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While there are many political and policy victories Trump supporters can point to after his first year back in office, there are also questions about what might have been. A lingering one is often uttered in the form of a sigh: “What the hell happened to DOGE?”

Elon Musk first suggested the Department of Government Efficiency to Trump during the 2024 campaign. A government agency specifically tasked with downsizing bloated federal agencies and rooting out fraud was politically popular, and signing an executive order establishing the agency was one of Trump’s first actions upon being sworn in.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Alongside the death and destruction occurring all throughout the Middle East as the war in Iran rages on, the rest of the world is experiencing the economic blowback of the conflict. Oil and natural gas prices are skyrocketing in the West as well as the Global South following the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek finance minister, joins The Chris Hedges Report to explain how the war will continue to mangle the global economy and what countries can expect in the coming months.

Senior Economist at The Australia Institute, Matt Grudnoff, says the RBA Monetary Policy Board’s decision to lift the official cash rate from 3.85% to 4.10% is a case of “all pain, no gain” for Australians.

He says while skyrocketing fuel prices will push up inflation, they are the result of a supply shock caused by the war in the Middle East. The RBA has previously stated it should not respond to a supply shock by lifting rates.

“The Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Board has made the wrong decision to increase interest rates today,” said Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist at The Australia Institute.

“Inflation caused by a supply shock cannot be brought down by increasing interest rates. How can increasing Australian interest rates open the Strait of Hormuz?

“The increase in fuel prices is already acting to reduce demand in the Australian economy. Higher petrol and diesel prices mean people have less to spend on other things, and as these fuels are largely imported, all the extra revenue is flowing overseas.

“All this increase in interest rates will do is heap more misery on Australian mortgage holders who are already being hurt by higher fuel prices.

“The RBA needs to be honest with the Australian people that nothing it can do will reduce inflation caused by a world oil price shock.

“At a time of great economic uncertainty, now is not the time for the RBA to be tapping the breaks, trying to slow the economy down.”

If the federal government implemented a 25% tax on gas exports, which is supported by the ACTU, WELD Australia,  The Australia Institute and many others, Australians would finally get a fair return for their resources.

“Ordinary Australians are being pummelled by skyrocketing petrol prices and, as their household bills go through the roof, the gas industry continues to get a free ride,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

“The conflict in Iran is both driving up the cost of fuel for Australians and flooding multinational gas companies with windfall profits. Meanwhile, the Australian government is doing nothing to make sure Australians get a fair return for their resources that are being shipped overseas.

“It is a failure of public policy that the government has given so much of this country’s gas, which belongs to the Australian people, away to multinational companies for free. The continued refusal to tax these companies properly has left us poorer as a nation.

The Senate inquiry report into the capital gains tax discount adds to mounting evidence that the investor tax break is making Australia’s housing crisis worse, with social housing advocates warning the federal government can not afford to delay reform.

The report handed down on Tuesday highlighted that the CGT discount, in combination with negative gearing, is driving up home prices and worsening inequality, while foregoing much-needed revenue that could fund social housing.

The report also included warnings against grandfathering and carving out exclusions for different assets in the reforms, which would worsen inequity and weaken the impact on housing affordability.

Last month, Everybody’s Home analysis of organisation submissions to the inquiry found more than seven in 10 want the investor tax break to be abolished or reformed.

Around half of all organisation submissions supported or raised the idea of redirecting the billions in savings toward building affordable rentals.

Everybody’s Home, Australian Council of Social Service, Tenants’ Union of NSW and Better Renting said appetite for tax reform is growing and the government has no excuse not to act.

The groups are urging the government to wind back the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing, and use the billions in savings to build more public and community housing.

Turns out The New Mexican decided to publish this op-ed I wrote after all.

Online here.

To get a gun licence in Australia, applicants must provide a “genuine reason” to own a gun, such as working on farms or as a security guard.

Hundreds of thousands of gun licences have been issued for licensees to participate in  recreational hunting and sports shooting. However, official data on sports participation shows that the number of people that actually participate in these activities is far lower.

This means that large numbers of gun owners do not use their guns for reason they claim they need them, raising questions about community safety and the effectiveness of Australia’s gun laws.

On 12 February the Assistant Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Sarah Hunter, gave an important speech on the relationship between the labour market and inflation. This speech suggests the RBA has re-thought its position and has partially gone back to an earlier orthodoxy, but in so doing it now holds untenable positions on such issues as the natural rate of unemployment. We first need a quick potted history of post-war macroeconomic thinking in Australia.

In the early post war period, a version of Keynesian economics reigned supreme. This model recognized that capitalist economies are inherently unstable and policy involved the management of aggregate demand so as to maintain full employment with low inflation. For many years unemployment was under 2% in Australia and when it went over that in 1961 the long-lived Menzies Coalition Government was reduced to a majority of one seat at the subsequent federal election.

The Phillips Curve, named after its inventor, AW Phillips of the London School of Economics at the time, was influential in positing a stable tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. This provided policy makers with an apparent choice between lower inflation or lower unemployment. For example, suppose say 3% unemployment was associated with 5% inflation, policy makers would read that from the Phillips Curve and then use aggregate demand to achieve that outcome.

