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On this episode of Follow the Money, Clive Marshall, former CEO of the Press Association (UK), and Emma Cowdroy, Acting CEO of Australian Associated Press, join Australia Institute Executive Director Richard Denniss to discuss artificial intelligence and the news.

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

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Guest: Clive Marshall, former Chief Executive Officer, The Press Association (UK)

Guest: Emma Cowdroy, Acting CEO, Australian Associated Press

Host: Richard Denniss, Executive Director, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss

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

Show notes:

Media and Democracy, the Australia Institute

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

“I've witnessed a lot of war and in that there is nothing that compares to the level of destruction, the level of [dis]proportionality, the absolute disregard for Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law and considerations of the laws of armed conflict. [Nowhere] in my career… have I witnessed anything close to the absolute escalation of violence and [unnecessary] force I witnessed in Gaza.”

As a Palestinian scientist and ecologist deeply rooted in Palestine’s landscapes and communities, I bear witness to a catastrophic unfolding—a systematic assault on our ecosystems, livelihoods, and survival. This assault is not collateral damage in conflict; it is ecocide.

“Ecocide” refers to severe, widespread, and long-term environmental destruction that undermines the ability of inhabitants to enjoy and sustain life. Although Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute recognizes wartime environmental harm as a war crime, this threshold has rarely been met or invoked in practice. Advocates now call for ecocide recognition as the “fifth international crime against peace,” to hold perpetrators to account in both war and peace contexts. In Palestine, environmental degradation is not incidental—it is intentional, protracted, and aimed at breaking the eco-sumud (ecological steadfastness) of the Palestinian people.

Since October 2023, Gaza’s environment has suffered nearly unimaginable devastation:

During a debate with his political nemesis Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln noted that “public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” The centrality of persuasion, which Lincoln correctly identified as the fundamental mechanism of statecraft in a democratic society, is the reason the Right is ascendant in America today. The Left has been telling its story for a long time, but the chasm between their claims and reality finally grew too large for most voters not to notice.

This opened the door for Donald Trump, a figure whose defining quality is a penchant for pointing out the failures of America’s political class—and it turned out that a majority of Americans agreed with his assessment.

The president’s achievement, properly understood, is reorienting conservatism toward using power well—what used to be called statesmanship—across four key categories: ideology, elections, policy, and competency. Each of these should be understood as a particular relationship with power. Ideology is alignment with the nation, the proper source of power. Elections are about persuading citizens to confer power. Policy is the design of a program for the use of power. Competency is the apt use and execution of power.

After decades of deepening economic integration, the world economy is increasingly challenged by rising geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry, notably, but not only, between the United States and China. Around the world, trade and investment barriers are rising, leading to the fracturing and rerouting of value chains. Strains are also beginning to appear in the international monetary and financial systems. Global governance institutions are gridlocked and increasingly dysfunctional, even as the global problems they are purportedly designed to address are intensifying. For many states and societies, including Australia, the fracturing of economic globalisation presents acute new challenges, even as new opportunities are also emerging to attract trade, investment and development finance. The world is clearly standing at a historic inflection point, but where are we heading?

The 16^th AIPEN Workshop is inviting papers, panels or roundtable submissions that seek to interrogate these and similar themes. As always, AIPEN 2026 is also inviting submissions related to any area in the international political economy broadly understood, including policy-related issues, reflecting the breadth and depth of the study of political economy in Australia and beyond.

The 16^th AIPEN Workshop will take place at the University of Queensland, 5-6 February 2026.

“The working stiff doesn’t get as much attention as before, or respect, and if any party works overtime to win their vote, it’s the Conservatives,” John Ibbitson wrote in the Globe and Mail on January 11^th, 2024. “They would never have won that vote on Ed Broadbent’s watch.” Broadbent, who passed away at the age of 87 on the day Ibbitson’s article was published, had been elected leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada amid the first great crisis of post-war social democracy in the 1970s. The origins of that crisis, as he understood it, ran deep in the contention between capitalism and democracy: slower economic growth, rising oil prices, demographic change as populations aged, and a shifting industrial landscape that produced new employment patterns. The combination of these social and economic pressures precipitated a fiscal crisis that was seized upon by those who sought to subordinate society to the dictates of the market. 

Jacob Kim-Sherman and Lee Seltzer

August was not a pleasant month for me.

I went into a weeks-long crash, unable to do much of anything but lie in bed with my migraine cap on, reflecting on what I wish had gone differently over the last several years. Sometimes I think about the week I caught the virus, but more often I think about life before the pandemic entirely. A world with no virus, I imagine. Some random combination of events strings together differently, back there in the fall of 2019. It all works out the way it didn’t. SARS-COV-2 never infects a human, or never makes it to this side of the Pacific. What would life be like?

I recently wrote about how much time I spend wandering around in my memories, revisiting friends, concerts, parties, bars, even jobs and trips to the gym. It’s strange though; even old photos have an air of doom about them. Like there’s a ticking clock over my head. 18 months until everything changes, I think. I didn’t know.

