Besides Barbie, Dolly Parton was one of the first grossly unrealistic images of womanhood I came across. I was around eight when I saw her on the cover of my mums’s Dolly Parton Favorites album and oh how deeply I loved her. Her big hair took up almost the entire front cover and her Tennessee-Mountain-cleavage was caked in rhinestones. Even by that stage I knew some of her songs by heart. I wouldn’t hear a bad word about her and I sung ‘Coat of Many Colours’ from beginning to end to many a family pet. I felt a kinship with her, not only because we were both ‘country gals’, but like Dolly I also grew up religious (my mum was an evangelical Christian) and we also didn’t have a lot of money.

I get the sense that Brutalism is in need of getting dressed; clothed in white, perhaps, or some other colour in the Taubmans paint box, in order to push back the grey we already see all over our cities. It is the palette – the veneer – that needs to be rendered differently.

So while we may see the violence at Don Dale as an awful aberration, it is actually part of a system of inherent violence conducted by the state. Rather than solving crime, the prison system perpetuates it, creating a permanent ‘criminal class’.

The idea that youth voters are more progressive but under-represented is not a new one, not specific to the English-speaking world and clearly not to Australia. What’s new, and what I want to argue for, is the idea that we should be actively combating this well-known state of affairs. The youth vote is powerful and should be treated as such, but youth themselves can’t help but feel powerless.

The pound is falling. Frustrated Londoners are picketing outside Boris Johnson’s home. Nigel Farage, the triumphant UKIP leader, proudly declared Britain’s ‘independence day’. Yet the weirdest thing, at least from our distance, is that the celebrations and backlash seem to come as a surprise to the British establishment: the polls were tight, but the bookies were predicting a remain result, and in any case how could one vote for Brexit when it’s an ‘act of economic self-harm’?

When the representative link, in which ‘the people’ and their aggregate wills (supposedly mirrored in the parliamentary apparatus) breaks down, the terrain is ripe for populist insurgency. Indeed, the rise of Donald Trump et al might be defined as a populist backlash: the result of the lack of perceived or actual representation from elected leaders. It is not simply racism that drives support of Trump or Le Pen, but more that people are looking for representation, someone who appears to understand their problems.

The negative attitude toward those on benefits, persistently propagated by the media, works as a smokescreen to conceal the fact that welfare payments are simply too low.

To respond to Storrar’s question by showering him with money – so much money, in fact, that it may potentially impact his benefit payments and require the assistance of a financial manager – seems to misunderstand the nature of the problem, no matter how well-intentioned the many donors may be.

25 years ago, on 15 April 1991, the $40 million, three-year long Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody submitted its final report. 25 years on, the bulk of these recommendations continue to be ignored despite their relevancy being as acute today as they were a quarter of a century ago.

A modern-day sugar tax is not about punishing a particular group and has a far more utilitarian basis. The concept of it is based on its function as a disincentive to change a set of unhealthy behaviours. Paternalism is often widely applauded – like compulsory minimum education, vaccination, drivers wearing seatbelts. Such laws are not immune to critique, nor should they be, but that’s ultimately how societies like ours can move along in roughly the right direction.

It’s the largest document leak in history: 11.5 million files and 2.6 terabytes of information detailing how our global elite avoid their responsibility to the rest of us. The Panama Papers have allowed us to peek behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and glimpse the very mortal old men pulling the levers of state. But we already know they play by different rules. We have long known, for instance, that the global elite use tax havens. Yet, what’s truly damaging about these leaks is that they demystify the process.

These days if you enter a McDonald’s restaurant in Australia or New Zealand and order a medium frozen Coke, they ask you if you wouldn’t rather have a large one, since they both cost $1 anyway. And why would you have the smaller one, when after all you can stop drinking it whenever you want? This basement price for the beverage – part of a promotion that began two years ago – could well be below cost, and seems designed to get you into the restaurant in the hope you will be persuaded to consume something else as well.