whichever is greater. The chilling effect of penalties like this, especially when combined with ‘guidance’ from the regulator that could generously be described as ‘vague’ means that any site with any content that could potentially be classed as ‘harmful to children’ would be taking a giant leap into the expensive unknown if they didn’t proactively comply. And compliance with ‘age verification’ is costly and time consuming: I personally can’t afford to do it, which is why I’ve just blanket blocked UK users from hearing the audio. Many other sites – both adult and non-adult – are coming to the same conclusion. Check out the Blocked page, from the Open Rights Group, which is tracking site closures and blocks as a result of the Act. Submit any sites you know of that are doing this too – let’s keep track of what we’re losing.

So there’s another harm: you’re not just losing access to this content unless you hand over private details, in many many cases (particularly with smaller sites and services) you’re losing access to it entirely. Even flashing your passport won’t get you to the content, because the site owner can’t afford to hire a bouncer to check your ID.

[…]

The UK government’s implementation of AV, without any exemption or concession for small sites, essentially means that those with the deepest pockets will get the most traffic. That means the large, ‘free’ porn tube sites – already an extremely dominant force in the adult industry, hoovering up a lot of the money and even shaping how we define ‘porn’ in the first place – will only become bigger and more powerful. Meanwhile those smaller sites trying to swim against the tide, offering a view of sexuality that is broader and more diverse than what you see on the front page of TubeFuck will struggle to get traction. As TechDirt put it this week:

   “This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but everyone else gets crushed.”

The system working as intended:

A National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) service provider was allowed to pocket more than $1 million by incorrectly billing for personal training services, while at least 4,000 other providers also incorrectly charged Australians with disability, the federal government says.

The provider that incorrectly billed for more than $1 million charged disabled Australians $193.99 an hour, nearly three times the government's recommended price.

The rort centres on a category of service called "other professionals", which was intended for services provided by a qualified therapist to deliver evidence-based supports.

However, unscrupulous providers submitted a range of other claims under that item, including payments for decluttering, personal training, golf lessons, float tanks and horse therapy.

The crackdown is part of a broader censorship of crucial sexual and reproductive health and rights information tracked by global NGO ReproUncensored all around the world.

Founder and executive director Martha Dimitratou told Index they have documented nearly 600 cases across big tech platforms in Australia and globally, with more than a dozen new cases reported in just the last few days.

Dimitratou said that Australia’s world-first teen social media ban, introduced last year and now set to be followed by about 20 other countries, could be to blame.

Adam Finch, marketing, branding and communications coordinator for Brisbane-based nonprofit HIV charity, Queensland Positive People, said that he had recently had one set of the same posts approved one day but then censored the next.

“I think we’ve just managed to dodge a bullet (but) in many ways it’s a matter of time,” he told Index, adding that they were starting to self-censor.

Dimitratou said that Meta and Google must be held accountable and provide full transparency on why awareness campaigns were being restricted.

“They must take immediate steps to ensure their moderation systems do not block lawful, evidence-based public health information,” she said.

“Finally, governments must reclaim democratic oversight from the growing sovereignty of US big tech companies, enforce the law, and call these practices what they are: illegal.”

This article presents findings from a para-ethnographic research/practice partnership with the National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA). Community-led public health organisations such as NAPWHA practice both public and counterpublic health promotion. They seek to work with and advocate for their constituent communities, while also seeking to work against public discourses stigmatising sex, drug use, sex work, and HIV. However, social media platforms increasingly suppress health promotion content as ‘sexual solicitation’, ‘misinformation’, or inappropriately ‘political’. At the same time, NAPWHA member organisations’ social media accounts are increasingly targeted by trolling and abuse framed as ‘freedom of speech’. Findings reveal the challenges of engaging people living with HIV (PLHIV) within the fragmented publics of contemporary digital health communication. Findings highlight the existential threats that social media platform policy and governance pose both to the political subjectivity of communities affected by HIV, and to public health promotion and outreach more broadly.

In 2016, 44.6% of MX-publishing domains in the top million ran their own mail server. In the 18 July 2026 snapshot that figure is 22.4% - and it is still falling, down another half a percentage point in the last thirty days alone.

[…]

The domains didn't disappear; they moved. Google Workspace now receives mail for 21.8% of MX-publishing domains and Microsoft 365 for 16.8%. Together that is 38.6% of the measured Internet's inbound mail behind two companies. Nobody else comes close: the next named provider, Proofpoint, sits at 1.9%.

It is easy to read this as a market-share story, but for this community it is really a resilience story. The RIPE community has spent years discussing DNS and CDN centralisation; email is following the same path, just more quietly. When more than a third of popular domains depend on two providers to receive mail, an outage, a filtering change or a policy decision at either one propagates through the whole ecosystem at once. And unlike a CDN, email has no graceful fallback - a rejected message is simply gone.

There is a second-order effect too. The fewer independent operators there are, the more the remaining ones inherit the deliverability problems of a world tuned for the big two. Anyone who has tried to stand up a fresh Postfix box in 2026 and get its mail accepted at scale knows exactly what I mean.
 

The Age newspaper estimated 6,000 participants, but based on my own experiences at marches, and comparing this crowd to past pro-Palestine rallies that have attracted anywhere between 3-30,000 people, I think the crowd was at least 10,000 strong. It was overwhelmingly white and skewed older and male.

The next observation I made was how incoherent the rally was. There was no clear structure, co-ordination, agenda, strategy or directions. The participants were also motivated by various grievances. The anti-immigration strain was quite clearly the most prominent, but there were sizable blocs agitated by Victorian state government policies, tax, and over-policing.

[…]

Some have pointed to these contradictions and suggested that the rally was a bust because the messaging was confused and uncoordinated. I think it’s important to understand that this is the case at most large rallies, including those organised by the left. The fact the first such rally of this scale, organised by the far-right, did not have message discipline is not really a surprise.

What’s more important, and became quite clear to me, is that whatever organisation and discipline there was, was being provided by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network, led by Thomas Sewell.

The heavy police presence in the CBD was overwhelmingly focused on blocking and disrupting the counter-protest. This effectively let the March for Australia take over the CBD and pour into whatever streets, lanes and public places they saw fit. It resulted in Sewell addressing the rally from the steps of Victorian Parliament, delivering white supremacist slogans to a crowd of thousands that cheered back in support and encouragement.

The same pattern played out across the country. Despite attempts to portray the march as somehow de-linked from organised far-right activists, it was quite obvious who was running the show.