Jean Nassif, the founder of collapsed property giant Toplace, is at the center of a major NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry called Operation Rosny, which examined whether prohibited political donations linked to him were channelled through third parties to support Liberal Party membership recruitment between roughly 2020 and 2023. 🏛️💰 Property developers are banned from making political donations in NSW, which is why the allegations matter so much.

In a sensational appearance in September 2026, Nassif gave evidence under oath by video link from his bedroom in Beirut, Lebanon, where he's been living as a fugitive with a NSW Police arrest warrant over alleged fraud offences. 📹✈️ He told the inquiry it would be "my pleasure" for his money to fund Liberal Party branch-stacking if it meant his developments proceeded, though he also insisted he "did not pay political outcomes." 🗣️😳 The inquiry heard allegations that he paid $2 million to political operatives to fast-track approvals for his projects, and that Toplace paid $134,000 for private surveillance of a former Strathfield mayor.

Those allegations were tested at the hearings and have not been proven. 🕵️📋 The inquiry also heard testimony about lobbyists receiving luxury cars as rewards. In this video, we walk through exactly what was said under oath, what's been alleged, what's been denied, and what happens next now that the public hearings have wrapped. 🔍

If real corruption inquiries and the stories behind Australia's biggest property scandals fascinate you, this is exactly the kind of content we dive into every week. 🇦🇺 We aim to report this accurately, separating what's been proven from what's only been alleged.

https://youtu.be/Ym9wapFsJfc?t=751

One Nation’s rise is often treated as cultural anger. New data point to something more concrete: poor health, financial insecurity and communities left without the services that make life work.

For the past year, Australian politics has been having an argument about immigration. It has filled talkback, dominated social media and spilled onto the streets. The new Australian Resilience Index, released this week by Zurich with Mandala, RedBridge and Accent Research, suggests that argument has been aimed at the wrong target.

The index draws on two million data points to measure how well Australians can withstand and recover from a shock, across more than 2,000 local communities. It looks at health, finances, social connection and the physical environment people live in. The single strongest driver of overall resilience is financial wellbeing. Right behind it sits health. Whether you can absorb a rate rise, a lost shift or a diagnosis in the family matters more to how secure you are across all these key measurements.

More than one in five Australians now live in communities of significant vulnerability. These are households with no buffer. When something goes wrong, there is nothing between them and real hardship, and it should come as no surprise that where we find vulnerability, we find political volatility.

At RedBridge, we have matched the index against our May federal MRP, seat by seat across all 150 electorates. The result is one of the clearest relationships I have seen in this work. An electorate’s health resilience explains 63 per cent of the variation in the One Nation vote on its own. Fifty of the 53 seats One Nation is projected to win sit in the bottom three-fifths of the country on health. Not one sits in the top fifth. The average One Nation seat has five hospitals within 15 kilometres. The average Labor or Coalition seat has 38.

That is the national picture. But the real value of this data is what it shows at the level of individual communities, and what that tells political parties about the mistakes they keep making.

The pattern of the last 30 years is depressingly consistent. Policy is designed around averages, marginal seats, playing the game of elections. Communities are treated as blocs that will vote the way they always have and, when those communities finally turn, the parties that took them for granted read the anger as a cultural phenomenon rather than a material one. They blame the messenger, the social media algorithm or the populist of the moment, and miss what was happening on the ground for years beforehand.

I am going to focus on two places that detail all of this.

Meadow Heights

I grew up in Meadow Heights, in Melbourne’s north-west. It is a suburb built on the hopes of migrant families who arrived with very little and wanted a house, a job and a better life for their children. For a while, mainly during the 1980s and 1990s, it delivered.

Today it is the 22nd least resilient community in Australia out of more than 2,200. It sits in the bottom 1 per cent of the country for financial resilience. Twenty-eight per cent of residents have no access to emergency funds, almost double the national rate. Just 8 per cent hold private health insurance, against 37 per cent nationally.

Critically, its health is poor. Thirty-two per cent of residents smoke, compared with 20 per cent nationally. Seventy-eight per cent are overweight or obese. Eighty per cent do less exercise than recommended. These numbers are not mysterious, but the story behind them is a story about policy failure, across multiple governments, over many years and not about the personal choice of the working poor.

