Queens Venture
Queens Venture began when I came across the figure that women-led companies received less than 3% of venture capital globally. I thought that was ridiculous. That inequality was the trigger.
Then I discovered that Gina Rinehart's company, Hancock Prospecting, was at 500 Queen Street in Brisbane. Queen's Wharf was under construction, and I was living down the road in Festival Towers. The synchronicities lined up for me, and I began thinking through 500 Queens and the possibilities of a global women's movement.
At the time, I was an unemployed man on workers compensation, with no corporate experience. I felt like an impostor trying to set up a global women's movement, so I didn't pursue it. The presentations preserve where that thought experiment took me.
Sovereign computing
My August 2026 papers address the Australian Parliament's Senate Environment and Communications References Committee inquiry into Artificial intelligence and data centres. Their central proposition is larger than putting a supercomputer in every postcode. Australia should deliberately build a federated intelligence stack spanning personal devices, neighbourhood meshes, serious community-scale compute, bioregional, state and national systems, commercial data centres, research supercomputers, quantum systems and future orbital capability.
The weakest part of that stack is the missing middle between the phone and the giant data centre. I use one serious community node for roughly every 10,000 people as an understandable starting ratio, adapted to geography, Country, population, energy, institutions and disaster exposure. Federation is not a pipeline for sending everything upwards. It creates choices about what stays local, what can be shared and what remains under personal or collective authority. Open interfaces, workload portability, degraded operation and the ability to change vendors are part of sovereignty, not optional extras.
I propose beginning with 32 deliberately different sites, four in every state and territory. An all-in planning allowance of A$6 million per frontier-class node makes that first cohort approximately A$192 million. Each installation would combine secure compute with a visible community laboratory, a digital twin, just-in-time XR training and an obligation to teach the next cohort. Recruitment would run through councils, schools, TAFEs, universities, hospitals, libraries, Indigenous developer pathways, girls-in-code networks, makers, creative industries and research institutions. The cycle is identify, qualify, train, install, experiment, document and teach the next cohort.
The Commonwealth would fund the national backbone, security standards and shared services, while states and territories would connect energy, planning, education, health and emergency-management systems. Local councils and community institutions would host place-based capability without inheriting another unfunded mandate. First Nations would hold a genuine sovereign layer wherever Country, language, cultural knowledge and collective data are involved, with authority to participate, connect or remain separate on their own terms.
My 24 August 2026 submission to the Brisbane hearing of the Independent AUKUS Public Inquiry takes that architecture into the national-security debate. The Inquiry itself asks about opportunity costs, cost-effective alternatives and whether AUKUS Pillar II advances could be achieved through other mechanisms. My answer is a Protopian Gambit: compare AUKUS with positive-sum security infrastructure that builds intelligence, education, science, climate and disaster resilience, cultural understanding and peaceful regional capability throughout society.
The scale comparison is deliberate. My cities dataset contains about 41,549 places with recorded populations of at least 9,000. At the same A$6 million planning allowance, a frontier-everywhere thought experiment is approximately A$249.3 billion, in the same broad order as the public A$268-368 billion life-cycle estimate for Australia's nuclear-powered submarine program. This is a strategic and moral question about what humanity is prepared to count as security infrastructure. Distributed civic capability can create peace before conflict becomes the only coordination mechanism left.
Queensland could test the complete stack: CSIRO Vetra at Pullenvale, universities and health networks, the proposed PsiQuantum facility at Moreton Bay, Brisbane 2032, Redlands and Minjerribah, the Gold Coast and wider national and international networks. I live on Minjerribah, and I have nominated 9 Ballow Road in Dunwich as one possible locally grounded community-compute, learning and disaster-resilience pilot. An island testbed could examine offline operation, backup communications, local energy, environmental modelling, public access and respectful First Nations data-governance pathways.
Brisbane 2032 could turn a temporary volunteer mobilisation into a permanent Civic Reserve skilled in AI, digital twins, logistics, communications, citizen science, disaster resilience, cultural stewardship and space-weather awareness. Aura Direct Hardware carries sovereignty into the machines themselves. Do not put all our eggs in one basket. Build the interfaces between the baskets.
The braided economy
My local-government submission addresses the federal House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Development, Infrastructure and Transport through its Inquiry into Local Government Funding and Fiscal Sustainability. The inquiry concerns the financial relationship between councils and other levels of government. My local setting is Minjerribah within Redland City Council, Queensland, connecting Commonwealth policy, state responsibilities and council-level practice.
My argument is the Incomplete Ledger: care, volunteering, social cohesion and ecological stewardship sustain a community, yet conventional accounts leave much of that contribution invisible. I proposed Community-Hours to record contribution and community sovereign wealth funds to retain and reinvest locally created value. Alongside them, sovereign digital twins connect personal and household records, voluntary neighbourhood sharing and council-level information without making private lives an open council database.
The original submission asks the Committee to recommend a Commonwealth legislative category for Regenerative Assets through changes to the Corporations Act 2001 and the digital-asset legislation then proposed. It also proposes a regulatory sandbox involving Treasury, ASIC, a pilot council such as Redland City Council and a First Nations partner. These are specific requests for a path into practice, with the Minjerribah proposal grounded in Quandamooka data sovereignty.
My later AI and treaty papers develop three distinct records: money for infrastructure and paid work, C-Hours for verified voluntary contribution, and outcome records for what actually changed. One verified hour is one C-Hour, without a dollar exchange rate. Paid work remains paid. That distinction matters: the hours given and the benefit created are related, but they are not the same measurement.
Family without assimilation
My Fiji-Australia Vuvale Union submission, dated 29 August 2026, and Ocean of Peace Alliance submission, dated 27 August, address the Australian Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. These are two separate federal parliamentary inquiries into agreements between the national governments of Fiji and Australia. The Ocean of Peace Alliance is also called the Veitacini Treaty.
For Vuvale, I propose an indicative A$100 million Civic Empowerment pilot: five to ten community-scale AI installations, with the rest supporting people, local models, food-waste reduction, cooperative finance, health research, digital twins and disaster resilience. The Vuvale Forum and long-term Work Plan offer a place to consider these locally chosen projects. I want the family relationship to become practical capability while each community keeps its own centre.
For the Ocean of Peace Alliance, I connect the treaty's Pacific Way, talanoa and consensus with daily civic cooperation. My proposals include locally governed pilots, shared ocean and climate sensing, public treaty knowledge, language tools, arts and youth exchange. GAJRA Earth brings in voluntary reflection on values across cultures. The aim is cooperation among distinct peoples, with the freedom to adopt, adapt or refuse, rather than one system absorbing everyone.
These treaty submissions extend the local-government and AI infrastructure work into an international setting. P4A.xyz is the foundation website for this civic architecture and the shared doorway into the Oceania and Native Nations pathways. Those cinema projects explore the relationships through imagined futures; the multi-site Minjerribah network returns to the places and infrastructure around my own home.