The world is at a crossroads and so far, Australia is reacting by sticking its head in the sand and pretending nothing is changing.
Leaders from across the globe are about to meet at the 80th UN General Assembly, in a nation which has cancelled the visas of Palestinian Authority delegates, is disappearing people off its streets, carrying out extrajudicial death sentences in its waters, and openly threatening war.
These are not normal times. Pretending they are, is part of what got us here in the first place.
The meeting will kick off on Tuesday, when the incoming president, Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign affairs minister, will outline her agenda which runs until September 8 next year. She is taking the reins at a time where the UN director at the International Crisis Group, Richard Gowan, says “illusions have been rather stripped away” about the world, and how people feel about its leaders. “It’s now very, very clear that both financially and politically, the UN faces huge crises,” he said.
“Now the question is, is there a way through that?”
And indeed, what role does Australia play in that?
Australia is part of the nations who have agreed to give conditional recognition to Palestine, but it remains unclear at this point what that will look like at the meeting.
The economic headwinds facing Canada are greater than the sum of its parts. The pace and sporadic nature of the United States’ trade war with Canada is unprecedented and has recently dominated headlines, but the underlying structural challenges demand careful attention. The Covid-19 Pandemic-induced economic shock can be blamed for the acute inflationary jump in the cost of housing and food, but the interlinked productivity and cost-of-living crises have been brewing for more than a decade.1 The OECD predicts Canada’s per capita GDP growth will be last amongst OECD economies in the next 40 years.2 Nearly half of Canadians report difficulties meeting day-to-day expenses due to rising costs.3 Recall it was these economic crises that catapulted the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre into dominant polling territory before Trump’s victory changed the narrative.
Cross-national research on social policy and welfare states over the past five decades has proven invaluable in helping us to understand why some nations have been more successful than others in reducing social inequality and promoting the well-being of their populations. To date, this research has largely focused on the character and impact of two central pillars of social support: income transfers and social services.
The networks of transfer payments that constitute the welfare state’s first pillar, including unemployment insurance, accident insurance, pensions, child allowances and social assistance, provide income to people who have temporarily or permanently left the paid labour force, or otherwise require economic assistance. The welfare state’s second pillar is made up of various forms of social services, such as the care economy services of healthcare, childcare and elderly care, as well as decommodified provisions such as education, social housing and public transportation.
This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.
In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.
Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.
The proposed park ends native forest logging on the land and creates a vast sanctuary for koalas and 66 other threatened species.
But it’s always best to read the fine print and understand the Ts&Cs. In this case, they reveal a diabolical trade off.
The native forest will only be saved from logging if the government can monetise it as “carbon credits”.
“The final creation of the park is dependent on the successful registration of a carbon project,” the government makes abundantly clear.
It wants the Clean Energy Regulator to let it generate carbon credits, it seems, from a national park – an unprecedented step. If it can’t, the government says the vast koala sanctuary on the state’s mid north coast won’t go ahead.
Why is this demand a worry?
The NSW plan would only protect forests if they were monetised in ways that support continued carbon emissions.
Carbon credits are a license to pollute. If the NSW government is allowed to generate carbon credits from native forests earmarked for the great koala park, the most likely buyers would be big greenhouse gas emitters.
Under Australian law, these businesses can keep extracting and burning fossil fuels provided they “offset” their emissions by buying Australian Carbon Credit Units or ACCUs.
That’s how Woodside justifies its plans to open up new gas fields and process export gas on the North West Shelf until at least 2070 – with federal government approval.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Matt tells Elinor about the massive class action lawsuit settlement the Government made with the victims of Robodebt, Labor potentially getting cold feet on superannuation tax concession reform, and what they both tell us about how Australia views our poorest and wealthiest people.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 11 September 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
Host: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
This article was co-written with contributions from Michelle Bilek, Jim Dunn, Jon Paul Mathias, Kateryna Metersky, Alex Nelson, Sophie O’Manique, Steven Rolfe, Colleen Van Loon, and Jeremy Wildeman.
Globally, researchers, service providers, advocates and lived experts who are trying to enact the prevention and ending of homelessness face various forms of government inertia. While United Nations member states have collectively signed onto the ‘right to adequate shelter’, 1 actualizing this human right occurs in significantly varying degrees between them. While human rights are ubiquitous, there remains an underlying perception of ‘deserving poor’, even among adherents and advocates to those rights, whereby assistance is provided only to some and under limited criteria. The status quo, in the form of government inaction on the actualization of these human rights, resists the universalization of these rights by creating counter-narratives against those proposing policy action.
