It's not clear to me that moving to optional is what he means:

“Preferences should not be a thing in Queensland elections, and it won’t be if government changes,” he said.

This quote suggests to me he wants to get rid of preferences all together.

There's an android app called URLCheck that can strip unwanted bits off the end of urls and then open them as well.

American politics infects Australian politics in many ways sadly.

This changes the effect of negative campaigning (people still show up in Aus vs the US), but the idea is to dissuade people from voting for someone, rather than encourage them to vote for you. This might have a positive effect on votes for the party doing the negative campaigning, but I think it's a poor definition of convincing someone to vote for you.

Well as people worried about victims I'd just be worried it might seem a tad disingenuous quote from a vast minority of cases and not provide any quotes from victims that never see justice you know?

https://archive.is/20230924091719/https://www.smh.com.au/national/five-years-a-thousand-messages-how-a-top-public-servant-tried-to-influence-governments-20230919-p5e5ss.html?btis=

I guess the greens decided they couldn't get anything more out of Labor.

The article doesn't refer to violent offenders? Is this in the actual report from the truth telling commission?

They didn't give any more examples than a politician saying they've spoken to people in the community.

1. If you don't trust anyone on here why bother? It isn't difficult to discern a bad faith argument.

As far as I'm concerned anyone making this sort of argument should be ignored because it's the easiest form of bad faith argument.

2. You trust polling but not another human that you are peaking to through the internet? Anecdotal evidence isn't perfect but polling has financial reasons to push lies and special accounting tricks to make the numbers say whatever they want.

This is true, and you can make an argument against the polling, but that's an argument that can actually be had. You can't argue with random anecdotes. I don't understand how you can simultaneously point out legit issues with polls but also accept unverifiable anecdotes.

Anyone who reads the constitutional amendment critically will see it is the way the referendum is written is just a empty gesture to delay real action.

I agree it's a risk. There's a lot of really easy things the country could be doing to help indigenous Australians and this may not help while just being a massive distraction.

Correct, scientists both do the labour of reviewing articles for free and then are also charged by the journals to view the articles.

There are essentially only a few publishing companies so it's basically a racket and they can do whatever they want. Most scientists in my field post preprint type articles on arXiv though so it can always be read there.

I take great exception to per capita values. In the overall picture it bears little relevance, the total output is the most important value.

Per capita values can be used to tell you where to focus your effort though, provided it's coupled with an understanding of why the value may be high (which this article gives).

I agree it would be good to be able to harness this sort of BS tactic, but I think part of the problem is that the people who generally use these tactics just don't give a shit about what's true. The other thing is that conservative groups and businesses tend to have a lot more money and control over media platforms that left wing groups do, so it's much easier to spread their message.