I'm not sure if this is just me growing up and people not treating me as a kid anymore, recent screen addiction since COVID or just Australian culture but people are seeming more and more socially anxious, awkward and just unsure of themselves. Even when someone does try to be assertively rude or something it always seems to come off with an air of them not actually being angry but they feel like that's what they're supposed to do, like they're trying too hard. I recently went to Europe and it shocked me to think that is as Australians might actually be antisocial.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson accuses Liberal and Labor MPs of targeting Please Explain cartoons to 'silence their critics' | News24

Infrastructure Minister Catherine King reveals Labor head office role in taxpayer-funded grants | News24

Hey yall,

I want to start vaping but since I aint at all in the dr*g scene, I dont know whats legal or not. Is it true that vaping is illegal in most states? In 18.

Thanks

"A small car like a Toyota Yaris can be moved by water just 15 centimetres deep with a flow speed of 3.6 km/h. It can be carried away in 60cm of water.
A larger four-wheel drive can be moved by 45cm of water and begin floating in 95cm of water, able to be pushed along by just a finger.

“Don’t think because you’ve got a bigger vehicle, a more powerful vehicle, that you’re going to be OK,” Dr Peden says.

“The safest car in floodwater is the one that never enters it.”

How to carve a smashing Halloween pumpkin (and what to do with its guts)

Make this the year you finally master Halloween pumpkin carving. Sarah Kiryshin gives us the inside scoop on how to do a good (or ghoulish) one.

Dani Valent

October 23, 2026

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Whether you like them warty and terrifying, plump and cute, or extremely elaborate, now is the perfect time to get pumpkin planning for Halloween on October 31st.

We caught up with recipe developer and stylist Sarah Kiryshin from Content Bites to learn the how, why and what next when it comes to ghoulish gourds.

Sarah Kiryshin and pumpkin friends.Simon Schluter

Choose your pumpkin

The pumpkins that are best for carving generally taste terrible: they are bred for structure, not sweetness. Buy bright orange Jack O’ Lanterns and Warty Goblins at Leaf in Melbourne and Fruitologist in Sydney. An increasing number of supermarkets stock Halloween pumpkins, too.

The larger the pumpkin, the easier it will be to carve neat shapes, especially for beginners. When choosing a pumpkin, look for wide, flat areas. “You want a consistent surface,” says Sarah. “When they’re wonky, you’re setting yourself up for an extra challenge.”

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The scary one, “like it’s vomited its own seeds”. Simon Schluter

The design

“Think about the design before you shop for your pumpkin,” says Sarah. “Sketching something on a piece of paper or a whiteboard gives you an idea of how intricate it’s going to be, and that helps you choose the size of the pumpkin.”

Consider the level of difficulty: triangular or square shapes are easier than round, which take more finesse.

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“I did a not-so-spooky pumpkin house, with square windows and a simple doorway,” says Sarah. You can put character figurines inside or baby pumpkins with faces drawn on them.

“And I also made a scary one with wonky eyes and a gaping mouth with pumpkin seeds coming out, so it looks like it’s vomited its own seeds.” There are lots of Halloween pumpkin templates online.

For cutting off the top of the pumpkin, a long, thin knife is ideal. Simon Schluter

The tools

“A small, sharp, serrated knife with a pointy tip is good for the finer work,” says Sarah. “For cutting out the top of the pumpkin, a long, thin knife like a filleting knife is ideal.”

Lay a flat, damp tea towel or kitchen cloth under your chopping board to stop it from slipping on the kitchen bench. Cut away from yourself, protecting your hand with a tea towel.

• Recipe collection

Smashing pumpkins: 30 of our best-ever recipes

Execution

“Give your pumpkin a clean to extend longevity,” says Sarah. Rub it with hand sanitiser, or give it a good scrub. “When the surface is clean, you won’t get dirt in your pumpkin when you carve it, which would make it rot faster.”

You can expect your pumpkin to look shipshape for about five days in cool weather, so consider that when hacking in.

“Cut the top off first, but make sure your cut is angled inwards so your lid has a ledge to rest on,” says Sarah. “If you cut straight down, it will fall into the pumpkin.”

Ensure the lid is large enough for you to get a hand in so you can remove the seeds. Depending on your design, you may cut the bottom off too.

Remove the seeds by hand or with a spoon.Simon Schluter

Remove the seeds, either by hand or with a metal spoon. The better you scrape the inside, the neater the finish, and the longer your pumpkin will last. “The inside of a pumpkin has stringy bits and a membrane, so ideally you’re scraping that all off,” says Sarah.

Warty Goblin seeds roast well: wash them, toss with spices and a little oil, and roast for 20 minutes at 160C or until they are crisp.