Since the late 2000s, Canada’s economic slowdown has been debated in terms of technological fatigue, demographic trends, monetary constraints, and global trade headwinds. This paper contends that the underlying source of stagnation fundamentally points to distributional imbalances and structural demand deficiency. Today’s stagnation is not cyclical, but a symptom of a structural trap—a regime of distributional stagnation rooted in the failure of the neoliberal paradigm to reconcile economic growth with social equity.
This analysis situates Canada’s stagnation within broader debates on “secular stagnation” and macroeconomic paradigm choice, drawing on leading theories that emphasize the role of demand, inequality, and institutional decline. There are three structural channels through which income inequality drives stagnation: (1) reduced household consumption due to top-heavy income distribution; (2) erosion of labour power weakening wage growth and demand; (3) a disconnect between rising profits and falling productive investment.
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.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics | The Roundtable Ep. 284
The editors open with an analysis of the killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a repeat violent offender, and discuss what it reveals about crime, media spin, and a legacy media more fixated on “Republicans pouncing” than the literally pouncing criminal himself. Follow-up discussion ranges from Europe’s disappearing crime stats to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s downward revision of nearly a million jobs during the Biden presidency, probing whether institutions still merit public trust and what a reality-based politics on immigration, safety, and the economy might look like. The editors also touch on an immigration sweep at a Georgia battery plant and the gap between GDP and lived experience before closing with fresh culture picks.
In the spring of 2025, when Canada narrowly avoided being swept up in a global wave of electoral successes for the (far) right, it was a puzzling moment. After years in which it appeared to be all but inevitable that Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservative Party of Canada would form the first government of the post-Justin Trudeau era, the election of another minority Liberal Party government, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, could seem an occasion for relief. An apparently ascendant right-wing in Canada was not so ascendant after all. However, notwithstanding the contingency of the minority Parliament and the initiation of US trade war upon the inauguration of the second Trump administration, it may be wrong to think that Canada has rejected or been spared the rise of the right. For the time being, at least, Canada’s Liberals have succeeded in a classic passive-revolutionary exercise: metabolizing and re-presenting elements of a threatening movement to ensure political survival and, as much as possible, re-establish electoral and policy dominance.
Woodside Energy is apparently baulking at strict new limits on nitrous oxide emissions the Albanese government wants to impose on its massive gas project to protect the ancient Indigenous rock art at Murujuga in WA.
The emissions limits are the “major sticking point” in the way of final approval for Woodside’s North West Shelf gas development, according to the AFR Rock art protections behind Woodside North West Shelf gas project delay.
Which begs the question: why is this a negotiation?
It tells you a lot about who wields power in Australia that Woodside is being allowed to haggle in secret over the conditions.
In May, Environment Minister Murray Watt gave provisional approval to a 45-year extension of the oil and gas giant’s liquid natural gas export hub on the Burrup, and an associated gas power plant.
This was subject to “strict conditions” – but they were never made public.
Supposedly, the secrecy was imposed to provide “procedural fairness” to Woodside. The gas giant was given 10 days to respond. It missed the deadline.
Four months later, the conditions are still cloaked in secrecy – and Woodside is still chipping away at them behind closed doors. So much for transparency.
Woodside’s gas facilities are adjacent to what many experts consider the most significant Indigenous rock art site in the world: The Murujuga Cultural Landscape.
In a democracy, the right to vote is a cornerstone of civic participation—yet for unhoused individuals across Canada, this right remains largely theoretical. Despite legislative guarantees under the Canada Elections Act, practical barriers continue to disenfranchise one of the country’s most marginalized populations. This article explores the persistent challenges that individuals experiencing homelessness face in accessing the ballot, using the Waterloo Region in Southwestern Ontario during the 2025 Ontario General Election as a case study to better understand these barriers across Canada. Through an analysis of systemic, logistical, and social obstacles, including restrictive identification requirements, inconsistent policy implementation, transportation challenges, and social stigma, this study aims to identify evidence-based strategies for advocacy and outreach that increase voter participation among unhoused individuals. The study combines a thematic analysis of interviews with representatives of organizations in direct engagement with unhoused people, alongside a comprehensive literature review, and offers recommendations to bridge the gap between electoral rights and electoral access for unhoused individuals in the Waterloo Region and across Canada.
