Yesterday, a young woman named Laura filed the first medical malpractice lawsuit against doctors in Latin America for perpetrating the lie that she was born in the wrong body. Doctors from the Clínica Valle del Lili in Colombia diagnosed Laura with gender dysphoria on her very first visit. Though only 15 at the time, they told her that testosterone and puberty blockers would solve her distress. Despite Laura’s desire to breastfeed one day, they performed a double mastectomy after she turned 18. Now, with the help of lawyers, she is going to court and to the public because “kids and teenagers shouldn’t be able to transition.”
Like youth in other countries, Laura first encountered gender ideology online. After seeing a Swedish girl use a breast binder, she became seized with the idea that she could “become a boy.” This offered her escape from impending womanhood—something she dreaded. Additionally, at only six years old, Laura was sexually assaulted by a person who worked in her household. As she began to go through puberty, that trauma resurfaced, and crippling fear made it hard just to leave the house.
Prosper Australia today welcomed the inclusion of a stamp duty to land tax transition in Infrastructure Victoria’s new strategy but criticised the absence of value capture as a sustainable and equitable funding mechanism. “We applaud Infrastructure Victoria’s endorsement of a broad-based annual land tax. This reform recognises that shifting the tax base from transactions to […]
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis joins Angus Blackman to discuss the results of last week’s sweeping election victories. They discuss what it all means for the Democratic Party, how the MAGA-verse is responding, and the impact of the longest federal government shutdown in American history.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 10 November.
Follow Emma’s work at The Point, where she publishes a column on the week in American politics every Monday.
Join Emma and Don Watson in conversation in Carlton on Saturday 15 November.
Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
Host: Angus Blackman, Executive Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB
In 1991, the Tailhook scandal rocked the U.S. Navy. Hundreds of aviators at a Las Vegas convention engaged in misconduct that shocked the public. The fallout was swift. Policies that had long rewarded tactical excellence and operational rigor gave way to gender sensitivity training, compliance mandates, and a culture of political correctness. Officers who once climbed the ranks based on battlefield skill suddenly found themselves judged on how well they adopted progressive talking points. Conservatives conceded too much to progressives, even if only rhetorically, and responded with caution, attempting to preserve what little influence remained. Once a warfighting meritocracy, the military had begun a subtle shift. The pivot favored optics over lethality.
Over the next three decades, this dynamic deepened. The Peter principle—the idea that competent individuals rise only to the level of their incompetence—was weaponized. Political loyalty and agenda signaling replaced combat effectiveness as the dominant criterion for promotion. Diamonds, the true experts in warfighting, began to sink under the weight of bureaucratic mandates, while incompetents and social climbers got to the top rungs of the Pentagon.
However, in 2025, reformers like Pete Hegseth have emerged, leading a merit-first reclamation project that aims to restore skill, innovation, and operational readiness.
Launched on 31 October 2025 at Gleebooks, Sydney, this post focuses on the book by Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, which will be followed next week by a commentary from the same evening delivered by Adam David Morton.
Before I’d watched the first episode, Rhea Seehorn’s screaming mug on the promotional poster for Pluribus captured the heady mix of primal terror, disbelief, horror and rage that’s been stewing in me over the last several years as a homebound person living with a virus most people will not acknowledge.
On hearing the show’s stated premise, I was even more intrigued: “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.”
The Gauntlet is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
In my daily life as a Long COVID patient, disabled by an infection in late 2023, it sounded like a tagline I might write about my own efforts over the last several years.
The Gender Equality @ Work Index produced by Sydney Uni academics is a great summary of national changes in gender workplace inequality, but the South Australian data might tell a slightly different story.
Between them, they’ve recorded a collective profit of more than $43 billion.
Much of that has come at the expense of Australian home owners who’ve been battling a cost-of-living crisis. The big 4 banks control almost three quarters of the nation’s home loans.
Research by The Australia Institute reveals the big four banks make $213,480 in pure profit from the average mortgage of a first-home buyer with a 30-year loan.
ANZ is the smallest of the banks as reflected in its profit being lower than the rest. It’s also the smallest using its share of total loans to residents or its share of home loans. The ANZ accounts for 13% of all loans to Australian residents and 13% of loans for housing.
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Nov 10-16, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9962
Today, Saturday November 8 2025, NSW National Socialist Network (NSN) members held an antisemitic rally outside NSW Parliament House under the banner of “White Australia”. Their photographs have been generously forwarded to our team by members of the community, and although we have an impressive inventory of details already, we are now appealing for more information about these men.
For the purposes of this article we have only included the names already in the media – see relevant articles at the links beside their names.
Does one of them work at your workplace? Has one of them given you a haircut? Trained at your gym? In classes with you at school, TAFE or uni? A known gronk in your local music scene? We're particularly interested in those working with government contracts or the legal sphere, and with access to major infrastructure, but any tip-off, no matter how small, helps.
Individuals are numbered 1-60 for ease of communication. Help us out by sharing any verifiable information by securely dropping us a line at thewhiterosesociety@protonmail.com. We will protect your anonymity.
Today, nearly all Americans agree that drug prices are too high. The average annual per capita spending on medications is over $1,000 and climbing. These sky-high costs burden working-class families with yet another expense, reducing their ability to save, invest, or buy other needed items.
In response to this urgent matter, politicians are singling out pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the financial negotiators between pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report in 2024 accusing PBMs of price-gouging and is currently suing one of these managers over insulin prices. The House Oversight Committee has made PBMs the primary target of its drug price-fighting efforts, rehashing the FTC’s accusations of profiteering.
In 1992, a young Democratic strategist on the Clinton campaign named James Carville coined the now-famous phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” He directed it to the campaign workers to ensure they remained laser-focused on kitchen table issues. In Tuesday’s elections, voters delivered that same message, loud and clear, in races in New York City, Virginia, and New Jersey. The results were not surprising—even the margins were roughly in line with 2017, the last off-year elections in those localities when Trump was president.
But the message was clear: while many give the economy solid overall marks, many young voters in particular are hurting economically. Of course, the Trump Administration is well aware of this. They’ve been digging out of the economic disaster Joe Biden left them. Compared to Europe and much of Asia, the U.S. is doing better, with unemployment still low and Trump having largely tamed inflation. But the global macro environment is still challenging—especially for young people.
This is why almost immediately after the election, the administration focused on ramping up its communication efforts on the economy. President Trump indicated an urgent need to blow up the filibuster and enact a legislative agenda commensurate with the issues young voters are facing. Trump’s approach was echoed by Vice President JD Vance, who noted, “We’re going to keep working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”
Not content with alienating voters in former blue-ribbon seats who think climate change is real by dithering on its net-zero commitment, several male Coalition MPs did their level best this week to alienate women as well.
Here’s what happened. “Priya’s Law” was an uncontroversial bill designed to clarify that employers can’t just cancel paid parental leave if a child is stillborn or dies after birth. The law was drafted after baby Priya died when she was just 42 days old and a heartless employer notified Priya’s mother, just days after her daughter’s death, that her pre-approved parental leave was being cancelled and she was required to return to work.
It is every parent’s worst nightmare. But for Barnaby Joyce, Andrew Hastie, and several other male Coalition MPs you’ve never heard of, it was also an opportunity to virtue-signal on abortion.
“Unfortunately – I hate to bring it up – there remains the issue of late-term abortion. We have a right to know if it includes that,” Joyce said.
Hastie reminded the Parliament he was opposed to late-term abortion, saying “I do have a question about the unintended consequences of this bill and it applies to late-term abortions.”
One year after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States for a second time, New York City elected a self-declared “democratic socialist” as Mayor. Zohran Mamdani beat independent candidate, disgraced former Democrat Andrew Cuomo, by nine percentage points.
In Virginia and New Jersey too, Democrats swept to double-digit victories. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s redistricting ballot measure (a direct response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas) also passed easily.
New Australia Institute polling reveals only 8% of Australians are genuinely convinced Australia “shares values” with Trump’s America.
“It is past time Australia rethinks national security – and focuses on fairness and climate action, not blind fealty to America.’
The Supreme Court began its November sitting this week in what is already shaping up to be a blockbuster term, both on the regular oral argument docket and the emergency docket. The latter has taken on huge significance as lower federal court trial judges in forum-shopped district courts have issued an unprecedented number of nationwide injunctions against President Trump’s executive actions.
I say “forum-shopped” because a large number of the roughly 400 cases that have been filed against the administration since January 20 have been brought in jurisdictions in which all (or nearly all) of the judges were appointed by Democratic presidents. All 11 of the sitting active judges on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, for example, were hand-picked by Democrats—one by Bill Clinton, five by Barack Obama, and another five by Joe Biden. The five judges serving on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees that court, are likewise entirely stacked with Democratic appointees—three by Obama and two by Biden.
Even before the term began on the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court was already checking what increasingly appears to be rogue rulings by anti-Trump lower court judges who are essentially second-guessing the president’s executive decisions dealing with foreign aid and other spending cuts, deportations, federal law enforcement, and administrative agency personnel firings—all core areas of executive authority.
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.
Groy Polloi | The Roundtable Ep. 292
Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic broadcaster, for a friendly interview, causing divisions to erupt on the Right. This week, as socialist Zohran Mamdani is forecast to take New York City’s mayorship, the guys appraise the influence of Fuentes on the mainstream and discuss the Right’s alternatives to curry favor with the middle. Plus: details have emerged about an FBI operation, “Arctic Frost,” aimed at targeting GOP officials’ comms to delegitimize Trump and his supporters post-2020 election. And more cultural recommendations!
I unpacked a box in the basement and photographed the remains of a life.
A notebook from the New York Daily News, where I earned $40,000 a year in my first job out of college: a job that later became an unpaid internship and now is probably done by AI. A Nokia cell, used for making calls: what else could a phone do? A card for a video store in Astoria, where I paid $900 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.
And the object that shifts Before to After: a keychain adorned with the flag, the Statue of Liberty, and God Bless America. I don’t know where I got it. But I know when: September 12, 2001. I attached it to my purse and wore it without irony, for a time.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This was slightly down on 2024 but, nevertheless, the CEO and executive group paid themselves $35.3 million, an increase of $2.4 million. CEO Andrew Irvine got a cool $5.6 million as remuneration in the year to September 2025.
NAB is Australia’s fifth largest company and third largest bank by market value. It accounts for 17% of all the loans to Australian residents. That includes 14% of housing loans and 22% of business loans, which means it is slightly biased towards its business customers.
Nevertheless, NAB is one of the big banks which, between them, control 72% of all Australian home loans. On average, they make $213,480 in pure profit from the average first home buyer paying off a 30 year mortgage.
“The NAB’s slightly lower profit has been described as “lukewarm” and “disappointing”. It is neither of those things. It is obscene,” said Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.
“The lack of competition among the big banks in Australia comes at a huge cost to struggling homeowners.
“Just like the similar profit posted by Westpac a few days ago, this massive profit from home loans far exceeds the level of risk the bank undertakes.
“The federal government has a huge majority and therefore a huge opportunity to help take the burden off the people who need help the most.
The meddling and infiltration of governments in Latin America by the United States is a huge chapter of its 20th century history. One of the most egregious and blatant examples of intervention was in Chile, where the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA-backed military coup in 1973.
The ensuing years saw violent repression of student activists, labor leaders, journalists, leftwing politicians and dissidents at the helm of a brutal military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. Among the victims of this ruthless crackdown were two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.
Greg and Elinor discuss the Reserve Bank’s predictable rates decision, Microsoft’s decision to refund some customers after pressure from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, and whether Australia’s tobacco excise has become self-defeating.
“But if they do this on net zero, they’ll never get elected” is one of the most common comments in response to having the situation explained to them.
This is the correct response, because the Liberals can’t get elected if they do this.
As much as some may look to Tim Wilson’s defeat of Zoe Daniels in Goldstein as proof they can manage to win back the teals (as James Paterson did on Wednesday), they forget that is when the Liberals had a net zero policy at least partly based in the science – and Goldstein was a perfect storm of circumstances unlikely to ever be repeated.
(Also, the best way to remind people of why they voted in independent in the first place is to have someone like Wilson back on the political scene.)
The thing to understand with all of this is that it is not logical and it never has been. This is about individual power and survival.
The Nationals have been openly dragging the Liberals around since the Turnbull years. Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton were canny enough to manage to contain the damage (and were also mostly on board). Ley has no such authority.
Recently, yet another scholar used me as an example of someone who says that demagoguery is always bad, while acknowledging that I explicitly say it isn’t. Today, a friend asked me whether Mamdani’s speech was demagoguery, since there does seem to be an us v. them. So, she asked, is demagoguery sometimes necessary for in response to demagoguery?
Counterintuitively, the best way to come to grips with the here and now is not to immerse oneself in the constant froth and daily firestorms of up-to-the-minute journalism and media. Real understanding requires a perspective informed by serious engagement with political history, a study of human nature, and a careful engagement with the noble if imperfect intellectual heritage left to us by our Western and American forebears. So the latest sensation from the world of podcasting—Tucker Carlson’s two-and-a-half-hour interview with the young streamer Nick Fuentes—will not be best addressed by those caught up in the breathless excitement of the moment, nor by those fixated on the cults of personality surrounding these two broadcasters. The issues raised by Fuentes and Carlson need sober evaluation from a critical distance.
On this episode of Follow the Money, Richard Denniss and Ebony Bennett discuss the lack of accountability in Australia’s universities, why some institutions’ claims of financial crises aren’t supported by their auditors, and what Australians think about the state of the sector.
This guest blog was written by our Trustee Dianne Danquah as part of Trustees Week, which celebrates the contributions of volunteers like Dianne. Even before joining in June, Dianne made huge contributions through being a youth advocate. I became a trustee at the Equality Trust earlier this year because I believe everyone deserves to live […]
Matteo Crosignani, Thomas Eisenbach, and Fulvia Fringuellotti
As in previous years, we provide in this post an update on the vulnerability of the U.S. banking system based on four analytical models that capture different aspects of this vulnerability. We use data through 2025:Q2 for our analysis, and also discuss how the vulnerability measures have changed since our last update one year ago.
Polling also found only 3% of Australians think making a profit should be a primary purpose of universities – however more than half believe that it currently is a primary purpose.
Meanwhile, fewer than half of Australians believe educating students is currently a primary purpose of universities, despite 80% thinking it should be.
Key findings:
Three out of four Australians (77%) think university degrees should cost $10,000 or less per year.
About three in five Australians (58%) think university degrees should cost $5,000 or less per year.
Less than one in 20 (3%) of Australians think that making a profit should be a primary purpose of universities, yet more than half (54%) believe that it currently is a primary purpose.
Four in five (80%) Australians think that educating students should be a primary purpose of universities, yet 44% believe it is currently a primary purpose of universities.
“University fees are totally out of step with community expectations. Despite about three in five Australians believing degrees should cost $5,000 or less a year, most university degrees are more expensive than this. Highly popular degrees such as arts, commerce, and law now cost about $17,000 per year,” said Jack Thrower, Senior Economist at The Australia Institute.
“High university fees are leading to mounting student debts, which are taking ever longer to pay off.
In Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of FoodSovereignty, Rowan Lubbock offers a compelling multiscalar analysis of the pursuit of food sovereignty. His account of the Boliviarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the central role of the Venezuelan state invites us to revisit the promise of regional integration as part of a socialist project of continental proportions. Cultivating Socialism highlights ALBA’s revolutionary challenge to US hegemony in Latin America and to the region’s historical dependency on commodity exports and outward-oriented growth. To do so, Lubbock – and the Venezuelan state – look to their neighbours and citizens to think about other sites and scales of transformation. There, he provides a Marxian and Poulantzasian reading not only of sovereignty but also of the subject of food sovereignty, seeing its achievement as ‘a democratic road to socialism’.