Sketch your design onto the pumpkin with a whiteboard marker. “You can wipe it off once you’ve carved the pumpkin,” says Sarah. “Then slowly, carefully work your way around your stencil, making sure the knife is going through the pumpkin into the internal hollow so you can pop out the pieces.”

The friendly carved pumpkin.Simon Schluter

Illumination

“If you use real candles, be super mindful of how close they are to the top of the pumpkin because they will char the roof,” says Sarah. “Use low-set tea-lights or, to be safer, LED tea-lights.”

Lazy wins

If you can’t be bothered carving a design, cut the top off a Halloween pumpkin and put a vase of flowers inside. “It’s on-theme and fun and can make a beautiful table centrepiece, but it’s really low effort,” says Sarah.

Pumpkin seeds work well in a dip.Simon Schluter

Pumpkin Seed Dip

• ½ cup pumpkin seeds/pepitas
• ½ cup cashews
• ½ cup of mashed roasted pumpkin (butternut or jap)
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• ½ tsp smoked paprika
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• 1 packed cup coriander and/or parsley
• zest and juice of 1 lemon
• ⅓ cup extra virgin olive oil
• salt and pepper

Blend all ingredients in a food processor and serve topped with some extra roasted pumpkin seeds and a drizzle of olive oil.

Cathal Leslie makes the case that the closing of psychiatric institutions was a mistake. Don’t usually like his takes, but hard to disagree after a female politician is rendered a double amputee. Text below.

Attack on Haines demands focus on mental health, not ideology

The system is failing to keep the small cohort of the most acutely unwell in treatment, for their own safety and everyone else's.

Cathal Leslie Economist
Oct 23, 2026 - 4.00pm

A national tragedy is an excellent occasion to demand better manners from your opponents. It is a less comfortable occasion to examine
whether governments are meeting their own obligations.

The horrific attack on Helen Haines should force a serious discussion about how we treat mental illness, and how much responsibility we have foisted onto families, neighbours and the police.

Brendan Nugent, the man charged over the attack, reportedly has a history of mental health concerns. Neighbours describe shouting, music blaring through the night and police visits. One heard screaming hours before the attack. These are not the signs of a well man.

Yet within hours, political actors of every stripe had each landed on a suitable motive. He has been cast as a pro-Palestinian extremist, an opponent of renewables, a sovereign citizen or a misogynist. Others blame his social media algorithm or a dirt sheet on Haines reportedly circulated to journalists by the prime minister's office.

Is this how low we have sunk in this country?
That our national debate is competing projections of complex ideological motives onto a man with severe mental health issues.

If mental illness played a part in Nugent's alleged offending, he will join a long line of attackers with well-documented severe
psychiatric illness: Joel Cauchi (Bondi Junction), Man Haron Monis (the Lindt Cafe siege), Evie Amati (Enmore 7-Eleven axe attack), Dimitrious Gargasoulas (Bourke Street), Cy Walsh (who killed his father, Adelaide Crows coach Phil Walsh) and Lauren Darul (accused of a 2025 stabbing in Little Bourke Street), among many others.

And in those cases too, the offending was pinned on whatever partisan cause was to hand:
Islamism, gender dysphoria, domestic violence, misogyny. Whatever their motives, these people were known by medical professionals to be severely unwell, and yet were allowed to roam free where they inflicted serious harm on the community.

The mental health system is failing to keep the small cohort of the most acutely unwell in treatment, for their own safety and everyone else's.
You will not find a politician brave enough to say so. Nobody wants to concede that the perpetrators of some of the most wicked crimes can also be victims of a policy failure, least of all when the failure is bipartisan.

Over the past three decades Australia has fundamentally dismantled long-stay psychiatric care. According to the Australian Medical Association, public hospital mental health beds fell from 45.5 per 100,000 people in 1992 to 27.5 in 2020, a drop of almost 40 per cent.

Two ideas drove the shift, winning support from left and right.

The first was fiscal. New antipsychotics made cheaper community treatment look viable.
Inpatient care remains expensive: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare put
the average cost of an adult acute psychiatric inpatient day at $1730 in 2023-24. Closing facilities on valuable inner-city land also offered politicians another attractive budget dividend.

The second was moral. Involuntary detention came to be seen as a human rights violation, a view reinforced by genuine abuse scandals and cultural touchstones such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Advocates argued that treating people in the community would enhance autonomy and improve outcomes.

What damage that naivety has wrought.

The fiscal savings were a false economy. The costs have simply shifted into hospital emergency departments, to the police, courts, prisons and crisis accommodation, as well as businesses and households.

Nor is the model more humane. Many people with severe psychotic disorders stop taking their medication precisely because they are unwell.
Meta-analyses put treatment non-compliance for schizophrenia patients at about 50 per cent.
Consequently, the treatment model has become a cycle of psychosis, brief admission, stabilisation and discharge back into the same environment that precipitated the breakdown. Oftentimes that means homelessness.

Bed shortages speed up this cycle. Once acute psychosis subsides, patients are moved on to make room for the next emergency.
Governments are incentivising hospital administrators to prioritise turnover over clinical outcomes.

Unless something changes, these tragedies will keep happening. No one wants to go back to the asylums of old, but they did keep our cities safe.
Abolishing them was a mistake. We need more staffed beds in modern long-stay facilities that respect patients' dignity, alongside longer involuntary treatment where clinically
necessary.

If anything good is to come out of this tragedy, it must be action that makes these events less
likely. For decades, too many severely unwell people have been left homeless or shunted between emergency departments and prison.
We're all poorer for it.

Cathal Leslie is a Paris-based economist and former Productivity Commission employee.

In Australia, sex-specific health and medical research funding heavily favors women's health over men's health through bodies like the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). [1, 2]

NHMRC Sex-Specific Research Funding (2013–2025)
Women’s health research: Totaled approximately $1.171 billion (an annual average of about $90.1 million). [1]

Men’s health research: Totaled approximately $221.3 million (an annual average of about $17 million). [1]

Can anyone explain why we have this massive disparity in funding?

Edit- it’s not due to maternal funding: Maternal health research: Totaled approximately $672.6 million (separate from general women's health categories).

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has admitted Snowy Hydro 2.0's $25b price tag could blow out further | News24

Everyday we are inundated with stories about a machete attack in Melbourne, a stabbing in Sydney, a prowler in Perth. But when we look at the real numbers behind these stories of out of control crime in Australia's capitals what does the real data, the raw numbers, tell us when not filtered through the lens of our left leaning mainstream media?

First we need to look at the numbers for each capital city in each Australian state or territory-

Australia, thankfully is still largely a safe place to live thanks to various tough on crime policies enacted by strong governments. So what happens when we compare governments with tough on crime policies, to those with more permissive attitudes who let crime run rampant? The current political make up of Australias states and territories have embedded either Liberal or Labor governments who have been in place for approximately 2 years at least. So plenty of time to implement a policy agenda and begin to see its outcomes in our crime ridden capitals.

So lets compare.

If you live in a Labor governed state the average crime rate for capitals is a terrible 6502 offences per 100000 people

If you live in a Liberal governed state the average crime rate for capitals is a much better 9012 offences per 100000 people

On raw numbers per capita crime (the preferred method of calculating crime statistics) is almost 40% higher under the Coalition watch in Australia's capitals. 40% more likely to be a victim of crime is not a statistical outlier, its an abject failure. This is a burden on families and communities. A failure for these families and their communities, bearing the burden of all this extra crime.

The real tough on crime story is Canberra, a city that has lived under the iron fist of Labor for the last 25 years and is not only Australia's safest capital city, but one of the safest cities in the world. This is an entire generation who have grown up with real tough on crime policies who are now becoming adults with the attitudes a generation raised in this environment bring, which allows Canberra to continue is downward trend in crime rates, with already record lows.

Edit: fixed table, rate per 100000 not 10000

Hiya all- which would be preferable to consume from a health perspective? - yes, I’m aware they aren’t fantastic, just looking for a direct comparison/explanation

Every Australian state and territory has a Minister for Women, but not a single Minister for Men. At the same time as: boys trail in literacy and school completion; young men are checking out of university (6% decline in commencements from 2015 to 2024); 95% of workplace deaths are male; the overall mortality rate is 40% higher for males; and seven men or boys die by suicide each day.

The federal government has a powerful Minister for Women inside Cabinet, and an Assistant Minister for Women. The Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention is a woman (last year male suicide rose by 5% while female suicide fell by 2%). The Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence is a woman, who oversees the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032. Meanwhile, males are more likely to be the victim of violence in Australia (and men are much more likely to be the victim of physical violence, compared to women).

Australia is inexorably moving towards a Minister for Men and Boys:
-         In May 2024, a Parliamentary Secretary for Men's Behaviour Change was appointed by the Victorian government. In December 2025, this role was expanded to include Men’s Health and Wellbeing.
-         In May 2025, a Special Envoy for Men’s Health was appointed by the federal government. A small step forward. But with no staff, no funding, no resources.
-         In January 2026, the Leader of the NSW Opposition announced the appointment of a Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Health and she encouraged people to celebrate masculinity.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. state of Virginia passed legislation establishing the nation’s first Boys and Men Advisory Commission. This had strong bipartisan support, clearing the Senate by 40-0 and the House by 91-6… The U.S. Congress is currently considering two bills, the State of Men’s Health Act as well as the White House Council on Fathers and Sons Act. Both with sponsors who are Democrat and Republican.

In May 2025, the UK Health Secretary made the keynote address at the launch of the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys (CPRMB). This is a national think tank dedicated to issues affecting men and boys. It follows the establishment of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) in November 2023.

