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On July 19, 1776, after New York’s delegates had received instructions from the new Provincial Congress in their colony to support independence, Congress resolved that the Declaration “be fairly engrossed on parchment, with the title and stile of ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America,’ and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress.”

The formal handwritten document, the one now displayed in the Rotunda of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., was probably prepared by Timothy Matlack, clerk to the Second Continental Congress, who was known for his fine penmanship. He was also a colonel in the Philadelphia Fifth Battalion and later became a delegate to Congress.

The Journals of the Continental Congress records on August 2, 1776, that “The Declaration of Independence, being engrossed, and compared at the table, was signed [by the members].” Most signed the Declaration on that date, though several delegates signed later. Delaware delegate Thomas McKean was a colonel of the Philadelphia Fourth Battalion, in New Jersey reinforcing Washington’s troops, and was the last person to sign the Declaration, perhaps as late as 1781.

For most people, this list didn’t include any Australian artists, and if it did it was likely someone well-established, like Vance Joy or The Kid Laroi.

Research by the Australia Institute looked at the top 10,000 artists being streamed inside Australia between 2021 and 2024 and found that the presence of Australian artists has declined, both in terms of the total number of artists and the total number of streams.

In 2024 Australia’s most streamed domestic artist was The Wiggles. The number of Australian artists appearing in even the bottom 5000 has dropped, which means new artists aren’t getting a look in.

The reason? If you rely on automated playlists – like the mixes Spotify recommends to its users – algorithms are deciding what music you hear.

Most streaming services now use large language models (LLMs) to make these playlists, which are based on the data of masses of listeners with similar tastes.

These algorithms can filter for language, but not for geography or culture, which means that all English language listeners – be they American, British, Irish, Canadian, Kiwi or Australian – are put into the same pool.

And yet, governments know we will accept it without question when it comes to taking from the most vulnerable.

How else to explain the ease with which the Labor government is not just cutting NDIS entitlements (cleverly marketed as “controls on future growth”) and now, the revelations from The Guardian’s Kate Lyons that not only will AI determine need and plans, but there will be almost no way for a human to intervene and make adjustments when, inevitably, human needs and nuances aren’t accounted for by software.

This will no doubt be celebrated by those who think “government can’t pay for everything” and it is “common sense” to put spending caps on care. Those same people never really think that spending caps ought apply to subsidies that just help people make money.

“NDIS costs soar as children flock to scheme” is a headline people accept. But we wouldn’t see those same papers of note report on “capital gains tax discount costs soar as investors flock to housing” – because that’s just the cost of doing business.

Take the event that fund manager Geoff Wilson recently held to celebrate knocking off the very modest superannuation reforms Jim Chalmers had floated.

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Angus discuss why the devil is in the detail of the latest economic growth figures and how the Victoria has led the other states on housing affordability.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 4 December.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘POD5’ to get $5 off.

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

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

Host: Angus Blackman, Executive Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB

Show notes:

There are two big drivers of Australia’s economic growth – but shape matters as much as size by Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia (December 2025)

Earlier today, I read yesterday's opinion in Molina v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Judge Beryl Howell wrote in support of her decision to temporarily specifically require the Trump regime to obey immigration enforcement laws it has been explicitly and overtly violating in the District of Columbia. Before I say anything about the legal ins and outs, we must consider the facts that have given rise to the litigation. They are comparatively banal and they are horrific. As I read them, I realized I felt exactly as I did when I was kid reading The Diary of Anne Frank or Elie Weisel's Night – the exact same sense of growing horror that the conduct described happened and happened daily, as if it were normal.

We must keep attending to the particulars of what the Trump regime is doing to people. It is the only way we will remain galvanized in the face of the relentless, large-scale fascism. The details make the utter moral wrongness crystal clear.

The prize committee is pleased to announce that Anja Bless’ article, titled ‘The co-optation of regenerative agriculture: revisiting the corporate environmental food regime’, published in the journal Globalizations, has won the 2025 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.