This study was conducted as a community partnership with Waterloo Region Community Legal Services (WRCLS) and completed as part of the Policy Research in Action course in the Master of Applied Politics program at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Like all of Australia’s universities, the ANU lacks effective mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and representation. Every new scandal the sector has seen in the last four months is further proof.
The core problem is a vacuum of accountability. In the university sector, no one is held responsible for failure, at least no one at the top.
It describes changes in other jurisdictions as “rushed, self-interested and poorly justified”.
The Australia Institute submission also warns that rules on early voting, roadside election signage and a 100-metre exclusion zone for handing out how-to-vote cards could undermine election day as a “festival of democracy” in the very heart of the nation’s democracy.
Research shows that a “reimbursement” model for public funding, as recommended by the ACT Electoral Commission, would favour wealthy incumbents at the expense of new entrants.
In 2021, a poll showed that only one-third (36%) of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 were “very” proud to be Americans. Another third stated they were only slightly or not at all proud of their country. Ten years earlier, Pew Research anticipated the trend when it noted that the rate of Millennials who called themselves “very patriotic” fell from 80% in 2003 to 70% in 2011.
Part of a national museum’s job is to prevent that outcome. Preserving the historical truth is a high purpose, but so is instilling the sentiment of gratitude. America’s museums can and should do both.
Instead, as of this writing, if you visit the home page of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, the very first exhibit you see is the Greensboro lunch counter from the famous sit-in of 65 years ago. The text introducing the exhibit gives visitors to the site the first fact they are to learn about the American past: “Racial segregation was still legal in the United States on February 1, 1960.”
On 6 September 2025 we revealed in The Age that Victorian dentist Ian Lomax is a member of the National Socialist Network.
Lomax previously practiced dentistry in New South Wales. We first saw him training at Elwood with the National Socialist Network in February this year, in footage taken by The Age:
Lomax has also featured on a National Socialist Network Telegram channel, in a training photograph for the Victorian Rural West chapter, alongside Hamish Cameron and Gus Hartigan:
Lomax attended the March for Australia rally in Melbourne on 31 August. Blair Cottrell badly blurred him in a video he published, attempting, “This man is a dentist so we can't show you his face on video. Morning Ian.”
We, as Nathan Bull’s family, are utterly devastated and remain in disbelief at his decision to join this group. From the very beginning, we made it clear that if he chose this path, we could no longer be an active part of his life. Sadly, that is the decision he made.
We are deeply concerned about the continued spread of misinformation and incorrect assumptions about our family. For clarity:
Nathan’s father has not been a member of Victoria Police for more than three years.
He is not “Luke Bull,” the officer charged and found guilty in relation to a separate matter last year.
He is in no way racist, nor did he have a negative influence on Nathan growing up.
We would also like to address a photo of Nathan shared publicly from his 21st birthday, where his father expressed pride in him. At that time, we had no knowledge of any association Nathan may have had with this group, nor any understanding of the meaning behind the T-shirt he wore. At that point, Nathan was working, engaged with his family, and we believed he was becoming a fine young man. Not long after, our trust in that belief was sadly shattered.
We respectfully ask the community and media to stop contacting us. I personally have received abusive phone calls today, including many from private numbers that I have not answered. This is deeply distressing.
We are embarrassed to see Nathan continually featured in the media and saddened by the possibility that he may never leave this group. His choices are his alone.
You may have landed here because you want to talk about neo-Nazis without helping them. Excellent.
You have an important role in combatting the rise of these groups. You must remember at all times – however they present themselves – the underlying ideology of all neo-Nazis is murderous.
Remember: They are a cult that want journalists to help launder their image and legitimise their movement and beliefs.
Above all – don't be fooled
Neo-Nazis look “normal”.
They have families, friends, work colleagues.
They shop at the same places you do.
They go to the gym.
They go to university.
They work on building sites and in offices.
They have respectable careers.
This isn't “Romper Stomper” – most do not have shaved heads, swastika tattoos and broken teeth.
Don't be fooled.
