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On this episode of Follow the Money, Leanne Minshull and Ebony Bennett discuss the Federal Government’s efforts to push through changes to Australia’s busted environment laws with the support of the Coalition.

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

Guest: Leanne Minshull, co-CEO, the Australia Institute // @leanneminshull

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

Show notes:

This shocking deal is a gross betrayal of millions of voters by Ebony Bennett, The Canberra Times (October 2025)

Top Australian scientists unite in defence of science on Maugean skate, the Australia Institute

Gizem Kosar and Davide Melcangi

The 18th Annual Wheelwright Lecture in Political Economy was held at the University of Sydney on 10 September 2025.

The 2025 event, part of a suite of events celebrating the 50th anniversary of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, was delivered by Emerita Professor Raewyn Connell on the topic “Should we abolish universities?”

Thank you to everyone who was part of this special occasion!

Here is the recording of the lecture and photos from the night.

Recording

Photos (Credit: Bill Green, The University of Sydney)

Full album available for viewing here.

By Ruth Puttick

Across the world, cities are where the future happens first. From tackling climate change to shaping inclusive economies, local governments are on the frontlines of humanity’s greatest challenges. Yet, while expectations for cities grow, the tools, data, and support they need to deliver often lag behind.

That’s why the scaling of the Public Sector Capabilities Index marks an important milestone. Over the past two years, in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Index has been co-developed with more than 200 government officials across 45 cities and over 100 urban experts.

A first-of-its-kind tool, the Index is designed to help city governments, and those that support their efforts, to assess, strengthen, and celebrate cities’ ability to solve problems, deliver for their residents, and contribute to addressing global challenges.

From “Black Jack” Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa deep into Chihuahua to fentanyl streaming into the United States, Washington forgets that the southern border has always been a battlefield.

In August, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum declared, “We will never allow the US army or any other institution of the US to set foot in Mexican territory.” Her words came after reports that President Trump had signed a directive authorizing the Department of War to conduct military operations against Latin American cartels designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Sinaloa foremost among them.

In Washington the rubric was “hemispheric defense.” In Mexico City it was heard as the prelude to invasion. Both capitals spoke as if the prospect was novel. But it is not.

American forces have crossed the Rio Grande in uniform far more often than most Americans realize. The Mexican-American War of 1846 amputated half of Mexico’s territory. Then, there were the Las Cuevas War of 1875 and the “Bandit Wars,” a series of raids by Mexican outlaws into Texas from 1915–1919. Even the obscure Garza Revolution of the 1890s followed the same logic. When cross-border violence spilled north, the United States answered not with demarches but with dragoons. Mexico remembers. But Americans forget and then declare the next repetition “unprecedented.”

For those of us who hold out hope that the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born bishop and missionary to Peru, Robert Prevost, will lead to more Christ-centered and less ideological leadership from Rome, the last few weeks have been disappointing. 

First, a 2023 video of the new pope resurfaced, where he spoke about the need to welcome people of diverse “lifestyles” to the Church (this follows the lead of his immediate predecessor Pope Francis), although he assured us that there had been no change of doctrine, at least “not yet.” Can one imagine Christ telling the adulterous woman whom he saved from stoning in the Gospel of John (John 7:53-8:11) not “to sin no more” but to continue in her “lifestyle” while being welcomed to his Kingdom? Or St. Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians, where he declines to chide these new Christians for their gross resort to sin and moral corruption, but encourages them to remain steadfast in their less-than-admirable “lifestyles”?

Pope Leo was also near silent about the killing of the Catholic schoolchildren by a trans fanatic in Minneapolis, initially treating it as an unfortunate example of gun violence. As Rod Dreher has pointed out, on the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the pope tweeted about migrants on the island of Lampedusa. While anti-Christian violence spiked, Rome seemed to fiddle.

Today, we commemorate Christopher Columbus, the man whose daring voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 initiated the Age of Discovery that reshaped the world. Columbus’s prediction that a western route to Asia was possible was not correct in its specifics, but he did not have to be correct to change the world. His legacy is about the spirit that drove him: a spirit of exploration, courage, and leadership.

Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic was no small feat. In an era when ships were fragile and navigation rudimentary, Columbus and his crew faced uncharted waters and unpredictable storms. The dangers were not merely physical; the psychological toll of sailing in the open sea, with no guarantee of land appearing on the horizon, tested the limits of human endurance. Columbus’s men urged him to turn back, but he pressed on, navigating not only the seas but also the fragile morale of his crew.

What does it mean to celebrate such a man? As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, we raise monuments to men as well as the spirit that moved them:

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

This spirit continues to inspire. We honor Columbus not just for what he achieved, but for the qualities that made his achievements possible.

As soon as Trump took his seat in the Oval Office that (distant) January of 2025, he signed his first 26 executive orders, one of which initiated the process of classifying eleven Latin American cartels—many of them Mexican—as terrorist organisations. Since then, collective psychosis has erupted, fuelled by speculation about possible military interventions. Although the political, economic, and diplomatic costs make a military incursion into Mexico unlikely, Venezuela appears in the equation as a more feasible and less geopolitically risky target, and one more profitable in the political calculations of MAGA’s interlocutors. On the 3rd of September, the Pentagon bombed Venezuelan unarmed and small ships in international waters in the Caribbean, allegedly and speculatively, belonging to the Cartel of the Soles. How far a potential military advance aimed at destabilising Nicolás Maduro’s government in the name of combating the grotesque figure of narco-terrorism could escalate remains unknown and politically contingent, but this tension illustrates a deeper geopolitical and historical problem: sovereignty in post-colonial Latin America has always oscillated between fantasy and fragility.

