Justice Beech-Jones unloaded on the Samuel Griffith Society last week, accusing it of copying the Federalist Society's playbook to stack Australian courts with right-wing jurists. The shot landed close to home: colleague Justice Steward, the court's most conservative member, is a three-time society speaker. Beech-Jones saved his sharpest words for the society's Mabo obsession, noting its papers compared the decision to "a disease": AFR

⚖️ Employment: The Fair Work Commission has handed a partial win to a Sydney mother working for real estate tech company Reapit, ordering that she only needs to come into the office once a fortnight rather than two days a week. Commissioner Matheson found the nexus between the employee's caring responsibilities and her flexible work request was established, particularly given one child's special needs affected school drop-off. Reapit's culture and cohesion arguments didn't fully land, partly because only a small number of the employee's team were Sydney-based, making it hard to see what her consistent presence would actually do for broader culture. Full WFH was refused though, so employers still have reasonable grounds to insist on some in-person attendance.

⚖️ Governance: The AICD and The Ethics Centre have dropped the second edition of Ethics in the Boardroom, updating their 2019 guide with a dedicated AI case study and a five-phase decision-making framework. The edition comes off the backdrop of the Australian Governance Summit, where only 1% of directors said their board was highly prepared for a geopolitical threat. The guide uses a "four lenses" model covering the organisation's ethics framework, board culture, interpersonal dynamics and individual director roles.

⚖️ Regulatory/Financial Services: The "efficiently, honestly and fairly" obligation in s 912A(1)(a) of the Corporations Act has quietly become one of ASIC's most versatile enforcement tools. It's a system-level obligation, not a transaction-level one, meaning licensees can be caught for governance and compliance failures well upstream of any specific misconduct. Whether the three limbs form a composite standard or three separate obligations remains unresolved, though courts haven't needed to settle it to find breaches. AFS licensees should treat the obligation as covering governance, remediation, data and incident response — not just the moment a financial service is delivered: Mallesons

The teal independents are in advanced talks to form a proper political party, with Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall leading the push, possibly weeks away from an announcement. The trigger is One Nation polling at 59 lower house seats, threatening to replace the Coalition as the main opposition. Malcolm Turnbull has reportedly been doing the recruiting and independent senator David Pocock was approached and is keeping his options open: SMH, ABC

The Vatican just became Silicon Valley's latest critic. Pope Leo XIV has dropped his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, calling for AI to be "disarmed" and properly regulated before it turns humans into "cogs in a machine." Tellingly, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah was in the room and conceded AI labs operate inside incentives that "can conflict with doing the right thing.": Capital Brief

💵 Cosette Pharmaceuticals has been ordered to pay Mayne Pharma $13.27m in legal costs, plus interest, after the Supreme Court dismissed all of Cosette's counterclaims in proceedings stemming from an alleged breach of the scheme implementation deed: Capital Brief

🐾 TPG's shelved Greencross IPO looks less like a pause and more like a pivot, with bankers now quietly working a trade sale of the Petbarn operator. Coles' interest has reportedly rekindled, Goldman Sachs is circling, and TPG isn't budging off ~$3.3bn: The Australian

⛏️ Mineral Resources and JV partner Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium have greenlit a $490m expansion of the Mt Marion lithium operation in WA, split across a $240m flotation plant and $220m underground development: AFR