New polling from The Australia Institute reveals that although Aussies love giving gifts, much of what we buy will spend years in the back of a cupboard and, ultimately, end up in landfill.
So, while it might be a season of joy, it’s also the season of waste, which is bad for the environment and bad for the hip pocket.
The Australia Institute surveyed 1,009 Australians between 13 and 15 November 2024 on issues relating to gift giving, consumption and spending habits during Christmas time. The margin of error is ±3%.
Key Findings:
Australians waste more than $1 billion on buying Christmas gifts for people that don’t get used.
Nearly one in two Australians (47%) do not think about how the gifts they buy for others will eventually be disposed of.
Over three in four Australians (77%) like buying gifts for people at Christmas, but over half of Australians (52%) would prefer it if people did not buy them gifts at Christmas.
A greater number of Australians buy gift wrapping paper (69%) than gift bags (52%). However, gift bags are more likely to be reused (65% of those who use gift bags reuse them) than wrapping paper (24% of those who use wrapping paper reuse it).
Nearly two in three Australians (64%) agree that it is better for the economy when people buy fewer things that don’t get used.
Salmon companies are ripping off Tasmania and trying to pass it off as yet another ‘jobs vs environment’ fight. This is the kind of fight that Tasmanian politicians love to have, and like performing seals, the Tasmanian government and opposition have lined up to bark and do their tricks.
But the fight over salmon farming is different. All three major companies are owned by multinational corporations. Tassal is owned by a major Canadian company and Petuna is owned by a Japanese-New Zealand corporation. The third main salmon company in Tasmania, Huon, is owned by JBS. JBS is a Brazilian corporation infamous for corruption. JBS’s bribery of Brazilian politicians played a big part in its expansion and its arrival in Tasmania.
These corporations literally want Tasmanians to accept their crap.
To be more precise, the poo and other discharge from salmon farms in Macquarie Harbour generates the same amount of nitrogen pollution as sewage discharged by a city of half a million people – that’s more than double Hobart’s.
Dumping the equivalent of two Hobart’s worth of sewage in a World Heritage-listed harbour has consequences. And the best-known is the impact on the Maugean skate, a stingray-like creature that has been around since the dinosaurs and lives nowhere else in the world.
Extinction bells have been tolling for some time for the skate. Scientific advice to the Australian Government is unequivocal that salmon farming is the key threat to its survival.
An interview with Chris Geidner of Law Dork about what he thinks happened at oral arguments in US vs Skrmetti and whether journalists should smooth the way for the high court to uphold bans on gender-affirming care for youth.
Pavlos Roufos is a Greek political economist living in Berlin. He has a PhD in political science from Kassel University. He works on central banks, constitutional law and European integration from the 1920s to today, with a special emphasis on the Eurozone crisis. You can find his newsletter "The End of Times" here
AI-enabled goods and services are now commonplace in the Australian market and people interact with AI-enabled products in their daily lives. These products range from entirely online digital products, such as subscription streaming services for entertainment and customer service chatbots, to internet-connected physical goods such as digital assistants in smart phones and smart speakers, to internet-of-things goods that have little to no human interactivity, such as robot vacuums.
AI-enabled products present unique challenges to consumers’ ability to participate fairly and safely in the market and enact their consumer rights using the Australian Consumer Law (ACL). The largest challenge is the opacity of AI and algorithms, making it difficult for individuals to assess whether a good or service meets the consumer guarantees of acceptable quality and fitness for purpose. Consumers understand there is a problem when a toaster doesn’t toast, however it’s near impossible for everyday people to assess the quality and efficacy of AI-enabled products, making it equally impossible to seek remedy using the ACL.
In the broader context of digital markets, in which AI-enabled products exist, practices of deceptive design, unfairness and manipulation should be addressed through economy-wide provisions. As such, DRW supports the introduction of a prohibition on unfair trading and refer to the work of consumer groups such as CHOICE and Consumer Policy Research Centre for further elucidation of the benefits of an unfair trading ban.
