Despite the remarkable contribution of various Australian scholars to degrowth scholarly work this century, a formal Australian degrowth movement only emerged with the launch of Degrowth Network Australia (DNA) in February 2023. DNA has inspired various urban and regional groups and Australian media interest, especially given that the controversial and often misrepresented term is becoming visible within publications and research activities of the European Union and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Routledge Handbook of Degrowth published mid- 2025 contains 35 chapters by 56 international contributors. At around 550 pages it is expensive to purchase as a hardback, but the whole collection was released open access simultaneously – and a more affordable paperback will follow in mid-2026. This means it is readily available for use in university courses, for degrowth and degrowth-interested practitioners, for reading and activist groups, for researchers, policy makers and anyone else interested in this relatively novel movement.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk’s latest foray into global far-right politics, and the devastating impact of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda.
This episode was recorded on Monday 15 September.
After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss are available now via the Australia Institute website.
Host: Emma Shortis, Director of International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB
The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: politics is about what is good.
We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—an unrivalled introduction to politics: “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.”
Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that there are many goods and many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth. Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.
Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: if there is some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good—if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless—it is clear that this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.
The assessment describes “severe” risks to defence and national security; regional, urban and remote communities; health and the environment; as well as “very high” risks to the economy and food production.
These include:
1.5 million Australians living along the coastline would be under threat of rising sea levels by 2050.
Deaths caused by heatwaves will soar by more than 400% in places like Sydney and Darwin.
63 “nationally significant” climate risks identified, including threats to social cohesion, supply chains and essential services.
Australia Institute research shows burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) compromises the fundamental systems underpinning Australia’s security, wellbeing and prosperity.
Coal and gas exports from Australia are also playing a major role in the destruction of the world’s climate, and climate change is having a devastating impact on Australia’s neighbours in the Pacific.
“Coal and gas exports from Australia are playing a major role in destroying the world’s climate, with devastating consequences for all the systems underpinning the security, wellbeing and prosperity of Australians,” said Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute.
“Climate change is making fires, floods and heatwaves more frequent and extreme. This isn’t just devastating in itself; it is driving our insurance premiums through the roof and making many homes uninsurable.
Charlie Kirk died as he lived, publicly debating his fellow citizens.
He had an unparalleled talent for activism, organizing, and fundraising, and for this he was respected in the halls of power. But his signature act, from the beginning of his career to the day of his death, was the basic activity of a citizen in a republic: arguing with his fellow countrymen about what was true and false and what should guide our common life. Indefatigably confident in the importance and efficacy of face-to-face conversations and confrontations, he embodied the political way of life at its most elevated and most fundamental level.
When it came to the roots of the West and the source of meaning in his own life, Kirk favored Jerusalem over Athens, Scripture over Socrates. He never neglected or subordinated his witness to Christ, the true Logos, to the tumult of politics. Nevertheless, as his name suggests (Kirk meaning “church”; Charles meaning “husband” or “free man” or “common man”), Charlie Kirk was both a Christian and a testament to what Aristotle wrote long ago: we are political animals because we have logos, the faculty of speech and reason by which we discern what is good and bad, just and unjust. And it is our partnership in these things that constitutes our domestic and political communities.
There’s a huge difference between the symbolism of poor optics and the substance of poor strategy.
There’s no doubt appearing in a group photo that included dictators Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin was poor optics for Dan Andrews (perhaps why Bob Carr chose to skip it).
Barnaby Joyce responded by urging Andrews “don’t come home”, and The Australian wrote about “how Andrews and Carr became Xi’s ‘useful idiots'”.
But in the end the photo was pure symbolism; Daniel Andrews appearance in it poses no threat at all to the security of Australians.
While the political establishment spent a lot of effort finger-wagging at a photo, they missed the significance of massive strategic transition that we’re watching happen in real time.
The Australia Institute’s Allan Behm once wrote that the greatest strategic risk to Australia was “the political and social collapse of the United States of America”, because America’s strategic collapse would follow. If as many front pages or column inches had been devoted to the security implications of Australia’s biggest military ally rapidly descending into outright authoritarianism as the supposed threat from China, perhaps Australia would be in a better position.
