Two workshops in one week, and what they showed me about memory

Last week I went to two workshops.

On paper they had little in common. One was about making cabbage tree hats. The other was about recording oral history.

By the end of the week, I was thinking about both of them through the same lens. They were both about the past, and about what happens when people decide it still deserves a place in daily life.

The first was Sue Brian’s cabbage tree hat workshop at Jamberoo Youth Hall. I went to watch, not to make a hat, which was probably wise. The people at the tables were learning how to boil, shred and plait the palm fronds. I was listening for the story behind the craft.

There was a lot to hear.

In the mid nineteenth century, cabbage tree palms were cut in huge numbers. The trunks were used and the unopened leaf spears were taken for hat making. Sue and the people who still make the hats use the palm differently now. They take the unopened leaf from young palms in a way that allows the tree to keep growing.

The 19th century method took the palm out of the landscape. The current one leaves the tree standing.

The same palm that was once stripped from this landscape is now being planted back into it. Landcare Illawarra’s Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm project is planting cabbage tree palms around Jamberoo, below Saddleback Mountain, where some of the last old palms still stand.

Cabbage tree hat making workshop proved to be very popular and the workshops will return in 2027. See bottom of blog post for contact details

The second workshop was at the Pilot’s Cottage in Kiama, run by Alison Wishart and hosted by the Kiama Historical Society.

Alison Wishart and attendees at Oral History workshop. The Historical Society always offer a superlative morning tea.

This was familiar ground. I have spent years helping people tell their life stories through written memories. Alison was talking about oral history, and the power of recording it.

As Alison reminded participants, the recording keeps the emotion for others to interpret. You hear the hesitation, the humour, the catch in the voice. On the page, I have to find another way to express it.

I keep noticing how much people here care about memory. Our local “remember when” Facebook pages come alive when someone posts an old photo. Within an hour, people are naming faces, houses, streets, teams and families. Someone always knows something. Someone else adds the bit they missed.

I understand that feeling more now than I did when I was young.

Earlier this year, when the council floated moving the Pilot’s Cottage Museum from Blowhole Point into a small space under the library, the reaction was immediate. Dr Tony Gilmour and the Kiama Historical Society volunteers led the campaign, and people who rarely write submissions wrote in. In five days, the idea was reversed.

Around the museum, they still joke that the council wanted to turn them into a KFC.

The museum is here to stay (but it is still looking forward to council giving it a 5 year lease – if only council worked as fast as our community)

I grew up in a family that took history seriously. Years were spent writing down who came to this country, where they settled, what the men did, how wonderful the wives and mothers were at raising children and keeping house. Which women never married because they stayed home to look after their parents or their ten plus siblings. Not an era I would have thrived in.

I always thought I should find it fascinating. I didn’t.

I did well in history at school, but I learned the dates to pass the exam.  I realise now I wanted to know what it felt like to be alive then.

I am grateful for the people I meet today who are prepared to share their story.

When I sit with someone to record their life, I am listening for what it was like to live through their sixty, seventy or eighty years. How much changed.  Who stood beside them. What they learned through grief, love, disappointment and endurance.

When I ask people what they would say to young people now, the answers are the same.

Find a way to live in peace.

Be kind.

At the oral history workshop, someone asked the obvious question. If you are recording one person’s memory, how do you know it is accurate?

It is a fair question.

Memory shifts. Families remember things differently. History is full of confident versions that do not line up. Put ten people at the same accident and the police will take ten different statements. Each person saw it from where they were standing.

So you listen for how that person remembers it. Their version may differ from someone else’s. It may differ from your own. But it is their story.

That does not mean anything goes. A life story is not a place to settle a score with family. The highs belong there, and so do the lows, but the purpose is to understand a life, not punish people from the page.

The other thing I came home thinking about is how different every person is to record.

Some people give you gold in the first ten minutes. Some hold their story so tightly you wonder why they agreed to begin. Some families want every sentence to serve a different purpose. Some people need audio. Some need a written story. Some need a patient interviewer who can sit with silence. Some need structure before they can begin.

There is no single right way.

The cabbage tree hat workshop showed me that a craft survives because people keep practising it, slowly and carefully, with their hands.

The oral history workshop showed me that a life story survives because someone listens, then chooses the way to record it that suits that person.

Anyone can keep the dates and the places.

I am focused on the voice behind them, and whether I can express enough of that voice on the page for the person and their loved ones to recognise them.

Three exciting things to share

  1. Dr Tony Gilmour the Vice President of the Kiama Historical Society told me the majority of the Oral History workshop participants would like to turn their workshop learnings into recording people’s lived experiences; Contact the society at E: kiamahistory@outlook.com  P: 02 4232 1001
  2. The Cabbage Tree Hat making workshops will return in 2027. Contact Kate Malfroy E: kate@lampshadeworkroom.com.au
  3. Landcare contact is Meredith Hall  E: coordinator@landcareillawarra.org.au
    M:  +61 (0) 499 027 770

Further reading:

Cabbage-tree hats through history 

Jamberoo welcomes the Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm Project

 

The palm we cleared for a hat, and the people planting it back

I have spent the past 18 months buried in local history, much of it around the Jamberoo Dairy factory and the families who built our community.

The deeper I went, the more I learned to be careful with certainty. One story about the dairy industry can quickly split into three versions, each told by someone who is sure they have the right one. They cannot all be right.

So when Sue Brian told me her PhD was on cabbage tree hats, I had the predictable reaction.

Four or five years on hats?

Then she started talking.

I was sitting in the Jamberoo Youth Hall at a cabbage tree hat making workshop held over two days, three weeks apart on 6 and 27 June, so people had time to do the plaiting between sessions. Our village sits below Saddleback Mountain, where some of the last old palms still stand, and it is now where they are being planted back. The workshop promised a rare chance to learn from a master hat maker and leave with a finished piece of living Australian history. I left with something more useful than a hat. I left with a different understanding of the palm, the craft, and the people needed to bring it back into the landscape.