The committee commended the article for its outstanding quality, noting the depth of research, theoretical novelty, and timeliness in drawing attention to the challenges of global food security.

The article is theoretically novel, linking the scholarship on corporate power with food regime theory in an innovative way. The committee commends Bless’ extensive and rigorous empirical research, which has been presented in a compelling and highly engaging manner. The author makes an important contribution to critical literatures of green capitalism, pushing beyond a simplistic analysis of greenwashing, to understand the ways in which sustainability claims open up new opportunities for accumulation.

Finally, the judges noted that while the article offers significant insights for scholars of corporate power and the global food system governance, it also has great applicability to broader IPE fields and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars.

‘Making the Good Society’ is a video series from the Broadbent Institute and Perspectives Journal that asks progressive leaders and thinkers about their vision for a good society that is humane, just, and democratic.

In this episode, Ironworkers Bert Royer and Nigel Hare explain how the unionized trades are fighting for affordability for their members. From wages and pensions to apprenticeships, Ontario’s Building and Construction Trades Council keeps unionized workers protected and empowered throughout their careers, pushing back against the cost-of-living crisis.

Many conservatives, myself included, have recognized the wisdom of a populist turn in our politics. A roused populace was necessary to address the growing illiberalism and sheer unaccountability of woke elites who, for at least a generation, have committed themselves to redefining the theory and practice of liberal democracy. But populism also has marked limits, especially when applied to the realm where principle and prudence, in the high and noble Aristotelian or Burkean sense, must inform action.

Populist anger must be calibrated and channelled so that it does not become self-destructive. The welcome resistance to the progressivist “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton so suggestively called it, must not give way to a rival spirit of repudiation on the Right that dismisses our intellectual and political forebears as fools and frauds. “What has conservatism ever conserved?” is both historically illiterate and politically ungrateful.

INXS. Kyle Minogue. Even the Wiggles. Australia has an incredible musical legacy, but with declining streaming numbers and revenues heading abroad, will the Aussie musician just become somebody we used to know? On this episode of Follow the Money, former Spotify Chief Economist Will Page and Australia Institute Research Manager Morgan Harrington join Ebony Bennett to discuss how to reverse the decline of Australian music.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘POD5’ at checkout to save $5 off the price – available for a limited time only.

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

Guest: Will Page, Strategic Advisory, Pivotal Economics

Guest: Morgan Harrington, Research Manager, the Australia Institute // @mhharrington

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

Show notes:

I have a longtime friend—I’ll omit his name because he is somewhat politically prominent—who has been very involved in the extraction of Afghans from Afghanistan who allegedly helped us and resettling them in the United States. My friend already has a demanding job, but he has often worked through the night, forgoing sleep to help with this task.

I have a number of strong political disagreements with him, but I would never question his patriotism. He voluntarily served as a soldier in Afghanistan after overcoming great obstacles to be accepted into the military. But I would strongly question his political judgment, and the judgment of anyone who thinks we should be settling Afghan refugees in America.

Unfortunately, a number of our former soldiers, no matter how sincere their beliefs, seem to sympathize more with people in a foreign country whom they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be allies rather than with the interests of the only country to which they owe their allegiance.

UPDATE 12/4: The answers to the Q & A are up:

As a pessimistic Boomer (and Big Law veteran) who channels Robert Bork, I regard the state of our politics in the MAGA era the same way Charles Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities nearly two centuries ago: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I try to temper my gloominess about the current zeitgeist by aiming for a perspective somewhere between Pollyanna and Jeremiah.

Thanks to President Trump, the 6-to-3 originalist majority on the Supreme Court is the only thing standing between us and the abyss—a hellish combination of Deep State corruption, socialist economics, cultish wokeism, and cultural degeneracy. Yes, President Trump has over three years left in his second term, and is heroically trying to drain the swamp. But Congress is gridlocked, the midterms loom, and recent election results suggest the MAGA agenda is not as popular as Trump’s 2024 drubbing of Kamala Harris might indicate. She was, after all, the weakest Democratic candidate for president since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Unlike Trump in 2024, the Bush/Quayle ticket won an Electoral College landslide, and a majority of the popular vote. The nation is much more divided now.

