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Brisbane Greens MP Stephen Bates has warned Australia’s housing market is heading towards an economic cliff unless urgent national reforms are made to tackle soaring rents and a broken tax system.

Everybody’s Home hosted the third town hall in its online series with incumbent MPs on Tuesday, where Mr Bates described the crisis as “existential” and said it was impacting people across the country – including many in his electorate of Brisbane, where more than half are renters.

“No one is free from the housing crisis we’re facing in this country,” Mr Bates said. “We have people living out of their cars with their kids … these are public servants who are now in this position where they can’t afford the rent.”

Mr Bates said the current housing system was the result of decades of policy failure.

“This isn’t something that has just come out of nowhere, it’s something that has been building for decades now…we can trace a lot of it back to the slowdown in the build of public housing and tax reforms that were brought in under the Howard Government,” he said.

“We’ve transformed the idea of a house to be somewhere that you live and a home where you raise your family that is now something to be speculated on, and bought and sold … an investment class.”

Mr Bates said $176 billion is “essentially given out as a handout” to property investors in tax cuts while families are sleeping in their cars.

When old and new MPs return to Canberra after the election, they’ll have a unique opportunity to tackle Australia’s biggest challenges on inequality, sustainability, health and education.

There is a need for more spending in disability care, childcare, aged care, health care, education and housing. There are also calls for more spending in defence. Regardless of which parties form government after the next election, they are going to need more revenue.

Fortunately, significant revenue can be raised relatively easily, and in ways which will make Australia fairer and safer.

By cutting fossil fuel subsidies, ending the gas industry’s free ride, reforming negative gearing and closing tax loopholes for superannuation and luxury utes, Treasury would raise between $12 billion and $63 billion.

• $12 billion could fund 70,000 extra jobs to improve education, health and a host of other public services.
• $63 billion would enable the government to raise support payments above the poverty line and double spending on education and housing.

Not only would these changes be easy to implement, they’d be popular.

And – after all that – Australians would still be paying significantly less tax than taxpayers in equivalent developed countries.

The Australia Institute’s new Discussion Paper, Raising Revenue Right, has five realistic  recommendations for Australia’s 48th Parliament:

As the Trump Administration pushes DEI out of schools and colleges, it should incentivize patriotic civic education as a salutary alternative. While curricular mandates from Washington violate federalism—besides the views of the growing chorus of Americans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—many federal tools remain available.

DEI, which nominally denotes “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” has come to stand for the full set of anti-American teachings and principles outlined in the January 2021 report of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. These include promoting a false history of slavery that inaccurately denigrates the American Founders, praising progressivism and muting the horrors of Communism, and inculcating racist identity politics.

In contrast, the 1776 Report highlights ways Americans can develop enlightened patriotism. The family, inspiring and accurate education, noble stories, solid scholarship, and reverence for the rule of law under our common Constitution of the United States all have their roles.

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.

By Mariana Mazzucato, Sarah Doyle, Bridget Gildea, and Luca Kuehn von Burgsdorff

“You need six months to break the habit, one year to build a new habit, and seven years for transformation.” In February 2023, Prime Minister Mia Mottley set out the need for a new economic and social transformation strategy in Barbados. Six months to deconstruct, one year to reconstruct, and seven years to transform.

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:

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

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.

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.”

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.

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).

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.

Introduction

Campaigning

My new book, The Last American Road Trip, comes out April 1 — and I’m going on tour! I will be talking with guest hosts, taking questions from the audience, and signing and personalizing copies of my books.

Tours are nerve-wracking, but meeting my readers has been a highlight of my life and career. It’s exciting to get to see folks face to face and I hope you all can make it! I’m grateful for the independent bookstores that make this tour possible.

Here are the dates, venues, and information.

April 1: St. Louis. Hi-Pointe Theatre at 7:00 PM. Sponsored by Left Bank Books. In conversation with Jason Rosenbaum of St. Louis Public Radio. More information on the Left Bank Books website.

April 7: Seattle. The Elliott Bay Book Company at 7:00 PM. In conversation with Kenny Mayne. Event info here.

April 8: Portland. Powell’s City of Books at 7:00 PM. In conversation with Omar El Akkad, author of the recent bestseller One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Event info here.

This was a talk I gave at the Sanctuary for Independent Media. Thank you to them for hosting me, and allowing my team to upload this talk I gave to The Chris Hedges Report. Visit their YouTube channel, where this originally aired, here.