Sue has been making traditional plaited and sewn hats for years. She learned the craft on Norfolk Island and brought it home to the cabbage tree palm, the same palm that gave eastern Australia one of its most familiar nineteenth century hats.

The hats are slow to make. The unopened leaf spear is boiled, dried, dipped again to take out the crinkles, shredded to width with a tool a bit like a rasp, plaited into long sennit, then sewn with a running stitch.

Sue can plait a little over two metres an hour on a wide pattern. The sewing takes about as long again.

You can see why people did it at night by the fire. In Australia plaiting was first taught as a convict skill, something to keep men occupied after dark, and the craft was still being practised in some prisons into the 1930s.

Sue has also corrected parts of the story that have drifted over time. I had assumed the plaiting was a First Nations skill. I was wrong. It came here by sea. It is a simple four-strand plait found across the Pacific, in the English straw-hat trade, and in parts of the United States. Whalers carried it around the Pacific during the idle stretches between catches. It reached Norfolk Island through the Pitcairn Islanders.

It was also a man’s hat, despite what is often repeated. Ladies’ cabbage tree hats were first advertised in 1900. Before then, when women appear in the records wearing cabbage tree hats, Sue says they were usually wearing their husbands’ hats.

A quarter of a million palms, cut for the fashion

Behind every hatmaker is a husband happy to be the mannequin.

Then comes the part that turns a small craft story into something much larger.

Sue has gone through the shipping records out of the Illawarra. Between 1840 and 1870, she can document more than a quarter of a million cabbage tree palms cut for the trade. The leaf spears were shipped to Sydney and turned into hats.

By the 1840s, readers were already writing to newspapers complaining that the palms were becoming rare.

It is easy, from this distance, to blame the settlers. The truth is more uncomfortable and more useful.

Clearing was the law. A land grant required it. A felled palm also brought in cash, about ten shillings a hundred in 1850. Tell a settler to clear the land or lose the grant, then pay for the palm on the way out, and the palm comes down.

The farmers did what they were told, and they were paid for it.

In today’s version farmers are being invited to partner with Landcare to replant the palms.

Planting them back needs the farmers. Slowly the palms are now going back in.

Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm Project comes to Jamberoo

Landcare Illawarra is working with local property owners in the Jamberoo area to preserve this unique species, replanting cabbage tree palms, with seedlings raised in a local nursery and planted in the riparian corners of private properties.

Planting is the easy day. The years after planting are the hard part.

Young palms need to be fenced from stock or they will be eaten. They also stay small for a long time before they become the tall, spiky trees people picture when they think of a cabbage tree palm.

On some properties there is an easier way. Where there are already fruiting palms, fencing them off from cattle can allow them to regenerate on their own within a few years.

The barriers will be familiar to anyone who has farmed this country. Kikuyu is an important summer feed for cattle, which is why farmers value it. It is also a headache for Landcare groups, because it can smother young native seedlings before they get going. Mature cabbage tree palms can stand above it. New ones need help.Deer are another growing problem.

Fence off an area, shade out the kikuyu with fast pioneers such as bleeding heart, keep the stock off, and the palms have a chance.

What the project needs now is farmers and a small section of their land.

There is a neat loop in all of this.

The same farms that cleared the palms under government order now hold the creek lines, gullies and corners where the palms can come back.

If the project reaches those farmers, the hat that helped strip the Illawarra of cabbage tree palms may become the reason a few hundred of them are planted again.

I began by thinking a PhD on cabbage tree hats was an odd way to spend four or five years.

Then I spent months inside the dairy industry’s history and watched one story fracture into a dozen confident, competing versions

This is where the value of PhD research can never be overestimated .

A topic can sound small until someone spends years following every thread. That is how old assumptions are tested. It is how family stories, local legends and confident retellings are put beside the records and asked to hold up.

The well researched version, the one with shipping records behind it, is usually the one that stands up.

Whether the palms get back into the landscape in time will depend on something much less academic.

It will depend on someone turning up at the gate to talk to farmers about cabbage tree planting  partnerships.

Further reading:

Cabbage-tree hats through history 

Jamberoo welcomes the Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm Project

 

We elected them to watch the road. Turning the bus around means taking back the wheel.

Turning the bus around means changing who the system is wired to listen to, not just swapping the person at the wheel.

We elect politicians to watch the road ahead, see the trouble coming, and steer us around it, or fix it if we hit it anyway.

Here is what happened instead, in five charts.

Pay did rise since 2021. Prices rose faster, every single year, so the average wage now buys about 5 per cent less than it did. And this measure leaves the mortgage out, so anyone paying one off has gone backwards further than the gap here shows.

Same house, same loan, nothing changed but the interest rate. The repayment on the average new loan has gone from about $2,950 a month to about $4,500. That is an extra $18,000 a year out of a household that did nothing differently.

Renters copped it a different way. The typical New South Wales rent has climbed from about $450 a week a decade ago to about $670 now, roughly $11,000 more a year for the same roof over your head.

This is who the system looks after. Australia is one of the biggest gas exporters on earth, yet the tax the gas companies pay on it comes in below what we raise from beer. And over the past four years, $149 billion worth of gas left the country without a dollar of royalty.

Put all of it together and this is what it does to the country. Since 2015 the inner cities have edged ahead while the outer suburbs and the regions have gone backwards. The same nation, pulling apart into three.

Yes the people we trusted to watch the road let this happen, in full view.

The system they operate in answers to someone else. The big end of town, the lobbyists and donors and the organised money, gets the meetings and sets the terms. We have watched it: gambling reform stalled for years, gas shipped overseas for next to nothing while our bills climbed, a housing fix that took three years to arrive and still will not start until 2027. Every time, the obvious popular thing lost to the organised well-funded thing.

We handed trust over on the understanding they would act for us. People do not need telling how that turned out. They live it.

So how do we turn the bus around?  What is wrong with a system that lets the big end of town decide what gets done? Until that changes, with the donations, the lobbying, the comfortable jobs waiting on the other side, the next government will feel the same pull and mostly make the same choices, whatever colour rosette it wears.

Turning the bus around means changing who the system is wired to listen to, not just swapping the person at the wheel.

