Family — Ministry of Doubt, Election Tracker, Oze

Author: Colin Dixon
Updated: 2026-08-14

Can’t Explain is not a standalone gag site. It is the fun, viral, claim-collection sibling in a small set of independent Australian public-interest projects by Colin Dixon / Oze. The family shares values and a design temperament. Each member has a different job.

The Ministry line is the spine:

Suspicion is not proof. Authority is not proof either. Show me the evidence.

Can’t Explain’s variation, used on the homepage and nowhere as a lecture:

Show me the evidence. Then we can laugh about it.

The jobs, so they do not collapse into each other

Property	Job	What it is not
ministryofdoubt.com	Book and public face of a method: how an intelligent person distinguishes genuine conspiracy, institutional failure, incompetence, groupthink, incentives, propaganda and nonsense — without becoming programmable by either side.	Not a claim hall. Not a news desk. Working dossiers stay offline.
electiontracker.au	Open, sourced, machine-readable Australian election ledger. Dates, candidates, parties, policies, polls. Git is the record.	Not a forecast. Not a how-to-vote. Not funny on purpose.
cantexplain.au	Hall of low-evidence, high-emotion accusations, each pinned to a source and a Git-timestamped receipt, presented with observational humour.	Not a daily paper. Not a campaign. Not the book.
ozeunleashed.substack.com	Essays and longer commentary.	Not a structured ledger.
oze.au / oze.net.au	Publisher / studio mark.	Not the editorial voice of any one site.
ozol.com	Author profile.	Not a project homepage.

If a piece of work is unsure where it lives, use the job column, not the vibe.

Shared values

These are non-negotiable across the family. A Can’t Explain entry that violates them is a bad entry, however funny.

Evidence over vibe. A claim without a source is not an entry. A caption without a receipt is a dunk.
Independence. No party, candidate, lobby or outlet has a right of review. No hidden funding that buys coverage.
Checkable sources. Original URL + date. Prefer a file in this repo so the timestamp is ours and public.
Git as a public record. History is part of the product — same instinct as electiontracker.au.
Australian voice, not a franchise of someone else’s culture war.
Fair process. The same rules apply to every target. Launch themes are Hanson-heavy; the standard is not.
Narrowness. Each site does one job well. Do not turn Can’t Explain into a second Ministry, or the Ministry into a punchline.

Shared design language (steal this)

From electiontracker.au, which already solved the chrome:

Warm paper, not clinical grey. Ink, not navy-because-serious.
Dark / light theme with no flash of the wrong palette.
Clean typography, generous type, mobile-first.
Accent colour that is not a party colour. Election Tracker uses plum. Can’t Explain uses a rust / sealing-wax accent — receipts, stamps, manila folders.
Evidence is visible in the layout: source, date, file. Not buried under “read more”.
Footer credit to Oze. “Elsewhere” links to siblings.

From ministryofdoubt.com:

Calm confidence. No hero video, no urgency bar, no “subscribe to unlock the truth”.
The public site is the public face. Working notes stay out of the deploy.

Distinct on purpose:

Serif display on Can’t Explain (editorial / cartoon energy). Election Tracker stays sans for data.
Humour is allowed in captions and chrome. It is not allowed to replace a field.

Cross-linking rules

Always

Footer “Elsewhere” lists Ministry of Doubt, Election Tracker, and Oze Unleashed.
About page has one short family paragraph and a link to this document’s public cousin (/about#family).
Homepage has one sentence that situates the site next to the Ministry line, then gets on with the hall.

When it is natural

An entry that turns on an election fact (who stood, who donated, who said what on the record) may link the relevant Election Tracker page rather than re-litigating the ledger.
A method question (“how do you know this isn’t just another conspiracy site?”) links the Ministry, not a 400-word recap.
A longer argument that grew out of a hall entry belongs on Oze Unleashed, with a link back to the card.

Never

Turn the homepage into a portal of every Dixon property.
Clone Ministry copy or Election Tracker methodology pages.
Use a sibling link as a punchline at the sibling’s expense.
Import personal social accounts into the project footer. Maintainer channels live on /about, same pattern as electiontracker.au.

Suggested homepage situating paragraph

Use this, or a close rewrite, not a longer manifesto:

Can’t Explain is the noisy sibling of a quieter rule. Over at the Ministry of Doubt the line is: suspicion is not proof, and authority isn’t either. Here we keep the same rule and apply it to the claims that arrive already shouting. The hall collects the accusation, the original source, and a timestamped receipt. The joke is the gap.

Author / publisher

Author: Colin Dixon
Physics, mathematics and IT background. Australian voice. Builds public evidence tools.

Publisher: Oze

Maintainer contact belongs on /about, not in every caption.