“I, Wisdom, dwell with prudence (phronēsis), and I find knowledge and discretion. By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just.”– Proverbs 8:12–14 (ESV)
“Practical wisdom (phronēsis) is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI.5–13
As Thucydides observed, the causes that drive nations to war—fear, honor, and interest—remain constant. A prudent foreign policy recognizes the powerful pull of these passions without surrendering to them.
Leo Strauss is often accused of inspiring not only neoconservatism, a movement bereft of such wisdom, but specifically the vigorous interventionism championed by the most vociferous voices within its ranks. On the surface, the Platonic rationalism that searches for the discoverable “just city” seems to infer the duty to impose such a schema onto others, willing or not. In direct contrast, the “Realism and Restraint” school is often linked with ideologies of amorality or isolationism. “Just leave me alone and let me grill.”
Both of these caricatures are foolish simplifications. In reality, both approaches share a moral foundation rooted in prudence (phronēsis), the classical virtue of doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.
Prime Minister Mark Carney is about to break a campaign promise made just a few months ago that will hurt Canadians in the middle of Donald Trump’s trade war. During the federal election, the Liberal Party platform in April clearly stated its commitment to “capping, not cutting, public service employment.” Fast forward to Carney’s first budget, and the federal government is ready to slash public service jobs at a rate not seen in decades when we should be reinforcing its ranks to tackle this economic crisis.
For Canada’s public servants, this is not new. Public servants are used to being scapegoated as the source of government overspending or used as a bargaining chip to appease fiscal hawks. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals resorted to arbitrary cuts to the public service to win back public support as it waxed and waned, but then outsourced services to overpriced contractors that often could not deliver.
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Nov 3-9, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9954
The Statement on Monetary Policy sets out the Bank's assessment of current economic
conditions, both domestic and international, along with the outlook for Australian inflation and output growth.
A number of boxes on topics of special interest are also published. The Statement is issued four times a year.
It also shows the RBA cares more about inflation than jobs.
“Unsurprisingly the Reserve Bank has chosen to keep rates steady at 3.6% This reflects that yet again the RBA care more about inflation than maintaining full employment,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.
“In the past month unemployment continued its steady rise to 4.5%, while the inflation had a surprisingly sharp increase due mostly to the end of state-based energy rebates.
“In response the RBA has shown it is less worried about ongoing rising unemployment than reacting to a surprising blip in inflation.
“The most recent household spending figures released yesterday showed households are slowing their spending and shifting towards spending on necessities.
“In order to keep unemployment from rising further that RBA must care as much about the full employment part of its dual mandate as it does inflation.”
This guest blog was written by our Trustees Yamini Cinamon Nair and Tom Allanson (Co-Chairs of the Board), and Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (Co-founders and Patrons) as part of Trustees Week. This week is intended to celebrate the huge contributions our trustees make to the Equality Trust – so we started by asking them […]
The polling follows reporting of the Albanese Government’s Federal Labor Business Forum, where corporations pay up to $110,000 for privileged access to Government Ministers. Government ministers are also keeping details of the meetings secret by blocking access to ministerial diaries. The Liberal and National parties engage in similar activities, though their own business forums.
Key findings:
Three in five Australians (63%) think that cash-for-access payments constitute corrupt conduct. Only 12% do not.
Most Australians think cash-for-access constitutes corrupt conduct, regardless of voting intention.
Four in five Australians (82%) agree that paying for exclusive access to politicians gives corporations and special interests unfair political influence.
An overwhelming majority of Australians (78%) agree that politicians should refuse to participate in events where participants with a vested interest in government policies have paid for exclusive access.
“Politicians could improve public faith in democracy by ruling out taking money in a way that most Australians view as corrupt,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.
“It’s clear that cash-for-access payments completely fail the pub test.
