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A friend asked a question about whether there is research on whether some people are more receptive to some communication styles and more resistant to others.

And there short answer is: a lot. There are scholars working on that question in advertising, political communication, health communication, political psychology, social psychology, argumentation, cognitive psychology, logic, interpersonal communication. Hell, Aristotle makes claims about what styles are more appropriate for various audiences (and rhetors).

Roughly a year before President Trump was inaugurated for the second time, I joined a group of 230 veterans in signing the Declaration of Military Accountability. It seeks justice for the violation of military members’ rights of conscience during the COVID era and calls for steps to be taken to make amends for abuses of command authority. Having lived through the terror of weaponized institutions being directed at us and our loved ones, those of us who are calling for a return to constitutional rule in the Armed Forces have no interest in an inquisition. It is not a technique we wish to make part of the American tradition. But systems of law remain trustworthy only when they uphold and administer justice.

There are three basic camps among top military management that enforced the Pentagon’s illegal shot mandate.

The Concerned Institutionalists had reservations about the legality and ethics of the Department of War’s COVID policies and enforced them with mercy and flexibility for those under their charge. They recognized that shot, mask, and testing mandates were morally suspect and tempered enforcement with sympathy. Though these supervisory officials personally adhered to immoral policies, they avoided acting in punitive ways toward subordinates who had moral and ethical concerns.

The Australia Institute board is pleased to announce Leanne Minshull has been named as co-Chief Executive Officer.

Leanne will be working in the role alongside Dr Richard Denniss, who will also serve as co-Chief Executive Officer.

Formerly the Institute’s Strategy Director, Leanne has built an extensive network across political, advocacy, and business communities, working as a senior strategist in social, environmental, not-for-profit, and political sectors.

Quotes attributable to Australia Institute Board Chair, Dr John McKinnon:

“The board is thrilled to have such capable and experienced leaders within the Institute, and under the leadership of Richard and Leanne we can ensure we remain effective as we continue to grow.

“The Australia Institute is nation’s most consequential think tank, and with more than 50 staff working on multiple projects and initiatives, we are one of the country’s most high-impact organisations.

“We look forward to the next chapter in the Institute’s development and our growing role in helping shape the future of the nation.”

Quotes attributable to Australia Institute co-Chief Executive Officer, Richard Denniss:

“I am thrilled Leanne has agreed to take on the role of co-CEO.

“Leanne brings a wealth of experience to the organisation, through decades of working to make Australia a fairer place across politics, policy, and advocacy.

The list has been compiled by Dr Frank Yuan, Postdoctoral Fellow at The Australia Institute, who insists China is far less mysterious and scary than most Australians might think.

In fact, he says, beyond daily news references to China’s economic and military power, there are countless stories of successful Chinese business tycoons, entertainers, journalists, academics and government officials – many with deep connections to the west.

There’s the tech mogul who flew too close to the sun, the “wolf warrior” journalist who once described Australia as “chewed gum stuck on China’s boot” and the global pop star who could teach Taylor Swift a thing or two.

The paper – Today’s China in Seven Life Stories – urges Australian to get to know the woman behind the face on the label of their favourite chili sauce, the energy tsar helping transform China into a renewable energy superpower and the theoretician who’s shaped China’s foreign outlook under three Presidents.

“China is a surprisingly cosmopolitan society. It is full of countless rags-to-riches stories as part of the astounding economic development it has experienced since the 1980s,” said Dr Frank Yuan.

“Many Chinese elites have not only visited western countries, but even educational or professional connections with them. Increasingly, popular culture in China is also becoming part of the globalised pop culture.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Dr Emma Shortis and Glenn Connley discuss Anthony Albanese’s major diplomatic tour, the US Defense Secretary’s concerning warning to his top brass, and why the Trump-Netanyahu peace plan seems “doomed to fail”.

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

After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis is available via Australia Institute Press.

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

Host: Glenn Connley, Senior Media Advisor, the Australia Institute // @glennconnley

Show notes:

After America, the Australia Institute

I slunk into the house, body bloodied and T-shirt torn, failing to go unnoticed. My son looked up from his video game of bedraggled freaks. The real deal had arrived.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I muttered, peeling a bandage from my arm. Deep cut shaped like a scythe or a smile, two dark blue steady growing bruises above.

“Bruh Mama,” my son said with concern.

Bruh Mama is my name. It is a Gen Z honorific, like Friar Tuck.

“That’s not nothing. What’d you do?”

“Went to the lake.”

“What happened at the lake?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said. “You’ll lose all respect for me.”

“Um…” he said, firing teenage ellipses like bullets, and I said, “Hey!”

“Respect, Bruh Mama,” my son said solemnly. “I respect you.” Grains of sand fell from my hair like little lost pieces of dignity.

“OK, I’ll tell you,” I said. “A giant flying carp hit me in the face and knocked me half out of my kayak into a fallen tree which trapped me with branches like claws and as soon as I broke loose, the goddamn carp flew back and smacked me again.”

“Now that everyone has seen the blatant white Christian nationalism on display at the Kirk memorial/political rally, here are some resources to help you learn more and resist more effectively.” This sentence was posted on X by Jemar Tisby, a protégé of the huckster Ibram X. Kendi. Tisby followed up that observation by helpfully pointing people to his own book, Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity with Racism, as a manual to combat the grave evils they had just witnessed in State Farm Stadium.

That Tisby would think to write and then publish this sentiment about Charlie Kirk’s memorial service shows the depths to which the Left has sunk. They are categorically rejecting the bonds of civic friendship that are necessary to keep our country whole. Instead of centering “whiteness,” they center race-based narcissism, envy, and pride, the modern Left’s unholy trinity.

Audited accounts show that the ANU generated a $90 million surplus in 2024 and increased the value of its net assets.

However, the ANU’s leadership declared an ‘underlying operating deficit’ of $142.5 million in 2024.

This was by dismissing a lot of the revenue items recognised by the Auditor.

Analysis shows that to get from the audited surplus of $89.9 million to an unaudited deficit of $142.5 million, $232.4 million revenue has been left unaccounted for.

“If an organisation – as opposed to its auditors – chooses to ignore nearly one quarter of a billion dollars in revenue then the organisation’s financial result will appear one quarter of a billion dollars worse,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

“Our paper outlines items the auditor included, and that the ANU leadership rejected. It shows any argument that the ANU is in an unhealthy financial position is flimsy.

“If we believe the auditor, there is no crisis at the ANU.

“To be clear, as a government owned, not-for-profit entity, the ANU is under no pressure to maximise its profits so that it can maximise dividends paid to shareholders.

“On the contrary, when the ANU made a surplus of $89.9 million in 2024 it did so by spending less money on its students, staff and community than it received.

Stephan Luck

Digital currencies have grown rapidly in recent years. In July 2025, Congress passed the “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act” (GENIUS) Act, establishing the first comprehensive federal framework governing the issuance of stablecoins. In this post, we place stablecoins in a historical perspective by comparing them to national bank notes, a form of privately issued money that circulated in the United States from 1863 through 1935.

Canadians widely recognize the value of a stable power grid: households and industries need a growing base load energy system that can withstand the pressure of increasing electrification in the face of decarbonization, and nuclear power must be part of the equation. Without it, Canadians would struggle to keep the lights on or charge their electric cars and would need fossil fuels to keep the grid running. The importance of nuclear power was recognized and made clear at the 2025 Ontario NDP Convention, where labour unions, environmental activists, First Nations delegates, and the ONDP caucus came together to pass a modernized nuclear energy policy resolution. The resolution backed low emissions electricity, including hydro, renewables, and made-in-Canada nuclear, while reaffirming support for public ownership of energy. The Saskatchewan NDP is now looking to explore opportunities for building the province’s energy future, with a particular focus on advancements in nuclear energy to replace coal energy.

From Senate Committee hearings to interviews, as well as reacting to everything going on in the news, check out a few highlights of our impact!

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

Save Tuvalu, Save The World can now be viewed publicly on YouTube.

In tiny, idyllic Tuvalu, there are no climate deniers. It’s impossible to deny what’s happening before your very eyes.

Sea water is pushing up through the land, destroying traditional crops and making the water unfit to drink. High tides are inundating the country, flooding the main island’s only airport, cutting Tuvalu off from the world.

“Tuvalu is ground zero for the global climate crisis,” said Stephen Long, filmmaker and Senior Fellow and Contributing Editor at The Australia Institute.

“No nation is more vulnerable than this small Pacific country.”

Save Tuvalu, Save The World looks at climate change through the eyes of those experiencing the consequences of climate change in their everyday lives, including young climate campaigner Gitty Yee, who visited Australia last week for three sold-out preview screenings of the documentary.

“I see myself as a climate warrior,” Gitty says.

“I fight for my country, and I fight for what we believe in. I fight for our right to live, our right to prosper, for our future generations.”

Natalia Fischl-Lanzoni, Martin Hiti, and Asani Sarkar

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’.