Incoming Feed Items

Over the past few decades, countless “rules” or “laws” have been coined to describe the murmurations of internet behavior. One of the most enduring of these is Godwin’s Law, which holds that as an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches one. This “law” is as much a joke as a thesis, but the universality of the reductio ad Hitlerum suggests something fundamental to public thought.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, they played the role of Hitler. Ukraine, too, needed to be de-Nazified. On October 7, Hamas recreated the Holocaust. Now Israel is smeared as a génocidaire. Gun control, porn bans, or HOA bylaws—it’s all fascist. Be they strict teachers or world leaders, everyone is someone’s führer. For Alec Ryrie, this rhetorical cliche is proof that the West has chosen Adolf Hitler as its primary moral reference point, replacing Jesus Christ.

This claim was argued in 2021 by another British historian, Tom Holland: “Today, when we ask ourselves ‘what would Hitler have done?’, and do the opposite…our forebearers…wondered ‘what would Jesus have done,’ and sought to do the same.” Ryrie agrees: “Crosses and crucifixes have lost most of their power in our culture. It is possible to play with them, even joke about them, and no one really minds. Not so with swastikas.” Renaud Camus has described Hitler’s role as a moral symbol as his “second career.”

In the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, sea water is being pushed up through the land, destroying traditional crops and making water unfit to drink. Tuvalu’s low-lying islands and atolls could become unliveable within decades, and without urgent action, it is a fate that could be shared by other Pacific nations, and Indigenous people in the Torres Strait islands.

A new documentary highlighting the devastating impact of climate change on the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu has been previewed in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. Save Tuvalu, Save the World is presented by Walkley Award-winning journalist and former ABC Four Corners reporter Stephen Long, and tells the story of a country on the frontline of rising seas.

The screenings drew strong interest from audiences keen to better understand the human consequences of global warming. Each event featured a Q&A session with Long and climate campaigner and Tuvalu resident Gitty K Yee, who shared personal insights into the challenges Tuvaluans face. In Sydney, the discussion also included City of Sydney Councillor Jess Miller, adding a local perspective on climate action.

Thursday 23 October 6:00pm
The Sibyl Centre, The Women’s College
University of Sydney

By Jack O’Connor, Anjali Parikh

In June 2025, the Public Sector Capabilities Index team at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), travelled to Finland to learn more about Finnish city government capability building. In this blog, we explore some of the ways in which these city governments build coalitions with external actors and offer some key lessons for other cities to build and sustain these partnerships.

Challenges facing cities

The multiplicity of challenges facing urban areas in Finland are no different than those in other parts of the world: climate pressures, housing affordability, inequality. With the prevalence of these challenges increasing, so too is the importance placed on city governments to effectively address them. Finnish city governments are proactively building coalitions and partnerships to tackle them.

Natalia Fischl-Lanzoni, Martin Hiti, and Asani Sarkar

Andrew Beck’s “Assimilation and Its Discontents” helps us understand why assimilation is an urgent concern. Anthropologists and historians make it clear that human beings, from bands of hunter-gatherers to modern nation-states, have always lived in sociopolitical groups that were distinct from one another. This enduring, fundamental reality elevates the importance of determining each group’s far edge. Who’s in and who’s out? And by what standard do we make this distinction?

The United States of America has been not only one of the most heterogeneous social orders in human history, but also one of the most successfully heterogeneous. Even in America, however, there is a limit beyond which heterogeneity renders a nation incoherent in both senses of the term: it doesn’t make sense; and it can no longer hold together as a single sociopolitical entity wherein Americans feel they have important ties and obligations to one another for no reason other than a shared national identity. To exceed that limit, Beck warns, invites the collapse of our nation into “fractious, tribal chaos.”

Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute, describes the decision as “very cruel”, ensuring more pain for those struggling with high mortgage repayments and more job losses.

He says all the key economic data supported another interest rate cut, which would have given them much-needed relief after three years of pain.

“The Reserve Bank has once again chosen to be content with rising unemployment,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.

“While there have been some signs of improved household spending, the major reason for the increase has been the recent interest rate cuts, rather than an underlying strength in the economy.

“The last recent GDP figures showed the economy still growing at barely half the long-term average, while unemployment has been rising steadily for all of this year.

“The opportunity to lock in unemployment at 4% is fast disappearing due to the Reserve Bank believing there needs to be more people unemployed in order to keep inflation below 3%.

“For those Australians forced to live in poverty on Jobseeker, this is a very cruel decision.”

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you’re a nobody? You know things about those roles. You’ve experienced them. You’ve been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you’re going to be treated like a nobody. You’re going to be treated like someone who doesn’t count, someone who doesn’t matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed.

If you believe the markets, there won’t be an interest rate cut after this week’s Reserve Bank meeting.

You’re likely to hear a bunch of reasons but missing from them is the most important one: The RBA has no confidence in what inflation is going to do and it is continually worried that it is about to shoot up.

In the past, the RBA has been confident in its inflation predictions. It needed to be.

The impact of interest rates on the economy takes time and you need to set them for where you think inflation is going to be in six to 12 months, not where they have been in the past.

But in the past decade, the central bank has made some spectacular mistakes about movements in inflation. The biggest was former Governor Philip Lowe saying interest rates wouldn’t rise until at least 2024.

He then had to rapidly increase them in 2022.

To be fair to Lowe, he did have some caveats on that prediction. But the public, including the media, largely took it as a promise.

The RBA was also caught out before the pandemic, keeping interest rates too high because it thought inflation was about to increase. It never did and the subsequent Reserve Bank review criticised it for that inaction.

Both of these episodes highlight that the RBA has misunderstood the main drivers of inflation.

This seems to have shaken it, and instead of looking forward with confidence, it is looking behind in fear.

On this episode of After America, Charlie Lewis joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the apparent obsession of Anthony Albanese’s opponents with that bilateral meeting, the transformation of the Republican Party under Trump, and how Australia’s political landscape is being influenced by MAGA.

This episode was recorded on Thursday 25 September.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.

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

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

Show notes: 

Welcome to the new McCarthyism by Charlie Lewis, Crikey (September 2025)

Theme music: Blue Dot Sessions

Foreword: This article talks about disordered eating.

When 20-year-old loner Thomas Matthew Crooks ascended a sloped roof in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, he unleashed a torrent of cliches. Commentators and public figures avoided the term “assassination attempt,” even if the AR-15 was trained on the head of a then-former president—instead, they condemned “political violence.”

“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” former president Barack Obama said. One year later, he added the word “despicable” to his condemnation of the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. That was an upgrade from two weeks prior, when he described the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School by a transgender individual as merely “unnecessary.”

Anyone fluent in post-9/11 rhetoric knows that political violence is the domain of terrorists and lone wolf ideologues, whose manifestos will soon be unearthed by federal investigators, deciphered by the high priests of our therapeutic age, and debated by partisans on cable TV. The attempt to reduce it to the mere atomized individual, however, is a modern novelty. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, from the 1863 draft riots to the 1968 MLK riots, from the spring of Rodney King to the summer of George Floyd, there is a long history of Americans resorting to violence to achieve political ends by way of the mob.

Rowan Lubbock’s Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA and the Politics of Food Sovereignty is an important book for understanding the agrarian dimensions of Venezuela’s socialist experiment and the ALBA regional integration project at both the theoretical and empirical levels. The rise of Food Sovereignty as a central organising demand for agrarian movements in Latin America in recent years raises several questions: who is sovereign? sovereignty over what? from what? To address these questions, Lubbock develops a class-relational conceptual framework for understanding modern sovereignty as an ‘historically specific combination of rights and territory – or the right to exploit labour and the territorial organization of social production’ (p. 9). From this, the struggles within food sovereignty are conceived as projects seeking ‘self-directed labour and cooperative territorial organization’ (p. 9).  This enables Lubbock to analyse the difficulties faced by diverse agrarian movements in very different local and national circumstances as ‘the strategic necessity of confronting the duality of modern sovereignty – condensed within spaces of capitalist production and the capitalist state itself’.