By inviting news providers to join the platforms they cannot beat, Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code effectively commercialises all news content. Even public service content is now reliant on the attention it can generate on platforms like Facebook and Google News to reach an audience.

The Facebook news ban in Australia was a brief skirmish in the longer war to control private and unregulated domination of our public spaces and libraries. It will take global coordination and willingness to wrest these spaces into public hands to serve our world community, support the essential role that journalism plays in our societies and not feed the domination fantasies of tech bro billionaires.

We need a diverse and flourishing media landscape, in which new content providers can make use of the incredible potential of the web and in which the historic role of journalism to speak truth to power is afforded protection and respect. Unfortunately, the proposed media code may take us in the opposite direction.

On June 29, I submitted an opinion piece to ABC’s online platform Religion and Ethics. After one week of back-and-forth editorial interventions, it was published alongside an opposing piece by Bren Carlill from the Zionist Federation of Australia. It became instantly clear that Mr Carlill had written his piece directly in response to mine.

While other important labour protests around that time, such as the 1917 New South Wales Strike, were set both inside and outside of Australia’s largest cities, the Victorian police strike offered Australian newspapers the opportunity to capture disruption unfolding in an urban setting, where the vast majority of protests take place today.

As the fifth anniversary of the disappearance of forty-three students from rural Mexico passes, questions remain about the culpability of the Mexican government in the crime and its subsequent cover-up. Now, with a new President and a special government commission, there’s hope the truth might be revealed.

But I have also witnessed student media falter against an all-too-familiar threat. Hard-hitting stories have ended their lives as unpublished drafts, shelved after being spiked or strongarmed. In the background, the defamation law system continues to whir, pitting the resource-poor institutions of student journalism against the legal machinery of the privileged. As a result, important stories are silenced.

These are, in many ways, scary times. The hard right, who had mentally prepared themselves for defeat, now feel themselves to be totally off the leash. That, too, is why solidarity matters. If we do not hang together, we will – as the saying goes – most assuredly be hanged separately.

Walk and wait, wait and walk. They only have one purpose on this trip and it’s to reach the United States. Their life, for the time being, centres on migration.

At the same time, the arts are struggling in an environment of reduced funding, static operating grants and straitened private giving. Institutions work within increasingly fixed parameters: the dimensions of a gallery or a stage; the production requirements of a tour; the marketing schedule of a festival; the presentation slots of a symposium; the artform categories of a funding body. ‘We loved your content!’ enthused a colleague after my talk at their event. ‘That’s not “content”,’ I replied, ‘that’s expertise.’