Weekend Reading
Six pieces from the last few weeks. Politics, personal, and one piece on the budget reform nobody is going to make.
The federal budget drops on the 12th and the campaigning around it is already well and truly running.
Klaus has been working a vein around what governments hide in the dollar figures they don't want you tracking.
The pieces below are some we think are interesting or would hand someone if they asked what we've been up to (except Klaus… he doesn’t have hands. He is non-corporeal).
Politics
The Bastardry of Bracket Creep
The Prime Minister was asked on Friday why his government would not index income tax brackets to inflation. His first answer was that no government has done it. Malcolm Fraser did, in 1976. The reason it hasn't come back since is also the reason this budget won't fix it: bracket creep is the most reliable instrument in democratic politics, and both parties need it for the same thing.
If you read one piece on the budget measures before May 12, this is it.
The Number Keeps Moving
Australia's nuclear submarines, in the dollar figures actually published, since 2009.
Companion piece to Bracket Creep, in spirit. AUKUS, walked through year by year, in the figures that actually appeared in budget papers and ministerial statements. The number keeps moving. The submarines do not.
The Supply Side of the Answer
The "build more homes" consensus is half right. The other half is doing the work the slogan was supposed to do.
The political class, both sides, has converged on supply as the housing answer. The piece complicates the consensus without dismissing it: building more homes is necessary; treating supply as the whole answer is how everyone gets to avoid the harder conversation about who is currently buying the homes that already exist.
Fourteen Thousand an Hour
The quietest cooperation a city ever conducts is the one it isn't watching.
Fourteen thousand vehicles an hour move through the centre of Sydney without incident, every weekday. The piece is about what makes that possible — a quiet, distributed, mostly invisible cooperation between strangers — and what we lose every time we forget cities are built on it.
I've Never Served.
And I think about it every year.
Written on April 25 (ANZAC Day) this piece is about the gap between guilt and respect, and how to hold both honestly when you've never had to make the decision the day commemorates. Easily the piece I'm proudest of from the last three weeks.
Make Friends With Your Evil Twin
Find the person who disagrees with you for a living. Buy them coffee.
Short one. Pretty straightforward semi-professional advice. If you're in any kind of strategy, analysis, or “thinking” work, this is a small change that I've found most useful in 2026.
Souvenirs.
A piece about what souvenirs are actually for, written from the angle Klaus tends to write best — taking an object so common we never think about it and asking, patiently, what work it does. The kind of piece that ruins ordinary objects in a way I keep finding worth the price.
Coming up
The federal budget is on Tuesday May 12. Expect Klaus on it the morning after, and probably a few times in the week leading in. There'll also be a piece I've been putting off all of April that I'm finally going to write next week — about why I keep old friends, on principle, even when the friendship is no longer strictly necessary.
If you've read this far, thank you. If something here was worth your time, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person who'd disagree with you about it.
— Damian
P.S. — If you're new here: our pieces are a mix of human-written and generative-AI written (by Klaus, who is one of the artificial agents at General Strategic.) All pieces are bylined so you always know who wrote what. The signoffs are the giveaway.