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Since I will be getting a bunch of new readers for this piece, I’m trying to explain every single moving part so this is very long. I will certainly do abbreviated mainstream Op Eds based on this piece. Skip ahead if you know financial markets well.

Introduction

The Disrupt Burrup Hub (DBH) campaign is a direct action campaign that is primarily targeting Woodside Energy projects at Murujuga on the Burrup Peninsula.

This report has been prepared on behalf of Disrupt Burrup Hub by the Commons Social Change Library. The report is intended to provide an analysis of the campaign’s activities from 2023-24.

Findings and discussion are primarily drawn from interviews with 10 core Disrupt Burrup Hub campaigners. These interviews have been anonymised to allow campaigners to speak honestly about their experiences in the group. In addition to these interviews, a rough analysis of the campaign’s strategy documents, and media coverage was undertaken. Both internal elements of the campaign and its strategic capacity, as well as external measures of the campaign’s outcomes and influence have been considered.

This report is not designed to be an objective assessment of the campaign’s success or failure, but rather provide an internal tool for discussion, helping the campaign team to reflect on their experiences and make plans for the future.

It is being published publicly here, with the consent of Disrupt Burrup Hub, in order to help share the lessons from the campaign with other activists and organisers around Australia and globally. 

The research, by The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, reveals that until recently, government policies reinforced economic trends that eroded workers’ power.

This erosion normalised low wage growth in Australia for both union and non-union workers.

The report – The Curious Incident of Low Wages Growth – found that of the 16 key developments in the labour market over the past half century, 14 reduced workers’ power, one increased the power of female workers only and just one increased the power of all workers.

From 2014, the majority of federal legislation buttressed this trend and further reduced workers’ power.

Since the election of the Albanese government in 2022, almost all federal legislation impacting wages has done the opposite. It has increased workers’ power. And this may continue, with the government seeking a pay rise above the rate of inflation for low-paid workers in its submission to the Fair Work Commission’s annual wage review.

“These findings dispel the idea that governments can do nothing about wages,” said Professor Emeritus David Peetz, Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow at The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work and author of the report.

In the world that emerged after the Cold War, power moved with container ships and capital markets. Liberalism’s invisible hand was fortified by a visible navy, and its logic was one of frictionless flow: of goods, information, money, and governance standards. The sea was its main artery, and the U.S. Navy its steward.

Today, that world is cracking. Capital markets are fragmenting. Supply chains are shortening. Naval supremacy is increasingly contested not by peer fleets but by $10,000 drones and firmware updates. And, perhaps most significantly, ordinary people—the supposed beneficiaries of the globalized order—are turning against it.

What we are witnessing is not simply a redistribution of power, but a transformation in the very grammar of geopolitical influence. Economic integration no longer secures peace; in many cases, it foments resentment. Technological innovation no longer reinforces traditional hierarchies; it bypasses them. And military might no longer projects primarily from the sea—it radiates from code, chips, and algorithms.

This is a world no longer ruled by frictionless flows, but by points of friction—strategic chokeholds where denial is cheap and control is asymmetric.

The architecture of globalization was strategic, not merely economic. The United States underwrote an open trading system, because it extended American influence while suppressing the rise of challengers. Pax Americana was a naval enterprise. Aircraft carriers were not just tools of war; they were guarantees of commerce.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton released the modelling behind his proposed gas tax ahead of last night’s election debate with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Labor is now the only party that hasn’t rebutted the multi-national gas exporters’ ridiculous claim that there is a shortage of gas in Australia when we are exporting huge quantities of it.

“Peter Dutton’s proposal to put a tax on gas exports is proof of just how fast the world is changing now that Donald Trump has ripped up the free trade rule book,” said Dr Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute.

“Australians have been told for a decade that we had a shortage of gas, but now Peter Dutton is rightfully arguing Australia has an abundance of gas and that all we need to do is to tax gas exports to ensure our gas flows first to Australian businesses and households. This is a big shift.

“Economics 101 says governments should tax things we want less of and subsidise things we want more of.

“So far in this election, we have seen the Coalition proposing a tax on gas exports and Labor proposing a subsidy for home batteries. It seems that after 10 years of ignoring economics, the major parties are starting to take energy policy seriously again.

Australia’s beleaguered university sector is never far from the headlines these days. Former Labor leader and current University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Bill Shorten probably doesn’t envy his former ministerial colleagues who are currently on the campaign trail, but nonetheless, he’s in the news today.

The Canberra Times reports that Shorten is announcing a new voluntary redundancy program for UC’s professional staff. “We are not looking to achieve certain targets nor have we identified further positions as excess to requirements,” he told reporters.

UC has saved about $30 million by letting go of 150 staff to date. But why were these cuts necessary in the first place? Like most universities, UC has spent big on discretionary things that aren’t education or research.

Its 2023 annual report shows that the university spent $16.7 million on consultants’ fees, $9 million on ‘outsource management fees’, $697,000 on ‘sponsorships’, nearly $4.4 million on travel and just shy of $3 million on advertising.

