New analysis shows revenue from reforming investor tax breaks could build tens of thousands of affordable rentals and cut rents for everyone by hundreds of dollars a year.
The report from Everybody’s Home models what happens when you stop pouring billions into investor tax breaks and start directing the revenue to build homes instead.
The $19 billion saving over five years is based on replacing the CGT discount with indexation and ending negative gearing including phasing it out for existing investors.
The findings show this reform could:
Build approximately 29,000 to 42,000 public and community homes
House around 12,000 to 17,000 households experiencing homelessness
Reduce the national median rent by 0.7% to 1%
In dollar terms, that means renters could save between $230 and $330 a year.
“The Federal Budget is the government’s chance to finally make housing work for all Australians, not just those who profit from it,” Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said.
“Every year, billions of dollars line investors’ pockets and it’s pushing up the cost of housing for everyone else. These tax breaks give the wealthy a hand up while locking out first home buyers and leaving renters worse off.
With the government proposing to de-corporatise SA Water, this post tracks what happened to water prices in Adelaide under SA Water and raises some issues for whatever regulatory regime will replace SA Water.
The new AppliedMMT dashboard is live this week — head to the beta dashboard link on the site to check it out. All the daily Treasury data, the flow phase model, vol shift, flow sentiment, and a handful of new model upgrades are now in one cleaned-up spot. I'll walk through what changed and how to use it.
On markets: April was a heck of a run, and we're now showing classic signs of technical exhaustion, we may need a pause here but I'm not convinced, with some caveats, that a big selloff is needed.
But here's the bigger story. While building out the dashboard, I came across a margin debt chart that genuinely jumped off the page. We're now seeing a divergence between price returns and margin debt growth that has only shown up at two other points in the last 50 years — and both times it preceded a major recession. Combined with what the deficit impulse is telling us about late 2026, the picture is getting clearer about where we are in this cycle. We're at least in the seventh-inning stretch.
Full breakdown below — including why I think the next leg higher is still on the table, and what the actual end-of-cycle trigger I'm watching for looks like.
Every week Australia delays introducing a 25% gas export tax is costing us $350 million. It’s a lot of lost revenue to ignore when your government has announced it will cut 160,000 people from the NDIS ahead of the federal budget.
Yet, when the Prime Minister visited Perth this week, he seemed to kick the can down the road on a gas export tax in this budget, reassuring the mining industry that it “will not undermine existing contracts on gas exports”.
It’s a safe bet the political pressure to tax gas fairly will not diminish – the public supports it from Greens to One Nation voters, and it’s an issue that unites everyone from the head of the ACTU to the head of the Commonwealth Bank. As the political pressure will only keep growing, so too will the economic cost of not doing introducing a gas export tax, it will only become more obscene and more unfair as the weeks drag on.
Unfairness was as the heart of the Global Progressive Mobilisation I recently participated in in Barcelona, convened by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The contrast between the unashamed call to arms for bold progressive action there, and the aggressive commitment to incremental centrism at home could not be starker.
Local council elections are often treated as a footnote to national politics, but your local government makes decisions every day that shape inequality in your community. From housing to social care, planning to procurement local councils hold real powers that can challenge – or entrench – inequality. Candidates will be happy to condemn the record […]
Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it. After yet another gunman tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones. Quite right. But the American Left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.
Consider: last Wednesday, the New YorkTimes hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers that “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Senator] Rick Scott.” He joked with Tolentino about “microlooting”—that is, shoplifting—and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.
The global economic impacts of the American-Israeli war on Iran are already being felt, particularly in Asia, through shortages of fuel and other necessities, the closure of factories and the loss of jobs. We are now on a path heading for a global recession, or even worse, a global depression. To sort out what potentially lies ahead and the likelihood of preventing the worst outcomes, Chris Hedges speaks with economist Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Few ideas are more daunting to an artist than opening up their creative process on the merciless sewer that is social media. Yet this is precisely what my dear friend Josh Steinman suggested when I shared my plan to write a symphony for America’s 250th birthday on a hot SoCal day in December 2024. “You should post live-to-tape updates with all of the mistakes, insecurities, decisions, and improvisation,” he proposed.
Thus began a process that no longer involved cloistered introspection. In the digital age, millions of creators vie for attention with stunts, AI slop, and general vapidity—yet almost none have capitalized on audiences’ desire for authenticity. What better way to be authentic than an egoless public struggle against oneself in the construction of a large-scale symphonic work!
In that initial pursuit of authenticity, the conduit for inspiration revealed itself in the form of a fundamental question: “What is America?” It is from meditating on that question that the American essence gathers through the rightly crafted language of music.