In practice that means tighter rules on lobbying and donations, daylight on who gets the meetings, and a press that asks the dull questions about who pays and who benefits. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is resisted, which tells you it would work.

We trusted them to see this coming. The least we can do now is refuse to look away from why they did not.

References

Prices vs pay

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index, Australia (latest release, April 2026)
  • Australian Bureau of Statistics, Wage Price Index, Australia (March quarter 2026)
  • Reserve Bank of Australia, on the roughly 5 per cent fall in real wages since 2021

The mortgage

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics, Lending Indicators, for the average new owner-occupier loan size (around $736,000)
  • Reserve Bank of Australia and APRA, for the move in mortgage interest rates from mid-2021
  • Canstar and CoreLogic, for the current average monthly repayment

The rent

  • CoreLogic, for the rise in median advertised rents over the decade to March 2025 and the current New South Wales median

Gas vs beer

  • Australian Treasury and Senate Estimates figures for Petroleum Resource Rent Tax and beer excise revenue, 2024-25, as compiled by the Australia Institute
  • The Australia Institute, on the value of LNG exported royalty-free

Three Australias

  • RedBridge analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics Household Income and Wealth, the ANU Regional Living Cost Index, and the Productivity Commission (2024)

With thanks to Vivien Twyford, whose “how do we turn the bus around” question inspired this piece, and to David Cornish, who pointed me to the Three Australias graphic.

Further reading: Political Trust in the “Places That Don’t Matter”

 

The science of how the watch dog ends up working for the dog.

Here is the trick nobody runs an ad campaign about. The watchdog ends up working for the dog. And once you see how, you cannot unsee it.

Are you as baffled as I am? One Nation has almost no policies to speak of. It lurches from one embarrassing headline to the next, a fresh gaffe from a candidate every other week, and then, like clockwork, climbs again in the polls. In a couple of the big national surveys it now sits ahead of Labor. None of the usual rules seem to apply, and for the life of me I could not work out why.

This is the point where, as my best work usually does, it turned into me getting cranky. I do not think a third of the country has fallen for Pauline Hanson. I think it is anger, the kind that builds when people feel nobody in charge is listening. So instead of yelling at the television like a sensible person, I went looking to see whether anyone had studied why people end up feeling that way. A great many clever people have, for the best part of sixty years, and they have given it a pile of important-sounding names. I have left most of the jargon at the door.

I am sharing it because I have been trying to make sense of this country, and I figured somebody must have worked it out already. They had. And it is not really a story about One Nation at all. It is a story about who gets listened to, and who does not. Here is what I found.

It comes down to one rule. A small group that cares enormously about one thing will almost always beat a big group that cares only a little about a lot of things. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Getting organised is hard work and it costs money. A handful of gambling companies, each with millions riding on the outcome, will happily pay for lobbyists, lawyers and ad campaigns, because the payoff to each of them is huge. The rest of us each lose a little, spread thin across the whole country, so not one of us has much reason to down tools and fight. The organised few beat the unorganised many, even though the many are far bigger. An economist named Mancur Olson set this out in 1965, and nobody has knocked it over since.

The red flag to watch for is a policy that hands a big win to a small group and spreads the cost thinly across everyone else. The small group fights like mad, because the stakes for each of them are enormous. Gambling advertising is the perfect example. The broadcasters and betting firms make a fortune, and the cost is paid in small, scattered harms across thousands of kitchen tables.

Noticing is not the same as power. The gap between what we can see and what we can change is where the anger lives.

The textbooks say we do not notice costs spread that thin. They are wrong. We notice. We notice the betting ad in every break of the footy. We notice when a friend cannot stop, when the pay disappears before the bills are paid, when a marriage falls apart over hidden debt, when someone we know loses the house or worse. Noticing is exactly why people are angry. The trouble is that noticing is not the same thing as power. Anger spread across millions who each lose a little is no match for a handful of companies with millions each on the line and the minister’s mobile number. We can see it perfectly well. We just do not have the machine to do anything about it.

None of this is because people are switched off. We notice. The harder question is why noticing so rarely turns into the organised pushback that actually shifts a policy. Fighting a lobby head on is a second job. It means turning up to every review, reading every draft, funding someone to sit in the room year after year. Your one vote, or your one furious afternoon, is almost never the thing that tips it. So the organised, funded few turn up to every fight, and the angry, busy many cannot. The lobby lives in that gap.

Once a group is that organised, something predictable happens to whoever is meant to keep it honest. Slowly the watchdog starts working for the dog. It is rarely brown envelopes. The minister spends all day talking to the industry, leans on it for the facts, and starts to see the whole question through its eyes. The posh name is regulatory capture, and a Nobel went to the man who described it.

What keeps it oiled is the revolving door. People move from government into industry and back, until both sides are the same faces. Nobody has to be corrupt for this to bend things. The simple prospect of a comfortable job later makes people friendlier now. You have seen it with resources ministers who end up at the gas companies they used to oversee.

A lobby does not need to kill a reform outright. That looks bad and invites a fight. Delay is not a failure for them, it is the weapon. Slow the thing down, send it off for another review, shave bits off until almost nothing is left. You do not lose the argument. You run out the clock.

That is the gambling ad ban exactly. A parliamentary inquiry handed the government a clear plan years ago. It sat in a drawer, came back a watered-down half version the government’s own experts say will not work, and it does not even start until 2027. We know the big television and betting companies kept getting their meetings in Canberra the whole time, because freedom of information requests dragged the records into the open. None of that is a feeling. It is on paper.

The cleverest power of all is quieter still. It is not winning the fight out in the open, it is making sure the fight never reaches the table. The decisions that shape a country most are often the ones that quietly never happen.

A royal commission watered down afterwards is one version. A royal commission never called, because someone powerful does not want the lights switched on, is the better trick, because there is nothing to point at. The banking royal commission is the watered-down kind. After a year of damning evidence, key recommendations were quietly trimmed or reversed once the industry went to work, which the commissioner said he expected. The clearest tell of all: bank share prices went up the day the report came out. The market decided the banks had got off lightly.

