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Dr. D, as I called him, was a scholar and a gentleman. He earned his PhD from Yale after writing a dissertation on Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Wittgenstein, published as Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy by The University of Chicago Press in 1981. Later he wrote David Hume and the Problem of Reason, from Yale University Press, and a book published by ISI called The Roots of Freedom, based on lectures he gave for Radio Free America. After starting his career at the University of Chicago, Dr. D moved to the University of Houston and then to Loyola University Chicago in 1993, just as I was enrolling there in graduate school.

It has a big majority in the lower house, an easy Senate and an opposition in a shambles.

Less widely remarked is that, outside of Parliament, some key potential critics are also at a low ebb, and it’s not just the traditional media critics that are no longer able to influence elections.

The mining and gas lobbies are also historically weak.

This might not seem obvious, given the Albanese government’s tendency to do whatever the resource sector asks – whether it’s approving carbon-bomb gas export projects for Woodside, putting environment law reform on the go-slow for the mining industry, or doing as little as possible to end the “great gas giveaway”.

But the government’s subservience to the resource lobbies stems more from the personal preferences of Anthony Albanese and his ministers, rather than the power of the lobbies themselves.

Long-gone are the days of 2010 when, the mining industry could claim – apocryphally or otherwise – to topple prime ministers and governments. These days it can hardly organise a meeting in a conference centre.

Last week the Minerals Council of Australia and the gas lobby Australian Energy Producers hosted Australia’s first Energy and Minerals Tax Conference.

Two of the country’s most powerful industry groups were teaming up to “highlight the significant economic and tax contribution of the natural gas and mineral resources sectors”.

Why did they need to have three-day conference with government, opposition and media invited to talk about how much tax they pay?

Jesse Merriam has inaugurated this symposium on the future of the conservative legal movement with a provocative essay arguing that the movement needs to reassess itself in light of our current political and cultural moment. He argues that it should shed its technocratic “focus on how precedents are interpreted and distinguished” in favor of a broader project “that conceives of law as a way to sustain the American way of life.” Legal conservatism, Merriam continues, should “develop a constitutional morality that reflects the larger project…of constitutional and…civilizational restoration.” He does not want to abandon originalism but says that the conservative legal movement needs to mount a positive project to meet today’s considerable challenges.

I agree.

In order to clarify Merriam’s argument, it is important to point out that the movement has always needed, if it has not quite always had, at least three separate but overlapping projects.

He had no evidence for this – just some spurious numbers around what he said a carbon price would cost – but it didn’t matter. As he wrote himself in Weatherboard and Iron, the claim took off.

Australia dumped the carbon price under the Abbott government and lamb hit record prices in 2025 – because of drought.

Joyce also claimed in 2014 that the “country would go broke” if the 2014 budget wasn’t passed (much of it wasn’t) and – surprise, surprise – the country is not broke.

But we never go back and check what is right or wrong in these debates, which is why people like Joyce can continue to make outrageous claims and have them reported as having the same weight as actual facts, with no responsibility or accountability for when it’s revealed as bullsh-t.

The Coalition did the same with the carbon price, a tax that was never a tax as admitted by one of the architects of the successful scare campaign, Peta Credlin herself years later.

Because that’s the thing – the people who deliberately muddy the waters through misinformation, cherry-picking facts or straight-up falsehoods then brag about their success, admitting they knew it was wrong, but hey, “that’s politics”.

They can do it time and time again, because every time they change the lie, it’s treated as a serious input into the debate.

Leader (for now – those who wanted net zero gone will wait for the polls to officially end her career) Sussan Ley was particularly egregious, answering the question of “what will you tell your grandchildren?” with:

“The other thing that I want to be able to say to my grandchildren is that you should inherit a better standard of living than my generation and your mum and dad’s generation. Right now, they are set to inherit the worst standard of living since the Second World War.”

Now, enough words have been written on this most recent bout of stupidity, but those particular words lingered.

The same week the Liberal Party sucked up any and all political oxygen, the Victorian Labor government made a mockery of evidence-based solutions and research by capitulating to populist scare campaigns and announcing that children as young as 14 could be treated as adults in court.

This is happening as the federal government makes a big song and dance about banning under-16s from social media. Too young for TikTok but apparently old enough to face the adult incarceration system.

But we don’t care about children when there are tough-on-crime headlines to be made.

Just as we don’t care about children when setting climate policy – even as the consequences hit us. Both major parties have voted against having a duty of care for future generations included in legislation, as well as having fought against it in court. Children are to inherit our consequences, but have no say in the decision-making.

Shortly after I started, the printing press was closed and that magic became a memory, a period of time I was lucky to experience in an industry that has been in flux since.

But when I was lucky enough to get to stay around and watch the paper get put to bed, you would also get the benefit of learning from the salty news dogs who’d spent decades in journalism and learnt some universal truths.