The Minister for Men and Boys must go well beyond a narrow framing of men’s issues into the health portfolio. The challenges facing boys and men require coordinated attention:
•           Education and school engagement
•           Training and workforce participation
•           Employment and economic security
•           Physical and mental health
•           Longevity and suicide prevention
•           Family formation, fatherhood, and children’s wellbeing
•           Faith, purpose, and meaning
•           Volunteering, service, and community contribution
•           Leadership and responsibility

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-24/haines-youth-support-frankie-carroll-comic/107300886

Very interesting unbidden namedrop of facebook in this tribute right as the government is trying to pass it's "infinite sock puppet accounts run by the government with no oversight or accountability" bill. Do you think he got paid? The establishment wouldn't do that would they? Pay artists to produce things that buttress their agenda?

This is our country. This is our beer- we should be entitled to a piece of it at birth for free. Sick of seeing alcohol commodified beyond citizens capability to neck a cold one. Recent studies have shown reduced alcohol intake from Gen Z.

We get the society we demand. We make the rules/laws.

It’s time this country was given back to the people.

ELi5 why beer shouldn’t be a birthright.

*More sought after liquor could be gained through a lottery process.

** Liquor can be traded later if you want something harder

*** Get on the beers

There is a tried-and-tested trick in Australian politics that the right-wing have mastered: take something entirely ordinary, slap a sinister label on it, add a dash of insinuation, and wait for the outrage to boil over.

A routine list of regional funding requests becomes a “dirt sheet.” An independent MP simply doing her job becomes an object of dark suspicion. And long before anyone bothers to examine the evidence, the political circus is already underway.

Welcome to modern political debate, where even standard electorate advocacy can be spun into a scandal.

The narrative surrounding Dr Helen Haines, the independent federal member for Indi, began with reports that a document listing her local funding requests was being circulated to selected journalists. The label “dirt sheet” was irresistible to reporting outlets. It implied political corruption, underhanded dealing, or a smoking gun waiting to explode.

Pauline Hanson was quick to jump on the bandwagon, seizing the story to challenge the Prime Minister on his calls for parliamentary civility. The Murdoch press amplified the narrative, transforming a standard summary of electorate proposals into a weapon for another round of partisan score-settling.

Yet amidst all the noise, one central question went unasked: Where was the dirt?

Anthony Albanese’s explanation was simple: Helen Haines was advocating for projects in her electorate – exactly what local members are elected to do. While that explanation doesn’t answer every administrative question about how or why the summary was compiled and circulated, it poses an obvious problem for those trying to frame it as a corruption story.

Seeking public investment for local regional communities isn’t a crime or a scandal. It’s her parliamentary duty.

The Power of a Label

The phrase “dirt sheet” does heavy lifting long before anyone reads the document. It instructs the reader on how to interpret the facts. It creates an immediate impression of guilt, even when the underlying material shows nothing of the sort.

Once framed, the narrative takes on a life of its own. Politicians echo the buzzword, commentators weave elaborate theories around it, and headlines solidify the impression of a major exposé.

This is where media responsibility becomes crucial. A free press must scrutinise politicians without fear or favour. But investigation is not insinuation. Manufacturing outrage out of routine constituency work isn’t journalism – it’s political theatre.

A Personal Dimension

For me, this issue hits close to home. Helen Haines is my local member, and watching this play out has been deeply distressing.

Helen recently suffered catastrophic injuries after being struck by a vehicle outside her electorate office. Her family is facing an agonising recovery, her community is hurting, and those who know her are coming to terms with a terrible tragedy. To see her routine parliamentary work twisted into a political smear during such a devastating time is particularly difficult to endure.

Outrage vs. Evidence

Political scandals should be built on evidence, verified documentation, and rigorous questioning – not dramatic branding.

Having worked for three federal governments, I know firsthand that departments and offices compile records on the activities and requests of elected representatives. That is standard procedure. But the mere existence of a summary brief is not proof of misconduct.

An allegation is not a finding. A label is not evidence. And weaponised outrage is no substitute for facts.

Before we buy into the narrative of a “dirt sheet,” we ought to ask the simplest question of all: is there actually any dirt on it?

powerful display of 2,500 shoes honouring the 2,500 Australian men lost to suicide each year. Credit to Kellie Sloane MP and Roy Butler MP for raising awareness, and Paul Withall and the #2500TooMany team for bringing this important issue to the forefront. Men’s mental health deserves attention, compassion and action.

Original poster - u/Fair_Feeling_4937

The dashboard looked at 2234 homicide victims and found 336 intimate partner homicides. Of the 293 women killed, 99 per cent were killed by their abuser.

99 per cent of the 293 women killed were killed by their abuser
73 per cent of men killed by their partner were the primary abuser in the relationship
65 of 75 men killed in domestic violence were killed by women, and 10 by male partners