Holding someone’s trust means people believe what you say to be true. Speaking the truth consistently wins people’s trust.
But trust isn’t always treated with the deference it should be. Too often it can be abused, with truth usually the first to pay the price.
There were a few instances this week which had us thinking about trust and the role it plays in dictating what is true or not.
One was the somewhat slavish and uncritical reporting of the Business Council of Australia’s ‘Regulation Rumble’ report which loudly declared Victoria the “worst state in Australia to do business”.
Headlines across Australia’s media outlets swallowed the conclusions: ‘Victoria ranks last for business amid state spending splurge’, ‘Victoria ranked worst state in Australia for business’ and ‘Victoria ranked worst for business as Labor debates brand damage in Albanese stronghold’ were just some of the headlines. And not just at News Corp – that last one was the ABC.
To the casual observer, it seems that media outlets are faithfully reporting on an independent report. But a cursory glance at the ABS data on business investment – you know, the raw numbers of where private business is putting its money – showed investment in Victoria was outstripping nearly every other state.
The representative of the three large, foreign-owned salmon farmers in the Apple Isle has made many claims about the economic impact of moving fish farms out of Macquarie Harbour. The research behind those claims remains secret.
The Australia Institute challenges those making unsubstantiated claims to a debate about what needs to be done in Macquarie Harbour.
“It’s time to start calling out the lies, exaggeration and misinformation,” said Eloise Carr, Director, Australia Institute Tasmania.
“It’s factually incorrect to describe the industry in Macquarie Harbour as ‘small.’ Currently, 9,500 tonnes of salmon and trout come out of the harbour annually. The amount of nitrogen pollution this contribute to the harbour is the same as the sewage discharged from a city the size of Hobart.
“Dumping the equivalent of Hobart’s worth of sewage in a World Heritage-listed harbour has consequences. And the best-known is the impact on the endangered Maugean skate, a stingray-like creature that has been around since the dinosaurs and lives nowhere else in the world.
“The science could not be clearer: fish farming is the primary threat to the skate. That’s what Australia’s top scientists are telling us.
The American material life is taken for granted. Things just appear. There is no consideration for what country the Empire destroyed to fuel their cars, which people are earning pennies inside sweatshops for their clothes or how many children’s hands touched the lithium in their phone batteries fresh out of the mine. The U.S. Empire makes sure these realities are out of the public consciousness and only the shiny, finished products end up in the public view, no questions asked. Matt Kennard, founder of the independent investigative outlet Declassified UK, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire.”
The report, Greenwashing Coal in New South Wales, reveals a stark contrast in funding priorities. State government organisations which are meant to be supporting communities with the transition away from coal have an initial budget of just $5.2 million, while public subsidies for coal research and promotion far exceed this amount.
Key points:
● The NSW Government’s proposed Future Jobs and Investment Authorities for the Hunter, Illawarra, Central West and North West regions aim to assist coal-reliant communities’ transition. But they are severely underfunded with a collective budget of just $5.2 million for all four authorities.
● These Authorities are not able to access increased funding from the Future Jobs and Investment Fund until 2028-29.
● Organisations devoted to promoting and prolonging the NSW coal industry, by contrast, have significantly more resources:
○ Coal Innovation NSW spent $27 million last year and has a balance of $45 million.
○ The coal industry organisation Low Emissions Technology Australia (LETA) is promoted as a $700 million fund. This fund is publicly subsidised, but recently asked to stop receiving contributions due to a significant surplus of funding.
The report calls for the abolition of Coal Innovation NSW and associated funds. It also recommends royalty deduction subsidies to LETA be immediately abolished.
Until 2020, Western Australians didn’t experience the energy price pain of their east coast cousins because all its domestic gas reserves were reserved for the domestic market. Up until then, all the gas WA exported came from offshore reserves, mostly in Commonwealth waters. That changed four years ago, when the WA Labor government allowed the export of onshore gas.
Why did the WA Labor government change the policy?