The decline of the United States has been rapid. Australia is unprepared for the fallout.
President Donald Trump is deploying the military against the civilian population in Democrat-run cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Sep 15-21, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9745
Hour nine, late July, an Amish food stand on an empty lot: these are the circumstances that led to our discovery.
We had been driving since dawn. You sighed as we pulled over, reminding me I’d spent an hour chatting with a Minnesota farmer about this year’s corn crop, a subject about which I know nothing, and that I made us stop at Big Dick’s Buckhorn Inn in Spooner, Wisconsin, to see where John F. Kennedy used the restroom in March 1960.
“This is your culture,” I protested. You gestured at your violin, placed with care in the backseat, and said, “That’s my culture.”
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Others deal Trump out of the game The Age & Sydney Morning Herald| Waleed Aly | 12 September 2025 https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/how-the-great-dealmaker-donald-trump-became-impotent-on-the-world-stage-20250910-p5mu14.html The vast bulk of Donald Trump’s presidential playbook centres on deal-making. On matters as diverse as trade and foreign policy, the approach seems broadly consistent: sweep away such guardrails as global rules of free trade […]
Public Procurement: Growing British industry, Jobs and Skills BetterforUs Consultation Response supported by the Structural Inequalities Alliance and Equality Trust Summary This document has been produced by BetterforUs, a national campaign run by Aspire Community Works, a Real Living Wage community business with seventeen years’ experience of delivering public contracts in London and the South […]
It marks the greatest giveaway of Australian resources ever and will undermine the nation’s energy security, while driving up energy prices.
Environment Minister Murray Watt has not provided details of the conditions on Woodside to protect the ancient, priceless Murujuga rock art or how much Woodside succeeded in watering down those conditions during 12 weeks of secret negotiations. However, it is clear that acid gas emissions from the project will continue corroding Murujuga until 2070.
Massive emissions
The approval will add around 90 million tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere annually, equivalent to building 12 new coal power stations.
Undermine energy security
The extension allows Woodside to export enough gas to supply Western Australia for around 90 years, despite WA facing looming gas shortages and price increases. Analysis here.
My first introduction to American religious debates was a course taught by a prof who came from Yale’s American Studies program (I ended up taking several courses from him), and, as is oddly appropriate for someone from Yale, he was deep into the theological disputes of the 17th century—Yale was founded because of those disputes.
This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor
This article complements ‘Ontario’s Costly Nuclear Folly,’ by David Robertson, originally published in Canadian Dimension on June 2, 2025.
The Ontario New Democratic Youth’s (ONDY) 2024 policy book envisions a future for Ontario that sounds like a Green New Deal dream. It paints a utopian picture of publicly-owned renewables, eco-brutalist social housing with rooftop solar panels, and socialized grocery stores. This democratic socialist vision for Ontario also includes the expansion of nuclear energy stations, operated by thousands of union members, generating enormous output without major greenhouse gas emissions. The ONDY policy book states:
The last time the nuclear industry got its way in Ontario, the province’s erstwhile publicly-owned electrical utility, Ontario Hydro, spent over two decades building 20 nuclear reactors. It was a mashup of missed deadlines, cost overruns and a troubling pattern of declining nuclear performance.
Even more troubling, the last generation of nuclear reactors forced Ontario Hydro to the edge of bankruptcy. It saddled the province with a mountain of nuclear debt that we are still paying off.
The Ford government is now repeating those costly mistakes in what amounts to the largest expansion of the nuclear industry in Canada’s history—risking a blunder of historic proportions.
Charlie Kirk was a loving and dedicated husband and father; a pious, learned, and evangelizing Christian; and a hero, inspiration, and mentor to millions of young Americans trying to make sense of our turbulent political times. Many knew him much better (and for much longer) than I, but in recent years he had become my friend. He was always on the move, and yet I found he still managed, over and over again, to be generous with time he didn’t seem to have. He was a patriot—a vital and irreplaceable part of the Right in America. Because he was tireless, passionate, inspiring, and, above all, effective, he was a target. Now, he’s gone.