They were usually on the night shift because they were no longer fit for human consumption, but also because they’d spot the errors others wouldn’t even know to look for (like an ad for funerals on the same page as a horror car smash or a story on air mattresses across from a sky-diving accident) and if they liked you, they’d tell you how little your university degree had taught you.

That was where I was told about “whinge and win”. It’s not specific to journalism, and it’s also known as being the loudest voice in the room.

Whinge and win is how the bullies, the incompetent and the plain annoying seem to always get their way. It’s easier to give in than to stand and fight, because the whinging winners have enough audacity to outlast all but the most staunch.

It’s how issues that aren’t issues end up dominating everyone’s agenda. How the worst people you know seem to always have victories, reinforcing their delusions the world is there to bend to them.

Because the flip side of whinge and win is suffering in silence. Which is what most people do, because the fight seems so overwhelming.

This is despite an increase in public funding through Workforce Australia, a Commonwealth Government service which pays private job agencies to help people who are unemployed find jobs.

The involvement of private agencies in the unemployment benefit system began in 1998, when the Howard Government replaced the government-run Commonwealth Employment Service. It instead contracted private or community-run job agencies to help people find jobs.

This was combined with the “mutual obligation” requirement for those receiving the benefit. This became known as the “Work for the Dole” program. Those receiving payments are required to do “work like” activities for a certain number of hours and/or to demonstrate an effort to find employment. Jobseekers sign up with private job agencies as a way of showing they are looking for a job. An agency claims “outcome payments” from the government when a client has completed 4, 12, or 26 weeks of work (the latter being considered long-term).

In short, instead of helping some of its most vulnerable citizens directly, the Commonwealth Government makes them jump through hoops to receive Jobseeker payments, and private companies who capture handsome profits in the process.

Over one-in-four of Jobseeker payment recipients have disability or health conditions which affect their capacity for work, as recognised by the Albanese Government’s employment whitepaper from September 2023.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.

I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.

After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.

We didn’t know it would be the last.

Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.

There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.

Richard Crump, Keshav Dogra, and Dennis Kongoli

Today’s conservative legal movement is the proverbial dog that caught the car. After years of effort (and more than a little fortuity), a solidly conservative majority now sits on the Supreme Court. The movement has racked up a string of wins on longstanding priorities, ranging from affirmative action to abortion to administrative agency deference, with perhaps the most seismic changes still to come. The Court’s blessing of the long-theorized “major questions doctrine,” which grants courts broad power to deem a particular action outside the purview of administrative agencies and properly committed to Congress, is a blade perfectly forged for dismantling that perennial movement bogeyman, the administrative state.

So where do things go from here?

Broadbent Research Fellow Angella MacEwen explains how public ownership and public investment are needed to fight inflation, fix inequality, and improve economic productivity. MacEwen shows that Canada has the power to build a stronger, democratic economy to fight back against the US Trump administration’s trade war and as an alternative to Mark Carney’s austerity agenda.

Progressive Political Economy is a video series that spotlights progressive economics and political ideas that push for a just and equal society.

Through interviews with Canada’s leading progressive economic thinkers, we lay out alternative approaches to orthodox economic thinking that have lent today’s inequalities and injustices.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Mike Rann addresses the fossil fuel industry’s tobacco-like tactics, South Australia’s leadership of progressive reform, and why policy bravery can be great politics, as he delivered the Australia Institute’s Hugh Saddler Memorial Lecture.

This episode was recorded live on Thursday 13 November.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available for pre-order now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘SAVE5’ to get $5 off.

Aiming Higher: Universities and Australia’s future by Professor George Williams is also available now.

Guest: Mike Rann, Chair of the UK Climate Group and former Premier of South Australia // @Mike_Rann

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

Show notes:

Nicola Cetorelli and Saketh Prazad

Nicola Cetorelli and Saketh Prazad

President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory—until they weren’t. Speaking recently on 60 Minutes, the president said he would let NVIDIA “deal with China,” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. NVIDIA’s stock jumped immediately—but China did not get what it wanted.

Days later, in a Financial Times interview, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: cut us off, Beijing wins.

The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. NVIDIA has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China. 

To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.

Launched on 31 October 2025 at Gleebooks, Sydney, this post focuses on the book by Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, which follows last week’s commentary from the same evening delivered by Brett Heino. 

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In acknowledging that we are on Gadigal land of the Eora Nation, I want to start by paying my respect to elders past, present, and emerging and also to those Indigenous peoples that are either in the audience or reading this commentary. Sovereignty in what is now called Australia was never ceded but, rather, violently dispossessed. In paying respects to Indigenous voices, I also want to draw inspiration from Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield (2019) that received, among others, the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. To cite one key passage:

Don’t know what it is about us that seems to rile the white man. The burden, the burden of their memory perhaps, or that we weren’t extinguished with the lights of those empires after all!

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

This episode looks at one of the first feminist social democrats in Canadian history: Francis Marion Beynon. Her work as journalist in Winnipeg in the early 1900s was critical for pointing out how exploitation wasn’t just about workers and bosses — it was also about the way that women were being treated by their husbands at home.