Despite all of this, unlike my friend Jesse Merriam, I am encouraged by the state of the conservative legal movement—at least relative to the Left’s capture of so many other American institutions.

In his opening essay, Jesse Merriam calls for a more positive, more substantive, and more ambitious legal conservatism. An almost exclusive focus on originalism, he suggests, has made the conservative legal movement too narrow, technocratic, and reactive. Merriam argues it has become overly concerned with means, such as the correct rules of constitutional interpretation, instead of ends, like securing the common good. It is too preoccupied with correcting old wrongs, like reversing erroneous precedents, instead of achieving positive results, such as fostering the conditions of a virtuous and orderly society. The scions of legal conservatism, Merriam contends, should learn from the great legal-political movements of the past like the New Deal and the civil rights movement and seek, through legal and political activism, to build the kind of legal order necessary to restore the nation’s traditional political identity.

On this episode of After America, Dr Ruth Mitchell, neurosurgeon and Nobel Prize winner with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Trump’s nuclear testing claims, American healthcare under RFK Jr.’s leadership, and the misogyny at the heart of key US institutions.

This discussion was recorded on Wednesday 19 November 2025.

1800RESPECT is the national domestic, family and sexual violence counselling, information and support service. Call 1800 737 732, text 0458 737 732, chat online or video call via their website.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available for pre-order now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘SAVE5’ to get $5 off.

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

Despite thousands of lawsuits against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma now being settled, the opioid crisis continues to devastate families and communities. This is why there are massive national efforts to expand addiction treatment, develop non-opioid pain alternatives, promote natural remedies, and confront the Mexican drug cartels flooding America with fentanyl. In recent years, opioid-related deaths have finally begun to decline, suggesting those initiatives are starting to make a real impact. But that progress may already be slowing.

One, because it was honest – a rarity in this game. And two, because it was mad.

Turnbull gave the interview during a time of upheaval in the Liberal Party. He was being undercut by members of the right faction, such as senator Nick Minchin, Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews, who had used the issue of climate change action as a launchpad for their wrecking.

“There is a recklessness and a wilfulness in these men which is going to destroy the Liberal Party,” 2009 Turnbull said.

He went on to say the Liberals would be destroyed if the issue wasn’t resolved.

”If Nick Minchin wins this battle, he condemns our party to irrelevance because what he is saying on one of the greatest issues and challenges of our time, one that will affect the future of the planet and the future of our children and their children, Nick Minchin is saying ‘Do nothing’,” Turnbull said.

In the same interview, the kicker: “We will end up becoming a fringe party of the far right.”

Turnbull was ousted the next day and the rest is history – Abbott beat him, then Turnbull won the battle against Abbott and that faction who had openly despised him since 2009, but lost the war, leaving The Lodge with a rather thin record as prime minister.

Money in the 2020s is in some respects very different than money in the 1920s, but as the Bank for International Settlements notes, the world seems intent on unlearning some important lessons. Who issues money, and how it is regulated, matter. Poorly regulated privately issued money is a recipe for disaster. Yet the Trump administration, in particular, seems intent on bringing “stablecoin” into the mainstream. Stablecoin are digital tokens that can be held in a digital wallet and used for payment on blockchains. Its defining characteristic is that the issuer promises it will be redeemed for an equivalent sum of whatever the token was originally issued in exchange for (e.g. if you provide $1 to get 1 stablecoin token denominated as a $1 token, the issuer promises to return $1 to you if you return your token). The dominant version of stablecoin are “asset backed” and “full reserve”. This simply means that the issuer takes the currency they receive and buys assets that it retains until needed to meet redemption requirements. In theory, high quality liquid assets stand behind the promise of redemption. There are currently around $275bn in issued stablecoins.

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.

And it’s not because of some inherent aspect of Australian culture that wants to bet on two flies crawling up a wall. It’s the predictable outcome of a predatory gambling industry that successive governments have been unwilling to take on.