Charlie was a Lincoln fellow, supporter, and passionate defender of Claremont. When he attended our Lincoln fellowship in 2021, he was already one of the most famous men in American politics. His security detail was always close. And yet, busy and renowned as he was, he was a model Claremont fellowship participant. He was there to learn because he wanted to continue to hone his understanding and arguments on behalf of America and her founding principles.
It has been almost a decade since Mark Carney put climate change on the agenda of central banks and financial authorities with his ‘Breaking the tragedy of the Horizon’ speech made at Lloyds of London Insurers. Carney noted that the catastrophic impacts of climate change would be felt too far into the future for financial institutions or policy makers to shift their decision-making today, but that “once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late”.
Carney’s solution was to leverage the power of the market by helping financial firms better understand the risks they faced from climate change:
“Any efficient market reaction to climate change risks, as well as the technologies and policies to address them, must be founded on transparency of information. A ‘market’ in the transition to a 2-degree world can be built. It has the potential to pull forward adjustment — but only if information is available…”(Carney 2015, 12)
The world is at a crossroads and so far, Australia is reacting by sticking its head in the sand and pretending nothing is changing.
Leaders from across the globe are about to meet at the 80th UN General Assembly, in a nation which has cancelled the visas of Palestinian Authority delegates, is disappearing people off its streets, carrying out extrajudicial death sentences in its waters, and openly threatening war.
These are not normal times. Pretending they are, is part of what got us here in the first place.
The meeting will kick off on Tuesday, when the incoming president, Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign affairs minister, will outline her agenda which runs until September 8 next year. She is taking the reins at a time where the UN director at the International Crisis Group, Richard Gowan, says “illusions have been rather stripped away” about the world, and how people feel about its leaders. “It’s now very, very clear that both financially and politically, the UN faces huge crises,” he said.
“Now the question is, is there a way through that?”
And indeed, what role does Australia play in that?
Australia is part of the nations who have agreed to give conditional recognition to Palestine, but it remains unclear at this point what that will look like at the meeting.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Matt tells Elinor about the massive class action lawsuit settlement the Government made with the victims of Robodebt, Labor potentially getting cold feet on superannuation tax concession reform, and what they both tell us about how Australia views our poorest and wealthiest people.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 11 September 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
Host: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
This article was co-written with contributions from Michelle Bilek, Jim Dunn, Jon Paul Mathias, Kateryna Metersky, Alex Nelson, Sophie O’Manique, Steven Rolfe, Colleen Van Loon, and Jeremy Wildeman.
Globally, researchers, service providers, advocates and lived experts who are trying to enact the prevention and ending of homelessness face various forms of government inertia. While United Nations member states have collectively signed onto the ‘right to adequate shelter’, 1 actualizing this human right occurs in significantly varying degrees between them. While human rights are ubiquitous, there remains an underlying perception of ‘deserving poor’, even among adherents and advocates to those rights, whereby assistance is provided only to some and under limited criteria. The status quo, in the form of government inaction on the actualization of these human rights, resists the universalization of these rights by creating counter-narratives against those proposing policy action.
Since the late 2000s, Canada’s economic slowdown has been debated in terms of technological fatigue, demographic trends, monetary constraints, and global trade headwinds. This paper contends that the underlying source of stagnation fundamentally points to distributional imbalances and structural demand deficiency. Today’s stagnation is not cyclical, but a symptom of a structural trap—a regime of distributional stagnation rooted in the failure of the neoliberal paradigm to reconcile economic growth with social equity.
This analysis situates Canada’s stagnation within broader debates on “secular stagnation” and macroeconomic paradigm choice, drawing on leading theories that emphasize the role of demand, inequality, and institutional decline. There are three structural channels through which income inequality drives stagnation: (1) reduced household consumption due to top-heavy income distribution; (2) erosion of labour power weakening wage growth and demand; (3) a disconnect between rising profits and falling productive investment.
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.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics | The Roundtable Ep. 284
The editors open with an analysis of the killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a repeat violent offender, and discuss what it reveals about crime, media spin, and a legacy media more fixated on “Republicans pouncing” than the literally pouncing criminal himself. Follow-up discussion ranges from Europe’s disappearing crime stats to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s downward revision of nearly a million jobs during the Biden presidency, probing whether institutions still merit public trust and what a reality-based politics on immigration, safety, and the economy might look like. The editors also touch on an immigration sweep at a Georgia battery plant and the gap between GDP and lived experience before closing with fresh culture picks.