What Authoritarianism Means

 — Author: Thomas Zimmer — Sunday 16th March 2025

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How to do a Successful and Safe Banner Drop

 — Organisation: The Commons Social Change Library — Sunday 16th March 2025

Introduction

These notes were compiled from a skillshare session in early 2025 as part of an afternoon of workshops in Musgrave Park, Kurilpa called ‘The Last Sunset’. This convergence of activists and community organisers was organised by volunteers through the Institute of Collaborative Race Research.

This article, originally published here, doesn’t cover how to make and sew together large banners (but you can easily find other resources online covering that).

Hanging a large protest banner or a flag from a bridge or monument is an effective and reasonably simple tactic to draw attention to a cause or show solidarity with a particular struggle.

Here are a few tips that might be useful for anyone planning an action like this…

Prepping your Banner

When hanging large banners (more than around 5m x 5m) off structures where they won’t have a solid wall behind them, it’s important to add some weights to the bottom and cut flaps/holes for the wind.

For a bigger banner – e.g. 10m x 15m – you usually only need 1 or 2 kilograms of weight in total along the bottom to stop it blowing in the wind too much.

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How is a Bike Tunnel this Freak'n Great!?

 — Publication: Not Just Bikes — Sunday 16th March 2025

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OregonDOT’s real financial problem isn’t revenue. It’s mega project cost overruns

 — Publication: City Observatory — Sunday 16th March 2025

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) blames its financial crisis on declining revenue from cleaner, more efficient cars. 

The reality is that the agency suffers from chronic overspending on highway megaprojects. 

Motor fuel revenue is actually up $100 million per year compared to 2020, but in the past five years, cost overruns on just three Portland area highway expansion projects in amount to nearly $5 billion. 

ODOT has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

ODOT’s poor management is to blame for these overruns, and they promise to become worse in the years ahead.

 

Joe Cortright’s testimony to the Oregon Transportation Commission

March 13, 2025

 

For the record. Joe Cortright, I’m an economist with City Observatory. I’d like to address two issues on the agenda today. They have to do with finance and climate.

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Choosing courage

 — Author: Heidi Li Feldman — Saturday 15th March 2025

Today was tough. Too many Democratic Senators caved, enabling the passage of a truly horrible six month spending bill favored by the Republicans. While that was unfolding on the Senate floor, Donald Trump personally visited the Justice Department and singled out individual U.S. lawyers by name, putting targets on the backs of Norm Eisen and Marc Elias, two attorneys who have had great success litigating against the Trump regimes, among many other achievements in their outstanding careers. Then, to cap off the day, Trump targeted another law firm for retaliation, this time yanking the security clearances of attorneys at Paul, Weiss.

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Cold Civil War Gone Global

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 14th March 2025

Two monumental events have shaken the U.S. foreign policy establishment since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. They took place at roughly the same time, but few have recognized their connection.

The first was the widespread exposure of USAID as the “world’s hipster vanguard of globalist, cultural Marxist revolution,” in the words of J. Michael Waller. When it wasn’t outright funding jihadist terrorism, USAID redirected billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to left-wing organizers promoting LGBTQ radicalism, anti-racism, climate change, and every other imaginable progressive policy around the globe.

While “charity” CEOs living in taxpayer-funded luxury wailed about how cuts would cost lives, the debate among the online Right was about burning USAID to the ground and salting the earth, or perhaps repurposing some form of foreign aid to support an America First foreign policy agenda.

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Demagoguery and Disruption

 — Author: Patricia Roberts-Miller — Friday 14th March 2025

I’ve been asked why demagoguery rises and falls, more than once by people who like the “disruption” theory—that demagoguery is the consequence of major social disruption. The short version is that events create a set and severity of crises that “normal” politics and “normal” political discourse seem completely incapable of ameliorating, let alone solving. People feel themselves to be in a “state of exception” when things they would normally condemn seem attractive—anti-democratic practices, purifying of a community through ethnic/political cleansing, authoritarianism, open violation of constitutional protections.

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The Week Observed, March 14, 2025

 — Publication: City Observatory — Friday 14th March 2025

What City Observatory Did This Week

Pretending Work-from-Home Never Happened.  Oregon and Washington highway department’s are planning for a $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Project based on assumptions that pretend that the Covid pandemic and work-from-home have done nothing to change predicted travel patterns.  They claim that unreferenced and apparently entirely mythical “industry standards” require them to ignore everything that has happened since 2019, even though a wealth of data shows that commuting and travel patterns have permanently changed.