Remember: All neo-Nazis share the same murderous beliefs. They want an extremely conservative white-only Australia. Anyone else “must go,” a euphemism that oscillates between deportation and mass murder. Never lose sight of that.
1. Do not assist their media strategy.
Neo-Nazis have a simple strategy when it comes to media:
If they can't get an opportunity to appear in the media, they create one.
On the 26th of January 2025, 17 people were arrested in Adelaide over a public stunt organised by members of the National Socialist Network (NSN).
We've provided a list of the 16 adult arrestees as an open call-out for any further detail you might be able to provide:
Do you know one of them through work?
The local shops?
Are they mates with your mates?
Did you go to school together?
Anything else of interest no matter how big or small.
Help us by sharing any verifiable information by securely dropping us a line at thewhiterosesociety@protonmail.com. You'll remain anonymous.
The information we're providing here is not exhaustive and is only given as an identification aid. We've omitted some information we already possess, but don't let that deter you from sending us a tip. Suburbs listed below are retrieved from either court or police reports, and may not exactly reflect the person's home suburb.
tl;dr: Racist bigot who pals around with neo-Nazis is a well-connected Victorian Liberal Party member who stood for local council elections as an independent.
Ex Victorian Liberal Party parliamentarian Moira Deeming has told the court over the past few weeks that she has no association with the far-Right whatsoever – we're not quite sure that's true. Join us as we pull the thread on one Deeming ally with dubious connections.
On July 24, 2024, at the Senate Committee investigating right wing extremist movements in Australia, practitioners from the Counter Extremism Project presented an embarrassingly incorrect account of the state of the Australian extreme right landscape, particularly concerning Active Clubs.
This highlights a key problem with the Countering Violent Extremism industrial complex—individuals who have spent the past twenty years focusing on the Islamophobic war on terror often lack substantial knowledge about the extreme right. Despite this, they are positioned as experts while chasing grant money into the right-wing space.
On September 15, 2023, neo-Nazis from National Socialist Network, armed with knives, attempted to attack an anti-fascist gig in Thornbury at Café Gummo. The gig was a fundraiser for us and the Black Peoples Union.
If you recognise any of these cowards e-mail us thewhiterosesociety@protonmail.com. Please share this image in your networks and on your social media in case anyone recognises them. We have numbered the faces of those we do not yet know the names of.
If you would like to amplify our X post/tweet of these faces you can repost it at this link.
Video of National Socialist Network running like rats:
My motion at council tonight to reaffirm our commitment to the LGBTIQA+ community after rainbow storytime events were cancelled due to threats from the far right, has passed!
On 21 June 2023, Councillor Tim Baxter from the City of Port Phillip successfully tabled a motion to reaffirm the council's commitment to the LGBTIQA+ community after rainbow story hour events were cancelled due to threats from the far-right. This has come in the wake of a wave of cancellations from councils and other event organisers this year, particularly related to IDAHOBIT Day and during Pride Month. This motion allows the City of Port Phillip to begin work on how to hold safer events in the future, an urgent issue for many other councils that requires leadership. We are pleased that the City of Port Phillip is showing leadership on this issue and hope it will lead to safer events for the Rainbow Community and families.
Content warning for extreme misogyny, racism, Antisemitism, Islamophobia and violence, discussions of neo-Nazi terrorist attacks, and mention (but no description) of rape.
Gabriel Llewellyn Russell Seymour from Thornlands is the leader of the Queensland branch of Australia's largest neo-Nazi network, the National Socialist Network (NSN). Posting simply as ‘Gabe’ in Nazi online chats or as ‘Gabe Smith’ on wider social media, Seymour's identity was unknown until our research was used to profile him in the recent expose by The Age of Australian neo-Nazi leaders:
Seymour’s identity was confirmed by anti-fascist researchers from the White Rose Society using online surveillance. They matched photos he posted of neo-Nazi propaganda at his Queensland home to pictures of a house listed for sale on a real estate website. Public records linked Seymour to this home address.
On December 3rd 2022, the National Socialist Network (NSN)/European Australian Movement (EAM) held a Mixed Martial Arts event at an undisclosed location. In advertising for the event, they said that it would take place in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne.
The Age newspaper today disclosed the location of this event. We provide the following information for the benefit of parents whose children attend this gym.
On December 11, the EAM Telegram channel posted a photo from the event. It depicted 47 people in an industrial gym setting with EAM and swastika flags hanging from the walls. Most of the people in the photo had their faces blurred in addition to wearing face coverings. For some reason, it seemed a few remained unsure about the quality of the NSN's opsec.
The gym in the photograph was very quickly identified by a number of anti-fascist researchers as belonging to Legacy Boxing Gym, and located in Sunshine West.
This report explores how political and cultural leaders weaponize narratives and policies on gender identity, women’s rights, and sexuality to advance authoritarianism. It demonstrates that attacks on women’s rights, feminism, and LGBTQ communities are neither random nor organic—but part of a larger strategy to manufacture social division, distract from policy failures and corruption, and create a permission structure for power consolidation and violence.
The report introduces a six-strategy framework that shows how authoritarian movements exploit gendered anxieties to divide societies, launder and normalize social hierarchies, and reshape cultural norms—all while eroding democratic freedoms.
On this episode of Follow the Money, transparency advocate Rex Patrick and Australia Institute Democracy & Accountability Director Bill Browne to discuss the failing freedom of information system and why the proposed changes could make government less transparent – not more.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Rex Patrick, former Senator for South Australia // @mrrexpatrick
Guest: Bill Browne, Democracy & Accountability Director, the Australia Institute // @browne90
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett
On Friday, the jobs data hit—and it wasn’t good. Non-farm payrolls came in at just 22,000, far below the already low expectation of 75,000, and well short of the 53,000 that would have at least met consensus. By any measure, that’s a weak print.
It raises a big question: are we looking at the beginning of a major slowdown, or is something else going on beneath the surface?
In this post, I want to break down how to interpret this report, why it might not mean what the “perma-bears” think it does, and how it fits into the broader macroeconomic picture.
Framing the Question: Major Slowdown or Temporary Pause?
Whenever I see a headline-grabbing data point like this, I try to step back and ask a few simple questions:
What are the main drivers of the economy right now?
What should we expect to see if the bearish case is real?
What doesn’t line up with that story?
With jobs data, the natural concern is that weak hiring means the cycle is rolling over. But to confirm that, we need to see reinforcing signals in credit, fiscal policy, inflation, and layoffs. Without those, a bad number might just be noise—or the result of something temporary.
Later this month, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk will issue a report calling for massive reparations from the West for the alleged harms wrought by colonialism. It will be the culmination of a long-gestating effort within the U.N. and by Third World nations to squeeze money and demand other goodies from former colonial powers in the name of “reparatory justice.”
In addition to being historically ill-informed, the effort is racist. What began as a simple extortion effort has since been supercharged into an all-out assault on European cultures. Since being appointed in 2022, Türk has transformed his office. It now issues daily muezzin calls for uncontrolled mass migration to the West and the erasure of white cultures. His report should cause Western nations to abandon every U.N. agency that pursues this sick agenda.
Following our 2025 Community Tax Summit, the federal government announced an Economic Reform Roundtable.
Per Capita and the organisations who partnered together for the Community Tax Summit each added their submissions to the Economic Reform Roundtable in the lead up to the event to help push for meaningful and effective tax reform.
The overwhelming consensus from the summit was that reform was needed. And while our opinions of how this could be achieved align in some places while differing in others, a robust discussion around this matter needs to be had.
We thank our partners for sharing their submissions with us.
The analysis finds that the costs of climate change to local councils – such as repairing roads, drainage, parks and community facilities after floods, storms, and fires – are increasing far faster than local government revenue.
The insured costs of climate change are now 12 times higher than 20 years ago, while local government revenue is only three times higher.
The findings support calls for the release of the National Climate Risk Assessment, which contains important data for councils to prepare for the impact of climate change.
When I served as an Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadet at Fordham University in New York City, the Department of War paid for my degree in American Studies. During my coursework, I read books like The New Jim Crow and was bombarded with the claim that the country I had signed up to defend was irredeemably racist and broken. My civilian classmates and professors were overwhelmingly liberal, and the university was in the capital of liberalism. I spent most of my time in that milieu as opposed to dedicated environments conducive to military formation.
ROTC should be nowhere near Fordham University. In fact, the Trump Administration should end ROTC programs in blue states, leftist cities, and anti-American universities, focusing instead on institutions that actually love America. Training military officers in environments that serve the national interest is a critical step toward restoring the U.S. military as a whole.
No longer should ROTC programs be benefactors of the woke and weaponized higher education system. The colleges and universities that ROTC cadets attend—and that the federal government pays for—shouldn’t feature Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other divisive ideologies, and the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, analyzes how the weaponization and distortion of the Holocaust, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, has been used to serve the narrative of Zionists and the Israeli government. He tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report:
“We know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part, indeed, of the making of the modern and late modern world.”
Segal recounts his personal experience learning about the Holocaust in Israel, revealing a Zionist perspective that is both skewed and contradictory.
Recent events regarding Lisa Cook’s attempted firing by Donald Trump have convinced me to do a premium series on the history of racial segregation and the Federal Reserve. This is for a few reasons. First, I think it's difficult to understand the import of this moment without understanding the history of racial segregation in the Federal Government and in the Federal Reserve System, specifically. Indeed this history hasn’t really ever gotten a serious treatment. This is for a variety of reasons which are beyond the scope of this piece to examine.
Most Americans don’t know who Graham Linehan is, but to put it into perspective, he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of the British/Irish sitcom world. Back in the 1990s, Linehan starred in Father Ted, which is now regarded as one of the greatest sitcoms in U.K. television history.
On September 1, Linehan’s real life merged with sitcom-level absurdity when he landed at London’s Heathrow Airport and was immediately arrested by five members of the Metropolitan Police. His crime? Three posts on X.
At The Spectator, Linehan commented on the bizarre and ominous episode:
In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer…(and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).
Australia’s national tax system is 110 years old. What has shaped it in the last century, and why is tax reform needed today?
The Federal Government has announced a Productivity Roundtable and indicated that broad tax reform will be part of the discussion to tackle the economic pressures our country faces today, to boost national prosperity, reduce growing inequality and improve living standards for future generations.
Following the popularity of her keynote speech at the Community Tax Summit in February 2025, Professor Miranda Stewart provides a follow-up address outlining how Australia’s tax system came to be how it is today, the reasons it needs reform and what that reform should look like, in light of the recently announced Productivity Roundtable.
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Miranda Stewart is a Professor specialising in taxation law and policy at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne and an Honorary Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. In 2024, Miranda was a visiting fellow at the Australian Treasury. Her most recent book is Tax and Government in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press).
On this episode of After America, Maskym Dotsenko and Illya Kletskovskyy, the Director General and Deputy Director General of the Ukrainian Red Cross, join Allan Behm to discuss the impact of the Russian invasion on Ukrainians, the role of Red Cross in armed conflict, and the importance of international humanitarian law in saving lives and reducing suffering.
This episode was recorded on Thursday 4 September.
After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss are available now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Maskym Dotsenko, Director General, Ukrainian Red Cross Society // @MaksymDotsenko
Guest: Illya Kletskovskyy, Deputy Director General, Ukrainian Red Cross Society
Host: Allan Behm, Special Advisor, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute
Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Sep 8-14, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9704
Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Monday September 8, at 7:00 - 8:00pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the live on YouTube/X.
Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Recent buzz about the possibility of Trump selecting Budapest to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine has brought Hungary back into the public consciousness. During the Biden years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was relegated to something of a footnote and regarded with distaste by the reigning administration. Now, Hungary has moved from adversary to ally in record time—a welcome reset that offers a window into Trump’s recalibrated foreign policy.
As early as the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Biden branded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a “thug” and lumped Poland and Hungary together as “totalitarian regimes”—incendiary language that prior U.S. presidents avoided, even when the two countries were under actual totalitarian control of the Communist Party.
It was hardly surprising, then, that in 2021 President Biden chose a gay, married LGBTQ activist with two adopted children as ambassador to Hungary—a country whose constitution defines marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman, bans adoption by same-sex couples, and enforces some of Europe’s toughest child-protection laws. U.S. Ambassador David Pressman ignited tensions by denouncing Hungary’s conservative stance on marriage and its 2021 Child Protection Act, which forbids gender propaganda in K-12 schools.
Ross Gittins wins 2025 E.J. Craigie Writing Award for the best article reflecting the ideas of Henry George. Prosper Australia is pleased to announce Economics Editor for The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, as the recipient of the E.J. Craigie Writing Award for 2025 for his article: Productivity Commission wants our big mining companies to […]
