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The Wrap with Matt Grudnoff

The government’s changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax passed the parliament last week. This is a big moment in the fight to make housing more affordable.

For too long policies to make housing more affordable have done nothing to slow the rapid increase in house prices. In fact, many of them made prices rise faster.

While it is early days, it seems that the housing market is already slowing and there are predictions that there will be small falls in house prices. These falls in prices are mainly being driven by uncertainty in the market. Many people are waiting on the side lines to see how everything washes out.

Photo: AAP Image/Dean Lewins

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— Matt Grudnoff is Senior Economist at The Australia Institute

The Big Stories

Introducing What’s the Point? with Richard Denniss

What’s the Point? with Richard Denniss cuts through the spin to explain the political and economic decisions shaping the lives of everyday Australians.

3 July 2026 – LGBTIQ+ groups and women’s organisations say the Coalition’s Bill to redefine ‘sex’ would undermine the privacy and safety of all women, and strip trans people of basic legal protections.

The Bill, voted down in the Senate 30 votes to 21 on Wednesday, would have also overridden existing state and territory protections, reversed decades of progress in anti-discrimination law for women and created unintended consequences for intersex people.

Chair of the Women’s Legal Services Australia, Elena Rosenman:

“The SDA provides critical protection for women, trans and gender diverse people and people who are intersex. This Bill would weaken these protections and take Australia backwards by inviting gender policing.

“No woman should have to prove she is 'woman enough' to be protected from discrimination. The strength of the SDA is that it reflects the reality of women's lives and protects people from discrimination based on harmful gender stereotypes.

“At a time when women continue to face discrimination, harassment and gender-based violence, Parliament should be focused on strengthening those protections for everyone - not creating a two-tiered system where some women are protected and others are left behind.”

Today is the 6th anniversary of Bloomberg Businessweek's profile on me, which forever changed my life. Its so long ago now that many readers may not actually be familiar with it, so I'm linking to it for the first time in many years.

To those who have hung around all these years, through the highs and lows, thank you for your support. For those who have never taken out a paid subscription, there has never been a better time.

“You Can Tell the Supreme Court Does Not Want to Mess with the Fed. They’ve said it as clearly as they can”

—Former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell

One of the earliest civic traditions to emerge in the United States was the Fourth of July oration. Prominent citizens gave speeches in churches, town halls, and philanthropic societies reflecting on what it meant to be an American. These speeches often included a full reading of the Declaration of Independence, an exercise recommended by founding mother Mercy Otis Warren to American youth “as a palladium of which they should never lose sight, so long as they wish to continue a free and independent people.”

One of the most famous—and arguably best—of these orations was delivered by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams on July 4, 1821, on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Today, Adams’s speech is best known for his brief concluding remarks on foreign policy—that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But his task was even larger than sketching out an enduring approach to U.S. foreign policy. The speech was intended to show his fellow citizens that the principles of justice and philosophical claims embedded in the Declaration of Independence cohered with their own political experience and could guide them to national greatness.

Up from Monarchy

Out of the ashes of decades of neoliberalism, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has focused on empowering the working class.

Drop Site News Latin America Reporter José Luis Granados Ceja spoke to Broadbent Institute about what Canadians can learn from Mexico’s experience in building a progressive movement that is transforming the country, lifting citizens out of poverty, and pushing back against US economic threats.

Centering the working class, creating universal social programs, and presenting a progressive transformative are needed for a mass movement to stand alongside their nation’s leadership to defend sovereignty and democracy.

At two o’clock in the afternoon on August 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln rose to address a crowd gathered at the Fulton County Courthouse in Lewistown, Illinois. He came to answer Senator Stephen Douglas, who had given a speech in Lewistown the day before. According to newspaper reports, Lincoln spoke for two and a half hours and had more listeners at the end of his remarks than when he began. The speech he delivered was not simply part of a campaign to challenge Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat. It was an act of recovery—an effort to recall the meaning of the American Founding at a moment when its principles were contested and under strain.

Lincoln spoke on that occasion of the evil of slavery existing in the American colonies when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “These communities, by their representatives in Old Independence Hall,” he recounted,

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Matt Grudnoff joins Elinor discuss the positive impact of the government’s changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, why migration hasn’t caused the housing crisis, and concerns about negative equity and grandfathering of the policies.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 2 July 2026.

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

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

Show notes:

No, rents won’t increase by $2,000 a year because of changes to negative gearing by Matt Grudnoff, The Point (June 2026)

It may be time to calm the farm on falling house prices by Greg Jericho, The Point (June 2026)

A few miles from this room, 86 years ago, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons, with Hitler’s army right across the English Channel, and delivered a speech for the ages. We all remember how he ended: “we shall fight on the beaches…in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender.” But we stop one sentence too soon. Immediately following that famous line, Churchill made another assertion: that even if his island were subjugated and starving, the struggle would go on “until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

In Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill looked across the Atlantic—to a younger nation born of English stock—and staked the survival of the West on the promise that America would come.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The war on information in the West has tread new grounds since the genocide in Palestine. Journalists and media outlets who report on the imperialist endeavors of the ruling class increasingly find themselves under the boot of legislators who concoct fascist legislation to act as imperial henchmen. Their methods are stretching the limits of the law with the scope and severity of the punishments imposed. Nowhere is this repression more apparent than in Germany where, since October 7 of 2023, governments have banned languages and symbols related to Palestine and many people, not only journalists but also professors, doctors and lawyers, have lost their jobs for speaking out against the genocide or participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations.

