just another person (beware imposters)

The Australian government is running Arabic language ads encouraging foreign non-citizens to access the “First Home Owner’s Grant” - subsidising non-citizens to buy homes in Australia even if they have property overseas. The First Home Owner scheme allows non-citizens to purchase homes in Australia with a 5% deposit, regardless of whether they own a home overseas. The Australian government acts as a guarantor for the remaining 15 per cent of the deposits, allowing the first homebuyer to avoid paying lenders mortgage insurance (LMI). Just unbelievable how badly our country is managed

Now One Nation is running the same play — campaigning to cut immigration by over 570,000, capped at 130,000. The actual data: net migration was 306,000 in 2024-25, already falling for the second consecutive year — and that figure includes temporary students and workers who leave. The permanent intake was 185,000 — mostly skilled workers already here, already contributing. The biggest driver of that headline number? International students — 157,000 people who pay upfront and leave after graduating. They contributed $53.6 billion to Australia’s economy in 2024-25. Our fourth largest export after iron ore, gas, and coal. 31.5% of Australians were born overseas. 48% have at least one parent born overseas. Immigration is not a threat to Australia. It IS Australia — with one critical exception. Aboriginal people are the only Indigenous Australians. Everyone else arrived from somewhere else. And One Nation has consistently opposed Aboriginal people too — native title, the Voice, the NIAA. Their hostility to black and brown people doesn’t begin and end with immigration. It never has. So what is One Nation’s actual plan? They vote against housing affordability measures and have no plan to increase supply or fix planning laws. Migration is a small piece of the housing puzzle. The crisis is decades of underbuilding. One Nation has no answer for that. Just a scapegoat.

At the mouth of the Mississippi River, there is a dead zone. A hypoxic zone: water so depleted of oxygen that almost nothing can survive in it. It forms every summer. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered approximately 8,776 square miles. An area larger than New Jersey, sitting in the Gulf of Mexico, producing almost no marine life. The cause: nitrogen runoff from the Corn Belt. The 90 million acres of corn in the American Midwest require synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, produced from natural gas, applied annually. The soil cannot hold all of it. The excess runs off into streams, into the Missouri, into the Mississippi, and down to the Gulf, where it fertilises algae blooms that consume the oxygen when they decompose. The dead zone has existed in some form since the 1970s, when nitrogen fertiliser use on the Corn Belt expanded to the scale it is now at. The shrimping industry in the Gulf of Mexico has spent fifty years working around a seasonal dead zone the size of a small state, caused by the runoff from a crop that is 40% destined to become ethanol. The ethanol is a fuel additive. The dead zone is an externality. The externality is 8,776 square miles.

A violent Sudanese criminal awaiting deportation after being jailed for just two years over the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl has escaped from custody in Sydney. Police said they didn't notify the public for more than 24 hours because they didn't want to cause alarm.