Let me save you the suspense. If your job can be done from a laptop and an internet connection, there is no good reason you should be commuting into an office during a fuel shock like this.
We already ran the biggest accidental experiment in remote work anyone could have asked for. It worked. The world did not end. Companies did not collapse. Projects still shipped, meetings still happened, and the entire knowledge economy did not spontaneously burst into flames because people were working from spare bedrooms instead of beige carpet boxes in the CBD.
The RBA just raised the cash rate to 4.1%. That is two hikes in two months. The big four banks are tipping a third in May to 4.35%, which would be three consecutive rate rises for the first time since March 2023, back when they were trying to wrangle post-COVID inflation. Two rate hikes in the first quarter of 2026 has added $225 a month to the average home loan, or $2,700 a year. That nearly wipes out the three rate cuts we got in 2025.
Australians are coffee snobs. This is not a stereotype. It is a fact. We are insufferable about it. We will complain about coffee in other countries. We will refuse to drink certain things. We will make faces at menu items that locals consider perfectly normal. We have opinions about milk texture that border on religious doctrine.
And you know what? We are right.
Australian coffee is genuinely, measurably, objectively better than what most of the world drinks. This is not nationalism. This is not bias. This is the truth, and I will not apologise for it.
In less than a week, Australia becomes the first democracy in the world to ban under-16s from social media. On December 10th, 2025, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, Snapchat, Reddit, and Twitch will be legally required to boot millions of Australian teenagers off their platforms or face fines up to $50 million per violation.
We are about to run a massive social experiment on an entire generation. And I do not think protecting children is the real goal here.
For the past ten years, every good opportunity in my career has come through people. Former clients who referred me. Colleagues who remembered a job I did well. Friends of friends who needed help and trusted the recommendation. In Australia especially, the circles in tech are smaller than you think and the degree of separation is tiny.
If you build real connections, you can often sidestep the mess that is interviewing and get hired for the work you actually do, not for how fast you can solve an algorithm on a whiteboard. I am genuinely grateful for that.