“Like all fascists’ aesthetics,” declared a Guardian editorial, “Trump’s gaze is backward to an idealized ‘classical’ age and forward to a time when he, the Great Man, is immortalized in stone and gold.” The charge is familiar. President Trump is having a roughly 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the White House and wants to erect a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery; the article describes this as “trashing monumental public works while building cheesy monuments” and defiling the United States’ “collective heritage.”

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.

What Makes an American—Birthright Citizenship and the U.S. at 250 | The Roundtable Ep. 324

On this episode of Follow the Money, the authors of new Australia Institute research, Dr Fergus Green and Frances Medlock, join Glenn Connley to discuss the major failures of the Safeguard Mechanism, the dodgy “carbon offsets” at the heart the scheme, and what can be done to drive down emissions.

This episode was recorded on Tuesday 23 June.

Guest: Fergus Green, co-author of ‘Safeguarding the fossil fuel industry?’ and Associate Professor, University College London // @fergusgreen

Guest: Frances Medlock, co-author of ‘Safeguarding the fossil fuel industry?’ and policy and law reform lawyer

Host: Glenn Connley, Senior Media Advisor, the Australia Institute // @glennconnley

Show notes:

Safeguarding the Fossil Fuel Industry? How Carbon Offsetting Undermines the Safeguard Mechanism by Fergus Green and Frances Medlock, the Australia Institute (June 2026)

Chief Justice John Roberts begins the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship opinion in Westminster in 1608 with Calvin’s Case and the English law of royal subjectship.

I would begin in Philadelphia in 1776.

Between those two places—and those two moments—lies the American Revolution. And the Revolution changed more than who governed America. It changed the very foundation of political membership.

That is the central problem with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara. The Court’s opinion is learned, careful, and historically rich. Chief Justice Roberts traces the English doctrine of jus soli through Calvin’s Case, Blackstone, a substantial body of antebellum American authorities, and finally United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It may well become the definitive defense of the conventional understanding of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

But it answers the wrong question.

The issue is not whether America inherited English legal language. It plainly did. The issue is whether America also inherited England’s understanding of political membership.

The Declaration of Independence imagines revolution and legislation as two distinct phases in man’s political history. First, an aggrieved people “alter or abolish” a form of government destructive of man’s rights. Only then does that people “institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

America’s revolutionaries, however, had to fight and legislate at the same time. As they were beating the British, they ratified state constitutions and legislated for a free people. New Hampshire’s temporary constitution was written before the Declaration was adopted, as was South Carolina’s. Ten of the 13 colonies adopted constitutions before the Battle of Saratoga in 1777—only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island did not. (Massachusetts adopted its constitution in 1780, well before the Treaty of Paris.)

Although state constitutions were defective in significant ways, they accomplished much. Combined with the Articles of Confederation, they were good enough to win independence. State constitutions reflected a social vision for a republican people that Americans could rally around during the war, one that would be elaborated for decades. They contained the promise of something better, something worth fighting and dying for.

This is a free piece of Notes on the Crises. All pieces in this OMB series will be free. Please take out a paid subscription to support this work. Or leave a tip. 

Joshua Lawrence is a research fellow at Notes on the Crises and graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. Find him on Bluesky here.

Juan Hanes is a research fellow at Notes on the Crises and a Journalism student at NYU. Find him on Bluesky here.

Fans of Fox News and various pro-Trump and pro-GOP pundits/media reject Snopes, PolitiFact, and various other fact checking sources as a reliable source. They say those sources are “biased,” since those sites make more corrections of pro-GOP/pro-Trump popular claims than of Dems, critics of Trump, or what they call “liberals.”

Here’s the important point: they don’t refute the fact checking. They don’t go into the data and show that the facts were actually correct, or that Trump (or whoever) didn’t actually say it, or that it was misrepresented, or in any way respond to the assertion.

New research by The Australia Institute shows that Australians have lost over $104 billion to gambling in the three years since the Murphy Review released its final report into the harms of online gambling.

Today the Albanese Government is expected to introduce legislation in response to the Murphy Review. If passed, it will introduce certain restrictions on gambling advertising, but stop well short of the full ban on ads for online gambling recommended by the Review.

The Australia Institute is today launching the National Gambling Toll, a real-time tracker of Australia’s estimated gambling losses since July 1, 2023, right after the release of the Murphy Report. The toll can be viewed here.

Key points:

In his recent book The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People, political economist Martijn Konings argues that the contemporary state has become a standing source of guarantees, subsidies and backstops for capital. Government is no longer capitalist in the sense that it protects property rights or is easily infiltrated by moneyed interests (two logics long recognized by Marxists). Instead, public financial management itself has become deeply interwoven with the production of private wealth. Tracing the origins of the bailout state back to the era of welfare capitalism, Konings depicts the neoliberal period not primarily as a sharp reversal of or decisive break with Keynesianism but as a moment in the longer evolution of institutional mechanisms that socialize the downside risk of asset ownership and manage the resulting inflationary pressure with austerity policies.

Mona Khneisser spoke with Martijn Konings about the book:

The Federal Government’s new carbon credits method for ‘protecting’ native forests will allow fossil fuel companies to greenwash their climate pollution and expand coal and gas production, according to the Australia Institute.

A new carbon accounting method, proposed to fund the creation of the Great Koala National Park in NSW, pits forest and biodiversity protection against acting on climate change, when those objectives are inseparable.

“Climate science makes clear that the Australian Government needs to stop approving new gas and coal projects while simultaneously stopping the destruction of enormous amounts of our native forests,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

“The science doesn’t say that it is okay for us to approve new gas and coal mines, as long as we save some trees at the same time. However, under this Great Koala National Park offsets scheme, that is exactly what is being proposed.”

Australia Institute research has shown that: