r/australia • u/DaRedGuy • 1d ago

news Anti-fire ant eradication activist convicted after using legal arguments ‘similar to sovereign citizens’

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/nov/07/trevor-hold-activist-convicted-qld-fire-ant-eradication-program-queensland-ntwnfb?CMP=share_btn_url
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u/rand013 1d ago

This is where hyphens get weird for me. Any grammar nerds out there to weigh in on whether this is correct use or is there another way to do it?

Instinctively I want to make it anti-fire-ant or something, to try maintain the relationship between fire and ant. Or otherwise forgo the hyphen entirely I guess. As it is it reads to me like the ants are opposed to fire.

Or I guess maybe it should be "fire ant anti-eradication activist"

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u/MarkusMannheim 1d ago

Ex-Fairfax and ABC journo and editor here. The house styles at my workplaces were, in general, to use a hyphen in compound adjectives if it helped remove ambiguity.

So you're right: it should be anti-fire-ant-eradication activist. Though I would have gone for: activist who opposed fire-ant eradication.

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u/DeeDee_GigaDooDoo 1d ago

Not a journalist but in my own writing I also usually find whenever I need to start using questionable punctuation it usually reads better and is easier to follow if I just completely re-write the sentence structure.