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As the Treasurer embarks upon a national tax reform debate, it’s important that the Australian public thinks about what we actually want to tax and how much.

Who is paying too little tax? Are we taxing the right things? These are all democratic questions as much as economic ones.

Taxes are just one of the ways that governments raise the revenue needed to provide the hospitals, schools, roads, aged care and social safety nets Australians rely on.

The more tax a government collects, the bigger the public sector it can sustain. But who we choose to tax and how much has profound implications for fairness and equity.

The fact is, Australia is one of the lowest-taxing countries in the developed world.

Australia raises very little tax revenue compared to similar countries. If Australia were to collect the same amount of revenue from taxation as the OECD average, the Commonwealth would have had an extra $140 billion in revenue in 2023-24.

Think what an additional $140 billion a year could deliver for your local emergency room, primary school, aged care facility or national park.

Yesterday, I wrote a post for the Indivisible Santa Fe website. As the title indicates, it is for all my communities. I’m lucky to have several. For those in this one, there’s an excerpt below. Full version here.

Today, I make a comparable pledge, one fit for today’s America, one I invite every member of my communities to join:

For the support of the restoration of pluralistic constitutional democracy in the United States and the better achievement by its government of the basic commitment to the equal right of all to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I pledge my life, my fortune, and my honor. 

I do not enter into this pledge lightly. 

As food prices keep climbing and grocery chains rake in record profits amid slim margins, it’s time to seriously consider a public alternative to the supermarket giants and dépanneurs: municipally owned grocery stores.

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.

Lala Peñaranda of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy Matt Kirkegaard of Progressive International present the Colombian Oilworker’s Plan — a bold strategy for a worker-led public pathway to transition off fossil fuels, with vital lessons for the Canadian labour and climate movements. 

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.

Alex Connolly, a renewable energy worker in Nova Scotia, compares the workplace conditions from his time in the oil sands to his current work putting up wind turbines. He shares how quality wages and work closer to home aren’t at odds with lower emissions. 

At the launch of the 2025 federal election, major political parties started their campaign with talk of tax reform. Mark Carney’s campaign platform, though neither progressive nor ambitious, garnered by far the most attention, in part for the reversal of his predecessor’s flagship tax policies: the consumer carbon price and the increase in the capital gains inclusion rate. The Conservative Party had initially campaigned in undoing these tax initiatives, but Carney’s campaign promises rendered right-wing sloganeering around these policies ineffective—conservatives got what they wanted.

While the personal finances of voters understandably took centre stage, little was said about another key tax policy: the corporate income tax (CIT). The federal NDP’s platform did promise to take on corporate income taxes and profits, with a surtax on corporations earning over $500 million in profits, as well as a 15 percent minimum tax on book profits, but these commitments were not elevated into the realm of public debate.

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

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.

Tenant organizing is often framed as a reactive force, sparked by crisis, but organizers also argue that the real strength of the housing justice movement lies in their proactive, long-term approach. Organizing can build durable networks that can respond to immediate threats like evictions or rent increases while, at the same time, pushing for broader systemic change.

One of the challenges in the fight for housing justice is aligning the decentralized, dynamic energy of tenants organizing with the policy strategies of institutional actors. While tenant unions and grassroots organizations often respond to crises such as evictions, rent hikes, and landlord intimidation, other tenant-related organizations like legal clinics, academic institutions, and other adjacent non-profit groups tend to work with longer timelines, formal processes, and policy interventions. These rhythms don’t always align, but when they do, the results can be transformative.

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

The 2025 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was held on Tuesday, May 20th in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts. A special thanks to TMU Interim Dean of Arts Amy Peng for hosting this Broadbent Institute event.

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

Canada’s public education system is in crisis mode. From chronic underfunding and privatization to attacks on teachers and burnout—these aren’t isolated issues. Across the globe, right-wing movements are attacking public education, banning books, rewriting history and pitting parents, teachers, and students against each other. That same rhetoric is taking hold here in Canada, as we saw in the 2025 federal election.

What does a progressive industrial strategy look like in an age of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and capitalist profiteering?

In this episode of Progressive Political Economy, Todd Tucker, Director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute, lays out the stakes for Canada and the US as Donald Trump dismantles the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and ignites a trade war. Drawing on lessons from the Green New Deal and FDR’s New Deal, Tucker shows how the fight against Trump’s tariffs gives Canadian progressives the chance to build a high-road industrial strategy for reduced emissions, strong communities, and empowered workers.

The IRA promised a rare blend of climate ambition and labour standards, proving that investment can be conditional on union wages, local sourcing, and prosperity for fossil fuel-dependent communities. While Trump rolls back that progress, Canada has the industrial policy for social infrastructure—like dental care, pharmacare and universal medicare—to lead where the US falls behind.

The last letter we have in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting is an RSVP, dated June 24, 1826. It is a response to an invitation from the mayor of Washington, D.C., to attend a celebration of the 50th anniversary of American Independence. Jefferson was too ill to attend. In fact he would die, as if American destiny had decreed it, on the day for which the celebration was scheduled: July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress.

In his letter, sent from Monticello, Jefferson reflected on the meaning of the Declaration, whose language he had famously crafted. He showed that his revolutionary spirit had not dimmed.

He called the Declaration “an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world”:

The scientific reality is that sea level rise and increased storm damage will make heavily populated parts of Australia uninhabitable, and the economic reality is that houses in those areas will be uninsurable.

It is impossible to get insurance against likely events.

The only reason an insurance company will insure your car is they know it is unlikely that you will crash it. That’s why no matter how much you are willing to pay, the company won’t insure your car if you have an accident while drink driving.

Put simply, insurance is a gamble, and your premium is determined by the odds of a payout and the size of the catastrophe.

When you insure your house, you are betting that something bad is going to happen and the insurance company is betting that it won’t.

At the end of the year if you do not crash your car or burn your house down you will probably feel good about your choices, but not nearly as good as your insurer who got a few thousand dollars from you in exchange for your peace of mind.

But insurance companies don’t make risky bets. They know that there is only about a one in 600 chance you will have a house fire, which is precisely why they are happy to bet you won’t.

But see what happens if you try ringing them to insure your car against hail damage after hail has been forecast. Hint, no chance.

Insurers don’t make big bets either.

The Wrap with Amy Remeikis

Earlier this week, 2025 clocked up its 183rd day.

Most of eastern Australia would have been keeping one eye on the weather report, given the ‘rain bomb’, while others were reeling from the news an alleged child sex offender had been working at Melbourne child care centres.

Like every day, millions of Australians would have been lost in the life changing and mundane, and many wouldn’t have noted the date at all.

But July 2 mattered. At least for those focused on the battle we have to save the planet and life as we (sort of) know it.

From July 2, we are now closer to 2050 than we are to the Year 2000.

It’s just eight more federal elections away (presuming we continue to have three year terms).

That gives us 293 months to try and keep global warming to just 1.5 degrees.

The global average temperature increase last year was 1.6 degrees.

Spikes happen, and a single year isn’t enough to say it’s done.  But we are trending the wrong way.

In the past week, decisions in Salem and Washington DC have driven a stake through the heart of the $2.1 billion plan to widen a mile-and-a-half stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland.

The metaphor for this project is quickly changing from “driving stakes” to mark the start of construction, to driving a stake through the heart of speculative financial plans ODOT has spun.

For decades, the foreign policy elite in both parties insisted that America’s greatness has more to do with Damascus than Detroit, or Baghdad than Bozeman. It was a bipartisan delusion—driven by ideology, divorced from consequence, and devastating to the American people.

Against the wisdom of the ancients and our own founders, we went abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” But our foreign exploits proved fruitless, producing little but fallen soldiers and toppled regimes, soon replaced by even more dangerous ones. Worse still, the sands of faraway deserts blinded us to the sand that our own house stood on.

Now is the time to rebuild—to restore our republic and usher in a new American golden age. But first, we must face the truth.

Neoconservative foreign policy, once mistaken as a legitimate branch of the conservative movement, has proven to be one of the most destructive ideological projects of the last half-century. With its soaring rhetoric and shallow roots, it promised that endless war could birth endless peace, that liberal democracy could be exported like grain, and that remaking the world was more urgent than restoring our own nation.

That misjudgment has cost this nation dearly. In blood. In treasure. In trust. 

Pat Buchanan foresaw this disaster decades ago. He warned:

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, substitute Greg (Matt Grudnoff) and Elinor discuss the 91 millionaires who paid zero tax, the grim reality driving the gender pay gap, and why negative gearing is back on trend (but still making housing less affordable).

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 3 July 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

Host: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff

Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek

Show notes:

Capital gains for the rich and persistent gender pay gaps: what we can learn from the ATO’s annual tax statistics by Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia (July 2025)

Wealth inequality by asset types. What’s driving wealth inequality? by Matt Grudnoff, the Australia Institute (February 2025)