The latest FOI annual report from the government shows that:

• During the first two years of the Albanese government, there were about 21,000 requests determined per year – the lowest since the Gillard government (20,000 requests in 2010–11).
• But in 2010–11, the total cost of administering the FOI system was $36 million – compared to $70 million in 2022–23 and $86 million in 2023–24.
• Determining half again as many FOI requests (34,000) only cost the Howard Government $25 million to administer in 2006–07.

Australia Institute research into freedom of information laws found:

• There were considerable delays with the FOI system, both in the processing of requests and the review of FOI complaints.
• The FOI system did not meet community expectations.
• Government ministers and officials were delaying and obfuscating releasing FOI information.

Polling research from the first term of the Albanese government found that:

On this episode of After America, Professor Elizabeth Saunders from Columbia University joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the extreme volatility of this administration’s foreign policy and how Trump is breaking down the guardrails of American democracy.

This episode was recorded on Thursday 28 August.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

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

Guest: Elizabeth N Saunders, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University // @profsaunders

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

Show notes:

‘Imperial President at Home, Emperor Abroad’ by Elizabeth Saunders, Foreign Affairs (June 2025)

It‘s been revealed that Santos’ Darwin LNG gas export terminal has been leaking large amounts of climate-destroying methane gas for 20 years – and gas companies and governments have failed to act.

This confirms The Australia Institute’s long-held concern that methane emissions are grossly underestimated and Australia’s regulators have been captured by the gas industry.

The reporting confirms that despite all relevant regulators and governments knowing about the leaks, the emissions will continue to go unreported and will not be included in Australia’s greenhouse gas reporting. Incredibly, Santos will be allowed to use the leaking tank until 2050 without fixing it.

It further confirms that the Northern Territory EPA (NTEPA), the CSIRO, the Clean Energy Regulator (CER), the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA), and NT WorkSafe all knew about the leak – and did nothing.

Santos will receive all the gas from the Barossa gas field that will feed its leaking Darwin LNG export terminal for free, as the Australian government will not charge it royalties. It is also very unlikely to pay Petroleum Resource Rent Tax and, according to the most recent AT0 Corporate Tax Transparency data, Santos LTD has paid virtually no company tax since 2016.

“Trust, it is constantly observed, is hard-earned and easily dissipated. It is valuable social capital and not to be squandered.

“If there are no guarantees to be had, we need to place trust with care. This can be hard. The little shepherd boy who shouted ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ eventually lost his sheep, but we note not before his false alarms had deceived others time and again. Deception and betrayal often work.

“Traitors and terrorists, embezzlers and con artists, forgers and plagiarists, false promisers and free riders cultivate then breach others’ trust. They often get away with it. Breach of trust has been around since the Garden of Eden – although it did not quite work out there.

“Now it is more varied and more ingenious, and often successful.”

Modern politics has created the perfect storm for a lack of trust in government and, by association, fractures in our society and the “social cohesion” our politicians hold up as reason, excuse and driver.

One of the ways they destroy trust is through secrecy and half-truths.

The Labor government has still not released the National Climate Risk Assessment analysis, which has been described by those who have seen it as “dire and “extremely confronting” as it continues to obfuscate on setting its 2035 climate target.

Believe it or not, in 2025, with Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions from transport at a near-record high, the Productivity Commission is more worried about subsidies for electric vehicles that account for just 1 per cent of the cars on our roads than it is about subsidies for the enormous 4WDs that have come to dominate our suburban streets in the past decade.

At the same time that the commission insists productivity in the housing market requires cutting back “red tape”, it is recommending a climate resilience code that would add regulation to the same industry. Pick a lane, commission people.

Let’s start with cars. The commission has suggested incentives for electric vehicles, such as the fringe benefits tax exemption, should be phased out on the basis that they “distort the market”.

That makes as much sense as arguing we should impose the GST on fresh food because it distorts the market – when distorting the market was the whole point of the tax break.

Economics 101 says we should tax things we want less of and subsidise things we want more of.

If the commission doesn’t think we should have more EVs on the roads, it should say so. But arguing that we should remove subsidies for EVs because they are working as intended is simply absurd.

But the real problem with the PC’s pogrom against EV subsidies is its lack of consistency.

One of the few outcomes of the Economic Reform Roundtable was the Treasurer announcing the Government would “see where we can reduce complexity and red tape in the National Construction Code”. The Housing Minister has previously said regulations are partly to blame for the housing crisis by making it “uneconomic to build the kind of housing that our country needs most”, stating “builders face a ridiculous thicket of red tape that is preventing them building the homes we need.” But making “over-regulation” the villain in the housing crisis fails to recognise how underregulated much of the housing market is.

Tax breaks for investors using homes as short-stay accommodation could be costing Australian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year, according to a new report by Everybody’s Home.

The Short-Stay Subsidy report estimates that this financial year the budget could be losing between $111 million and $556 million in forgone revenue through negative gearing deductions claimed on short-stay rental properties.

Across Australia 167,955 entire homes are estimated to be operating as short-stay accommodation instead of long-term rentals, yet owners can still claim negative gearing and the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) discount.

The report found: