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He had no evidence for this – just some spurious numbers around what he said a carbon price would cost – but it didn’t matter. As he wrote himself in Weatherboard and Iron, the claim took off.

Australia dumped the carbon price under the Abbott government and lamb hit record prices in 2025 – because of drought.

Joyce also claimed in 2014 that the “country would go broke” if the 2014 budget wasn’t passed (much of it wasn’t) and – surprise, surprise – the country is not broke.

But we never go back and check what is right or wrong in these debates, which is why people like Joyce can continue to make outrageous claims and have them reported as having the same weight as actual facts, with no responsibility or accountability for when it’s revealed as bullsh-t.

The Coalition did the same with the carbon price, a tax that was never a tax as admitted by one of the architects of the successful scare campaign, Peta Credlin herself years later.

Because that’s the thing – the people who deliberately muddy the waters through misinformation, cherry-picking facts or straight-up falsehoods then brag about their success, admitting they knew it was wrong, but hey, “that’s politics”.

They can do it time and time again, because every time they change the lie, it’s treated as a serious input into the debate.

Leader (for now – those who wanted net zero gone will wait for the polls to officially end her career) Sussan Ley was particularly egregious, answering the question of “what will you tell your grandchildren?” with:

“The other thing that I want to be able to say to my grandchildren is that you should inherit a better standard of living than my generation and your mum and dad’s generation. Right now, they are set to inherit the worst standard of living since the Second World War.”

Now, enough words have been written on this most recent bout of stupidity, but those particular words lingered.

The same week the Liberal Party sucked up any and all political oxygen, the Victorian Labor government made a mockery of evidence-based solutions and research by capitulating to populist scare campaigns and announcing that children as young as 14 could be treated as adults in court.

This is happening as the federal government makes a big song and dance about banning under-16s from social media. Too young for TikTok but apparently old enough to face the adult incarceration system.

But we don’t care about children when there are tough-on-crime headlines to be made.

Just as we don’t care about children when setting climate policy – even as the consequences hit us. Both major parties have voted against having a duty of care for future generations included in legislation, as well as having fought against it in court. Children are to inherit our consequences, but have no say in the decision-making.

Shortly after I started, the printing press was closed and that magic became a memory, a period of time I was lucky to experience in an industry that has been in flux since.

But when I was lucky enough to get to stay around and watch the paper get put to bed, you would also get the benefit of learning from the salty news dogs who’d spent decades in journalism and learnt some universal truths.

They were usually on the night shift because they were no longer fit for human consumption, but also because they’d spot the errors others wouldn’t even know to look for (like an ad for funerals on the same page as a horror car smash or a story on air mattresses across from a sky-diving accident) and if they liked you, they’d tell you how little your university degree had taught you.

That was where I was told about “whinge and win”. It’s not specific to journalism, and it’s also known as being the loudest voice in the room.

Whinge and win is how the bullies, the incompetent and the plain annoying seem to always get their way. It’s easier to give in than to stand and fight, because the whinging winners have enough audacity to outlast all but the most staunch.

It’s how issues that aren’t issues end up dominating everyone’s agenda. How the worst people you know seem to always have victories, reinforcing their delusions the world is there to bend to them.

Because the flip side of whinge and win is suffering in silence. Which is what most people do, because the fight seems so overwhelming.

This is despite an increase in public funding through Workforce Australia, a Commonwealth Government service which pays private job agencies to help people who are unemployed find jobs.

The involvement of private agencies in the unemployment benefit system began in 1998, when the Howard Government replaced the government-run Commonwealth Employment Service. It instead contracted private or community-run job agencies to help people find jobs.

This was combined with the “mutual obligation” requirement for those receiving the benefit. This became known as the “Work for the Dole” program. Those receiving payments are required to do “work like” activities for a certain number of hours and/or to demonstrate an effort to find employment. Jobseekers sign up with private job agencies as a way of showing they are looking for a job. An agency claims “outcome payments” from the government when a client has completed 4, 12, or 26 weeks of work (the latter being considered long-term).

In short, instead of helping some of its most vulnerable citizens directly, the Commonwealth Government makes them jump through hoops to receive Jobseeker payments, and private companies who capture handsome profits in the process.

Over one-in-four of Jobseeker payment recipients have disability or health conditions which affect their capacity for work, as recognised by the Albanese Government’s employment whitepaper from September 2023.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.