Any group that is well organised, well funded and focused on one issue gets the same advantage, and that includes foreign policy. Australia has a well-resourced pro-Israel lobby, including groups such as the Australia, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia, that presses government hard in exactly the way the gambling industry presses on its own. How a government responds to that pressure is a fair thing to examine.

It is an organised, well-funded operation, not a stand-in for a whole community. Jewish Australians do not all think the same way, and plenty are among the toughest critics of the Israeli government. What I am looking at is organised advocacy and how power responds to it.

If that sounds like a theory, two American researchers put numbers on it. They checked nearly two thousand policy questions against what ordinary people wanted, and against what the wealthy and organised interest groups wanted. What the organised and the wealthy wanted predicted what became law. What the average person wanted made almost no difference on its own. American data, so treat it as American data, but it is the cold-numbers version of everything above.

There is a cheerful counter-theory. It says that with so many groups pushing against each other, no single one ever dominates, and it balances out. The catch is that the groups are not evenly matched. The organised and well-funded turn up to every fight, and the rest of us are the busy, distracted, powerless majority. Whether you think the contest is fair or rigged is the real argument, and you can make up your own mind.

And here is the bitter twist.

The party so many angry, powerless people are turning to, the one that says it stands for the forgotten, is bankrolled by Gina Rinehart, one of the richest and most powerful people in the country. One Nation is not the outsiders’ revolt it sells itself as. It is the best-funded lobby in the land wearing a battler’s hat. The unorganised many, looking for someone to fight the organised few, have been handed a megaphone owned by the organised few.

So where does this leave One Nation? Right back where this piece started. A party can have almost no policies and a fresh embarrassment every week and still keep climbing, because it is not selling policies. It is selling the feeling of being on the side of people who have worked out, correctly, that the system is not built to listen to them. You do not take the wind out of that by being louder, or by borrowing its worst lines. You take it out by changing who gets listened to, by fixing the obvious thing for once, so an ordinary person can point at it and say, look, they heard us.

I have stopped taking the excuses at face value. When something obvious does not get fixed, the easy explanation is that politicians are useless. Sometimes they are. But there is a better question.

Who is making money out of this not being fixed, and who in office is helping them?

Ask it out loud, and ask it often, and by name, and you drag the whole game into the light. One voice is easy to ignore. A few million asking the same question, by name, is the one thing money cannot buy its way past.

Sources

  • Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), on why small groups organise and large ones do not
  • James Q. Wilson, on concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, sometimes called client politics
  • Anthony Downs, on rational ignorance, why it is sensible for voters not to study everything
  • George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971), on regulatory capture
  • E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (1960), and Bachrach and Baratz, on the power to keep issues off the agenda
  • Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), Testing Theories of American Politics, the United States study on whose preferences become law
  • Robert Dahl, on pluralism, the more hopeful counter-view
  • The Conversation, on the banking royal commission and the industry lobbying to water down its recommendations
  • Michael West Media and Crikey, on the delayed gambling advertising ban and the freedom of information records of industry meetings

About this post

These notes are put together by Betty in Blacktown, mostly so she and her brother Kevin in Kiama always have something that keeps them thinking it through long after phone call has ended. If it helps you stay in the loop too, even better.

 

Daily News Roundup – 4 June 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

From a council meeting where nothing happening was the good news, to the women flocking to Pauline Hanson, to a Congress telling Trump to stop his war, here’s the local-to-global wrap for 4 June 2026.

Betty from Blacktown and her brother Kevin from Kiama, making sense of the world’s chaos the only sensible way: over toast, a strong cuppa, and a good long natter on the phone. That’s what this Catch Up is for.

Very Local: the extraordinary meeting where nothing happening was the good news

Here are the bits that caught my attention.

Council held an Extraordinary Meeting on Wednesday 27 May, and the headline is that nothing much happened, which in this case is the good news. Councillors voted unanimously to accept the variation to the Performance Improvement Order that Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig had offered. The State has given Council an extra twelve months to balance its budget, pushing the deadline out to the end of the 2027 to 28 financial year. CEO Jane Stroud was to write to the Minister confirming Council will work towards the new requirements.

Mayor Cameron McDonald welcomed it, and his framing was that it means Council will not have to cut community services or staff, at least not on the timetable that the original draft budget had been threatening. That is a real reprieve for the people whose jobs were on the line a few weeks ago.

The extra time does not make the underlying problem go away. The Minister was careful to say the order remains necessary because Council still faces serious financial sustainability challenges, and that the order does not make Council’s decisions for it. Council still has to do the hard work itself, just with more breathing room. So the unanimous vote was less a moment of drama and more everyone agreeing to accept a longer rope.

The detail I am keeping an eye on sits underneath all the calm. The revised timeline gives Council more flexibility to look at the long term future of its five tourist parks, and there are reportedly three unsolicited partnership offers from large operators already on the table. That is the holiday parks question we have been circling for a while, and it is the kind of thing that gets decided quietly while everyone is relieved about the budget extension. The strategic business case for Blue Haven Terralong is also written into the varied order, so that thread is still very much live.

The next one to watch is the Extraordinary Meeting on 30 June, where the actual budget and the planning documents get adopted. That is the one where the real numbers land.

Across the State (NSW)

The PIO variation is the local face of a wider NSW story, which is what happens to small councils that cannot make the sums work. Hoenig has chosen the patient path with Kiama rather than the heavy hand, more time and a Strategic Finance and Governance Improvement Plan rather than administrators. It is worth watching whether other councils in similar trouble get the same latitude, because that tells you whether Kiama is being treated as a special case or as a template.

Across the Country (Federal): the Hanson surge, and the women driving it

A Redbridge Group and Accent Research poll published by the Australian Financial Review put One Nation’s primary vote at 31 per cent, ahead of Labor on 28 and the Coalition on 20. Two years ago One Nation was sitting around 7 per cent. That is not a wobble, that is a genuine shift, and it follows real electoral results in South Australia and in the federal seat of Farrer rather than poll noise alone.