Good question. Woodside started running out of offshore gas for its giant North West Shelf export terminal, and decided to turn to the domestic reserves to keep feeding it. But it needed some help.
Enter media magnate and fossil fuel investor Kerry Stokes and his company Beach Energy. Beach Energy owned the licence for some of WA’s onshore gas reserves and wanted to export that domestic gas because gas sold on the international market fetches higher prices than it does domestically.
Beach Energy made a deal with Woodside to export its domestic gas. And then it used its considerable influence to lobby the Western Australian government to let them do it. In August 2020, while most attention was on the pandemic and the border closures, then-premier Mark McGowen announced Woodside could export WA’s domestic gas for five years – and a lot of it … the equivalent of around a quarter of the total gas used in WA!
So, what is the problem?
Woodside now wants to extend the deal for another 50 years. And that’s terrible news for Western Australians.
Outside supporters of trans rights showed their fighting spirit. While inside, questions about detransition signaled court’s openness to gender affirming care bans.
Digital Rights Watch has been involved in many Senate committee consultations since our founding in 2016. Never before have we witnessed such a shocking display of misusing the committee inquiry process as a sham consultation for the purposes of “box-ticking” community engagement.
We are dismayed to see the government prioritise the theatre of policy-making in the lead-up to a federal election over meaningful legislation over the long-term. It is particularly egregious to expect a Senate committee inquiry to provide adequate analysis with such short timescales as in the terms of reference. We do not have any confidence that this inquiry can return anything of use in the time available other than to insist upon a longer period of consultation and analysis for this important policy issue.
It is a gross disservice to the children of Australia and the Senate to use this committee inquiry to distract from the evidence that the government has failed to do adequate policy development in this area, yet is determined to push through this amendment despite expert advice from many relevant fields.
We apologise to the committee for exceeding the desired length of submission, but we have simply not had the time to make this one shorter.
Draft Consolidated Industry Codes of Practice for the Online Industry (Class 1C and Class 2 Material) under the Online Safety Act 2021
We recognise there are genuine challenges regarding the safety of vulnerable groups, including children, as well as the distribution of unlawful material online. We also recognise the legitimate interest of the Australian government to promote safer online services to individuals across Australia.
As a leading Australian organisation working to protect our collective digital rights, DRW is primarily concerned with ensuring an appropriate balance is struck with regard to the impact upon individuals’ and communities’ rights, including any adverse impacts it may have on privacy, digital security, and freedom of speech and expression.
As always, we emphasise that privacy and digital security are essential to uphold safety. Questions of legitimacy, proportionality, and reasonableness also must be carefully considered in any rights-balancing activity when determining online safety policy interventions. Digital Rights Watch is contributing to this consultation in the spirit of seeking to ensure that Australia’s approach to online safety does not end up disproportionately undermining safety in the quest to enhance it.
On this episode of Follow the Money, Australia Institute Chief Political Analyst Amy Remeikis joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the slings and arrows of the political year, why Australia doesn’t use its power on the international stage, and how next year’s federal election campaign is shaping up.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 3 December 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
There are lots of ways to protect workers in Tasmania, but there is only one way to protect the critically endangered Maugean skate. The skate has been around since the time of the dinosaurs. It has just one home – Macquarie Harbour. It’s globally unique – the only known brackish water skate in the world. It’s recognised internationally as one of the natural values of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.
Minister Plibersek says she will listen to the science and follow the law. Australian government scientists are unequivocal that salmon farming is the key threat to the skate’s survival. Top Australian independent scientists have confirmed this. Scientists have also told us how to save the skate: stop salmon farming.
“Is anyone other than the AWU seriously suggesting we should not listen to science and not follow the law?” said Eloise Carr, Director, Australia Institute Tasmania.
“But, of course, if they want to do what the AWU says – as the elected government – that’s obviously their choice to make.
“Democracy is about choices. We used to hunt whales, log the Daintree and mine asbestos and all those industries created some jobs.
“There are lots of places where salmon can be grown but only one place in the world where the Maugean skate can live. If we chose a bit more salmon over the last of the dinosaur fish, then it speaks volumes about our priories.”