The above graph shows that those items cost more in total than the 150 jobs that UC has since cut to repair its deficit.

News of Britain’s disastrous 30-year experiment with mass migration appears to have left the rainy little island for the sunny uplands of America, where it was picked up by JD Vance. Speaking at a recent Washington, D.C. summit hosted by Andreessen Horowitz, the vice president argued that Britain’s economy is stagnating due to high levels of immigration, and accused Western nations of growing “lazy” by relying on imported “cheap labor” as a replacement for productivity.

The extensive “Notes on the Crises Investigative Journalism Source Wish List” can be found here. All listed items are important to me. As always, Sources can contact me over email or over signal (a secure and encrypted text messaging app) — linked here. My Signal username is “NathanTankus.01” and you can find me by searching for my username. I will speak to sources on whatever terms they require (i.e. off the record, Deep Background, on Background etc.)

This leads to messy disendorsements and a flurry of bad press. When these disendorsements happen late (after the “close of nominations”, after which no new candidates are accepted), the candidate still appears on the ballot as a member of the party that disendorsed them.

Such was the case for Pauline Hanson, who won the 1996 election while listed as a Liberal candidate. The Queensland Liberals expelled her only after nominations had closed in response to highly controversial comments she made to local journalists about Aboriginal issues. Hanson was one of five independents elected in 1996, including others who quit or were expelled from their political party.

Other times, candidates are disendorsed before the close of nominations – which means the party can choose a replacement candidate. In 2016, the seat of Fremantle lost both its Liberal and its Labor candidates, the former for controversial statements about Indigenous politics and same-sex marriage, and the latter for failing to disclose previous criminal convictions concerning drink driving and assaulting a police officer. The replacement Labor candidate, Josh Wilson, won the seat and holds it to this day.

At the upcoming election, three former party MPs are defending their seats: Andrew Gee, who left the Nationals in protest over their opposition to the Voice; and Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough who quit the Liberal Party after losing pre-selection.

Tonight is the first televised debate between Albanese and Dutton. It will go out live on Sky News at 7.30pm.

But leaders’ debates aren’t the crucial campaign events they used to be. Whether they are worthwhile depends on the format – a scrappy and personal debate turns politics into a blood sport, and alienates voters from the political process itself.

Prime minister Robert Menzies abstained from the first ever televised election debate back in 1958, but his deputy Harold Holt and senior minister Billy McMahon faced off against Labor’s leader H. V. Evatt and deputy Arthur Calwell. Barely 18% of TV viewers bothered tuning in, according to one historian.

Prime ministers and opposition leaders didn’t start debating during elections until 1984. A lacklustre PM Bob Hawke faced off against opposition leader Andrew Peacock, who managed to win the debate but not the election. Hawke chose not to debate John Howard in 1987 but performed spectacularly in a rematch against Peacock in 1990. It was, by Hawke’s own account, the ‘highlight of the campaign’.

This is the highest it has ever been, far above the 25,000 voters per MP in 1903 (the first election where most women could vote).

In the intervening 122 years, parliament has significantly expanded twice: from 74 to 121 seats in 1949, and from 125 to 148 in 1984.

Both times, the number of people per seat sat at a then record high: 64,000 and 75,000 respectively. While the number of registered voters is nine times that in 1903, the number of electorates has only doubled.

Australia’s voter–to-MP ratio is higher than Canada’s, the UK’s, and much higher than New Zealand’s. Across the ditch there is a member of parliament for every 30,000 voters, four times more representation than in Australia.

As the number of voters per MP grows, the access any individual voter will have to their member necessarily shrinks – Australia Institute polling in 2018 found that only 13% of Australians had ever spoken to their local MP.

The more voters there are in an electorate, the larger a campaign needs to be to make any difference to the result, making it more difficult for grassroots campaigns to have an impact.

Background Wealth is deeply unequal in the UK and getting more so; recent analysis also suggests this increase is particularly stark for younger generations. Within that inequality, the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey indicates a large ethnic wealth inequality. Household wealth holdings by ethnicity vary enormously, from a low of £34,000 where the head of […]

The post The Challenge of Ethnic Wealth inequalities appeared first on Equality Trust.

On this episode of After America, Dr Richard Denniss joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the economic impact of Trump’s tariffs, why Australia has never really had a ‘free’ trade agreement with America, and whether the Australian defence and foreign policy establishment can break free of its old assumptions about how the world works.

This discussion was recorded on Monday 7 April 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

Order What’s the Big Idea? 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia now, via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Richard Denniss, Executive Director, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss

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

Show notes:

Polling – President Trump, security and the US–Australian alliance, the Australia Institute (March 2025)

Billionaires are thriving, corporations have raked in massive profits off our cost of living crisis, and global shareholder payouts are the highest they’ve ever been. Yet we’re being asked to swallow billions in cuts. 

The post This Year, We Could Choose an Alternative to Austerity appeared first on Equality Trust.