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On 13 January 2026, our Co-Executive Director Priya Sahni-Nicholas spoke at Public Policy Exchange’s event to discuss the recently published Child Poverty Strategy, Tackling Child Poverty: Improving Welfare, Security and Future Prospects. Inequality and child poverty are deeply linked. Her analysis of the strategy found that, although there’s evidence of a welcome shift in beliefs […]

The post Briefing: Inequality and the Child Poverty Strategy appeared first on Equality Trust.

“Everyone gets a fair go” is one of Australia’s most cherished values. We often pride ourselves on being a country where diversity is a strength and where anyone — with enough passion, hard work and persistence — can rise to leadership. But The Way In, Per Capita’s latest analysis of the 48th Parliament, reveals a more complicated truth. While we have taken meaningful steps forward, the pathways into federal politics remain narrow, elite, and far from reflective of the nation our parliamentarians are elected to serve.

Before diving into the findings, I’m reminded of a moment that crystallised the power of assumptions. When I was invited to speak at a leadership conference, I arrived at a venue hosting two events: one on leadership and the other on childcare. Other participants were asked which event they were attending – I wasn’t, staff directed me straight to childcare. It showed how assumptions about who looks like a leader still shape how people are seen and treated.

Historians will, I predict, deem the current situation in the United States the American Civil War II.

This is a civil war instigated by the federal government when it began sending unnecessary and militarized forces into American cities. I date the start to the weekend of October 4, 2025 when Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth secretly ordered U.S. military troops to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, to aid and abet violence by federal agents against peaceful civilian populations. The militaristic federal invasion and occupation of Minneapolis is a continuation of this war.

Civil wars do not follow a template. Secession is not a necessary condition for an American civil war. In the current one, the American Democracy side and the Republican Fascist side are in existential disagreement over the following constitutional questions.

• Whether the executive branch of the federal government is constrained by the U.S. Constitution, laws passed by Congress, and judicial branch reiterations of either or both.
• Whether the executive branch may ignore the Constitutionally-defined sovereignty of states.

These are now live issues. The Trump regime has made them live by adopting the view that the federal executive branch is not constrained by the Constitution and relevant federal laws and using militaristic force against Americans in states whose voters have rejected this position and whose governors side with American Democracy.

Just days after hundreds of homes were destroyed and tens of thousands of livestock died in Victoria’s bushfires, across the state hundreds more people were evacuated and multiple cars washed out to sea due to flash flooding following an intense storm.

Fossil fuel companies cause the climate change that turbocharges extreme weather events, but ordinary Australians are paying the price. It’s time that changed.

Global warming means extreme weather events like storms, floods, and bushfires are more frequent and more intense. But these disasters are still too often framed as tragic but unavoidable acts of nature, rather than the inevitable consequence of Australia being the third largest exporter of fossil fuels on Earth.

Gas, oil, and coal companies are let off the hook, while the true costs of climate-fueled disasters keep landing on the wrong people, again and again. It’s well past time Australia implemented a climate disaster levy on fossil fuel companies.

Because the costs of climate-fueled disasters are enormous. Homes and properties are destroyed. Businesses shut down. Cattle dead. Farms damaged. Local infrastructure – roads, power, water – wiped out in a matter of hours.

Following a string of major floods across the east coast of Australia in 2022, Australians claimed more than seven billion dollars on their home insurance – almost double the previous record.

Ley, and others in her increasingly small circle, mistook Josh Frydenberg’s win in forcing the Albanese government to call a royal commission into the events that led to Bondi as a personal victory.

It became obvious that was a mistake almost as soon as it happened. The Liberals may have found brief unity in a feverish lust of blaming the government, and anti-genocide protesters, for the actions of deranged terrorists, but that unity was never going to hold.

After losing the summer, Anthony Albanese is playing the long game. In throwing together a little of what everyone wanted into a bill no one wanted, he got to say he tried.

It is a well-worn Australian political tactic – wielding power through failure: “We tried to do something, and just couldn’t and that’s someone else’s fault” becomes the narrative, with the focus then shifting to who is not letting the government do as it wishes, rather than the government’s failure to find the support it needs to get it through.

In this case, Labor itself didn’t want the “something” it was attempting to do. It played a high stakes game with liberties to own the right, aided by the Greens, who saw the lay of the land and made the smart choice.

Now Ley must own the Coalition walking away from legislation it said it wanted, while the government gets to pretend it tried to meet its expectations.

In more crass terms, Ley f–ked around. Now she’s finding out.

Almost immediately after he came down the golden escalator in 2015, Donald Trump was being compared to Andrew Jackson. From his anti-establishment tenor to his breaking of norms to his raucous times in office, media observers and even the president himself have highlighted their similarities. “It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar to you?” Trump asked in 2017 during a speech marking Jackson’s 250th birthday.

But less discussed is the comparison between Jackson’s own revolution and Trump’s, particularly the endings. While this is understandable—Trump has in many respects served as America’s past, present, and political future for the last decade, and an ending to his time at the center of American life is difficult to fathom—as 2028 draws near, those who wish for Trump’s revolution to extend past his presidencies should look to how Jackson handled his own movement after he exited the White House.

Though Jackson left office in 1837, he did not leave the political scene. In fact, his political revolution was only half over. In managing the second half, Jackson would go on to become the most powerful former president in American history—and would see his revolution through to its conclusion.