Today’s conservative legal movement is the proverbial dog that caught the car. After years of effort (and more than a little fortuity), a solidly conservative majority now sits on the Supreme Court. The movement has racked up a string of wins on longstanding priorities, ranging from affirmative action to abortion to administrative agency deference, with perhaps the most seismic changes still to come. The Court’s blessing of the long-theorized “major questions doctrine,” which grants courts broad power to deem a particular action outside the purview of administrative agencies and properly committed to Congress, is a blade perfectly forged for dismantling that perennial movement bogeyman, the administrative state.

So where do things go from here?

Broadbent Research Fellow Angella MacEwen explains how public ownership and public investment are needed to fight inflation, fix inequality, and improve economic productivity. MacEwen shows that Canada has the power to build a stronger, democratic economy to fight back against the US Trump administration’s trade war and as an alternative to Mark Carney’s austerity agenda.

Progressive Political Economy is a video series that spotlights progressive economics and political ideas that push for a just and equal society.

Through interviews with Canada’s leading progressive economic thinkers, we lay out alternative approaches to orthodox economic thinking that have lent today’s inequalities and injustices.

I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.

After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.

We didn’t know it would be the last.

Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.

There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.

Richard Crump, Keshav Dogra, and Dennis Kongoli

On this episode of Follow the Money, Mike Rann addresses the fossil fuel industry’s tobacco-like tactics, South Australia’s leadership of progressive reform, and why policy bravery can be great politics, as he delivered the Australia Institute’s Hugh Saddler Memorial Lecture.

This episode was recorded live on Thursday 13 November.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australians are courageous is available for pre-order now via Australia Institute Press.

Aiming Higher: Universities and Australia’s future by Professor George Williams is also available now.

Guest: Mike Rann, Chair of the UK Climate Group and former Premier of South Australia // @Mike_Rann

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

Coalition offers crash course on staying in opposition for forever by Ebony Bennett, The Canberra Times (November 2025)

President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory—until they weren’t. Speaking recently on 60 Minutes, the president said he would let NVIDIA “deal with China,” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. NVIDIA’s stock jumped immediately—but China did not get what it wanted.

Days later, in a Financial Times interview, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: cut us off, Beijing wins.

The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. NVIDIA has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China. 

To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.

Nicola Cetorelli and Saketh Prazad

Nicola Cetorelli and Saketh Prazad

On this episode of After America, Crikey’s Charlie Lewis joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss Congress’ failure to extend life-saving health insurance tax credits, Trump’s inability to make the Epstein files go away, and whether there is evidence of US involvement in the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

This discussion was recorded on Friday 14 November.

Aiming Higher: Universities and Australia’s future by Professor George Williams is available now via Australia Institute Press.

Guest: Charlie Lewis, Reporter-at-large, Crikey // @theshufflediary

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Show notes:

Shorter America: Opposing Trump, trouble in paradise, the American elite by Emma Shortis, The Point (November 2025)

For decades, U.S. education has been dominated by the American Left. Their stranglehold was highly visible during the Biden Administration, with countless stories about wildly inappropriate books in school libraries, Critical Race Theory being taught in classrooms, and national associations calling for parents to be designated as domestic terrorists.

How did our public school systems—including those in red states, from Iowa to Alaska—become infected with radical leftist ideology? The answer is education consulting groups.

Most Americans don’t realize that every aspect of governance, from parks and wildlife departments to the curriculum in kids’ schools, has been outsourced to a coalition of nameless, faceless NGO consulting groups that are funded by millions of taxpayer dollars funneled through the government. One of the worst offenders is the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

Launched on 31 October 2025 at Gleebooks, Sydney, this post focuses on the book by Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, which follows last week’s commentary from the same evening delivered by Brett Heino. 

***

In acknowledging that we are on Gadigal land of the Eora Nation, I want to start by paying my respect to elders past, present, and emerging and also to those Indigenous peoples that are either in the audience or reading this commentary. Sovereignty in what is now called Australia was never ceded but, rather, violently dispossessed. In paying respects to Indigenous voices, I also want to draw inspiration from Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield (2019) that received, among others, the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. To cite one key passage:

Don’t know what it is about us that seems to rile the white man. The burden, the burden of their memory perhaps, or that we weren’t extinguished with the lights of those empires after all!

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

This episode looks at one of the first feminist social democrats in Canadian history: Francis Marion Beynon. Her work as journalist in Winnipeg in the early 1900s was critical for pointing out how exploitation wasn’t just about workers and bosses — it was also about the way that women were being treated by their husbands at home.