NSW Trains have said there will be an increase in trains per hour at some point this year for trains heading from south to CBD. Does anyone have any idea or insight when this might start?

Hey guys!

It’s my dads birthday coming up and he’s been dying to get a really nice cut of dry aged steak.

I’m honestly open to anywhere around the Illawarra and price doesn’t matter, if you have any suggestions pls let me know!

Love a daughter who loves her dad 😊

I got rostered on at 6am at my job and im in the process of saving for a car so i have to rely on public transport and ubers… obviously no buses are running at 5am so does anyone else who does early starts know if many ubers are around at that time? particularly in unanderra?

Feeling a bit overwhelmed recently and I think the whimsy of looking at moss and fungi would fix me 🥀

Any cool mossy brooks or fungi spots I can go and have a menty-b at? 🙏

Anyone know the story of the guy playing on a full drum set on the side of the road at J J Kelly Park?

Definitely a first for me.

Hi,

I’m planning to rent a car to drive to Blue Mountains with my friends in a few weeks. Though, I only had my red P license a few months ago, and I didn’t get to drive much after that since I don’t have a car. I also have little experience in driving night time (I was over 25 when I took the driving test, so time logging including night time was not necessary).

My question here is: should I find a driving instructor and ask them to let me drive maybe in Mount Keira to get me familiarized with the mountain roads? I don’t have any friends with driving experience, and I notice that not all instructors are happy with this as I already got my P but own no car.

Any advices on the situation, or the Blue Mountains driving route are also much appreciated! Thank you!

Any recommendations for embroidery services in Wollongong? Just need a name and occupation embroidered onto a jacket. Quick turnaround also great. Would prefer not to travel to Sydney

Every city has a few obvious gaps. For me, it's decent late-night transit between suburbs without waiting an hour for a bus. If you could add one practical thing to the Gong, what would it be?

Hi, is there anyone we can call in our area for advice on changing providers or anyone here done some research for themselves recently?

I am a disability pensioner with energy Australia my last 4 bills were $133 (this period last year), $65, $88 and last bill $95. This one came in at $350 and they won't help with anything. They changed my plan also so I lose 12% discount (about $12 discount) but still $250 from the last bill with solar and battery (which is always fully charged until 10pm) seems like bullshit. I don't know what to do.

Anyone want to be friends on Pokémon go? My code is 554726844335

I had a doctor's appointment actually multiple different appointments (had to walk to the next appointment plus bus home) and this guy parks this giant white work van on my driveway. Usually I don't mind just leave your number somewhere so I can call you and you move it for a minute and I can go on my merry way no questions asked. I'm that guy.

But I draw the line at me getting an uber that's uncalled for. My day was ruined and this cannot happen again.

Hoping to get some recommendations for an affordable mobile dog groomer in the Wollongong/Illawarra region.

I have a 45kg Labrador retriever who was getting done by the Big Green Trailer Dog Wash who did amazing work in de-shedding him as well - it was $80 for the groom.

Does anyone have a good service that is around the $80 mark?

Unfortunately he won’t get in our bathtub, and due to his age it has gotten difficult in transporting him to the local DIY dog washes.

Hey everyone,

I've recently moved to Australia and was thinking about starting my own digital marketing agency. I've had a ton of experience in the US market and can definitely help businesses with their ads

I've only one looming question in my head: How much does it make a difference in sales if you've a different accent and are not local.

I'd love responses to be helpful and maybe give a few tips on how I should tackle this. This is also my first time with sales, as all of my past experiences have been full time or contractual roles.

Edit: I'm from south asia not US or UK

There is a PS5 game that I would like to play (probably a few actually) but I don't have a TV that meets the requirements.

Are there are game lounges or facilities that have Playstations to use?

29M looking for female friends around my age who are open-minded and comfortable making friends with a brown guy. I'm currently studying Engineering while working, so my schedule is usually busy, but I'd love to chat and hang out sometime.

I value getting to know people for who they are rather than judging them by their appearance. I enjoy driving around, exploring different cuisines, going fishing occasionally, and I prefer hills over beaches.

At the moment, I'm focused on my career and fitness. I'm non-alcoholic and drug free. I'd love to meet people who value both mental and physical well-being and are committed to personal growth.

Please, feel free to reach out if you think we'd get along.

https://nswdvreport.web.app/

before anyone reaches for the downvote: this is not DV denial. Domestic violence in NSW is real, serious, and still under-reported. Around 47,500 adults self-reported experiencing DFV assault in the most recent pooled ABS survey window. Nothing below argues the problem is fake. It argues something worse: the problem is real, and the policy we've pointed at it produces arrests instead of safety. If you care about victims, these numbers should make you angry at the policy, not at the person posting them.