The much-vaunted Cuban revolutionary model is on the verge of unceremonious collapse: the economy is in shambles, the electric grid is only occasionally functional, and the supposed achievements of the Cuban Revolution have culminated in near-universal penury and misery. As of 2024, 89% of Cubans lived in poverty, sometimes of an abject kind—and things have only gotten worse over the last two years. Revolutionary Cuba is a model only of what is to be avoided.

In Cuba, growing crowds denounce Communism and the dictatorship that has enslaved the island nation since 1959. Anti-regime voices bang pots and pans in public demonstrations, demanding freedom for Cuba for the first time in 66 years. Yet, Western leftists continue to express solidarity with the Cuban people’s oppressors and blame Cuba’s problems on an American embargo that is often flouted. More absurdly, they insist that the oil embargo imposed by the Trump Administration after its defenestration of the Maduro dictatorship at the beginning of this year is the cause of Cuba’s present discontents. Somehow, the administration is responsible for the deep-seated structural problems that confront a Cuba immiserated by decades of unaccountable Communist rule.

The poll of 2,010 Australians, conducted by Redbridge, reveals that 62% of Australians support access to abortion services. A further 25% support access in limited circumstances.

Nationally, fewer than one in ten One Nation voters (9%) oppose abortion access completely, despite the party’s policy to wind back access to services.

Australians living in rural areas overwhelmingly support abortion access (66%).

Key findings:

• 62% of voters support access to abortion services. A further 25% support access to abortion services “only in limited circumstances”.
• 50% of One Nation voters support abortion access. 34% support access in “only in limited circumstances”.
• Support for abortion access is strongest in rural Australia, where 66% say yes, and a further 24% say they support access “only in limited circumstances.”
• Just 8% of Australians do not support access to abortion. 5% say they’re not sure.

“Abortion is legal across Australia and this research shows a majority of Australians support access to abortion, whether they live in cities or country towns, or where they sit on the political spectrum,” said Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director of The Australia Institute.

On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss the Trump administration’s apparent failure to plan for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Pete Hegseth’s attacks on American media, and the Australian government’s response to the conflict.

This episode was recorded on Monday 16 March.

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

Host: Angus Blackman, Executive Producer, Podcasts, the Australia Institute // @angusrb

Show notes:

Shorter America This Week: Very complete, pretty much; We already know who’s next (it’s Cuba); Looksmaxxing by Emma Shortis, The Point (March 2026)

Albanese’s policy on Iran makes us complicit in the collapse of international rules by Emma Shortis, Guardian Australia (March 2026)

It didn’t change the law, but it revealed something important about the politics of gas in Australia-the old political lines are starting to blur.

Independent ACT Senator David Pocock moved a motion calling for an inquiry into “Why Gas Companies Pay Less for Offshore Liquefied Natural Gas than Australians Pay in Beer Excise”. It’s the kind of thing the Senate, as the house of review, examines all the time. Yet the response from Parliament revealed a lot about the current state of politics.

The motion was supported by an unlikely coalition of independents, the Greens, and One Nation. On an issue that usually splits along predictable ideological lines, politicians from across the political spectrum were aligned.

The major parties, however, failed the test. Labor voted against the inquiry. The Coalition, including new Nationals leader Matt Canavan, did not even turn up to vote.

In doing so, they avoided answering a question many Australians are now asking: why does one of the world’s largest gas exporters collect so little tax from the industry extracting its resources?

Australia is one of the world’s biggest exporters of liquefied natural gas. Our offshore gas fields generate enormous profits for multinational corporations. Yet the public return on these resources is astonishingly small.

After all, that’s how politicians and the media describe the gas industry. But the truth is the federal government collects more money from the beer excise than from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax, as Independent ACT Senator David Pocock pointed out in Parliament, in an exchange that went viral.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked why Australian beer drinkers pay more tax than gas export companies, the PM dodged the issue by accusing Senator Pocock of “promot(ing) grievance”.

If, like most Australians, you think Australia shouldn’t be giving away its gas for free, or that the gas industry should contribute more from its super profits tax than the beer excise, the Prime Minister seems to think you should stop whingeing about it. The real question is – why isn’t the Prime Minister aggrieved by this gas rip-off?

Australia has a gas export problem. Gas exports have led to the tripling of wholesale east coast gas prices and doubling of electricity prices, since exports began in 2015. The gas export industry doesn’t even pay royalties on more than half of those exports, according to Australia Institute research. In just 4 years, multinational companies made $149 billion exporting gas from Australia royalty-free.

Welcome, subscribers! I am grateful for the tremendous response to my article, The No World Order. I have new readers asking about the broader context of our crises. Many of your questions are answered in depth in my books. This isn’t a sales pitch; the books are in the library. I only want you to know the information is there.

My book Hiding in Plain Sight covers transnational organized crime, the multi-decade rise of Trump and decline of the US, and Jeffrey Epstein. It contains Epstein court documents that politicians now pretend are new. Hiding in Plain Sight was a bestseller in 2020. The reaction to Hiding prompted me to title my next book They Knew.

Published in 2022, They Knew covers mafia states, corrupt US institutions, and why some dismiss tough questions as “conspiracy theories”. Chapter descriptions are here.

I started this newsletter in 2023. I don’t believe in paywalls in times of peril, so I am deeply appreciative of subscribers who choose to pay and keep me going! Join here: