On this episode of Follow the Money, Richard Denniss joins Ebony Bennett to discuss why the constant search for the centre ground doing Australians harm, why bipartisanship can actually be bad, and his new essay, Dead Centre.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Richard Denniss, Executive Director, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett
As we develop the Public Sector Capabilities Index, a question we have been asked is, What are ‘dynamic’ capabilities? And how are they different from ‘ordinary’ capabilities?
In this post, we explain how dynamic capabilities differ from operational ones and why the distinction matters.
Why dynamic capabilities matter
Stating that governments are facing complex problems is a well-rehearsed argument. City governments are having to balance large-scale shocks, such as those caused by geopolitical conflicts or health crises, with managing the demands of day-to-day delivery, often with fiscal constraints.
The Statement on Monetary Policy sets out the Bank's assessment of current economic
conditions, both domestic and international, along with the outlook for Australian inflation and output growth.
A number of boxes on topics of special interest are also published. The Statement is issued four times a year.
Does this make up for its bad call at the last meeting in July, when it left rates on hold?
No, because the data since the July meeting shows it should have cut again in August. So Australian borrowers are still at least one 0.25 per cent cut behind.
Unemployment is up, economic growth has almost completely stalled, and inflation is well and truly under control.
How far do rates need to fall before they are no longer weighing down the economy? This is known as the neutral rate. A rate that is neither slowing nor stimulating the economy.
It’s a bit fuzzy as to exactly what that rate is, but it is generally considered to start at around 3 per cent. So, we still need another two or three 0.25 per cent cuts on top of Tuesday’s, before rates aren’t dragging the economy down.
With headline inflation at 2.1 per cent, which is at the very bottom of the target band, all the talk has shifted to the underlying rate of inflation.
The underlying rate, also known as the trimmed mean, is the headline rate minus the volatile bits. It gives us an indication about where inflation is heading.
So, what is it telling us about where the rate of inflation is heading?
As if to confirm the problem Andrew Beck identified in “Assimilation and Its Discontents,” U.S. Representative Delia Ramirez just days after publication of his piece declared (in Spanish) at a leftist gathering in Mexico City, “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” The Chicago-born Democratic congresswoman—more than the Hindu idol in Texas Beck decries—defines the problem we face in creating an unum out of the plures of people, states, and regions that make up our sprawling continental nation.
Representative Ramirez deserves all the obloquy heaped on her for being America Second (at best). But the core assimilation problem we face is not that some immigrants and their children are insufficiently committed to America—it’s that America is insufficiently committed to assimilation.
Immigrants are going to take their cues from Americans about what we expect of them regarding assimilation. As an old boss of mine used to say, you teach people how to treat you—and we’ve been teaching newcomers that it’s okay to, as Beck puts it, “come to America, live in America—but…not become an American.”
Senior Economist Matt Grudnoff said while the cut in the official cash rate from 3.85% to 3.60% will provide long-overdue relief for mortgage holders, it should have happened five weeks ago.
“Borrowers should have been celebrating back-to-back cuts today,” he said.
Mr Grudnoff says the drawn-out period of high interest rates achieved its goal months ago – and is now doing more harm than good.
“Interest rates are still restrictive. They’re still weighing the economy down and causing unnecessary pain for borrowers,” he said.
“Headline inflation is at 2.1%. The underlying rate, which moves more slowly than the headline rate, has fallen every quarter for the last year. Unemployment is up and economic growth has almost completely stalled.
“How far do rates need to fall before they are no longer weighing the economy down? That figure is generally considered to be around 3%. So, we still need another two or three 0.25% cuts on top of today’s cut, before rates aren’t dragging the economy down.”
It remains true. And that’s how we know business is very worried about the productivity roundtable Jim Chalmers has called for later this month.
Back in 2020, when the pandemic had all elements of Australia’s industrial relations sector in a panic, the emphasis was on the ACTU and business working together.
Countless op-eds were written about how union boss Sally McManus and the Coalition’s then-IR minister Christian Porter worked to find elements of consensus in how to address the looming crisis.
“No time for a workplace brawl”, advised the Australian Financial Review. That push for consensus continued into 2022 when Labor held its Jobs Summit, with the Business Council of Australia and the ACTU jointly releasing “shared principles and policy suggestions” ahead of the talkfest, as if laying the groundwork for the shared interest would make disagreeing later easier.
It didn’t. And getting along doesn’t mean good policy. Usually it just dulls any progressive push for structural change.
Which is why the immediate pushback against the ACTU’s call for a 25 per cent tax on revenue from gas exports in place of the flawed Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT), a minimum 25 per cent tax rate on family trusts and individuals earning more than $1 million a year, changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions and caps to the diesel fuel rebate very telling.
The first full program of courses in political economy at an Australian university began in 1975. It was in the product of a long struggle by a dissident student-staff movement at the University of Sydney, campaigning for a PE course that students could take as an alternative to mainstream economics.
The struggle took place at a time when social activism in Australia was developing on many fronts – feminist, environmentalist, anti-apartheid and anti-imperialist, for peace and Indigenous peoples’ rights. It was a context in which the local activists’ success in getting a PE course up and running contributed to the view that ‘another world is possible’ because it showed that formally powerless groups can make a difference in driving change.
The early PE activists hoped that similar course programs would be established at other universities, and many struggled to try to make it happen. The Australian Political Economy Movement (APEM) was formed in 1976 to provide nationwide support and set up the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE). as its flagship publication. In practice, however, the development of PE courses beyond Sydney Uni turned out to be more sporadic, usually depending on the personal interests and comings and goings of academic staff at those other universities. Moreover, the changing social, political and economic context has become less conducive to initiatives of this kind than it was in the 1970s.
The frog, who has seen scorpions sting and kill its brethren, is cautious and tells the scorpion no, because he is afraid of being stung.
The scorpion reassures the frog by telling it he too would die if he stung the frog while riding it across the river, and the frog sees the truth in this and offers the scorpion his back. As they approach the middle of the river, the frog feels the scorpion’s tail pierce his skin, and the poison immediately begin to flow through and paralyse his body.
“Why?” he gasps as he and the scorpion sink beneath the water.
“I’m sorry,” the scorpion says as the two see the face of death. “It is but my nature.”
The moral of the story, at least as it was relayed to me as a child, is that you cannot expect rationality from those unwilling to fight their worst nature.
This week, watching Tim Wilson and the Liberals attempt to reignite the work-from-home debate, just months after the Coalition was forced to dump its policy to force the public service back into the office mid-election because of how unpopular it was, brought the frog and the scorpion front of mind.
Andrew Beck has made a cogent case for why the U.S., like other countries, requires cultural and moral cohesion to protect its nationhood and act with a unified will on behalf of the common good. Beck correctly notes that the U.S. started out as a country with a well-defined collective identity. If we look back at America’s beginnings, we discover John Jay in Federalist 2 defining this original American identity in a memorable observation:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.
At the time this was written, the newly formed American nation-state was composed overwhelmingly of Northern European Protestants; its legal institutions were largely British. Its shared culture was shaped by, among other things, reading and revering the King James Bible. Among the professional class, the Bible’s authority was supplemented by that of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (to some extent) classical texts like Plutarch’s Lives.
For some Gen Zers, it’s already time to retire. A new trend known as “micro-retirement” has spread like wildfire on social media. It involves young adults working for a few years, quitting their jobs to pursue life experiences, and then repeating the cycle. While it is tempting to dismiss this trend, micro-retirement’s appeal to Zoomers reveals much about their unique perspective on life.
One popular influencer, Adama Lorna, made the case for micro-retirement in a TikTok video: “Instead of waiting until you’re 60 or 70 to travel the world and indulge in hobbies, you do them while you have your youth, your energy, and health.” As she sees it, micro-retirement is a way for young people to have their cake and eat it too. By “retiring” every few years, they’re able to reap the freedom that comes with retiree life while enjoying their youth.
Lifestyle guru Timothy Ferriss coined the term “micro-retirement” in his book titledThe 4-Hour Workweek. Although it was written in 2007, it didn’t catch on among Millennials. The fact that Zoomers popularized a term coined while they were learning their ABCs suggests that something about their generational experience primed them for it.
On this special crossover episode of Follow the Money and After America, Dr Emma Shortis joins Glenn Connley to discuss the Australian protests calling for more action to protect Palestinians, the momentum against the troubled AUKUS submarine pact, and Trump’s decision to fire his chief of labour statistics after job growth slowed.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 4 August 2025.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
Host: Glenn Connley, Senior Media Advisor, the Australia Institute // @glennconnley
Introduction This response to the government’s call for evidence draws upon the Equality Trust’s research, collaboration with partners, stakeholder insights from place-based and participatory projects, and practitioner insights from the field. We have chosen to address the specific questions where we have the most relevant data and experience to make a contribution. This includes proposals […]
10 September, 5:00-7:30 pm (drinks and canapés from 5pm, lecture starts 6 pm)
Lecture Theatre 200, Social Sciences Building (A02), The University of Sydney
18th Annual E.L. ‘Ted’ Wheelwright Memorial Lecture
Speaker: Raewyn Connell
In the last generation there has been heavy criticism of what universities have become, in an era of commercialism and managerial control. This lecture will discuss the main points of criticism, whether they amount to a case for abolition, and what practical processes of abolition are under way. It looks at the prosperity of higher education as a global industry, and tries to probe a little into the contradictory situation we are now in: the corrosion of the labour process, the sustainability of the workforce, the appropriation of benefits, and current pressures on critique and truth. Finally it touches on the history of the sector and some memorable examples of struggle and change.
First, let’s set one thing straight. This is basically all about the coal and gas industries. More than 54% of emissions covered by the Safeguard Mechanism come from gas or coal:
This chart shows how big the emissions from the gas and coal industries are compared to other industries covered by the Safeguard Mechanism. Often industries like cement production, agriculture or manufacturing are presented as being a big part of Australia’s climate debate. This chart shows that they’re not, at least in terms of the Safeguard Mechanism.
So, here’s how the Safeguard Mechanism manages to look effective while actually facilitating gas and coal projects.
Satellite imagery reveals what Israel didn’t show to the ABC when it granted rare access inside Gaza ABC | Jonathan Hair | 10 August 2025 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-10/gaza-kerem-shalom-rafah-damage-aid/105630618 Satellite imagery has revealed the catastrophic damage done to the areas surrounding an aid depot where Israel has staged tightly controlled media visits. The ABC was granted access to […]
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Aug 11-17, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9500
9 August 2025 - Free Palestine Melbourne expresses its unwavering solidarity with the courageous people of Gaza. We salute their steadfastness in the face of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and starvation at the hands of the terrorist Israeli regime.
A few years ago, I was invited to observe some student presentations on the topic of Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It is one of the perks of my job as a professor at a Catholic liberal arts university that I get invited to such events. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations, but I could sense from the Q&A that one part of the audience remained unpersuaded: the students’ parents. Moms and dads who had worked hard to pay for their children to attend college were not enthusiastic about the main point their sons and daughters were making: work is not what life is all about.
Leisure is the goal of work, after all. Leisure activity (rather than do-nothing inactivity) awakens the greatest part of our souls, the part that is capable of wonder and contemplation. Beginning with Aristotle, excellent philosophical authorities over the years have made that very argument. Classicist Sarah Broadie once observed that Aristotle’s idea that “we are not-at-leisure in order to be at leisure” remains understudied—except by the mid-20th century Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, the foremost recent thinker who has argued for leisure’s importance. In 1948, he wrote that “the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work.”
The gender cap in perceptions of cities. A new YouGov survey of 2,000+ Americans reveals striking gender differences in how cities are perceived across the country. Women rate Portland a remarkable 31 percentage points higher than men—the largest gender gap among 50 major cities surveyed. Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco also score significantly higher with women.
The geographic pattern is telling: West Coast cities consistently appeal more to women, while Southern cities—particularly in Texas and Oklahoma—resonate more with men. Every California city except Bakersfield rates higher with women; every Texas city except Houston favors men.
Rising temperatures and ocean acidification caused by greenhouse gases are among the greatest threats to the marine environment, particularly coral reefs.
Australia Institute research shows emissions from the recent expansion and extension of Woodside’s gas export projects in WA will add around 130 million tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere annually, more than all of Australia’s coal power stations.
Woodside also conducts seismic blasting, which is detrimental to marine life, and is proposing drilling close to the pristine Scott Reef, which the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority flagged as unacceptable.
“Woodside is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than virtually any other company in Australia,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.
“This sponsorship is another example of greenwashing by one of the companies doing the most damage to our marine environment and coral reefs.
Fixing American education begins with figuring out what to do about the United States Department of Education (ED). The Trump Administration wants to eliminate the ED at once. Kenin Spivak’s recent article for The American Mind argued that policymakers should simplify the ED and reduce its power, and then consider whether to eliminate the department entirely. Regardless of the option they ultimately choose, policymakers should at minimum return most of the ED’s powers to determine the content and structure of education back to the states and local school districts.
Why should the first priority of education reformers be to eliminate the Education Department, or at the very least remove most of its power over American education?
The National Association of Scholars’ report Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalismprovides chapter and verse on how the ED misbehaves. The Education Department and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) use four big tools to impose ideologically extreme policies on states and school districts. These tools are:
FPM Media Report Wednesday August 6 2025 We cannot stand by’: Government sends strongest signal yet on Palestinian recognition https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/we-cannot-stand-by-government-sends-strongest-signal-yet-on-palestinian-recognition-20250805-p5mkii.html Matthew Knott Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has discussed efforts to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with the head of the United Nations as the government sends increasingly strong signals it will join a coalition […]
“An AI created a podcast of your paper,” the email said. I blinked and read it again.
The paper was a work I had written in graduate school and uploaded to the website Academia. The subject was digital freedom and social control in authoritarian states.
I uploaded it in 2010 to thwart the paywalls that blocked academic research from the public. I wanted people to grasp the digital dangers of surveillance, censorship, and impersonation. I wanted them to understand that no one was safe from the future.
It did not occur to me that in 2025 a robot would steal my words and make a podcast out of them and try to charge people, including me, $170 to listen.
I don’t know what the podcast says. I ain’t paying no doppelganger ransom.
In 2010, I sought to debunk the widespread belief that the internet was an inherently democratizing force. In that halcyon era, when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto did not yet prompt bitter laughter, this was a controversial take. It came from researching the internet in authoritarian states, where dictators used it to monitor dissidents and torpedo their rebellions.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss how Trump is normalising the idea that he might not leave the White House once his second term is up. Then, Helen Haines MP, independent member for Indi, joins Emma to discuss her community’s concerns about Israel’s actions in Gaza and the growing push for more transparency and accountability in Australian foreign policy.
Emma’s discussion with Helen was recorded on Tuesday 29 July. Her discussion with Angus was recorded on Thursday 7 August.
After America will be back on Tuesday 19 August.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Helen Haines MP, Independent Member for Indi // @helenhainesindi
Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
In a recent trip to New York, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s John Singer Sargent exhibit in order to bask in the work of the greatest portrait artist of the twentieth century. I had only seen his paintings once before, in Chicago, which quickly converted me into a worshipper of his larger-than-life portraits of the wives of capitalists adorned in silks and pearls and chiffons, the materials rendered with brushstrokes so effusive and instinctive that portraits from the masters that came before him seemed stagnant in comparison.
At the Met, I was finally reunited with these paintings and many more — all showing a painterly grasp of human expression that clearly had no time for the hagiography for which Sargent was likely hired. The expressions he captured on faces were so real, so momentary and subtle, that it’s hard to believe they were the product of hundreds of hours of careful painting and not the momentary release of a shutter. Sargent found his art in the midst of painting for the oligarchs of the time, and he found a way to both aggrandize and humanize them all the same. The material contradictions of his day were transmuted into something ecstatic.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg explains the Productivity Commission’s proposals for corporate tax and why Trump fired his labour statistics chief, and Elinor discovers people actually like economics.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available to pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 7 August 2025.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @grogsgamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
It assumes that all political disagreements are really a zero-sum conflict among various kinds of people. As soon as politics is imagined that way, then we’re in a conflict about dominance—which group should be in power?
It’s also wildly ahistorical, and simultaneously false and non-falsifiable.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
To coincide with the visit of Ilias Alami at the University of Sydney and a series of presentations on raced finance and state capitalism, we are re-blogging his feature on mutations in state capitalism that was first published at the Law & Political Economy Project.
Global capitalism is undergoing turbulent mutations, including the seemingly unstoppable rise of Big Tech and the aggressive reengineering of globalization to intensifying geopolitical rivalries. The supercharged business and political news cycle is moving at an ever more dizzying pace. In this context, many of us are seeking intellectual resources to help us understand the specificity and significance of the present moment, particularly in light of the long historical development of global capitalism.