Music is a language. It is the most poetic language because it is the most abstract language, as words never seem to elucidate its emotional or spiritual power. There are, however, clear stylistic markers or syntactic structures that may evoke truths of specific peoples. America is no exception.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss the latest inflation figures, which are the first to include the impact of the war in Iran, and why the RBA should take a step back and look at all the data, before they meet to assess interest rates next week.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 30 April 2026.
Visit The Point for research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts at the Australia Institute and beyond.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
The United States, in its recent war on Iran, has completely misread the Iranian people and failed to recognize the deep revolutionary spirit that pervades Iranian culture. Rather than inciting Iranian people against their government, the US-Israeli war on Iran has united the population. Rather than promoting democracy in Iran and empowering the people, US economic punishment and aggression have accomplished the opposite and have made life more difficult for most Iranians. Like Cuba, Iran is being targeted because it will not relinquish its sovereignty. As Chris Hedges explains, Iran is being punished for “its refusal to become a client state aligned with American interests in the region.”
Media Release Number 2026-11: The Account-to-Account Payments Roundtable has today released a public consultation on the draft vision for the future of account-to-account (A2A) payments in Australia. Submissions close 22 May.
National housing campaign Everybody’s Home said the federal government must prioritise building social housing and ending investor tax breaks in this year’s Budget, as new analysis reveals virtually no affordable rentals exist for people on the lowest incomes.
This year’s Rental Affordability Snapshot, released by Anglicare Australia, found that nationally, 0% of private rentals were affordable for people on JobSeeker and Youth Allowance, just 0.2% for someone on the Age Pension, and only 0.5% for a full-time minimum wage worker.
Everybody’s Home spokesperson Chantal Caruso said the Federal Budget must deliver tax reform and redirect those savings into homes people can afford.
“It’s staggering that there are virtually no affordable rentals in the private market for people on the lowest incomes. Even full-time workers on the minimum wage are being completely priced out,” Ms Caruso said.
“The system is failing, but it can be fixed if the federal government steps up now with meaningful reform and investment.
“This Budget presents a critical opportunity to deliver meaningful reform by ending unfair investor tax breaks that are making the housing crisis worse, and reinvesting those savings into building more public and community housing.
If George Washington and John Quincy Adams were in the Oval Office advising President Trump on whether to go to war with Iran, what would they have said? They would likely have argued that any American war in the Middle East—whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Iran, or in partnership with any ally that commits American money, armaments, or troops—is pure folly.
Both in theory and practice, early American political leaders unequivocally rejected the claim that America was an empire or world hegemon like those established by Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, the Mongols, or Napoleon. Instead, America was a new kind of regime unseen in world history: a republican empire of liberty, limited in constitutional scope and political geography but unlimited in the power of her political spirit and her example to the world.
Equal Nations
The Preamble of the Declaration of Independence includes a curious phrase often overlooked by commentators: “and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” What did the founders mean by a “separate and equal station,” and what does this phrase tell us about their conception of America’s political regime?
New Democratic Party members selected Avi Lewis as the new party leader, with a majority of votes on the first-round ballot. Now, the complex task of rebuilding the movement continues. With a House of Commons NDP caucus of 5 MPs as of the time of writing, Lewis and his new team will need to continue the organizing that took place during the leadership campaign, uniting over 100,000 existing and new party members that participated in voting for a new party leader.
The 2026 NDP Convention and leadership vote, held in Winnipeg, Manitoba from March 27 to 29, also saw the election of a new party executive; some have already voiced concern about the lack of equity among the new executive team. I would like to see Lewis’ leadership team and the new federal executive act swiftly and take a different approach from the previous leadership, to ensure equity is at the forefront of the party in all aspects from governance. This means strengthening Electoral District Association (EDA) organizing, as promised during Lewis’ campaign. It also means stronger equity and earlier candidate searches, as well as turning NDP equity values into effective, intersectional, and tangible policy proposals.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
On this episode of Follow the Money, Senator Larissa Waters, leader of the Australian Greens, joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the causes of Australia’s housing crisis, making gas exporters pay their fair share, and the Greens’ new ‘tax the 1%’ campaign.
The footage was grainy and imprecise, the black-and-white nighttime combat visuals to which Americans have become accustomed over the past generation. Still there they were: American aircraft and American soldiers in action, another strike in defense of a nation at war. Yet this combat operation was not part of the American war with Iran, then only four days old: the announcement on March 3, followed by another on March 6, concerned American forces in Ecuador.
With the cooperation of Ecuadorian authorities, the United States attacked narco-terrorists who were reportedly a splinter faction of FARC, a guerrilla force that once sought leftist revolution in Colombia. Now having devolved into a cartel with socialist characteristics, its successors find themselves on the receiving end of American violence. The two military actions received relatively little attention in U.S. media: an air-assault infantry raid in the Andean region isn’t as telegenic as B-2s flying over Isfahan. But they just might be as portentous.