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Denver Is Tired of Subsidizing Parking

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Friday 14th March 2025

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Finding the Balance: Community Organising Models in Australia and New Zealand

 — Organisation: The Commons Social Change Library — Friday 14th March 2025

Introduction

Understand how progressive organisations navigate the complexities of community organising in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

This overview of an academic paper published in 2025 in The Organizing Journal summarises the first known exploration of the community organising landscape across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

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.

The researchers invited 97 groups across the two countries that engage in community organising, and 24 of those group responses.

These were groups that mainly worked on

• climate change (44%),
• political issues like democratic rights and unions (29%),
• environmental concerns (21%), and
• social issues (4%).

By examining these survey responses, the research team uncovered patterns in how different groups structure their organising work and the common hurdles they face along the way.

Findings

One of the main findings is that these groups use a bespoke mix of community organising approaches. Most of them use mixed approaches that blend local, relationship-based organising with centralised professional support.

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Commonwealth live music inquiry: sing along with the chorus now…

 — Organisation: The Australia Institute — Friday 14th March 2025

The Australian Government’s latest report into the state of live music – “Am I Ever Gonna See You Live Again?” – makes some great recommendations, including for:

• tax offsets to be given to venues that host live music;
• training and education programs to help foster a love of music among young people;
• a rebate or voucher scheme to incentivise younger audiences to attend live music (which, as Australia Institute research has shown, is an approach that has been successful in Europe).

But, for these recommendations to have any weight, they’ll need to be backed up with adequate funding; the March budget is an opportunity for just that.

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The Bottom-Up Revolution Is…Re-Localizing the Benefits of Housing Development

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Thursday 13th March 2025

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Can the Trump Administration Arbitrarily Take Money from Anyone’s Bank Account?

 — Author: Nathan Tankus — Publication: Notes on the Crisis — Thursday 13th March 2025

Notes on the Crises pivoted on February 1st into around the clock coverage of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025. Today is Day Forty Two.

A version of this article is simultaneously appearing in Rolling Stone.

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The Dumbest Anti-Wind Propaganda On Television

 — Organisation: Climate Town — Thursday 13th March 2025

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03/13/2025 Market Update

 — Organisation: Applied MMT — Thursday 13th March 2025

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Honor and Oblivion

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 13th March 2025

“[T]he love of fame,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, is “the ruling passion of the noblest minds” (Federalist 72). But—also in the noblest minds—passion bows politely to reason, and the love of fame is tempered by love of the true and the good. Fame is the height of honor on the grandest scale, and the noblest minds will want to be honored only for what is most worthy of honor. They don’t seek the applause of fickle opinion here and now, but the respect of the wise and good of all times and places; ultimately, they want to be measured by what is worthy in the eyes of God.

What is most worthy of honor deserves to be remembered. “Old men forget,” as Shakespeare’s King Henry V proclaims at Agincourt, “yet all shall be forgot,” before oblivion shrouds in darkness the most worthy deeds. These will be remembered “from this day to the ending of the world.”

No human deed, in the whole “course of human events,” surpasses the American Revolution—bringing forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Rightly will the names of those happy few, that band of brothers—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams—be remembered to the ending of the world.

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Tennessee is Entering An Era of Yes. Your Place Can Too.

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Thursday 13th March 2025

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How Do We Defeat the Far Right this Election?

 — Organisation: The Commons Social Change Library — Thursday 13th March 2025

Introduction

It’s the question progressives are all asking: how can we grab the opportunity presented by the 2025 Australian Federal election to steer the public narrative – in the media, on the streets and online – in the direction of care and connectedness for people and nature? 

No matter what policies or campaigns we’re working on, our messages can influence the election outcome for good at this crucial time.

But there’s no doubt we’re up against it.

Organisations like Advance are prepared to spend millions to promote a very different story – one based on the neoliberal ideals of wealth accumulation, competition and social power for a selected ‘in-group’. Even a glance at the news from the USA shows we can’t dismiss their appeal to the voting public – especially when it’s all they’re hearing. 

So what the heck can we do? What must we do, if we want to gain traction for our ideas, our policy asks, and our own worldview? 

The good news is that plenty of very astute thinkers have been applying themselves to this very question.

Narrative Lessons

Here are some important narrative lessons for progressives in Australia in 2025.

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