Linkage

In 1987, the Medical Journal of Australia published a paper titled Gender-disordered children: does inpatient treatment help? by Robert Kosky, then director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Services in Western Australia.

It described eight children, all under 12, who were hospitalised at Stubbs Terrace between 1975 and 1980 for what the paper called "gender identity disorder".

The children were separated from their families and treated for months at a time. The paper argued their "cross-gender behaviours" were the result of inappropriate family dynamics — and suggested the hospital program corrected them.

When Anja Ravine, a trans youth health researcher at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, came across it decades later, she was alarmed.

"It's implicit that they were expecting gender identity to return to what was expected. So that is really within the definition of conversion therapy."

Efforts to suppress or change a person's gender identity or sexuality, often referred to as "conversion therapy", are now illegal in most parts of Australia.

"We know now that people who've been exposed to this actually carry long-term psychological scars. It's very harmful," Dr Ravine said.

Despite being nearly 40 years old, the Kosky paper is regularly cited by opponents of gender-affirming care in submissions to lawmakers, courts and medical regulators around the world.

Even in Australia, the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, has written a clinical guide on how doctors should care for gender diverse youth that also cites the paper.

Dr Ravine said that the study being used is "deeply troubling".

There are investors like the Wilsons all over Australia, who have built or bought disability homes where they are not needed, often under the guidance of property or investment advisers.

Property investment adviser Goro Gupta said part of the problem was that the NDIA — the agency that administers the policy — has not released clear data about where eligible people with a disability want to live.

That has meant many SDA houses have been constructed on the outskirts of capital and regional cities where the land is cheap.

"That's why, of course, the average investor wants to invest," Mr Gupta said.

At one estate in outer-western Melbourne, he was incredulous that so many houses for people with profound disabilities had been built.

"In these areas, there's a lack of amenities," he said.

"It's not close to shops, it's not close to the allied health services that people with disabilities need on a day-to-day basis.

"I mean, have a look at this area. It's paddocks."

For some investors who have overextended to build the homes, renting them out as a normal property is not an option because the returns are nowhere near enough to cover their mortgage repayments.

That means the homes are sitting empty in the hope that an eligible disability client will move in.

Some state governments were suspicious of the Commonwealth's desire to involve itself in housing supply, but the government still managed to secure their support to introduce a national scheme for subsidised rental housing.

The policy was less ambitious than housing reformers wanted, but it was better than nothing.

During the second reading debate on the legislation, a Labor MP from Tasmania, John Frank Gaha, told his parliamentary colleagues that he supported the CSHA "in its entirety". 

However, he said, he regretted the fact that constitutional limitations prevented the Commonwealth and states from taking a "wider view" of the role that housing played in the structure of the economy itself.

He said it made a huge difference to people's lives when they owned their own homes, especially in retirement.

He said it would be great if the government could devise a scheme to keep rents at a low level nationally, so some of the money that low-income families would otherwise spend on rent could be used to help them pay off a family home.

"In this way, we would make the average worker a capitalist; and that is our only solution to communism in this country," Dr Gaha said.

Anti-immigration rallies that have drawn out tens of thousands of Australians in capital cities are being secretly controlled by neo-Nazis – part of a co-ordinated “fraud on the public” experts say could become even more violent when they march again next month.

An investigation by this masthead can reveal how neo-Nazi leadership is using far-right influencers to sell the March for Australia rallies as a “spontaneous” groundswell of “everyday Australians”, while they stack crowds with plain clothes Nazis and send key members interstate to headline rallies. Some neo-Nazis have even donned yellow vests to act as official safety marshals in order to bring marches under the group’s control.

Leaked chatlogs, recordings and insider accounts tell the full story of how the March for Australia rallies grew out of a mysterious TikTok video in early August and descended into a day of chaos and violence across the country on August 31.

And they lay bare the strategy of Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, as they move to radicalise the right to their dangerous fascist ideology under the cloak of the Australian flag.

Actually, the Kimmel story mattered quite a lot – both diagnostically (meaning: as a window into the state of American politics) and politically (in terms of how it is impacting the ongoing struggle). Regardless of its outcome, it pointed to what is one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and his second presidency. While the Trumpists were never defenders of free speech, there was no systematic attempt during Trump I to nullify the First Amendment or use the levers of state power to suppress protest and public dissent. They simply didn’t know how to use the government in that way, and they didn’t have the people in place who could have systematically used the state machinery as an instrument of repression. This led to a pervasive frustration within MAGA, and it is precisely what animated the big planning operations the Right launched during the Biden era – most infamously Project 2025. In fact, Brendan Carr literally wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025’s policy agenda – in which he envisioned using the agency exactly the way he has since taking over as chairman in January: As an instrument to put pressure on business and media, threatening regulatory action or lawsuits against anyone not sufficiently deferential to Trump’s will.