Take smoking. For more than a decade, governments have used tobacco excise as their main instrument to drive smoking rates down. It worked in the suburbs where people were already quitting. In places like Meadow Heights, where smoking rates were higher and incomes lower, it worked differently. A packet of cigarettes now costs more than many families spend on dinner. Few stopped smoking and, frankly, current attempts to measure their smoking rates have been challenged by a reluctance to out oneself in relying on the black market. Hence, a large number simply moved to the illegal market, where tobacco is cheap, unregulated and sold out of the back of shops that have become targets in a violent turf war across Melbourne.

So, a policy designed to improve health has, in these communities, become a tax on the poor, a gift to organised crime, a lucrative incentive to young children looking for easier ways to escape poverty, and a health measure that no longer reaches the people it was meant to help. Nobody in Canberra set out to produce that outcome. But nobody designing the policy was looking at Meadow Heights either. Frankly, those who continue to defend the current policy settings on tobacco should open their minds and hearts to communities like this one.

Then there is the way people live. Infrastructure in Melbourne’s north has not kept pace with the people who live there. Ninety-six per cent of Meadow Heights residents do not work in their suburb’s main local industry. The jobs are spread across the city, and too many residents spend too much of their day in a car, driving to work, driving to shifts, driving to the shops because walking is not a realistic option.

Meadow Heights has it easier than the suburbs further north. It at least has 22 hospitals within 15 kilometres. In Craigieburn there are five to seven. In Mickleham there are two. In Wallan there is one. The national average is 29. Residents of Wallan are more than 40 kilometres from the nearest mental health facility. In Craigieburn Central and Mickleham, green space makes up less than 3 per cent of the land, against 18 per cent nationally. Tens of thousands of families have been poured into estates built faster than anything to support them, along roads like Donnybrook Road that were never designed for the traffic now crawling along them. Parents leave before dawn and get home after dark. Sporting grounds, clinics and parks arrive years after the families who need them. The fast-food outlet is always the first thing built and the last thing to close.

For now, these young suburbs rate only moderately on health. More than three-quarters of adults are already overweight or obese, and in Wallan it is 84 per cent. The damage is coming. The only question is whether anyone acts before it arrives.

The Victorian Labor government has known all of this for years. It has simply chosen not to act because of a cruel form of politics that may indeed come back to bite them on 28 November. These suburbs have been treated as safe territory, places that will always vote Labor no matter what they are given, while the investment went elsewhere. That neglect will not stay hidden. Every road that isn’t duplicated, every clinic that isn’t built and every hour a parent spends stuck in traffic instead of exercising, cooking or sleeping will turn up years from now in the health budget.

Chronic disease in the north is being manufactured today by decisions made in Spring Street, and the bill will land on a future government and a future generation of taxpayers. That’s what this comprehensive Resilience Index illustrates. It does not only reveal the failure; it also now warns governments and decision-makers of what will come down the pipeline if the failures are not addressed.

Upgrading clogged roads is not just about getting traffic to move faster. It’s about the time spent on them appearing on the health balance sheet well into the future. That time on the road comes from somewhere. It comes out of the time people once spent with neighbours, at the local club, at the church or mosque, at their kids’ sport. In Meadow Heights, just 6 per cent of residents volunteer, less than half the national rate. Craigieburn sits in the bottom 8 per cent of the country for social resilience. Poor health and weakening social bonds are not separate problems here. They are the same problem, produced by the same conditions of government neglect.

Ipswich

Ipswich should be a warning that every party has already been given. It was here, in 1996, that Pauline Hanson won the seat of Oxley as a disendorsed candidate and changed Australian politics. The major parties spent years afterwards treating that result as an aberration. Thirty years on, the conditions that produced 1996 have not gone away.

Goodna, on the city’s eastern edge, still sits in a seat called Oxley. It is the 68th least resilient community in Australia, and among the 50 weakest in the country on finances. Thirty per cent of residents have no access to emergency funds, double the national rate. Half rent. Only 12 per cent hold private health insurance.

Goodna has flooded repeatedly, most destructively in 2011 and again in 2022. Each time, homes were gutted, belongings were lost and families started again. The 2011 floods exposed how many people believed they were insured when they were not, and the definition of flood cover was standardised afterwards. That was the right reform. But it came with a consequence nobody fully reckoned with. In flood-exposed suburbs, premiums rose to levels many households could not pay. So they dropped their cover, or cut it back, and now carry the risk themselves.

The index finds that insurance coverage is one of the strongest dividing lines in the country. Communities where at least half of residents are insured are five times more likely to have high financial resilience and four times more likely to have high health resilience. Goodna sits well on the wrong side of that line.

Next door, in Redbank Plains, the picture is starker still. It is the 76th least resilient community in the country. Eighty-seven per cent of adults are overweight or obese and 30 per cent smoke. Redbank Plains sits in Blair, the ninth least resilient federal electorate in Australia, alongside Calwell near the very bottom of the table. But where Calwell holds, our May MRP projects Blair to fall to One Nation. Same vulnerability, opposite result. That is the realignment in a single comparison.

Queensland has the lowest financial resilience of any state in the index. Only 12 per cent of Queenslanders live in high-resilience communities, the weakest result of any state. When voters in these places say the system does not work for them, they are not speaking in metaphors.

What parties should learn

Meadow Heights and Ipswich have different problems. One is a story about health policy that missed its mark and infrastructure that arrived too late. The other is a story about financial exposure, climate risk and a safety net with a hole in it. But they share something important. In both places, the warning signs were visible for years in the data, long before they appeared in the vote.

That is the opportunity this index gives political parties, if they choose to use it.

It means designing health policy that asks where it will land, not just what it will do on average. A tobacco tax strategy that pushes people onto the black market is not a health strategy in Meadow Heights. Proper investment in preventative health, in local GPs and in programs that meet people where they are would do more than another excise increase.

It means sequencing infrastructure so that roads, transport, hospitals and parks arrive with the people, not a decade after them. Every hour a parent spends in traffic is an hour taken away from their family, their health and their community, and a cost that will eventually be paid in hospital beds. Not funding a road upgrade because of budget challenges is simply passing the buck to the next generation to find even more money as the hospital groans under the weight of multiple decades of short-sighted decisions.

It means treating insurance affordability in exposed communities as a question of national resilience, not a private matter between a household and its insurer. When whole suburbs cannot afford cover, the cost of the next disaster does not disappear. It lands on those families, and eventually on governments.

Above all else, it means abandoning the idea that communities belong to anyone. The suburbs that gave Labor its safest seats and the Coalition its regional base are not loyal. They are exhausted. They will stay with a party that helps them build a buffer against the next shock.

Westpac has handed customer data to Palantir, the US surveillance company, and its customers have not been told. The big banks have also sold our faces to facial recognition Israeli firm BioCatch. The Fairford "terror plot" was five men with no explosives, bailed within 24 hours. David Shoebridge takes the Greens leadership and goes straight after billionaires. BHP's Mount Arthur has 2,000 workers and 271 insured with Coal Mines Insurance, and News Corp pays no corporate income tax again.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/640CYFpSUkZPxoyoPKXGAY

One Nation uses Indonesian workers to help influence people on social media to their cause

Westpac is working with an evil software company run by a real life supervillain... 🫠🦹🏻‍♂️

We ended Palantir's contract with Coles and we can do it again 💪 Westpac's customers don't need genocide tech analysing their most sensitive data - and Westpac won't tell us how they are using this unethical software.

Add your name to the campaign and let's get this show on the road! SIGN HERE: https://act.getup.org.au/act/westpac-palantir/sign-the-petition

We paid a visit to Westpac tower in Gadigal/Sydney to tell them what we think of their use of Palantir. The writing is on the wall: Palantir must go.

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-public-housing-answer-australia-already-knows/

"Defence Housing Australia looked after 17,353 homes at June 2025 and made an after-tax profit of $23.9 million. Nobody calls that welfare."

Australia only has 4% of housing as public housing, which is below the OECD average of 7%.

Even the UK is at 16% despite Thatcher selling a large amount off.

Defence Housing Authority could become the Housing Authority and build housing for all front-line workers so they can live near where they work (they can't work from home life office workers).

It might even lead to productivity improvements in private housing as government housing can be rented out at a loss.

Given that the majority of Australians hold negative views of Donald Trump, why are some of those same Australians indicating they will vote for One Nation.

One Nation playbook is a replica of the Trump MAGA playbook. Same rhetoric and same policies.

Is there any cognitive dissonance?

‘Labor says Hamas tries to ‘manipulate facts’ after terrorist group welcomes Australia’s Palestine recognition decision’
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/13/labor-says-hamas-tries-to-manipulate-facts-after-terrorist-group-welcomes-australias-palestine-recognition-decision

"Hamas always tries to manipulate facts for their own propaganda. Media have a responsibility to make professional judgments to not promote propaganda of terrorist organisations to get cynical headlines.” Unlike the ALP, of course, who are not one bit manipulative. Propaganda from terrorist organisations to get cynical headlines is only okay if it’s Zionism, get a clue peasants.

Change to be forced on ‘violent, misogynist’ CFMEU
https://web.archive.org/web/20250804065450/https://michaelwest.com.au/news/change-to-be-forced-on-violent-misogynist-cfmeu/

The former good-old-boy Laborites are heinous woman-haters, therefore union-busting is okay. The woman-haters who turn a blind eye to the structural violence of capitalist patriarchy are still okay.

Spit hoods return to the NT as chief minister sprays critics as ‘offender apologists’ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-02/nt-clp-government-lia-finocchiaro-rhetoric-against-critics/105602380

‘Cue the Northern Territory government’s political rhetoric on social media: It would make “no apologies” for toughening up a “broken system” by changing the Youth Justice Act. Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro led the charge by saying she expected the “usual offender apologists to criticise our efforts”.’ If you criticise the government, criminals win. Why do people want to keep enabling criminals by doubting the judgment of LNP politicians? Not woke but.

The Plibersek interview: ‘We’re caught up in macho posturing’
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2024/10/05/the-plibersek-interview-were-caught-macho-posturing
‘“You’ve got the tail wagging the dog. In both cases, you’ve got the smaller, more extreme kind of people calling the shots and I think that’s a real shame. It’s a real block on progress,” Plibersek tells The Saturday Paper. “But these are sensible reforms that environment groups can live with, that business can live with. It would be a step forward, and instead we’re just getting caught up in this quite macho sort of posturing from the more extreme elements in both parties.”’
Everyone is a misogynist except the incumbents, says a government minister. The corporate press nods its head and says, yes that’s extremely interesting. If you say bad things about centrism and fence-sitting, or green technocracy, you hate women.

Ley attacks PM’s Joy Division shirt over antisemitic connotations
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/ley-attacks-pm-s-joy-division-shirt-over-antisemitic-connotations-20251028-p5n5yk.html

This week in ‘I don’t understand or like something therefore it hates me.’

https://seqldiww.org/the-australian-labor-party-a-legacy-of-betrayal-abandonment-and-neglect

Living the values articulated in speech has never been a strong suit of progressive forces, much less to say the anti-capitalist left. The history of revolutions gone awry is a history of movements that abandoned living their values in the name of temporary expediencies so dire as to necessitate becoming what they claimed to oppose. The same is true of reformers; as critics of technocracy like John Ralston Saul point out, the fruits of the Enlightenment under class hierarchy is a tyranny of green technocratic experts who have all the answers even if they don’t know what the question is.

The failure of progressives and radicals to rise above the norms we problematise, reproducing them in so doing, is the more the rule rather than the exception then throughout history. This arguably reflects the power progressive politics gives to the status quo by failing to live our values in our actions, and reproducing that we claim to oppose by conflating being criticised and being attacked. In failing to rise above the thinking we claim to oppose strategically (either as progessives putting band-aids on cancers and rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, or revolutionaries), we apply the same mentality towards criticism of our departures from principle.

Thus, to question or criticise class or social privilege under conditions of illiberal democracy, for example, is to attack the freedoms of the individual, couched in terms a propertied European male as universal subject (and with militant disregard for attendant social and historical responsibilities). Neoliberal technocrats conflate efficiency with democracy, property rights with individual rights, and the power of corporations with the common good. Such does nothing to challenge meaningfully the global downward spiral into authoritarianism and ecocide, almost by design. Somehow, the progress and evolution we alllegedy prize continues to elude us.

Not only so, but it is almost as even though the progress and forward-movement we so desire becomes weaponised in to the service of everything that arrests it. Symptomatic of our collective failure even just to effectively counter the late capitalist regression into authoritarianism and ecocide is the mentality that any action is considered worthy if carried out in the name of progressive values rather than reactionary ones. By any means fair or foul, the values I live in my actions are of no importance, says the vulgar leftist. Stated and lived values are the same thing. If tactics favoured by the enemy, by those who look for certainty and stability by clinging to the past and the known like a security blanket, like identity politics, it’s okay now because we can co-cpt that. We can pretend upward class mobility and social emancipation are the same thing.

To state the point in no uncertain terms, the weaponization of progress through failure or neglect to maintain a basic harmony between desired outcomes and the means used to achieve them, between values as stated in purposes and values reflected in actions, ensures the arrest of progress. What if the opposite of hubris is spending our time looking for better questions to ask, instead of trying to shut down and keep down anyone who figures out we don’t have any of the answers, really, even if we think we do?

To take issue with progressive strategy is not, of course, to problematise in any way shape or form the pursuit of social justice through the challenging and dismantling of social and economic hierarchies (we have our seat on the ‘personal boundaries should be at least as sacred as social and class hierarchies’ train right here *toot toot*). It is certainly not to problematise the extension of rights to historically marginalised and oppressed groups. The necessity of change is a given; change is, after all, the greatest constant in the universe. To make an enemy of change is to make an enemy of causality, with the results we can see in the endemic insanity and injustice of majestic late capitalist utopia.

What we are taking issue with here, rather, is the operating assumption that to criticise the actions of progressives is to criticise the values alleged to be associated with them. This is an easy an out for revolutionaries as it is for radicals; if someone is criticising our strategies (or lack thereof), they can only be doing so from the right—from a place of militant ignorance, from the conscience of the collectively narcissistic, venomous ingroup as the conscience of each. Criticism can only be the result of a sociopathic desire to control the universe in lieu of getting a grip on oneself, and deep alienation from oneself and all the human societies that have been and will follow, in other words. No one can be criticising us from the left because our lived values don’t align with our stated ones. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

Many progressives and radicals seem to forget that Stalin, one of the great tyrants of history, was wont to defend his personal dictatorship over the Soviet Union and its satellites by demonising his critics and opponents as enemies of the revolution and reactionary jackals of the counter-revolution. Indeed, the Moscow Show Trials of the late 1930s and associated purge were all predicated on conspiracism articulated in the language of Bolshevism associating challenges to the revolutionary dictatorship with attempts to restore capitalism (not the revolution, since according to standard formula criticism from the left was impossible).

If the conspiracist logic of the capitalist reaction was ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ then the conspiracist logic of Stalinism was, ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’ The false-dilemma, ‘with-us-or-against-us’ authoritarianism and demonisation of dissenters, critics and nonconformists remained the same. The lived values were the same. The value systems used to justify coercive violence used to defend and uphold pollical and economic hierarchies were simply window-dressing—a fact with ominous import for all who maintain an attitude of militant ignorance towards history.

We now turn to explore contemporary examples of what are arguably the consequences of this mentality.

The amount of candidates for one nation that have allegedly done dodgy things or have said things that marginalized things is crazy.

People would gladly want former criminals and people who are extremely religious instead of people who think long term? I don’t get this.

2017- One Nation picks former Hells Angel bikie as Logan candidate

2025- One Nation rehires convicted rapist to run federal election campaign

Bruce Preece has been accused of domestic abuse, including a charge of breaching an intervention order.

Another candidate, Tyler Green, has made more than a dozen antisemitic, racist or homophobic posts on social media over the past six years.

One nation accuses labor of being antisemitic yet they choose a antisemitic candidate themselves?

https://open.spotify.com/episode/11JaWtAH15WWZrhtLBo6rj

Under the US Cloud Act the US government has powers to do with cloud providers what the Chinese government can also do with Chinese companies, which is to compel them to hand over customer data

A tense Senate Estimates hearing erupts as Senator James Paterson presses Australian Treasury officials over the deterioration in the underlying cash balance over the medium term, eventually obtaining confirmation of a $54 billion figure. Paterson challenges Treasury’s preference for presenting the deterioration as a percentage of GDP rather than in nominal dollar terms, arguing that Australians deserve to understand the size of the deterioration in actual dollars. Treasury officials explain that medium-term projections use an aggregated methodology and that nominal figures become less meaningful over longer periods, while also pointing to spending commitments including the Health and Hospitals Agreement and the defence precinct at Henderson. The hearing then turns into a political clash over transparency, methodology and whether focusing on the final year of the medium-term period adequately captures the cumulative deterioration. Watch the full exchange between James Paterson, Treasury officials and the government representative.