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On this episode of After America, Dr Ruth Mitchell joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss how Canada and Australia have responded to tariffs, what America’s decision to sell out Ukraine means for efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, and RFK Jr’s performance as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 13 March 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

Read more from Emma in the latest edition of Australian Foreign Affairs.

Order What’s the Big Idea? 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia now, via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Ruth Mitchell, Board Chair, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War // @drruthmitchell

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

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

Show notes:

On this episode of Follow the Money, Eloise Carr, Director of the Australia Institute Tasmania, the Federal Government’s dangerous proposal to get around Australia’s already inadequate environmental protections and why salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour needs to end.

This discussion was recorded on Wednesday 19 March 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

Sign our petition to end salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour.

Order What’s the Big Idea? 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia now, via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Eloise Carr, Director, the Australia Institute Tasmania // @eloise-carr

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

Show notes:

Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for Australia’s annual gas pantomime, guaranteed to scare the wits out of struggling consumers.

Every year it’s the same tired script, where the villain is cast as the hero, and crisis is averted in the nick of time. Hurrah! The heating stayed on for another winter. Standing ovation.

Frack that

On Thursday, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) releases its annual gas statement of opportunities, GSOO as it’s affectionately known. Cue scary headlines and claims of a looming “gas shortage” and a “catastrophic supply shortfall” unless we let the gas cartel unleash more fracking and mining of the fossil fuel.

For media companies, GSOO is manna from heaven — almost guaranteed to deliver a “warning” that, framed a certain way, can scare the bejesus out of people and pull in a big audience. For the gas industry, it’s an opportunity to demand more and more gas expansion and to castigate any government concerned about climate change and the environment.

Nothing short of bull

As Public Enemy sang, don’t believe the hype. There is no gas shortage. Australia has an abundance of gas. It is the third largest exporter of liquified natural gas in the world. Each year, giant gas companies ship offshore far more of the fuel than Australian businesses and households could possibly use. The gas industry uses more of it to liquify the gas for export than Australia’s entire manufacturing industry consumes.

At the time, many argued we had paid too much, and US President Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium shows it can’t even protect Australia’s steel and aluminium from being slapped with arbitrary tariffs.

Those exports will now face 25 per cent tariffs in the United States.

This should serve as a wake-up call that the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) can’t even do what it’s supposed to do: protect free trade between Australia and its most powerful ally.

AUSFTA was signed in 2004. The Howard Government had pulled Australia into the Iraq War and was dedicated to deepening ties with the George Bush-led USA through a trade deal.

The final text included no major concessions from the US, and, despite Australia’s focus on boosting agricultural exports, the US only gave small and gradual concessions on its otherwise protected and subsidised agricultural sector, and didn’t loosen restrictions on sugar imports at all.

Introduction

During the early years of Narrative Initiative, we interviewed more than 100 thought leaders working on narrative change. This report captures some of what we learned.

In early February 2017, we set out on a listening tour of over 100 experts, innovators, and visionaries from a range of disciplines and communities working at the intersection of social justice and narrative change.

This report presents an overview of common challenges, hard-earned lessons, and urgent needs for the field, as well as insights into best practices. 

Foreward

The field of narrative change is both emerging and eternal. From mythology to marketing, the human impulse — no, necessity — to make sense of the world, to justify values and bolster beliefs, is innate and immutable. We build, inherit and rely on schematic shortcuts for our own cognitive comprehension and physical survival. We learn codes and internalize signals meant to protect us: which colors and sounds represent safety or danger, whose authority we trust or reject, whose lives and dreams matter.

Humans, as pattern-seeking social creatures, assemble collections of mutually-reinforcing stories, in turn establishing shared common sense and constructing stereotypes about people and places, communities and cultures, ideologies and institutions.

Much has been written about Trump Derangement Syndrome, that mental and emotional affliction that distorts its victims’ ability to make measured judgments about the doings of our past and present president. No doubt much more will be written about it, because this malady shows no signs of abating.

One of the worst side effects of TDS is the widespread circulation of bogus constitutional claims. As Trump, the astute politician that he is, has staked out popular positions on many issues of interest to the public, his critics, at a loss for other arguments, routinely say he is trashing the Constitution.

This is a serious problem. Preserving our constitutional system, and the many blessings that flow from it, depends on preserving a correct understanding of the Constitution’s various provisions among the public. But the public’s understanding of the Constitution is undermined by the TDS brigade’s continual reiteration of fanciful claims of constitutional violations.

The blizzard of lawsuits against the Trump regime continues apace. The developments today in a relatively recent one, J.G.G. v. Trump, were truly wild, perhaps the wildest in any of the litigation against the regime so far. Ultimately, the best way to understand the executive branch's actions and positions in the case is to see all of them as bid to get the question of executive branch compliance with judicial orders in front of the Supreme Court as quickly as possible, and in a case where Trump is claiming he has vast, unilateral authority because he claims to be acting in the national security context. (He is deploying the same strategy in Perkins Coie v. U.S. Department of Justice.)

IIPP launches Strategic Economics Alliance in Latin America aiming to reshape economic theory and practice

The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose has expanded its Strategic Economics Alliance (SEA) initiative in Latin America through a series of convenings in Mexico and Brazil. These sessions seek to reinforce and deepen IIPP’s existing policy work in the region bringing together women economists, policy practitioners, and civil society leaders to advance new economic thinking and translate theory into transformative policy outcomes.

Introduction

Transforming Narrative Waters: Growing the practice of deep narrative change in the UK provides background on narrative change practices as well as the opportunities and challenges for narrative work in the UK.

The report examines what it takes to design deep narrative change, how to design narrative interventions, and offers recommendations for building more successful narrative change projects in the UK.

While we might win occasional policy battles, these wins are constantly under attack and in danger of being reversed. We win some battles, but we are losing the war. One of the reasons for this is that we are often working against powerful narratives that are embedded in the overarching culture. Thus we also need to look beyond the policy sphere, as narratives are embedded in the larger culture and in institutions. They shape the way in which problems and priorities are identified; they limit the types of solutions that are viewed as acceptable and possible, and determine how certain types of people are categorized and treated. – Brett Davidson

Contents

Introduction 04
Defining deep narrative change 07
What it means to do deep narrative change 14
Current practice in the UK 19
Barriers to practice 32
Recommendations 42
Concluding thoughts 60
Sources 61

The sector is plagued with scandals, from wage theft and conflicts of interest to excessive spending on marketing, travel, and consultants.

Alongside these scandals, Australia’s Vice-Chancellors are some of the highest paid in the world.

A recent Australia Institute submission provides an extensive list of recommendations that would improve university governance.

However, the Australian National University (ANU) has unwittingly shown that a good place to start would be greater use of a powerful existing tool: Senate Estimates.

Last month ANU’s Chancellor Julie Bishop was the subject of questions at Senate Estimates about external consultants and conflict-of-interest processes.

Value capture is an equitable and efficient funding mechanism to support the development of high speed rail. It ensures that those who benefit the most from high speed rail contribute to its cost.

Introduction

Starting in 2016, Narrative Initiative began gathering up different ways people talk about narrative change, how it’s structured, and how it moves in the world. As our staff—a team experienced in capacity building, organizing, communications, philosophy and culture work—engage partners and practitioners, we’ve found it helpful to highlight existing terms in use and offer shared terminology where we identify gaps.

Narrative change is a practice that draws on many different disciplines. Some have well established standards, like the legal profession. Others, digital organizing for instance, rely on an evolving set of practices to get the job done.

We and many others are doing the work of “narrative change” every day and, depending on where we’re coming from, we talk about it in many, many different ways.

What is Narrative Change?

A narrative reflects a shared interpretation of how the world works. 

Narrative change, writes Brett Davidson, “rests on the premise that reality is socially constructed through narrative, and that in order to bring about change in the world we need to pay attention to the ways in which this takes place.”

Australian renters now need an annual income of $130,000 to afford an average rental, with even six-figure earners facing housing costs exceeding 30 percent of their income in capital cities and many regional areas.

The 2025 Priced Out report by national housing campaign Everybody’s Home shows a single person needs to earn at least $130,000 per year to comfortably afford the national weekly asking rent for a typical unit. An even higher income is required to afford the average unit rent across capital cities.

The report, which analyses rental affordability for Australians earning between $40,000 and $130,000 per year, found rental stress has extended well beyond low-income earners.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London is undoubtedly one of its worst decisions in the past 20 years. The Court gave state and local governments the option to transfer private property from its rightful owner to another private owner, justifying this as a “public use” since it will supposedly promote “economic development.” Kelo is a classic example of activist judges rationalizing a predetermined result—in this case, overturning the Constitution’s protection of private property rights.

The Court’s decision stripped Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the historic Fort Trumbull neighborhood of their property in order to build an “urban village”—a fact Justice John Paul Stevens breezily dismisses in his opinion, which is a thoroughly unimpressive piece of legal legerdemain. Stevens failed to note that the neighborhood would be bulldozed even though he acknowledged that not only had Kelo lived in her house since 1997, and had made substantial improvements to her property, but that “Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life.” The continued existence of what was apparently a very stable residential area, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of “progress.” Stevens held that the residents and their homes must be sacrificed in the interest of a supposed greater good.

Introduction

Here is a list of definitions of different organising models, including the snowflake model, strike circles, distributed network, Ganz model, etc. This list of definitions is from an academic paper published in 2025 in The Organizing Journal, which summarises the first known exploration of the community organising landscape across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The list illustrates the combination and evolution of organising models and approaches mentioned by the survey respondents.

The academic paper was developed from a project by the Commons Social Change Library, Australian Conservation Foundation, and Australian Progress which aimed to fill a gap in understanding how advocacy groups organise in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Organising Models

Ganz Model

Marshall Ganz’s organizing model focuses on developing leadership through relationships, storytelling, and strategy.

It emphasizes the importance of building teams, creating shared purpose, and developing the capacity for strategic action. The model combines personal narrative (the “Story of Self”), collective identity (the “Story of Us”), and a vision for change (the “Story of Now”) to motivate and mobilize people for collective action (Ganz 2010).

Introduction

Campaigning