In the spring of 2025, when Canada narrowly avoided being swept up in a global wave of electoral successes for the (far) right, it was a puzzling moment. After years in which it appeared to be all but inevitable that Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservative Party of Canada would form the first government of the post-Justin Trudeau era, the election of another minority Liberal Party government, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, could seem an occasion for relief. An apparently ascendant right-wing in Canada was not so ascendant after all. However, notwithstanding the contingency of the minority Parliament and the initiation of US trade war upon the inauguration of the second Trump administration, it may be wrong to think that Canada has rejected or been spared the rise of the right. For the time being, at least, Canada’s Liberals have succeeded in a classic passive-revolutionary exercise: metabolizing and re-presenting elements of a threatening movement to ensure political survival and, as much as possible, re-establish electoral and policy dominance.
Woodside Energy is apparently baulking at strict new limits on nitrous oxide emissions the Albanese government wants to impose on its massive gas project to protect the ancient Indigenous rock art at Murujuga in WA.
The emissions limits are the “major sticking point” in the way of final approval for Woodside’s North West Shelf gas development, according to the AFR Rock art protections behind Woodside North West Shelf gas project delay.
Which begs the question: why is this a negotiation?
It tells you a lot about who wields power in Australia that Woodside is being allowed to haggle in secret over the conditions.
In May, Environment Minister Murray Watt gave provisional approval to a 45-year extension of the oil and gas giant’s liquid natural gas export hub on the Burrup, and an associated gas power plant.
This was subject to “strict conditions” – but they were never made public.
Supposedly, the secrecy was imposed to provide “procedural fairness” to Woodside. The gas giant was given 10 days to respond. It missed the deadline.
Four months later, the conditions are still cloaked in secrecy – and Woodside is still chipping away at them behind closed doors. So much for transparency.
Woodside’s gas facilities are adjacent to what many experts consider the most significant Indigenous rock art site in the world: The Murujuga Cultural Landscape.
In a democracy, the right to vote is a cornerstone of civic participation—yet for unhoused individuals across Canada, this right remains largely theoretical. Despite legislative guarantees under the Canada Elections Act, practical barriers continue to disenfranchise one of the country’s most marginalized populations. This article explores the persistent challenges that individuals experiencing homelessness face in accessing the ballot, using the Waterloo Region in Southwestern Ontario during the 2025 Ontario General Election as a case study to better understand these barriers across Canada. Through an analysis of systemic, logistical, and social obstacles, including restrictive identification requirements, inconsistent policy implementation, transportation challenges, and social stigma, this study aims to identify evidence-based strategies for advocacy and outreach that increase voter participation among unhoused individuals. The study combines a thematic analysis of interviews with representatives of organizations in direct engagement with unhoused people, alongside a comprehensive literature review, and offers recommendations to bridge the gap between electoral rights and electoral access for unhoused individuals in the Waterloo Region and across Canada.
This study was conducted as a community partnership with Waterloo Region Community Legal Services (WRCLS) and completed as part of the Policy Research in Action course in the Master of Applied Politics program at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Like all of Australia’s universities, the ANU lacks effective mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and representation. Every new scandal the sector has seen in the last four months is further proof.
The core problem is a vacuum of accountability. In the university sector, no one is held responsible for failure, at least no one at the top.
The economic headwinds facing Canada are greater than the sum of its parts. The pace and sporadic nature of the United States’ trade war with Canada is unprecedented and has recently dominated headlines, but the underlying structural challenges demand careful attention. The Covid-19 Pandemic-induced economic shock can be blamed for the acute inflationary jump in the cost of housing and food, but the interlinked productivity and cost-of-living crises have been brewing for more than a decade.1 The OECD predicts Canada’s per capita GDP growth will be last amongst OECD economies in the next 40 years.2 Nearly half of Canadians report difficulties meeting day-to-day expenses due to rising costs.3 Recall it was these economic crises that catapulted the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre into dominant polling territory before Trump’s victory changed the narrative.