According to an April study by the same pollsters, Hanson is the most popular party leader among women voters, ahead of the Prime Minister, and One Nation is women’s leading first preference party. On net favourability, her approval minus her disapproval, Hanson came in at zero, which sounds unremarkable until you see that every other leader was in negative territory. Anthony Albanese was on minus 19. So Hanson is the least disliked leader in the country, and she is doing it partly on the strength of women.

That cuts against decades of assumption. Far right parties have traditionally been thought of as men’s parties, both in who votes for them and in the very masculine image they project. The Conversation ran a good piece making the case that what we are seeing here is not a local quirk but part of a global pattern. Across Europe, parties of the hard right are pulling in more women than they used to, and a striking number are now led by women. Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany. Hanson belongs in that company now, not as an oddity but as part of the trend.

So why women, and why now? The pollsters point at mood rather than ideology. Around 63 per cent of respondents said the country is heading in the wrong direction, and Redbridge’s read is that this pervasive sourness is what is feeding anti establishment support. When people stop believing the major parties understand their lives, especially on cost of living and housing, the protest vote has to go somewhere, and One Nation has positioned itself as the somewhere. The voters switching are not all lifelong believers. The coverage is full of former Liberal and former Labor voters, including women in their thirties working in sectors like aged care, who say the old parties no longer speak for them.

It is tempting to read a 31 per cent poll as the country falling into the sea, but keep some perspective. On a two party preferred basis Labor still leads One Nation 51 to 49, our preferential voting system makes it very hard for a minor party to convert a big primary vote into actual power, and Hanson sits in the Senate, which means she cannot be Prime Minister from where she is. Some commentators argue, fairly, that the surge is being over read and that One Nation remains more brand than government in waiting. I think that is partly right and partly wishful.

A party does not need to win government to reshape what the major parties say and do. The Coalition’s troubles and Labor’s negative numbers are exactly the soil this grows in, and the women’s vote is the signal that it has broken out of its old, narrow base. That is the bit I would not wave away.

The deeper point, and one we have talked about before, is that the conventional remedy of voting people out does not seem to be producing the policy change voters actually want. The cost of living and housing pressures that are driving this have not been fixed by changes of government, so the frustration keeps looking for a new outlet. Hanson is the current outlet. If the conditions do not change, the outlet will keep finding voltage. I have had more to say about this on Substack here

Around the World (International): Congress tells Trump to stop the war

The Sydney Morning Herald has been fairly thin on Trump and tariffs lately, while the American press is consumed by something our papers are barely touching, which is the war with Iran and the political revolt it is now causing inside Trump’s own party.

The United States, alongside Israel, struck Iran in late February. More than three months on, the war is still going, six American servicemembers have been killed, and it was launched without Congress authorising it. That last point matters constitutionally, because under the American system only Congress can declare war, and there is a War Powers Act designed to force a president to either get authorisation or withdraw.

On Wednesday 3 June, the House of Representatives, which the Republicans control, passed a war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran. The vote was 215 to 208, and four Republicans crossed the floor to vote with the Democrats. That is the clearest rebuke yet of how Trump has handled the war, and it came from his own chamber. The four who broke ranks were Tom Barrett, Warren Davidson, Brian Fitzpatrick and Thomas Massie.

The vote is largely symbolic. The Senate has tried and failed several times to pass its own version, an earlier attempt was blocked 52 to 47, and even if both chambers passed it, Trump would almost certainly veto it, and his administration disputes whether the War Powers Act is even constitutional. So Congress has sent a message rather than pulled a lever. House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Trump and reached for the line that Iran declared war on America decades ago.

It still matters. The reason Republicans are nervous is the economy. American producer prices posted their biggest jump in four years in April, petrol has gone up, and Democrats have made affordability their central midterm message ahead of the November elections that decide control of Congress. Privately, Republicans in tight races are reportedly worried the war could become a political liability if it drags on. Trump’s own answer to that pressure has been to say he is in no hurry to do a deal. So the war, the tariffs and the cost of living are not three separate stories. They are one story about prices and patience, and the politicians who are closest to the voters are the ones blinking first.

This is why it pays to read across. The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Reuters and CBS have all been on the war powers vote and the economic fallout. Al Jazeera has the detail on the earlier Senate blockages. Our own papers, by contrast, have given Trump’s domestic troubles a light touch. If you only read the Herald you would think tariffs were a minor item. If you read the American press you would think the Trump presidency was being tested by its own party. Both are looking at the same man.

The bottom line

It all joins up, Betty. People are unhappy about prices and housing and the feeling that nobody in charge is listening, and that unhappiness is showing up everywhere. In Kiama it looks like a council buying time on a budget it cannot yet balance. In Canberra it looks like a third of voters, women now very much included, parking their vote with Pauline Hanson. In Washington it looks like members of the President’s own party voting to stop his war because they are frightened of what petrol prices will do to them in November. Different countries, different scales, same engine.

 hopeful note, and I do look for one, is that the American vote is a reminder that institutions can still push back.

It was mostly symbolic, but a legislature telling an executive to stop, with members crossing party lines to do it, is the system doing what it is meant to do. That is worth holding onto when the news makes you want to switch it all off. Plenty to chew over with Kevin on the next call.

Sources: The Bugle, Wave FM, Kiama Council, Mirage News, Australian Financial Review, The Conversation, The New Daily, NPR, Washington Post, Reuters, CBS News, Al Jazeera, and others.

A note on Betty and Kevin: Betty grew up in Kiama before life took her to Blacktown. Her brother Kevin still lives in their old home town. Keeping up with what’s happening down the coast is partly nostalgia for the place she came from, but mostly it’s how she and Kevin fill those long phone calls she looks forward to all week. That’s what this Catch Up is really for. Not just the news, but the conversations it keeps alive.

The Paddock That Grew Nothing

On why “save our farmland” is the wrong fight for the right reason.

Wollongong Railway Station, 1900. 

Take a good look at that old photo of the railway station. Timber and tin, a scatter of weatherboard cottages, and open paddock rolling away in every direction. Now go and stand where the photographer stood. There isn’t a vacant block for miles. Every one of those paddocks filled in, one approval at a time, and nobody felt the loss on the day it happened. That’s how it always goes. The green doesn’t vanish in a single bad decision. It goes in slices, each one too small to argue about, until one day you look up and the hills have a rash.

The same station, 1920. Twenty years on

And it didn’t stop in 1920. Local residents Lesley East and Annette Young and their now husbands still remember driving into Wollongong in the early 1960s to see Psycho at the Regent Theatre on Keira Street, then a grand Art Deco picture palace only a few years old. They parked in a paddock right near the cinema. A paddock, in the middle of town. Today Wollongong is a city of more than 200,000 people, the Regent has been a church since 2005, Crown Street is a pedestrian mall, and the idea of an open field to leave your car in near the main street sounds like a tall tale. But that’s the whole point. Every one of those paddocks was “just one block” once.

Nobody stood in it the day it was lost.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the worry behind Graham Pike’s comment on one of my Catch-Up posts. He was referring to a development application on Minnamurra Lane, Jamberoo, a house and a farm shed on a vacant block, the one Cr Lawton sensibly sent off for a second look and independent legal advice at the May Council meeting. Here’s part of what he said:

“We might not be using the vacant lands or the land in question for food production right now. but most of these lands have been used for farming within the past century or less and, most importantly, we’ll need them for food production again as the human population, even in our area, increases uncontrollably and unsustainably and the resulting suburbanisation sprawls across and fragments this same agricultural/food producing land. The zoning of the land as RU1 or RU2 is a human construct and immaterial. It is still land that we have used and will in future need to use, if any is left uncovered by concrete and asphalt, for food production.” Graham Pike, Jamberoo

I’ve turned that over for days, because there’s a lot in it I agree with. The slow creep of houses and sheds across those hills is real. I’ve watched it happen. And his bigger worry, that we keep paving over the very ground we’ll need to feed ourselves one day, is a serious one.

In a later note, Graham went further and put his finger on what he sees as the root of it all: too many people. Human overpopulation, driving an economy that chews through the natural world. It’s a heartfelt view and plenty of thoughtful people share it.

That’s too big for me to sort out. What I’d say is simpler: whatever any of us thinks about how many people there ought to be, they’re already here. They were born, they need a roof, and saying “there are too many of them” doesn’t put one over a single head. So my mind goes to the thing we can actually do something about, which isn’t the number of people, but where they’re going to live.

The thing is, all that green didn’t go in one big decision anyone could point to. It went in slices, a block here, a shed there, each one too small to worry over on the day. Nobody ever stood up and voted to lose it. It just happened while we weren’t looking.

So maybe the better thing isn’t to fight every single house, but to decide on purpose where the houses should go, instead of letting them turn up one at a time until the hills are full again and we’re left wondering how.

And there’s a part of these “save our farmland” conversations that almost never gets said out loud. Farming is a business. For most farmers, the land isn’t only where they work. It’s the biggest thing they own, the nest egg meant to see them through old age after a lifetime of hard years and thin margins.

So when we say a paddock must stay green forever, I think we should stop and hear what we’re really asking. We’re asking that farmer, and only that farmer, to lock away the worth of their own land so the rest of us can enjoy the view on the drive past. A person in town can sell their house for whatever it’ll fetch. The farmer gets told their paddock is a community treasure and they ought to keep it green for a fraction of what it’s worth. I’m not sure that’s protecting farming. It feels more like asking one family to foot the bill for everyone else’s nice outlook.

I’ve stood on that side of the fence. I dairy farmed for decades, and I know what it is to look at a paddock and see both a lifetime’s work and the only retirement you’ve got. So I find myself asking the question that doesn’t get asked much: is that fair?

And it’s a slippery word, fair. Everyone in this thinks they’re on its side. The people in town feel it’s only fair the hills stay green, they get the view and lose nothing. The farmer feels it’s only fair they get to realise the worth of the land they’ve worked their whole life, the same as anyone else can with what they own. Both are sincere. Both are “fair.” They just can’t both have their way.

And it tends to be the farmer’s fairness that gets left out, because the farmer’s usually not in the room when the rest of us decide their paddock is too precious to touch.

So where does that leave me? Not where you might think. I’m not saying build everywhere. And I’m not saying the green hills don’t count, they’re a good part of why people love this place, and why the visitors come. The slow spread of sheds and houses across those ridgelines is real, and worth watching very closely.

But if we want our farmers to keep the hills green for the rest of us, the least we can do is be honest that we’re asking them to give something up, and decent enough to talk about who carries that cost rather than pretending it’s free.

Lock the gate on a farmer’s land and we haven’t saved farming. We’ve decided their retirement is a fair price for our view.

Good on Cr Lawton for asking for a proper look before anyone signs anything. That’s the kind of careful, eyes-open thinking this deserves, on this block and the next one. The conversation I’d like us to have isn’t “green or houses.” It’s “if we want the green, who pays for it, and is that fair on them?”

I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m not sure there is one. But I think we owe the farmers at least the courtesy of asking.

A note on the photos: I came across these two images on Facebook, where they were dated 1900 and 1920 and identified as Wollongong Railway Station. I haven’t been able to independently verify the dates or the photographer, so if anyone can confirm the details or knows the original source, I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch.

Daily News Round Up – 24 May 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

From a band called Fukers raising the roof for our firies, to an eighty-something bloke who built an ocean-going boat in his backyard, to a war that’s still keeping petrol dear, here’s the local-to-global wrap for 24 May 2026.

Betty from Blacktown and her brother Kevin from Kiama, making sense of the world’s chaos the only sensible way: over toast, a strong cuppa, and a good long natter on the phone. That’s what this Catch Up is for.

Very Local: a joyous night in the village, and a boat sixteen years in the making

Two cracking local stories this time, and both of them good news for a change.

The Fukers had Jamberoo dancing. The fundraiser in the village was a roaring success, raising money for the Jamberoo Rural Fire Brigade and the Red Cross. By all accounts it was a beauty. One person who was there summed it up far better than I could:

“Fukers didn’t disappoint, in fact they were wonderful. Congratulations organisers and Fukers for a joyous, uplifting evening that included audience participation via singing, dancing and the good news from vocalist Paul Taylor that the band will return next year to again help raise funds for the Rural Fire Brigade and Red Cross. Thank you Fukers for an absolutely fabulous evening in the village.”

Best of all, Paul Taylor has promised the band will be back next year to do it all over again. Good on the organisers, good on the band, and good on everyone who put their hand in their pocket for our firies.

The building is the thing. On the side of Saddleback Mountain, a Jamberoo fella named Michael set himself a job that would make most of us put the kettle on and have a lie down instead. In his own backyard, by hand, he built an ocean-going catamaran. An eighteen-and-a-half-metre boat that he designed himself. It took him sixteen years, with his wonderful wife Susie beside him the whole way.

Everyone who knew that narrow little road kept asking the same question: how on earth are you going to get it down off the mountain? There was even talk the ABC might film the whole thing and lift the boat out by helicopter. In the end no chopper was needed. The boat was cut into pieces and crawled down the road bit by bit over the best part of a week. And now she’s finally floating on the water, named Archimedes. A lovely reminder that it’s never too late to chase a big dream, and that sometimes the building of the thing matters just as much as where it ends up. You can read Lynne’s full story here.

Across the Country (Federal)

A surprise change out of the United States is worth a mention, because it touches plenty of Australian families with loved ones over there. The Trump government has announced that foreigners already living in the US who want a green card will now have to leave the country and apply from their home country instead. It’s a big shift from how things have worked for years, and it’s caught a lot of people on the hop.

Around the World (International)

Trouble at home for first responders abroad. A sad reminder this week of how dangerous the job can be. In New York, one person died and 36 others were hurt in a blast at a shipyard, and most of the injured were firefighters and other first responders rushing in to help. And over in Southern California, around 40,000 people were told to leave their homes and schools were shut after a storage tank kept leaking a hazardous chemical. A timely reminder of what emergency crews everywhere put on the line, which makes a night like our Fukers fundraiser for the Rural Fire Brigade feel all the more worthwhile.

The bottom line

It all joins up, Betty. A war on the far side of the world squeezes household budgets, the same squeeze that’s shaking up politics everywhere. But closer to home, the news is brighter. A village packed a hall to look after its firies, and a man on a mountain proved you’re never too old to do something improbable and wonderful. Not a bad lot to talk over with Kevin and a cuppa.

Sources: Clover Hill Diaries, NPR, Euronews, CNBC, Sydney Morning Herald, and others.

A note on Betty and Kevin: Betty grew up in Kiama before life took her to Blacktown. Her brother Kevin still lives in their old home town. Keeping up with what’s happening down the coast is partly nostalgia for the place she came from, but mostly it’s how she and Kevin fill those long phone calls she looks forward to all week. That’s what this Catch Up is really for. Not just the news, but the conversations it keeps alive.

The Building Is the Thing

Sixteen years, one very narrow road, and several quietly skeptical dinner parties later: Michael aboard Archimedes.

There’s a question that creeps up on people somewhere in their sixties and seventies. It arrives quietly and starts sitting in the room. What do you want this stretch of life to be for? Some people decide the answer is rest. Some chase the places they never got to. Some pour themselves into grandchildren, or a garden, or finally restoring the car that’s been under a tarp for twenty years. And a stubborn, wonderful few decide that what they want is to build something enormous and improbable with their own two hands, just to prove it can be done.

Michael is one of those few.

On the side of Saddleback Mountain, at Jamberoo, he set out to build an ocean-going catamaran. A self-designed, eighteen-and-a-half-metre boat, built in his own backyard. He’d talk about it with this great, infectious enthusiasm: the big idea, the plan, the vision of it finished and on the water. And beside him, as she always is, his gorgeous wife Susie would sit and smile. What a woman she is.

He’d bring it up at dinner parties, the way other people mention a renovation or a recent trip, and around the table you’d see the same look settle on every face. We were all thinking something. We were each, I suspect, thinking something completely different. Somewhere in that circle was jealousy, and amazement, and flat incredulity, quietly calculating the boat’s chances against a road that accommodates cows and precisely one car at a time. We’d nod warmly and pass the wine. Then we’d go home to our perfectly normal backyards, containing no catamaran whatsoever.

How on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?

When he started, I doubt Michael imagined it would take sixteen years. The big idea rarely comes with the small print attached. Somewhere along the way there was even talk that the ABC might make a documentary of it, that the grand finale would see the boat lifted out by helicopter, surely the only sensible way to get a thing that size off a mountain. Anyone who knew the narrow road he lived on was asking the same question we all were: how on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?

Photo credit 

The helicopter stayed on the ground and the documentary went unmade. What happened instead was better: the boat was cut into pieces and crawled down a narrow road, metre by metre, over the better part of a week. The polished launch footage you can find online skips all of that and shows the dream going into the water, clean and triumphant, with the difficult and stubborn and real parts left on the cutting-room floor. Watching it, knowing what it actually took, I find myself quietly amused. That’s a long way from how it looked coming down the hill.

The building is the thing. Some people garden. Some people restore cars. Michael and Susie built an ocean-going boat by hand, for sixteen years.

Where they take it, and whether they take it anywhere at all, almost feels secondary to having proved it could be done.

Michael built something else, long before the boat, and I have carried it for twenty years.

When I started out in agricultural advocacy, I was wrestling with the question the whole industry wrestles with. How do you get people to value farmers when most of them will never set foot on a farm? The standard answer then, and the standard answer now, is to teach people how food is produced, on the theory that understanding leads to appreciation.

Michael, over the side fence, put it differently. You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it. He pointed at the mobile phone. Almost nobody can explain what happens inside one, and almost nobody would give theirs up. Appreciation grows from knowing the people, admiring what they made, and feeling some tie to the place it came from. The mechanism barely comes into it.

You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it.

That sentence changed how I built every project after it. I stopped explaining the supply chain and started introducing people to the makers. A child who meets the man who turned a tiny valley factory into a national champion, or spends a day on a farm with a young dairy farmer who loves the life, comes away admiring them. The admiration is the appreciation. How the milk gets processed can come later, or never, and it holds either way.

It is the same thing I felt watching Archimedes come down the mountain. I could not tell you how Michael engineered an eighteen-and-a-half-metre catamaran in a backyard, and I do not need to. I appreciate the sixteen years and the four hands. The building is the thing, and the builder is who you come to admire.

That is what I want for farmers: a nation that admires the people who feed it. Whether they can explain how it is done matters far less. Michael handed me the key to that twenty years ago, over the fence, and then he spent sixteen years on the side of a mountain proving it.

The launch video carries a line as its title: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. It’s the closing line of Tennyson’s Ulysses, a poem about old age and the refusal to stop. Whoever chose it understood exactly what this was: a way of answering that quiet question that arrives in your sixties and never quite leaves.

What do you want to do with the years you’ve got left?

Michael and Susie answered it on the side of a mountain, one piece of fibreglass at a time. And the boat is finally on the water.

Want to hear more from Michael and learn what does it take to pull off an incredible Project like ” Archimedes” ?

 

A Little Shout-Out to Kiama Library

Something caught my eye on Facebook the other day and it put a smile on my dial.

Whoever runs the socials at our local Kiama Library is very clever, and they deserve a shout-out.

The first one was a brilliant bit of bookface, the art of holding a book cover up so it lines up with a real person behind it, and the cover seems to finish the picture. It turns out this has a name and a bit of history. It grew out of an older idea called “sleeveface” from 2007, where people posed with vinyl record covers. The book version really took off when the New York Public Library started sharing theirs in 2015, and France’s famous Librairie Mollat bookshop turned it into a global craze a couple of years later. These days libraries everywhere join in, usually tagged #BookFaceFriday.

But Kiama hasn’t just copied the trend. They’ve put their own cheeky stamp on it. Here are a few that made me grin:

They’ve also got a running gag about AI coming for library jobs, which had me laughing too

What I love is that it’s not just clever photography. It’s a warm, funny way to show off the books on their shelves and remind us what a gem we have on our doorstep. So this is just a small thank you to the team at Kiama Library. You’ve brightened up my feed and reminded me to pop in and borrow something. How clever are they?

Why GDP Gets So Much Attention

 

Same money, two doors. Most of it went to the houses.

Last time we cracked open GDP and found the weird bit: your house can double in value without the country making one extra thing. We worked out why. You buy a house that’s already there, you’re richer, but nothing new got built. That’s just savings in a nicer jacket. Money goes into a business instead and it buys gear, takes people on, makes stuff. That’s productivity, and that’s the thing that lifts everyone, not just the bloke who spent the money.

So your house doesn’t count. Fine. But here’s the bit you’d be right to ask about: so what? Why does that matter for the whole country, not just for you?

Because the country’s only got so much money to put to work. And where it goes decides what kind of country you end up living in.

Picture all the nation’s savings as one big pool. Every year money flows in, and it has to go somewhere. It can go into businesses that make things and hire people. Or roads and trains. Or it can go into buying houses that are already standing and bidding the price up. Same pool, different doors. And for years now we’ve shoved a massive chunk of it through the housing door.

Money through the productive door, the country can make more next year than it did this year. More stuff, more services, more done per hour. That’s the pie getting bigger. Money through the housing door, the pie doesn’t grow. The same house just changes hands for more. You feel richer because the number on the place went up. But the country can’t actually do or make a single thing more than it could before.

Do that for thirty years and you get exactly what we’ve got. A country that looks loaded on paper and can’t work out why it feels stuck. The money’s real. It’s just locked up in land that makes nothing. And the things that would grow the pie, the businesses, the new industries, got starved of the money that went into property instead. That’s the bit people miss. The boom in one is the drought in the other. Same pool.

Here’s what that looks like on a normal Thursday. The jobs figures came out this week and they were grim. Unemployment up to 4.5%, worst since late 2021. Thirty-three thousand more people out of work, nearly 19,000 jobs gone in the month. Hit young people hardest, youth unemployment’s over 11% now, and this month the losses fell mostly on women. That’s work getting harder to find, which worries a household long before it worries anyone in Canberra. And on the very same day, the share market had one of its best days in weeks. Two numbers, one morning, pointing opposite ways. What’s good for the big end of town and what’s good for your kitchen table just aren’t always the same story.

That gap right there is the whole thing in small. A country can post lovely-looking numbers while the ground under ordinary households gets wobblier, because the wealth and the work have come unstuck from each other. And part of why they came unstuck is where the money went. Money sitting in land that just gets dearer isn’t money building the businesses that’d hire those 33,000.

You see it everywhere once you’ve spotted it. Wages that don’t climb like they used to, because there’s no productivity growth underneath pushing them up. A tax system that rewards buying the thing that makes nothing and punishes building the thing that does, so even more money goes through the wrong door. Smart people and big money chasing the next property deal instead of the next business, because that’s where the easy money’s been. None of these are separate problems. It’s the one problem wearing different hats.

Lets not make it too neat. Housing isn’t all dead weight. Building new homes is good, very good. It employs a lot of people, and having a roof over your head is worth something no GDP number ever captures. And plenty of countries with dear housing still get along fine. One bad month of jobs figures doesn’t prove any of this on its own either, the economy has its own ups and downs that have nothing to do with houses.

So it’s not that houses are the baddie, and it’s not that one bad month of jobs figures proves the whole thing on its own. It’s that when a whole country leans this hard on the one thing that doesn’t grow the pie, year after year, the pie stops growing. And when the pie stops growing, you’ve got less to go round for everything else.

That’s why it’s a big deal. The GDP in not some magic number on the telly. The GDP is the scoreboard for one choice the country keeps making without quite meaning to: do we build the thing, or just sell each other the thing we already built for more. We’ve spent a long time doing the second. And the bill for that isn’t a number. It’s a country that could’ve been doing more, and isn’t.

Your house doesn’t count. Turns out that’s not some quirk of the accounting. It’s the whole story in one line.