Travis Jordan
@grugstan
professional good boy // democracy, cities and tech // travisjordan.work // these are my own opinions and not those of my employer he/him // living in Meanjin Brisbane
Consider a migration system that explicitly said we're only allowing people to come to the country to do jobs at lower wages and with less investment needed for local training – while sacrificing the pro-social migration rules that promote Australia as an open, welcoming place – might fuel tensions?
Ever get so mad you make a whole Instagram account? (Betoota post for the Meta-free)
In our follow-up paper for Assembly's Electoral Matters Committee in November last year, we conducted a top-level comparative analysis of Australia's state and territory Parliaments against some of the metrics the independent review highlighted. Full paper here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ROvL...
Late last year, there was a shocking revelation that the median age of a Queensland LNP member was 72. Today it's been revealed that the Liberals nationwide have a median age well into the 60s and overwhelmingly male. The median Australian is 38 and the median voter is 44 – both Millennials.
Forgetting your headphones when you're walking to the shops is great for idly dreaming of the kinds of things you'd do if money was no object. This time I was thinking about how much I miss News Magazines – and what I value about newspapers today that I don't see enough of. And I dreamt of this:
Divisions in the House are performances. The function they serve is to create vision for social media and TV. The problem with inefficiency on one hand and ensuring voters' know the outcomes of votes on the other isn't to reform divisions – it's to have mandatory electronic voting on all motions.
JSCEM's interim report into the 2025 Federal Election is out and mainly deals with safety and voter experience at polling booths – recommending mandatory codes of conduct and volunteer registration systems and new political signage restrictions – but this is the one that jumped out. ABOUT TIME!
Imagine getting freaked out about the Fabians in TYOOL 2026. THESE guys??
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been posting much the last three months: My paper on the future of Australia’s games industry — and what the government can do to avoid another Crash wiping — is out today. drive.google.com/file/d/1Hnr_...
I was BULLIED into smiling in my new headshots I hope you’re all HAPPY
I love that we have a completely indecipherable civic ritual for our democracy! It's like the stickers in the US or The Orange Guy in New Zealand!
Turns out you can kinda just add malted milk powder to anything and instantly make it better.
Hot on the heels of the electoral commission removing First Nations electorate names and the government passing emergency legislation to change JCU's governing council to stop them renaming the university, the Courier Mail is now mounting a full-throated attack on First Nations naming and language.
If I'm understanding Hume and Canavan's comments correctly, the Coalition's current policy on working from home policy is that you shouldn't be allowed to if you live in a city – but if you live anywhere else, it should not only be allowed but the government should subsidise trips to the office.
Obviously AI Boosters' obsession with universal basic income is mostly a deflection so they don't have to meaningfully engage with the social or economic repercussions of their chosen fantasy future, Mulino's reaction at today's Banking Summit is very telling on how governments will respond to it.
Compare this to socials traffic which overwhelmingly comes from Facebook. If you've ever wondered why it feels like your parents live in a totally parallel world to you, this is why.
In a case of me having to update my priors, Streem's state of the sector report shows that Australian news outlets still overwhelmingly draw social media stories from Twitter over all over apps. A big of this will be the dominance of Twitter in contemporary US politics.
Amid dozens of compelling econometric and data-led papers from early and mid career researchers, many of the leaders of housing research nationally have put out supply-skeptical abstracts with seemingly little data to back them up mostly referencing each other.
This guy seems to just own 40+ properties and has some Ideas about how to reform tenancies – but that's enough to have four abstracts at the Conference.
In the same theme, these same academics did another great research project that surveyed public attitudes towards local government, how expansive they expected local government's responsibilities to be and how often they expected local government to stray outside that. The Results Might Shock You.
Big Brisbane news! The Lactalis Pauls milk processing facility in South Brisbane has announced its closure in June this year, hot on the heels of the redevelopment of the Visy Glass and Heidelberg Hanson sites announced last year. These are the last big brownfield sites in Brisbane's inner city!
I posted some longer thoughts about @free-play.bsky.social, its future, and my seven year tenure on the board on LinkedIn.