← Feed

Posts

• View post

  The Albanese government's digital duty of care legislation gives users the option to opt out of algorithmic feeds. That's a genuine win for user autonomy, a step away from surveillance-driven content. But the real test is implementation: will platforms face penalties for hiding the choice? And will the law survive lobbying from Meta and Google? Fusion supports giving people control over their own information diet. That's a floor, not a ceiling. Share this if you want the choice to be...

• View post

  The record El Niño coming this summer could push grocery bills even higher. But look at the numbers: staples like bread, cereals, and dairy have already jumped 28-30% in the last five years – compared to just 3-6% in the five years prior. That's not weather. That's supermarket pricing power allowed to run unchecked while governments do nothing. Another external shock will hit households already paying more for less. The Reserve Bank may hike rates again, making rent and mortgage repaymen...

• View post

  Justice doesn't start in a courtroom. It starts with a stable home, proper healthcare, and enough income to leave a bad situation. Invest in people instead of punishing them for society's failures. Universal Basic Income, no-strings-attached. Medicare properly funded. Housing as a human right. A Treaty with First Nations. An Australia Day that belongs to everyone. The country's long-term prosperity depends on the quality of ordinary lives, not on incarceration rates. Most people woul...

• View post

  Labor used new cancellation powers for the first time to shut down a graduate diploma it says is being misused by international students to extend their stay. Transfers into the Graduate Diploma of Management (Learning) jumped from 510 in 2020 to 4,000 in 2025, with 77% coming from higher education. 452 providers deliver it, with 41k active enrolments. The government says it's protecting integrity, but this is a reactive fix to a broken system. The Coalition left a 'shocking mess...

• View post

  Metro Trains and Yarra Trams pocket public money whether they run on time or not. Franchise contracts guarantee availability payments regardless of performance, and penalties are too weak to shift behaviour. The next Metro Trains contract renews before November 2027 – once signed, the figures stay hidden for another decade. Fusion's fix: a windfall levy on franchise profits when service standards fail. Miss the standard, give it back. A Fusion MP would compel profit disclosure and make a...

• View post

  The state spent $13.48 billion building the Metro Tunnel's five underground stations, then left the land above them for private developers. Fusion Victoria's policy: mandate public housing and public income retention at every major station precinct. We will use the Victorian Wealth and Housing Fund to build at cost, retain the assets, and collect the rent. Hong Kong's MTR model gets 40% of revenue from property. Singapore's HDB houses 80% of the population. This w...

• View post

  Labor's migration overhaul is a textbook duopoly panic. One Nation and the Coalition push for cuts, so Labor scrambles to slash net migration from 300k to 225k. They killed the Graduate Diploma of Management, a dodgy course with 41k students, 18k of whom never studied. But the real story? Industry says they can't find local workers because the training system is broken. Hotels paid $74m into the Skilling Australians Fund, yet hospitality training is de-prioritised. Now backpacker...

• View post

  Communities locking farm gates against transmission lines gets framed as NIMBYism. But a new study of three WA towns tells a different story. In Busselton, residents said consultation came too late to influence anything. In Kojonup, some landowners got investment opportunities while neighbours got disrupted views and zero benefit. In Albany, a wind farm that has been running for two decades now powers 80% of the city and draws 200,000 tourists a year. And the locals love it. This is not anti-r...

• View post

  After decades of campaigning, including a three-week sit-in at the park in 1994 and another in 2002, the Waanyi people have formally regained ownership of Boodjamulla National Park. More than 247,000 hectares of their ancestral land, including Lawn Hill Gorge and the World Heritage Riversleigh fossil deposits, has been returned. The land is leased back to the state for continued public access, with equal representation on a board of management. As Hayley Iles, chair of the Waanyi PBC, put it: &a...

• View post

  Every day CityLink rakes in $2M in tolls and every dollar goes to Transurban shareholders. Not back to the Victorians who paid for the road. Fusion has a better idea: a Citizens Dividend that returns the income from our common assets to the people who own them. We start small, around $112–$418/week for tenants in VWHF homes, and scale toward every Victorian as the fund matures. No raids from Treasurers because the dividend is paid only from the fund's own surplus, not from consolidated r...

• View post

  Fusion's policy: citizen-initiated referenda for Victoria. No more cabinet making 42-year monopoly extensions or committing lottery revenue to 2068 without a single public vote. We want to make 'nothing about the people without the people' law. A petition threshold + deliberative panel (citizens' assembly) stops capture. In a minority parliament, we'll push for a government-initiated advisory referendum per term. This is how we build real democratic muscle...

• View post

  Subject scaling is supposed to make the ATAR fair across different Year 12 subjects. But in practice it systematically rewards students at advantaged schools and punishes everyone else. 2025 Victorian data: a raw score of 30 in Latin (offered at a tiny number of elite private schools) scaled to 46. A raw 40 in agricultural/horticultural studies (top 10% of the subject) scaled down to 34. The pattern is stable year after year. Students from low-SES backgrounds and rural schools are more likely...

• View post

  Chanel Contos wants to make social media algorithms opt-in. That means you get to choose how your feed is curated, not some opaque machine trained on whatever keeps you scrolling longest. This is floor-not-ceiling logic: the state sets a minimum standard for how algorithms treat you, then gets out of the way and lets you decide. The opposite is the current model, where platforms extract your attention with no meaningful consent enforced. Contos is right that the same structural forces that pus...

• View post

  Australians are doing the sensible thing: buying EVs and hybrids to escape $2/L petrol. Nearly one in two new car sales now. That's 0.4% quarterly spending growth and the RBA sees it as demand that keeps rates high. We're punishing households for trying to save money. The bank's model treats a rational cost-cutting switch as 'inflationary spending.' But where is the same scrutiny on corporate margin expansion? Coles, Transurban, the energy retailers all p...

• View post

  Victorian toll road contracts are classified. You can't read them. The West Gate Tunnel deal extended CityLink to 2045, locked in behind commercial-in-confidence rules. The Metro Tunnel's fixed-price PPP cost $11bn at announcement and at least $13.48bn by September 2024, with extra payments of up to $888m in 2024 alone. The 25-year availability payment clock started in 2026, but no single reconciled total has ever been tabled. Fusion will declassify and publish all toll road agr...

• View post

  Victoria's pothole crisis is getting worse. Complaints up 46% in a year, 10k more this year alone. The government's solution? Inmate labour for roadside mowing. But experts say the real fix is a data-led resilience plan, like Queensland's foam-bitumen stabilisation that survived Cyclone Debbie unscathed. Victoria has no public database tracking road hazards, and the NTRO only collects data every two years. Queensland has 13 years of continuous data. Labor's $352M...

• View post

  The Victorian Budget says 2026-27 is a surplus year. But the entire $1.05 billion figure is funded by a single one-off payment: $1.145 billion from Tattersall's for a 42-year lottery licence extension. Strip that out and there's no surplus — just accounting tricks. Fusion is demanding an independent forensic audit. One MP in PAEC can force Treasury to release the real numbers. Join us to help make that happen. #auspol #vicpol https://go.fusionparty.org.au/e4Cqa

• View post

  The message from Football Victoria and the club that overrode a girls' fixture is damning. An under-12 girls' points match was stopped at halftime so an under-11 boys' team could take the field. The girls waited 40 minutes, then were directed to a waterlogged, unsafe pitch. The match was abandoned. One young coach left in tears. Football Victoria says it's 'reviewing expectations' and running a Member Protection process. That's not good en...

• View post

  Democracy doesn't have a table charge. Fusion Party Victoria will ban corporate cash-for-access fundraisers and mandate public registers for all minister meetings. This isn't about your side or our side. It's about whether a $10,000 table buys a private policy discussion that the rest of us never hear about. Victoria already bans property developer donations. The same principle applies here: no one should be able to purchase access to an elected representative. We&#39...

• View post

  Brisbane City Council sat on 17 state school transport grant applications from suburbs like Fig Tree Pocket, progressing just two to nomination, while Townsville and Cairns pushed through over 60% of theirs, leaving grandmothers and primary students waiting in the rain for basic bus shelters a state program could fund if the council bothered to apply.