Cross-national research on social policy and welfare states over the past five decades has proven invaluable in helping us to understand why some nations have been more successful than others in reducing social inequality and promoting the well-being of their populations. To date, this research has largely focused on the character and impact of two central pillars of social support: income transfers and social services.
The networks of transfer payments that constitute the welfare state’s first pillar, including unemployment insurance, accident insurance, pensions, child allowances and social assistance, provide income to people who have temporarily or permanently left the paid labour force, or otherwise require economic assistance. The welfare state’s second pillar is made up of various forms of social services, such as the care economy services of healthcare, childcare and elderly care, as well as decommodified provisions such as education, social housing and public transportation.
This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.
In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.
Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.
The proposed park ends native forest logging on the land and creates a vast sanctuary for koalas and 66 other threatened species.
But it’s always best to read the fine print and understand the Ts&Cs. In this case, they reveal a diabolical trade off.
The native forest will only be saved from logging if the government can monetise it as “carbon credits”.
“The final creation of the park is dependent on the successful registration of a carbon project,” the government makes abundantly clear.
It wants the Clean Energy Regulator to let it generate carbon credits, it seems, from a national park – an unprecedented step. If it can’t, the government says the vast koala sanctuary on the state’s mid north coast won’t go ahead.
Why is this demand a worry?
The NSW plan would only protect forests if they were monetised in ways that support continued carbon emissions.
Carbon credits are a license to pollute. If the NSW government is allowed to generate carbon credits from native forests earmarked for the great koala park, the most likely buyers would be big greenhouse gas emitters.
Under Australian law, these businesses can keep extracting and burning fossil fuels provided they “offset” their emissions by buying Australian Carbon Credit Units or ACCUs.
That’s how Woodside justifies its plans to open up new gas fields and process export gas on the North West Shelf until at least 2070 – with federal government approval.
It describes changes in other jurisdictions as “rushed, self-interested and poorly justified”.
The Australia Institute submission also warns that rules on early voting, roadside election signage and a 100-metre exclusion zone for handing out how-to-vote cards could undermine election day as a “festival of democracy” in the very heart of the nation’s democracy.
Research shows that a “reimbursement” model for public funding, as recommended by the ACT Electoral Commission, would favour wealthy incumbents at the expense of new entrants.
On 6 September 2025 we revealed in The Age that Victorian dentist Ian Lomax is a member of the National Socialist Network.
Lomax previously practiced dentistry in New South Wales. We first saw him training at Elwood with the National Socialist Network in February this year, in footage taken by The Age:
Lomax has also featured on a National Socialist Network Telegram channel, in a training photograph for the Victorian Rural West chapter, alongside Hamish Cameron and Gus Hartigan:
Lomax attended the March for Australia rally in Melbourne on 31 August. Blair Cottrell badly blurred him in a video he published, attempting, “This man is a dentist so we can't show you his face on video. Morning Ian.”
We, as Nathan Bull’s family, are utterly devastated and remain in disbelief at his decision to join this group. From the very beginning, we made it clear that if he chose this path, we could no longer be an active part of his life. Sadly, that is the decision he made.
We are deeply concerned about the continued spread of misinformation and incorrect assumptions about our family. For clarity:
Nathan’s father has not been a member of Victoria Police for more than three years.
He is not “Luke Bull,” the officer charged and found guilty in relation to a separate matter last year.
He is in no way racist, nor did he have a negative influence on Nathan growing up.
We would also like to address a photo of Nathan shared publicly from his 21st birthday, where his father expressed pride in him. At that time, we had no knowledge of any association Nathan may have had with this group, nor any understanding of the meaning behind the T-shirt he wore. At that point, Nathan was working, engaged with his family, and we believed he was becoming a fine young man. Not long after, our trust in that belief was sadly shattered.
We respectfully ask the community and media to stop contacting us. I personally have received abusive phone calls today, including many from private numbers that I have not answered. This is deeply distressing.
We are embarrassed to see Nathan continually featured in the media and saddened by the possibility that he may never leave this group. His choices are his alone.