Robust banks are a cornerstone of a healthy financial system. To ensure their stability, it is desirable for banks to hold a diverse portfolio of loans originating from various borrowers and sectors so that idiosyncratic shocks to any one borrower or fluctuations in a particular sector would be unlikely to cause the entire bank to go under. With this long-held wisdom in mind, how diversified are banks in reality?
Today the Business Council of Australia released its “Regulation Rumble 2024 report” which ranked Victoria as the worst state to do business. And yet when we examine the actual business investment figures from the Bureau of Statistics, it is clear private business investment in Victoria is actually growing more strongly in that state than almost anywhere else in Australia.
The discrepancy between what the BCA argues and what the data says is due to the reasons behind the BCA’s report. Notionally the report is designed to rank the states in order of places to do business. In reality, it is designed to pressure state governments to reduce taxes and regulations in order to increase the profits of companies.
This is made clear by the criteria – the BCA noted that it “examined planning systems, payroll taxes, property taxes and charges, retail trading hours, workers compensation premiums and licences to do business”. That is, anything that costs businesses is bad regardless of the impact it might have on the community through perhaps better services funded by state revenue. It concluded that South Australia was the best place to do business and that “this was largely driven by it having lower payroll taxes, lower property charges and less voluminous business licensing.”
The BCA has a very clever media strategy, and its report got wide coverage.
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the costs of job displacement in energy-intensive industries in selected OECD countries. Based on harmonised linked employer-employee data from 14 OECD countries, we estimate the effect of job displacement in three energy-intensive industries, namely energy supply, heavy manufacturing and transport, compared to other industries. We find that workers displaced from energy supply and heavy manufacturing, experience larger earnings losses compared with workers in non-energy-intensive and transport sectors. Larger earnings losses mainly result from weaker re-employment outcomes in terms of wages and job instability but also challenges with finding another job. They reflect significant differences in the composition of workers and firms in energy supply and heavy manufacturing and the rest of the economy. Displaced workers in these sectors tend to be older, are less skilled and more likely to be previously employed in high-wage firms.
The Commons Social Change Library gathers the collective wisdom of people engaged in social change and makes it available on one easy to use website. All of our educational resources are free of charge and available to everyone with internet access.
The Commons was a Community Partner for FWD+Organise 2024.
FWD+Organise 2024 was a conference that gathered community organisers and digital campaigners for two days of intensive learning at the Abbotsford Convent (Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) in December 2024. It was hosted by Australian Progress.
The Albanese government wants to pass major changes to national electoral laws with the help of the opposition.
On the cards are tens of millions in taxpayer funding for the major parties, donation caps, and limits on campaign spending – though the rules are much stricter for independent challengers than for major party MPs. They are the biggest changes to Australian democracy in decades – and Australians saw the legislation only last Monday.
The Albanese government is also rushing a social media age ban. It did graciously allow a parliamentary inquiry for this one. Don’t bother writing something – it gave only 24 hours for submissions, and “would appreciate” nothing more than two pages long.
But South Australia takes the cake for pushing new laws through before anyone has time to react.
Two weeks ago, Premier Peter Malinauskas announced Labor, Liberal, Greens and One Nation parliamentarians all supported his legislation to massively increase the amount of public money going to political parties and MPs while simultaneously banning most political donations. The bill will deliver political parties millions of dollars in extra funding while putting limits on newcomers’ fundraising.
Only once the bill was introduced to the Legislative Council did cracks appear; it was described as “rushed”, “a bit of a leap of faith”, an “election vanity project” and compared to the movie Sophie’s choice.
Disinformation thrives on stereotypes, scapegoating and soundbites. Direct conversations with people that go deeper into experiences and feelings have been found to be effective at reducing stigma and discrimination, shifting opinions and actions.
Deep Canvassing
“Deep canvassing is a voter contact model where canvassers prioritize two things:
Non-judgmentally inviting a voter to open up about their real, conflicted feelings on an issue.
Sharing vulnerably about their own life, and asking curious questions about the voter’s life (especially the experiences that have shaped how they each feel about the issue).
In other words, deep canvassing is about working to create mutual understanding grounded in lived experience, instead of in debate or talking points. When we take this approach, people’s experience leads them away from prejudice, stigma, or fear, and towards empathy and a willingness to consider progressive solutions.” The New Conversation Initiative
One-to-one conversations have been a key tool of community organising for many years. Deep canvassing builds on the approach by focusing on conflicted feelings and encouraging taking the perspective of others.
On this episode of After America, Zoe Daniel MP, Independent Member for Goldstein and former foreign correspondent, joins Dr Emma Shortis to talk about the incoming Trump administration, Australia’s relationships with the United States and China, and the role of independent politicians in Australian defence and foreign policy-making.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 28 November and things may have changed since recording.
Our latest article, entitled ‘The Dialectical Matrix of Class, Gender, Race’ published in Environment and Planning F, goes beyond intersectional studies on the themes of class, gender, and race to assert Marxist dialectics in the analysis of capitalist, patriarchal, and racial forms of oppression. Understanding the ways in which these forms are internally related is of utmost importance, considering heightened global tensions within the polycrisis reflected in the conditions characteristic of genocide in Gaza; or the wider global femicide; or the intensifying crisis of global capitalism.
Building on a previous article in Environment and Planning A, our more recent article assesses wider contributions within and between Marxism Feminism and Black Marxism to elevate consideration of the structural relationships between gender oppression, racial discrimination, and capitalism.
Per Capita’s research and relentless advocacy over many years has secured many progressive policy changes this year across tax, gender equality, industry policy, education, housing, responsible technology and progressive economics:
Stage 3 tax cuts The government changed these to be fairer in January after our years of advocacy.
Super on parental leave
Superannuation will now be paid on government-funded parental leave. We have been calling for this since 2017.
Future Made in Australia The government’s proposed industry policy closely aligns with recommendations from our Centre for New Industry around decarbonising and diversifying Australia’s industry.
Paid student placements
Social work students will now be paid for their mandatory 1000 placement hours following our report and advocacy.
At the moment numerous media outlets are attempting to make the case that the Victorian government’s finances are in a parlous state. The Financial Review for example has editorialised “Allan and Pallas in denial about Victoria’s state of decline”, while The Age stated as though it was an uncontested fact that “The state’s finances are heading towards a cliff.”
The media like to point to Victoria’s debt and deficit but they do so by including government fixed capital investment in the deficit. This might seem to the layperson as perfectly reasonable, but it is not how accounting works in the private sector and it presents a distorted picture of the state of the budget.
Including capital investment in a similar manner would, for example, see BHP’s 2024 profit drop from its declared US$20.7 billion to a marginal US$0.2 billion. Many other profitable companies would be in deficit were their budgets measured in the same way that now has the media suggesting the Victorian state finances are in deep trouble.
In 2022-23 (the latest year of ABS data), Victoria’s general government sector actually made a profit (net cash flow from operating activities) of $4.0 billion. Victoria’s budget papers also show a $1.4 billion surplus from operating activities in 2023-24.
The Vulnerability to Extreme Heat report identifies locations across Australia which have a high likelihood of experiencing extreme heat and a high concentration of people who are vulnerable because of illness, age and/or income level.
It finds that wealthy, coastal areas of major cities are generally less vulnerable to extreme heat than inland suburbs, and that rural areas are generally more vulnerable than urban areas.
Extreme heat is the number one cause of weather-related illness and death in all parts of Australia, except Tasmania, and Australians on low incomes who are older and/or have a long-term health issue are more vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat.
Doctors for the Environment Australia say the research is a vital tool which will help governments to save lives.
Tasmanian MPs’ rate of pay has been frozen since 2018. Before then the base salary of Tasmanian members of parliament increased annually. It was last increased in July 2018 to $140,185 per year.
Figure 1: Members of parliament base rate of pay 1996-97 to 2023-24