• View post

  Victoria spent $11 billion on the Metro Tunnel. Land values around stations soared because the state built the infrastructure, yet landowners captured the gain. The Windfall Gains Tax catches some uplift at rezoning but misses land already zoned and sitting idle. A surface car park near a new station can appreciate for decades and pay nothing. Fusion's fix: a compounding annual surcharge on commercial surface car parks and single-use sites within a kilometre of a station. The levy rises...

• View post

  Australian kids are reading for pleasure at alarming rates: 52.5% never read for fun in 2022, up from 10.8% in 2019. Daily social media use jumped from 26% to 85.4% in the same period. NAPLAN reading results dropped from 74.5% to 71% for year 5s. One in three kids can't read at grade level. Library funding is a postcode lottery, so poorer areas lose out. Literacy groups are calling for a national reading strategy and mandated, properly resourced school libraries. The case is overwhelming. Yo...

• View post

  Labor lost 23% of its primary vote and suffered a 19% swing to One Nation in the Secret Harbour by-election. Your cost: a political duopoly that only notices outer-suburban families when they turn to extremism. https://vic.fusionparty.org.au/policies/nothing-without-the-people

• View post

  Fusion's policy is clear: an unconditional, ongoing payment to every adult Australian. No means testing, no compliance officers, no poverty traps. Just the security to leave a bad job, escape an unsafe home, or retrain for a future that fits. The bureaucracy savings alone justify it. When people aren't desperate, they can make better decisions for themselves and for the country. Join us to make it happen. #auspol #UBI https://go.fusionparty.org.au/6pZpA

• View post

  Good news story: Fremantle's new traffic bridge is coming back before Christmas, on budget at $596 million, and ahead of its original 2027 timeline. But the real headline is what happened during the closure: Fremantle Station boardings jumped 20%, parking up 30%, and overall river crossings fell by a fifth. People changed behaviour. They used public transport. It proves transit works when it's given a chance. Now imagine what we could achieve if that same focus and funding were directe...

• View post

  Victorian electoral law treats volunteer hours as if they don’t exist. A company can second 20 staff to a campaign for weeks and declare zero. Fusion’s policy: count every hour, value them at twice minimum wage ($50/hr), and trigger matching public funding up to 3:1 via our Democratic Campaign Equalisation Trust. This makes grassroots support visible and properly funded. We also propose lowering the public funding threshold from 4% to 2%. Join Fusion to push this through. #auspol #vicpol https:...

• View post

  New Australian research confirms what many have suspected: expensive, invasive IVF add-ons being pushed on desperate patients often have little or no evidence they actually help. These extras can cost thousands per cycle, adding financial strain to an already gruelling process. While clinics profit from hope, patients are left paying for treatments that may not improve their chances. We need mandatory disclosure of evidence for every add-on, and a crackdown on pricing that exploits vulnerability...

• View post

  Doctors in WA are calling for a simple fix to laws governing voluntary assisted dying. They say a decades-old ban that has nothing to do with healthcare is creating unnecessary barriers. The message is clear: the delay is political, not medical. While politicians dither, terminally ill patients face added trauma. It's time to remove outdated restrictions and respect people's right to choose a dignified end. Fusion supports voluntary assisted dying as a matter of bodily autonomy. Read our...

• View post

  Kmart's $89 Anko Smart Glasses sold out in under a week. They can record HD video and snap photos without the subject knowing. The Privacy Commissioner says Australia's Privacy Act doesn't cover individuals filming with them, only businesses and agencies. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has asked the OAIC to investigate, citing risks to women and children. 85% of Australians are more concerned about privacy since 2021. This isn't a fringe dystopia. It's a $89 impulse buy at...

• View post

  New research confirms what frontline workers have known for decades: higher-risk drinking by men is directly linked to intimate partner violence over time. The researchers are calling for policy change, but policy change means shifting money from punishment to prevention. So what happens? The same cycle. More policing, more courts, more prisons, more remand. Alcohol treatment? Underfunded. Public housing for victims fleeing violence? Waiting lists. Men's behaviour change programs? Gutted. We...