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Recall that the Supreme Court ruled that Venezuelans threatened with removal under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act had to use habeas corpus proceedings to challenge threatened deportations. Because habeas petitions must be filed in the geographic locale where detainees are held, this has led to litigation all over the country. Much of it has involved emergency motions seeking temporary restraining orders to halt deportations while the underlying legal issues are litigated. Now, for the first time, a court fully briefed on the relevant issues has ruled that the entire Trump effort to use the AEA as a basis for removing purported members of TdA is unlawful.

Judge Fernando Rodriguez of the Southern District of Texas has entered a final judgement and permanent injunction granting habeas relief to the Venezuelans detained in that District and forbidding the Trump executive from detaining, transferring, or removing them on the basis of the AEA. That's the bottom line, but understanding how Rodriguez got there is more complex.

Around 80% of Australia’s gas is exported as liquefied natural gas (LNG), the gas industry pays ZERO royalties on more than half the gas exported.

Australia has an abundance of gas. In fact, Australia is one of the biggest exporters of gas in the world, alongside Qatar.

Australia Institute research shows over half (56%) of gas exported from Australia attracts zero royalty payments, effectively giving a public resource to multinational gas corporations for free.

It’s time the gas industry started paying its fair share.

There is no gas shortage

The gas industry loves to pretend that we have a shortage of gas. The reason? To use as cover to open new gas fields, most of which will feed their export plants.

We thought we’d better make an ad for that too.

When presented as a Peter Dutton proposal, 61.7% of Australians support the idea that gas exports should be taxed, 11.0% oppose. When presented as an Adam Bandt proposal, 59.0% support the idea and 12.3% oppose.

Furthermore, more than one in two Australians (55.7%) agree that Australia exports too much gas, 12.6% disagree, and an overwhelming majority of Australians (72.3%) support a parliamentary inquiry into whether Australia is getting a fair share of the profits from selling its gas, 7.6% oppose.

“Australia is awash with gas, and our research shows Australians know it. Forcing the gas industry to prioritise Australians ahead of exports is popular at the ballot box, and if would be foolish for whoever forms Government to miss this opportunity,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.

“With all sides of politics finally recognizing Australia’s gas export problems, the next Parliament will be in a good position to do something about it.

“Our research shows that Australians overwhelmingly support the idea that gas exports should be taxed, irrespective of which political party suggested it.”

This was a unity ticket, minus one.

Liberal ACT senate candidate Jacob Vadakkedathu opposed the move. He said that voters tell him, “we don’t need any more pollies”. It’s easy to offer an argument against more politicians in a cost-of-living crisis.

To be fair to Vadakkedathu, the Liberal Party historically had form on senate representation for the territories.

In the 1970s, Liberals opposed the creation of senate seats for the ACT and NT, arguing that the senate might one day be “swamped” by representatives from other territories like the Cocos Islands, and that it might lose its constitutional character as a “states’ house”. They fought against the measure at three successive elections (including one double dissolution) and forced the matter all the way to an historic, deadlock-resolving joint sitting of the two houses in August 1974.

The idea of “swamping the senate” was laughable then, and even more so now. The quota for ACT and NT Senate elections is extremely high. The Labor Party, the Greens and Independent Senator David Pocock all agree that the ACT’s senate representation should (at least) be doubled.

On April Fool’s Day, the Reserve Bank board decided not to cut interest rates, citing uncertainty about the economy.

At the time we criticised the decision arguing that not only were there enough signs that the economy was faltering and households were hurting, but that given the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs two days after the April RBA meeting, the board should have met again, rather than wait till the 20th of this month to make another decision.

Today’s retail trade figures highlight just how badly the RBA has misread the economy.

In the board’s statement in April, they noted:

“Household consumption growth had started to recover in the December quarter, underpinned by the ongoing pick-up in real household incomes. While some of this recovery in consumption appeared to reflect price-sensitive consumers concentrating spending in promotional periods during the December quarter, the pick-up in spending growth among components not affected by sales events suggested there had been a genuine improvement in underlying momentum. More recent indicators signalled that some of this pick-up had been sustained.” [our emphasis]

Well, today’s retail trade figures show the complete opposite. There was no genuine improvement, nor any sense of sustained pick-up in retail turnover.