In 2014, Noel Pearson delivered an eulogy for Gough Whitlam. Professor Tom Clark wrote about it for The Conversation and said “Pearson came to praise Caesar on Wednesday, certainly not to bury him” as he listed the achievements of one of Australia’s greatest reformers.
Pearson said he was speaking to “this old man’s legacy with no partisan brief” but named the Racial Discrimination Act as one of the most important acts of Whitlam’s prime ministership, saying “without this old man the land and human rights of our people would never have seen the light of day”.
“Only those who have known discrimination truly know its evil,” Pearson said on that day.
He later described the Whitlam government as the “textbook case of reform trumping management”.
Prices for groceries, rent, insurance, gas bills are up and the cost of petrol is through the roof, and wages aren’t keeping up with rising prices. While many Australians are finding it harder to make ends meet, there has been an explosion in the wealth of the super-rich. Australia taxes wealth very lightly, it’s time that changed.
“Billionaires have the lowest effective tax rate of all social groups everywhere”, according to French economist Gabriel Zucman.
“There is a legitimate debate to have about the proper degree of tax progressivity … But nobody should accept a situation where the super-rich can pay less than the middle class. It’s a basic violation of the fundamental principle of equality before the law, which stands at the heart of our social contract.”
Taxing wealth fairly is not just important for the economy, it’s important for our democracy. As the federal budget approaches, we’re about to hear a lot about what Australia ‘can’t afford’. We can’t afford for so many people to access the National Disability Insurance Scheme, for example. We ‘can’t afford’ to increase the unemployment benefit above the poverty line. But somehow we can afford $368 billion for nuclear submarines we may never receive, and we can afford to give away half of our liquid natural gas royalty-free.
For millions of people, renting is how they access a home. Everyone should be able to live in a home that is stable, affordable and safe — and to trust that the system will treat them fairly.
But while housing is as essential to our society as water, healthcare and energy, governments have largely failed to regulate renting that way. That has left too many renters exposed to insecurity, rising costs and poor conditions.
A new report from Anika Legal, Better Renting and the Consumer Policy Research Centre, Essential Homes, shows strong public support for a different approach:
83% say renting is an essential service
77% say a generation of renters may never be able to afford a home
73% want governments to reform the rental system so it works fairly for renters
The report sets out a practical vision for renting built around stability, affordability, comfort and accountability — and the reforms needed to get there. It’s time to treat renting like the essential service it is.
The lovely folks at the Social Media + Society journal asked me to contribute to their anniversary issue by reflecting on the trajectory of social media. Ooof. Snark exuded from my pores as I tried to figure out what I might say. But then I thought about how my students don't know about an era of social media without recommended content, algorithmically curated feeds, and an infinite scroll of cotton candy content. They never encountered a world of social media where people were focused on sharing with their friends rather than becoming influencers. They don't realize how much the "social" in social media has changed.
The 2024 People’s Circle for Palestine protest encampment at the University of Toronto is best understood in terms of “contradiction” as the tensions and struggles which make political life. Over its two-month duration, it was neither a unified expression of solidarity nor reducible to a narrative of institutional repression, but a shifting field of forces in which insurgent organizing and institutional authority converged. What emerged from the People’s Circle was a political formation shaped by the interaction of these opposing forces, each delimiting what could be sustained.
Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel-turned-movie We Need to Talk About Kevin was a major prize-winner, a bestseller, and a hit, especially among liberals. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as it dealt with two of their favorite subjects: school shootings and mental health. However, her latest work of fiction, A Better Life, is guaranteed to be received less warmly on the Left, if it’s acknowledged at all.
The central figure in A Better Life is Gloria Bonaventura, an archetypal liberal white woman whom conservatives and independents know all too well. While many New Yorkers at least bristled at their city’s 2022 “migrant crisis,” in which billions were spent on hotel housing alone, Gloria splashily ramps up her do-gooder bona fides. The Brooklyn resident and mother of three adult children sets up a clothing drive for “our newest New Yorkers,” then pushes supermarkets to install donation bins for “culturally appropriate” food, a new program called “Big Apple, Big Hearts” that lets her reach new heights in conspicuous charity. Gloria also brings a highly questionable asylum-seeker into her large home to live with her and her Gen Z son, Nico. For Gloria, young Martiné of Honduras becomes the perfect vehicle, in the words of Nico’s woke sister, to “assure her that she’s making the world a better place.”
Earlier this month, TheAtlantic published a hit piece on FBI Director Kash Patel, accusing him of frequently drinking to excess and often being absent from work and unreachable by colleagues in the administration. Reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick’s article claims that Patel’s deficiencies are a threat to national security given the essential role the FBI director has in protecting the country from grave threats.
Patel responded by suingThe Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation. His lawyers argued that the article’s claims are false and accused The Atlantic of behaving irresponsibly by publishing them. The lawsuit alleges that, among other things, the magazine did not give Patel sufficient time to respond to the allegations before publication, and that the article did not adequately convey the denials and counterevidence that Patel and his supporters had provided.
What are we to make of all this?
Patel certainly has something to complain about. The Atlantic presents the claims of his alleged drunkenness and absenteeism as facts, not as mere speculation. And, as his filing notes, such factual claims certainly amount to libel per se. That is, they are claims that are prima facie injurious to reputation without the need to consult their context.
On August 27th, 2025, about 50 activists gathered at City Hall in Terrace, British Columbia, a rural community of 12,000. From City Hall, they marched to Skeena—Bulkley Valley MP Ellis Ross’ constituency office where they delivered a letter demanding an arms embargo against Israel. The protestors marched from there to a nearby park, where they gathered to hear community members speak about the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, Canada’s involvement in these crimes, and how ordinary Canadians can build power and fight to win a different world.
Ferret around in the National Archives of Australia and you can turn up NAA A6119, 2749 and 3044, digitised redacted versions of Volumes 1 and 2 of data compiled by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) between 1967 and 1971 regarding Rowan John Cahill. The online presence is due to researchers long ago who sought the data under access regulations of the time. Subsequent Volumes remain in the care of ASIO.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis reflects on yet another appalling yet unsurprising act of political violence in the United States, before Mother Jones journalist James West joins the show to discuss the midterm elections and whether real fractures are emerging in the MAGAverse.
This episode was recorded on Thursday 23 April Australian time.
In his latest newsletter, Jamison Foser writes beautifully and compellingly about Bruce Springsteen, the USA, politics, and we the people. There is much to learn from Foster’s piece, especially about culture, true patriotism, and collective action.
I’m deep in the trenches in two different collective action efforts. (More here and here.) And down in the trenches, it is easy to feel bogged down. To be reminded that my own work is connected to so many others’ work and to so many others’ hopes and dreams is empowering and encouraging. Jamison’s essay fulfills the same function he sees Springsteen performing. He reminded me of the connection between my own ordinary efforts and the great project of American democracy.
In the third book of the Discourses on Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli argues that republics “do not last if they do not renew themselves” by recourse to their origins, when they were at their most pure. “Because in the process of time that goodness is corrupted, unless something intervenes to lead it back to the mark, it of necessity kills the body.”
Historian J.G.A. Pocock elaborates on this idea, arguing for a “Machiavellian moment” (the title of his sprawling and majestic book on the subject) in which a republic must act to save itself by returning to first principles. Per Pocock, the Renaissance Florentines, the Commonwealthmen of 18th-century Britain, and the Revolutionary-era Americans all faced such a moment and were forced to act against the corruption of their regimes. These moments, however, are not always successful. The Florentines lost their republic, and the Commonwealthmen remained a minority in Britain, whose legacy was predominantly to influence the American patriots at the end of the century.
If the United States is serious about giving citizenship to worthy immigrants, we also need to be serious about revoking it from the unworthy.
More than 800,000 immigrants became American citizens in FY 2024, and a comparable number are expected in FY 2025, though the final numbers aren’t out yet. There are more than 25 million naturalized American citizens, which is about half the foreign-born population. Having delivered remarks at many swearing-in ceremonies, I welcome those—undoubtedly the majority—who followed the rules and took the Oath of Allegiance in good faith.
But many didn’t. That’s where denaturalization comes in.
The question of revoking citizenship from immigrants who lied on their applications or were otherwise ineligible is part of a broader debate about what membership in our national community means—a debate made especially urgent by the waves of mass immigration the political class has allowed into our country over the past 50-plus years.
The 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was held on Wednesday, April 22nd at Toronto Metropolitan University with support from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – New York Office. A special thanks to TMU Faculty of Arts Dean Amy Peng, and RLS-NYC Director Stefan Liebich for hosting this Broadbent Institute event.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the left’s foremost theorists on democracy and history, and often promoted the idea that democracy always has to be fought for and secured from below, never benevolently conferred from above. The Broadbent Institute founded the annual Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize & Lecture to honour Professor Wood’s legacy as an internationally renowned scholar and to bring her work to new generations of Canadians.
The Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is given annually to an academic, labour activist or writer and recognizes outstanding contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, or sociology. Each year’s recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture.