Columbus Day ought to provoke reflection as much as celebration—and not just because the White House is emphatically committed to the latter. It was the right move, of course, for the administration to confidently reject acts of erasure like “Indigenous Peoples Day,” and the whole apparatus of academia, media, and elite-left cultural bludgeoning behind it. We should understand what exactly was meant to be erased.

Although Columbus Day in its historical roots is a de facto holiday for Italian Americans, that group was never really the target of those attacking Christopher Columbus or the holiday in his name. Rather, the opposition to Columbus and his day came due to enmity toward the values and roots of those Italian Americans—and every other American worth the name.

Columbus’s Journal of the First Voyage opens with “In nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi (In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ),” revealing that his journey was an act of faith. He navigated the dangerous waters of the Atlantic to bring about the evangelization of the world foretold in sacred Scripture.

On this episode of After America, Elizabeth Pancotti, economic policy specialist and former advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the US government shutdown and how the Trump administration is using it to further consolidate power.

This discussion was recorded on Friday 10 October 2025.

Tickets for America Unravelling, featuring Emma Shortis and Don Watson, on Sunday 19 October at the Queenscliffe Literary Festival are available online.

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

Guest: Elizabeth Pancotti, Managing Director of Policy and Advocacy, Groundwork Collaborative // @ENPancotti

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

Show notes:

October 13-15, 2025, Washington D.C. Streaming available for some sessions


More “Announcement
Eighth Interdisciplinary Sovereign Debt Research & Management Conference”

In this current financial year, an estimated $21 billion in superannuation tax concessions will flow to the richest 10% of Australians – more than is spent on either child care subsidies, government schools or the estimated $13.6 billion that it would cost the government to include dental in Medicare.

The proposed changes would only affect around 0.5% of people with superannuation and would have been a very small but vital attempt to redress the gross imbalance in the system.

Australia Institute research shows the vast majority of people under 30 will never have more than $3 million in superannuation.

“The government’s watering down of the changes, by indexing the $3 million with inflation, and ruling out taxing unrealised capital gains will be of great comfort to those who abuse the superannuation system in order to avoid paying tax,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.

“The tax system needs reform to make it fairer and to remove distortions such as the capital gains tax discount which has greatly contributed to the housing affordability crisis.

“These changes do little to rein in massive inequality of the superannuation tax system.

“The government’s decision today will embolden those who prefer a tax system that favours the rich.”

This is a more personal entry at Heidi Says than some others. I wanted to share with you what I am doing, day to day, in the hope that I might inspire some of you to try to incorporate the fight against Republican Fascism into your own daily lives.

Once again, this past Saturday, October 11, 2025, I had the chance to participate in Indivisible Santa Fe's Speakers' Corner. It was a rainy, somewhat chilly day but we had more Indivisible Santa Fe members turn out than the previous, sunny session the Saturday before.

I spent some of my time urging my fellow Santa Feans to use our liberty and our current relative safety to speak out against what the Trump regime is doing in Chicago, Portland, and throughout California, where he and his minions, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and Pam Bondi have installed terroristic federal agents and threatened to put federalized National Guard troops on the streets.

The ethics of artificial intelligence are increasingly being framed in ways that risk missing the real point.

In recent years, some companies have begun to speak of “model welfare,” as though machines themselves might be entitled to dignity. Proposals include allowing chatbots to withdraw from unpleasant conversations, treating models as though they might one day suffer, and designing systems that symbolically protect their “feelings.” 

Anthropic’s decision to let its chatbot Claude “exit” distressing interactions is one such example. While company openly concedes that there is no evidence Claude is conscious, it still justifies the measure as a safeguard against hypothetical harm. This is best understood as a pseudo-risk, a precautionary step to address the possibility of machine suffering for which there is no evidence. 

“Single JobSeeker [payment] just hit $400 a week. Let me know how you’d go if you were getting that little and were randomly not paid.”

This comment, from the people behind Nobody Deserves Poverty, points to the ignored cruelty at the heart of one of Australia’s most shameful open secrets.

The mutual obligations system – the system by which we set (through privatised “job providers”) mostly demeaning and useless tasks for unemployed people to meet in order to receive their welfare benefits – is documented to cause harm, with little evidence it actually does anything to meet its main objective: get people into work.

The system is so convoluted and already stacked against people that even without the issue of lawfulness, it would still be not just harmful, but useless. In terms of punishing people, it is working as intended. But governments tend to pay attention when harm can also be considered unlawful, and that’s the issue here.

When the Coalition introduced the Targeted Compliance Framework (TCF) in 2017-18, it gave private job agencies the power to punish “non-compliant” job-seeker behaviour without the checks and balances of government.

If a job agency decides that one of their “clients” hasn’t met their mutual obligations – or just screws up and doesn’t report that they have – welfare recipients literally pay the price. Their payments can be suspended, or they can be forced into menial work-for-the-dole programs, without any consideration of their suitability. Concerns were raised almost immediately.

Buy my new book “A Genocide Foretold"

A young person wanting to learn something of American history could do worse than to watch the works of director John Ford (1894-1973).

One of the great American filmmakers—in my view, the greatest—Ford delved deeply and repeatedly into American history, and not just that of the American West for which he is most famed. You also have Ford’s films on the Second World War (including the award-winning war documentaries he made while on active duty for the U.S. Navy), Abraham Lincoln, and the Great Depression. There are Ford films that take place during the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, and the First World War. Themes addressed in his films include American race relations, immigration, religion, and urban politics.

One of Ford’s crowning achievements is the so-called Cavalry Trilogy, three films starring John Wayne about the U.S. Cavalry in the West, made between 1948 and 1952. They are all about the same subject and in roughly the same setting, but the story and characters are different in each.

I’d like to propose that John Ford had a second trilogy—perhaps more loosely connected than the Cavalry films, certainly less known and less celebrated, but still a triumph of All-American filmmaking and worthy of rediscovery.