Every year, the gambling industry destroys lives, and it’s even plotting to expand its reach by targeting new demographics such as young women.

In 2023, after a parliamentary inquiry into online gambling (the “Murphy review”), it seemed like change might be coming. The inquiry included pollies from the Labor, Liberal and National parties, as well as independent Kate Chaney. Despite their usual appetite for animosity, the cross-party committee unanimously endorsed 31 recommendations to reduce gambling harm, including a phased-in ban on advertising for online gambling.

In his new book “From Resistance to Reform: Case studies of long term social justice advocacy in Australia”, Prof Philip Mendes presents a comprehensive historical and political analysis of four policy areas where reform was achieved after many years of neglect.

– Young people transitioning from out-of-home care
– Medically supervised injecting facilities
– Social security payments for the unemployed, and
– Compulsory income management

For each of these policy areas, Mendes presents the long-term chronology of the public policy debates, the key arguments and evidence presented by researchers and advocacy groups in favour of policy reform, the strategies used by policy advocates, and the contrary arguments presented by governments and other bodies, as well as other factors which may have hindered or enabled policy change.

Arguing that governments should introduce policy development processes and networks that include active engagement with knowledge from domestic and global research studies, this is critical reading for scholars and policymakers internationally on the dynamics of policy initiatives, outcomes and reform.

Prof Mendes joined us at the November 2025 John Cain Lunch, to give a presentation on his latest book Resistance to Reform: Case Studies of Long-Term Social Justice Advocacy in Australia.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

“How do we understand now if we don’t understand 1948 or 1917 or all the things that happened during the British Mandate?”

This is a central question Micaela Sahhar, author and educator, asks while dissecting her book, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. Sahhar reframes these monumental events in Palestinian history through an intimate, granular lens of her own family’s displacement during the 20th century.

In Bruce McKenna’s piece for Perspectives Journal, ‘Embers of the Mass Party,’ he laments the failure of the New Democratic Party to build a meaningful membership culture and embrace mass politics. In its current state, the NDP has embraced a top-down and centralized leadership model where policy, communications, and strategy is developed in the leader’s office, and disseminated to the grassroots. McKenna thinks this approach is a mistake, arguing that, “with a stronger membership culture, bodies like federal and provincial councils, executives, and equity commissions would develop stronger legitimacy and policy capacity.”

While this has remained true for much of the NDP and its provincial wings, the Ontario NDP debate around nuclear energy, brought forth during its September 2025 party convention, demonstrates that a burgeoning membership culture in organizations like the Ontario New Democratic Youth (ONDY) can rekindle the mass party. Structures like ONDY and labour unions within the party itself, informed by social movements outside of the party, can support credibility and build capacity for NDP policy by engaging with membership and facilitating democratic policy development.

From hosting a sold-out Barrie, Bowers & Friends event in Sydney, to The Hon. Mike Rann giving the Dr Hugh Memorial Lecture in Adelaide, to appearing before the Senate, there was a lot to do! And that’s on top of all our research!

The post November 2025 Media Highlights appeared first on The Australia Institute.

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.

Friends and Frenemies | The Roundtable Ep. 295

A recent White House meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani gave the president a chance to flip the script while publicly debasing the rhetorical currency of the “anti-fascist” Left. In this special holiday episode, the guys are joined by Matthew Peterson to discuss the president’s latest strategy, and answer listener questions. On the docket are emerging factions within the conservative movement, federal leniency on Antifa post-domestic-terrorist designation, and more. Plus: The crew gives thanks and share holiday plans, antics, eats—and cultural recommendations!

Today’s budget was a missed opportunity. Every budget is a collection of political choices; the Chancellor could have chosen in this budget, and in every budget, to confront the reality that inequality is out of control and it’s doing real harm to our democracy, society, and planet. Instead, the Chancellor chose to design this budget […]

The post Budget 25: Billionaires Protected At Our Expense appeared first on Equality Trust.