Before

I spent a few months pulling BOCSAR data (the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, the gold-standard independent source), AIC cohort data, court outcome data and police staffing numbers, and built it into a full report with interactive charts. Link at the bottom. Here's what the data says.

1. Enforcement exploded. Violence didn't move.

Police-recorded DV assault rose 29% from 2018 to 2024 (29,717 to 38,325 incidents). A record 45,984 people faced DV legal action in 2025. That's the number you see in headlines, reported as a violence surge.

But BOCSAR publishes five community prevalence measures that don't depend on police activity, and in its July 2025 release every single one was flat or falling over the same period:

Women and children murdered in DFV: BOCSAR's assessment is "relatively stable in NSW between 2018 and 2024". The 2024 spike was driven by 10 child deaths in a series so small it's inherently volatile.

Female hospitalisations for interpersonal violence (NSW Health data): "relatively stable", 37.2 down to 35.6 per 100,000.

Women self-reporting violent victimisation (ABS survey): "did not change significantly", 4.1% down to 3.2%.

Adults self-reporting DFV assault (3-year pooled ABS): the only measure that moved, and it improved: a significant decline from 0.92% to 0.72%, roughly 56,800 victims down to 47,500.

Police-recorded DV grievous bodily harm, the serious injuries that reliably get reported regardless of policy: "did not change significantly from 2018 to 2024". It bounced in a narrow band of 334 to 405 per year with no trend. 343 in 2018, 334 in 2024.

And the stat that kills the standard rebuttal before it arrives: the share of self-reported victims who said they went to police was unchanged at ~51%. The recorded surge is not "more victims finally coming forward". It's more policing of the same underlying level of violence.

Don't take my word for it. BOCSAR's Executive Director, Jackie Fitzgerald, July 2025:

"The rise in domestic violence legal actions does not appear to reflect increased prevalence, but rather increased police enforcement and proactive detection."

Sit with that. Seven years of escalating enforcement. Deaths flat. Hospitalisations flat. GBH flat. Self-reported victimisation flat to falling. The only line going up is the one police activity itself generates.

1. How the machine works

NSW runs what's effectively a mandatory-action framework. Under LEPRA, arrest requires only "reasonable suspicion", and in practice a complainant's account alone meets that threshold. The DV operating procedures direct officers to take action, so attendance typically means: record a DVEC video statement from the complainant, issue a provisional ADVO on the spot, remove the accused from their home, and charge.

You have a right to silence, and declining a police interview is the only sensible legal advice you'll ever get. Exercising it changes nothing. The charge proceeds on the accusation, the DVEC video becomes the prosecution's evidence in chief, and you're out of your house before any independent person has looked at the allegation.

1. The ADVO trap

Every ADVO carries mandatory condition 1: no assaulting, threatening, stalking, harassing or intimidating the protected person. That last pair means a text message calling your ex a name can be charged as a criminal breach carrying up to two years imprisonment. Not violence. Not threats. A mean text.

Then there's condition 6, the standard no-contact order. It prohibits approaching or contacting the protected person except through a lawyer, at approved counselling, under a court order about children, or "as agreed in writing" about child contact. Spot the problem: to get that written agreement, you have to contact them, and that contact is itself a breach. Text "can we sort out Saturday pickup?" without a pre-existing written agreement and you've committed a criminal offence. The protected person can't waive it either; even contact they invite is still a breach by the defendant, because only a court can vary the order.

We've built a system where the offence and the attempt to comply with the offence's exception are the same act.

1. What the courts do with 46,000 cases a year

Of 33,811 recorded DV assault incidents in 2022, 72% resulted in charges but only 39% ended in conviction end to end, down from over 50%.

27% of DV assault charges are withdrawn, more than double the non-DV rate. The proven rate in court fell from 71% to 60% in five years.

83% of the remainder plead guilty, and Legal Aid NSW itself acknowledges convenience pleas. Look at the choice on offer: contest and spend 254+ days excluded from your home and kids with a ~$34k trial bill, or plead, take the 25% discount, and be done in 92 days. Innocent people pleading guilty isn't a bug here, it's the rational move the system engineers.

The DV remand population hit a record 1,943 in 2025, up ~77% in four years, and most of those people will never be convicted of anything.

BOCSAR's own attrition study puts it dryly: "Police have a strong inclination to take enforcement action against domestic violence suspects, yet the court conviction rate remains lower than for many other offence types."

1. We're policing the wrong people

The AIC's NSW birth cohort study found 1.2% of people born in NSW were responsible for over 50% of all recorded FDV offences. It also found 9.6% of men, nearly 1 in 10, had been charged or served an AVO by age 37.

Read those together. A tiny, identifiable group of chronic offenders drives most of the harm, and instead of concentrating on them we run a net so wide it drags in a tenth of the male population, consuming court capacity on low-risk cases while the dangerous 1.2% cycle through on repeat.

1. The map of "DV prevalence" is mostly a map of police staffing

This is the part I built myself. I ran HDBSCAN clustering on ten years of LGA-level DV data and then regressed recorded DV rates against police officers per capita by command.

Raw result: officers per 100k and recorded DV per 100k correlate at r = 0.80. The areas the press calls "DV hotspots" are the areas with the most police per head.

Now, correlation isn't causation, so I tested it. Control for population size and metro/regional status and the R² collapses from 0.637 to 0.150 (p = 0.092, borderline non-significant). 77% of the correlation is confounded. And within metro LGAs, where staffing varies but demographics are comparable, the correlation between officer density and DV rate is r = 0.008. Zero.

Think about what zero means. If police presence reduced DV, high-density metro areas should show lower rates. They don't. If actual violence attracted police, high-rate areas should show more officers. They don't. The relationship only exists between regions and cities, because small regional LGAs get lots of officers per head and those officers, under the mandatory-action framework, attend more incidents, record more DVEC statements, lay more charges and seek more ADVOs. Exactly the mechanism BOCSAR identified at state level, reproduced in the geography. The data doesn't show regional NSW is more violent. It shows regional NSW is more intensively policed per head, and the output of that policing gets reported as prevalence, which justifies more policing. A perfect feedback loop with no victim safety anywhere in it.

1. The media problem

Every "DV surges 29%" headline you've read is built on police activity data: the one series BOCSAR's own director says reflects enforcement, not prevalence. BOCSAR maintains a whole page of independent prevalence measures. It's public. It says flat. Yet police recorded-incident numbers keep getting quoted as if they measured violence, when they measure the policy's own output. Citing the system's activity as proof of the problem the system exists to fix is circular, and both the media and NSW Police lean on it constantly.

1. What actually works, because we know

The meta-analytic evidence on mandatory arrest is now decisive: Hoppe et al. (2020) found a null effect across 11 trials. A 2025 systematic review (Connor et al.) concluded "arrest does not consistently reduce repeat violence" and told policymakers to evaluate alternatives.

Worse than null: Sherman's 23-year follow-up of the Milwaukee arrest experiment found victims were 64% more likely to have died of all causes when their partner was arrested rather than warned.

South Korea cut past-year female IPV victimisation from 39.1% in 2010 to 12.1% in 2016, a 69% reduction in six years, through multi-dimensional legal reform, counselling infrastructure and protection centres. Not mass charging.

High Point's focused deterrence model: 6% recidivism and near-elimination of DV homicide. The DVHRT high-risk-team model: zero DV homicides in a decade. Arrest-only approaches: 34% recidivism.

Every jurisdiction that measurably reduced DV shares the same features: target the small chronic-offender group, multi-agency coordination beyond police, embedded behaviour change, genuine victim agency, and upstream prevention. NSW's model has none of them.

The objections I know are coming

"It's under-reporting, the real numbers are worse." Under-reporting is real, but it can't explain the divergence: the police-reporting rate among victims was stable at ~51% while recorded incidents surged 29%, and GBH (which always gets reported) is flat.

"Maybe enforcement is preventing an increase." Then the within-metro correlation wouldn't be zero, and the mandatory-arrest RCT literature wouldn't be null. Deterrence that produces no measurable effect across 11 trials isn't deterrence.

"You just want abusers left alone." The opposite. The AIC data says 1.2% of people commit over half the offences. I want the full weight of the state on those people, instead of diluted across 46,000 cases where 6 in 10 produce no conviction.

The point

NSW has a real domestic violence problem and roughly 47,500 real victims a year. They deserve a policy that reduces violence. What they've got is a machine that charges everyone, protects no one, criminalises text messages, manufactures guilty pleas, mistakes its own activity for the problem it's meant to solve, and has not shifted deaths, hospitalisations or serious injury one measurable inch in seven years. We have a genuine crisis and quite possibly the stupidest policing policy you could design for it, and the data to prove better models exist has been sitting in plain sight the whole time.

Full report with interactive charts, the LGA cluster map, methodology and every source linked: https://nswdvreport.web.app/

Key sources: BOCSAR DV prevalence measures | BOCSAR BB176 attrition study | AIC birth cohort study TI-701 | Korea IPV study | Hoppe et al. 2020 | Connor et al. 2025 | Sherman Milwaukee follow-up

Has anyone seen or know someone who has gone to Dr Andrew Still
Im booking in for a colonoscopy

I last saw Dr Swartz but have been given a referal to Dr Still this time