The Hubei Association is an Australia-wide community association for those from the Hubei province, whose capital city is Wuhan… the very place where COVID-19 started. How deep does that rabbit hole go?! Somebody please get our best pundits on the case!

Neither campaign ultimately took up the Association’s offer of assistance.

The issue came up in during a regular segment featuring Liberal campaign spokesperson Jane Hume and O’Neil herself on the Seven network. Hume remarked to the minister that there “might be Chinese spies handing out” her how-to-vote cards, but the Liberals had “dozens, thousands, hundreds of young people” on the hustings.

The campaign, which appears to have run out of serious policy, seems to be resorting to a back catalogue of redbaiting and dog-whistling from Cold War-era electioneering. But the history of fearmongering about foreign interference in Australian elections runs deeper.

I am standing on the Devil’s Promenade, waiting to see the light.

Folks have been flocking to this rural road since the early 20th century, when the apparition was first publicized. The Devil’s Promenade — also known as East 50 Road — borders Hornet, Missouri, so named because Route 66 commerce once made it buzz with activity. Now Hornet is a ghost town, and its ghost is the central attraction.

They call it the Spooklight. Stay past sundown, and a fiery orb the size of a basketball will float down the avenue, alive as an animal, chasing and taunting you. It has been spotted by everyone from Quapaw Nation elders to long-time locals in nearby Joplin to the US Army Corps of Engineers, which confirmed its existence as a “mysterious light of unknown origin” during World War II.

I had a list of things I wanted to see before America ended, fantastical things like accountability and prosperity and the Hornet Spooklight. I knew my odds were best with the Spooklight, so to the Devil’s Promenade I came.

In 2016, there was arguably no issue that was more important to Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign than the fate of the U.S. Supreme Court. Due to the February 2016 death of conservative judicial icon Antonin Scalia and the remarkably successful strategy of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to sideline then-pending nominee Merrick Garland and hold Scalia’s seat vacant through November, voters were able to cast their ballots uniquely confident that the winner of the presidential election would be able to decisively shape the Court’s future trajectory. The Scalia vacancy, along with Trump’s publicly floated list of possible high court picks, helped galvanize religious and social conservative support for the heterodox Republican nominee at a time when Roe v. Wade was still on the books.

Students of communications, humanities and the arts are particularly bad off since the Morrison government came up with the controversial Job-ready Graduates package (JRG) in 2020. JRG increased the cost of law and commerce courses by 28% and saw the cost of humanities subjects more than double. At the time, ministers argued that price incentives would redirect students to STEM, nursing, teaching and other areas.

Before JRG, fees for degrees were justified by some combination of the cost of teaching (for example, teaching dentistry is more expensive than history) or the graduate’s expected earnings (for example law and business graduates tend to earn more than those in creative arts and social sciences). JRG tossed away these justifications. Arts subjects are cheap to teach, and graduates have relatively lower earnings.

What is a fund?

There is no singular definition for a “fund”; governments regularly refer to a lot of very different things as “funds”. What they have in common is allowing governments to announce big numbers (“we will create an $20 billion fund!”) without spending that amount of money.

I’ll explain why by looking at two categories of funds that governments create: investment funds and investment vehicles. There are overlaps between these categories and all sorts of financial shenanigans, but I’ll keep it simple (ish).

Investment funds

An investment fund is a government investment account, usually involving investments in something like the stock market. Let’s think of it as a bank account that earns interest. Creating an investment fund generally doesn’t have much effect on the budget balance (deficit or surplus): if I take out a $1,000 loan and put it in a bank account, my financial position hasn’t changed (I have $1,000, I owe $1,000, netting out to $0).

Sometimes, governments design funds so that the interest (investment returns) they earn goes to something specific. An example of this type of fund is the Albanese Government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund. Despite constant mentions in the media, this did not directly spend $10 billion on housing; the government basically created a bank account, labelled it “housing”, and then (after negotiations) committed to spend about $0.5 billion each year, a small fraction of $10 billion initially deposited in the account.