The FCC’s attempt to coerce ABC into canceling Jimmy Kimmel was a reminder that the Trumpists intend to use the federal government as a machine that serves only two purposes: To impose Trump’s will and desire for retribution – and to impose a reactionary societal order against the will of the majority. It was also a demonstration of how an authoritarian transformation of a democratic society tends to work in the twenty-first century. Kimmel’s cancellation sits right at that intersection of open state repression – and pre-emptive self-censorship and complicity by businesses and civil society actors. No need to send the thugs in boots and brown uniforms to rough the place up, or to send the secret police to arrest everyone, if you can also “nudge” these institutions to comply by… less untidy means.

While the National Socialist Network might be “deluded in thinking they can get a Nazi elected”, researchers at the White Rose Society say “you just have to look at the way [some] mainstream conservatives” have latched onto the Shrine booing stunt, to question Welcome to Country ceremonies, “to get a preview of how a Nazi political campaign will be used to push the Overton window”, referring to efforts to bring extreme views into the mainstream.

Far from deflating their party launch, researcher Dr Kaz Ross expects the publicity from the stunt will boost it. “They’re eating One Nation’s lunch,” she said. “And they’re growing.”

Pure inflation is the theoretical concept. It may be defined as the undifferentiated devaluation of the monetary unit in relation to all goods and services in the economy, on a continuing or sustained basis. This is the type known to acolytes of Milton Friedman as being “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” (Henderson 2021) It is rarely (if ever) encountered in real life. Possibly in 16th-century Europe the influx of silver and gold from the Americas and their effect on the value of metallic monetary units then in use provides an approximate example. The modern hyperinflations and currency collapses of (among others) Germany and Zimbabwe conventionally fall into the same category, even though these undoubtedly had differential effects on exports, imports, and non-tradables. But by contrast, a single once-for-all devaluation (say, Mexico 1995) would not count, if the national money then stabilized, and the price shock passed through the domestic economy within a limited time.

The opposite case, everyday inflation, is of a once-for-all increase in the price of a core commodity – a price shock, typically in energy – that propagates through the general price structure in rough alignment with the factor-intensity of that commodity in different sectors. In the cases of oil and natural gas, direct derivatives such as fertilizer, plastics, and transportation would be hit hard, more remote sectors (such as housing and services) less so. In this case, an increase in the general price level is always observed, because almost all prices of produced goods and services, and especially wages, are sticky downward, so there is never a full offset of increased prices in one sector by decreases in another. However, the net effect is always a shift in the distribution of incomes toward the sectors experiencing the largest price and profit gains, which is why inflation of this type cannot be qualified as “pure.” Further, the shock to the general price level usually dissipates after a certain interval – perhaps normally a few months. It may persist in the data and headlines for longer, as discussed below.

Having identified the two polar cases, “pure” and “everyday” inflation, we may admit the possibility of an intermediate case. This could be called “hybrid” or “persistent everyday” inflation. It would be marked by a sequence of knock-on or ratchet effects (Wood 1978), in which relative price impulses are passed from one sector to another without major damping. A structure of staggered wage contracts across different powerful trade unions could have this quality, with wage and then price increases ricocheting from one industrial sector or public service to the next. The US and UK inflations of the 1950s through the 1970s were more-than-possibly of this type.

With this typology in mind, the US price increases of 2021-2022 were certainly an everyday inflation.

In the overlapping global emergencies of the pandemic, climate change and geopolitical confrontations, supply shocks have become frequent and inflation has returned. This raises the question of how sector-specific shocks are related to overall price stability. This paper simulates price shocks in an input–output model to identify sectors which present systemic vulnerabilities for monetary stability in the United States. We call these prices systemically significant. We find that in our simulations the pre-pandemic average price volatilities and the price shocks in the COVID-19 and Ukraine war inflation yield an almost identical set of systemically significant prices. The sectors with systemically significant prices fall into four groups: energy, basic production inputs other than energy, basic necessities, and commercial infrastructure. Specifically, they are “Petroleum and coal products,” “Oil and gas extraction,” “Utilities,” “Chemical products,” “Farms,” “Food and beverage and tobacco products,” “Housing,” and “Wholesale trade.” We argue that in times of overlapping emergencies, economic stabilization needs to go beyond monetary policy and requires institutions and policies that can target these systemically significant sectors.

In the UK one can barely turn the page of a newspaper without coming across some article written about transgender people. Such articles rarely tend to be trans‐supportive. Sensational stories about trans women invading women's spaces, appropriating female “sex‐based rights”, and trans women dominating women's sports can be found in print, online, and on television. What is happening in the UK is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, the country has strong protections for trans people, but, on the other, hostility toward trans people is becoming more common. We seek to find out why. By using an online survey of UK residents, we found that anti‐transgender views tended to be held most strongly by those people who scored highly on a scale of authoritarianism. What these results mean in a country currently in the grip of an anti‐trans moral panic has yet to be fully determined.