Talking with Georgie about the horrible crime committed against Brittany Higgins.

I hope Brittany finds some justice, somehow.

Here's the thing: nothing that matters will change.

A thread:

Two side notes:
* Content warning for trauma and sexual assault
* I initially drafted this and was going to delete it because it's too cynical and very bleak, but it's also the truth and Georgie asked me to be brave and post it.
A Royal Commission has changed nothing.
Paris Street's revelation about St Kevin's changed nothing.
Grace Tame's bravery has changed nothing.
The Pell case has changed nothing.
The Wilson case has changed nothing.
The Redress Scheme has changed nothing.
Georgie burning two careers to jail a serial child rapist has changed nothing.
The National Apology has changed nothing.
The hundreds, if not thousands, of people who report sexual assaults each year have changed nothing.

Because the rules don't apply to the people at the top.
If you're at the top, it doesn't really matter if you're a politician, a political staffer, a journalist, a senior police officer, an ADF officer, a bishop, a business tycoon, or anything else.
If you're in the club, you're in the club.
And the club has one overarching rule: we don't rat each other out.
You can disagree about politics, economics, football clubs, religion, or anything else.
But you never rat out another club member.
Occasionally the evidence is too clear and someone has to go under a bus, because they were just too careless and lacked discretion. They pushed too hard, they were too obvious about what they were doing, and a Court does its job.

Then the club all act surprised and shocked.
But nobody else in the club ever knew what was happening, never heard the stories, never saw the closed doors, never noticed the women who unexpectedly quit their dream jobs, because he (or she) just isn't like that! And we would have said something if we'd known!
Only they all know. Everyone working at Parliament House knows who's safe to be alone with and who's to be avoided.

Everyone at the diocesan office knows which priests are normal and which can't be trusted around kids.

Same thing at the universities. Same at the best schools.
This sounds impossible, right?
Georgie was raped multiple times in Canberra.

People in the club - bishops, a Press Gallery journo, elite music teachers - knew. They looked the other way, because he was an important musician doing great work.

And he was firmly in the club.
We know these people knew, because we have the letters talking about him - they were used at his trial.

We have emails from some of these people admitting what they knew, but saying "it was a different time" and "you don't understand how important he was in our community".
Because when you're at the top, the rules don't apply to you.

And everyone at the top knows it.

And that rule won't change. Ever.

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How does a government put a legislation on 'hold'? Is there any constitutional mechanism for the executive to 'pause' a validly passed legislation? Genuine Koshan.


So a committee of 'wise men/women' selected by the SC will stand in judgement over the law passed by


Here is the thing - a law can be stayed based on usual methods, it can be held unconstitutional based on violation of the Constitution. There is no shortcut to this based on the say so of even a large number of people, merely because they are loud.


Tomorrow can all the income tax payers also gather up at whichever maidan and ask for repealing the income tax law? It hurts us and we can protest quite loudly.

How can a law be stayed or over-turned based on the nuisance value of the protestors? It is anarchy to allow that.

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save as q
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.