What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Dec 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: 10085
Respect for all The Age | Letters | 14 December 2025 https://edition.theage.com.au/shortcode/THE965/edition/be7063b7-de9d-574d-d79a-2c27d629694c?page=72ac0eed-f421-e5ee-4a48-ca9662db98c5& If Bayside Council had re moved a teenage council volunteer who was wearing a Star of David necklace from its newsletter, there would have been justifiable cries of antisemitism. Some people need to realise that we live in a multicultural society and that […]
15 December 2025: Free Palestine Melbourne is appalled and deeply saddened by the massacre at Bondi beach. We extend our condolences to the family and friends of the victims.
Chile rarely captures sustained American attention. It is distant, orderly, and often portrayed as a reliable outpost of stability in South America. But this image is vanishing—and the shift matters far more to the United States than many realize.
Chile is a crucial democratic partner in a region where China and Russia are expanding their influence. Its economy is tightly linked to U.S. markets, its copper and lithium reserves are central to American technological and defense supply chains, and its politics influences the balance of the entire Southern Cone.
The country features a two-round system for its presidential elections, the second round of which will be held on December 14. Two candidates are running: one from the Right and the other from the far left-wing. A Communist victory in Chile—or a prolonged period of instability—would affect U.S. geopolitical, economic, and security interests.
But the deeper reason Chile matters to Americans is that its current crisis illustrates a broader lesson: economic success without a strong cultural foundation cannot sustain a free society. The United States faces its own internal cultural fractures. What is happening in Chile is not only a regional concern—it is a cautionary tale.
To understand how Chile arrived at this fragile moment, one must look at its origins and the long-standing tensions that have shaped its national identity.
This is to announce that the Past & Present Reading Group will be meeting to discuss, on a weekly basis and starting in February 2026, our next text which is:
If you only read social media, you’d think the conservative legal movement is in dire straits. Politicians lash out at judges and at the Federalist Society. Some on the Right grumble that originalism has yielded little more than panel discussions and law‑review symposia. In this very forum, friends suggest that our moment demands a new “constitutional morality,” a more ambitious jurisprudence that will somehow arrest civilizational decline.
Count me unconvinced. The short answer to “What comes after originalism?” is more originalism, plus better policy. The movement’s future lies in consolidating the gains of the last decade, deepening our commitment to the Constitution’s text and original public meaning, and building political and cultural institutions that can address the “crises of belonging, fertility, and meaning.” Courts have an important—but limited—role in that project. Asking judges to save the country is not just unrealistic; it’s a category error.
By Andrew Purves Growing up in Hong Kong in the 1970s, I remember the noise and disruption of the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) construction. Cut-and-cover tunnelling tore up roads, while new property developments rose above the stations. These developments would reshape Hong Kong’s urban landscape — little did I know that I would be writing […]
Today, Judge Paula Xinis ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released from immigration detention, granting his petition for habeas corpus. This is a signal ruling, though not the end of Abrego Garcia's journey through the looking glass world of a lawless executive branch's treatment of him.
In the first part of my extended reflection on the character of conservatism, I warned that the American Right is confronted by a “pseudo-Rightist culture of repudiation” that in important respects mirrors the intellectual and political Left. The crude white nationalism and vociferous anti-Semitism of the so-called “groypers,” who delight in the nasty, transgressive utterings of the internet chameleon Nick Fuentes, present the most recent example of that phenomenon.
On another front, a spirit of ingratitude dominates in certain precincts of the Right. There is a marked tendency to dismiss even the most admirable conservative wisdom of the past as outdated, irrelevant, or worse. A young critic of mine at The American Conservative, who writes very much in that dismissive spirit, accuses me of making “rote” appeals to the likes of Burke and Churchill, as if deep immersion in the thought and action of these two great conservatives can only be formulaic and irrelevant.
But a conservatism that forgets the most capacious meaning of the social contract, the enduring bond that connects the living to the dead and the yet to be born, and the multiple reasons for gratitude to our noble if imperfect forebears—Burkean themes par excellence—has lost essential bearings, and will rather quickly lose its soul.
Every few years, someone tells us the United States is not really the child of the long tradition of republicanism, English common law, colonial self-government, the natural rights principles enshrined in our Declaration, and the debates involving the framing of a new government that transpired in Philadelphia after the war. No, we’re subtly led to assume that our political father is someone else entirely: this time, it’s the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy.
Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary on the American Revolution leans into that claim, suggesting in the first episode’s preamble that the very idea of our Union was inspired by the Iroquois. By subtly juxtaposing the Iroquois and the Founding Fathers, viewers are invited to believe that if they thought Franklin, Washington, and company fathered America, then they’ve been building the wrong monuments.
Burns tells a vivid story. But it’s also a deeply misleading one—and the very treaty on which his opening narrative depends says almost the opposite of what he needs it to say.
The scene in question is the 1744 Lancaster treaty council. Representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia met with Iroquois leaders to settle land disputes and keep them allied against the French. During the talks, an Iroquois speaker did just as Burns relates—namely, he advised the colonial governors to live at peace with one another and act together as the Iroquois nations did. But the colonial reply—effectively omitted by Burns—matters just as much.
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.
*All clips used in this interview are from the film, ‘‘The Encampments,” and are credited to Watermelon Pictures and BreakThrough Media*
The ongoing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test of institutional integrity. When a university denies the reality of Israel’s brutality, it reveals complicity with the genocidal regime’s actions. To then misrepresent campus dissent over institutional investment in the Zionist entity as illegitimate — or even “antisemitic” — makes it clear that that these institutions are invested in the existence of Israeli apartheid and genocide.
On the final episode of Dollars & Sense for 2025, Greg and Elinor discuss why it’s a time for bravery in our economic policy-making and whether rate hikes are on the way in 2026.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 11 December.
I woke to light as harsh as the internet. The screen, I thought, find the screenand kill it. I rose to hunt the offender. It was three a.m., the dark hour of the soul, or as we call it in the 21st century, any hour that ends in “o’clock.”
There was no screen: the glow of fresh snow lit the night. I couldn’t turn it off. 2025 had scrambled and stolen the seasons. Summer lasted until late October, followed by two weeks of fall. Now white light flooded my room like the inverse of a shadow.
Winter was early. I felt stuck and circumscribed, like living inside an app. I avoid apps when I can. The ones I have line my phone like little prisons. “Walled gardens,” they call them, like you can stop to smell the roses and the hills don’t have eyes.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
On this episode of Follow the Money, Hereditary Chief Na’Moks of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, Gwii Lok’im Gibuu Jesse Stoeppler of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Nations, and Kai Nagata from not-for-profit Dogwood tell us about their fight to stop gas giants including Woodside on unceded Indigenous lands.
Join Hereditary Chief Na’Moks and Gwii Lok’im Gibuu Jesse Stoeppler at the Stop Woodside in Canada event at Victorian Trades Hall at 6.15pm AEDT on Thursday 11 December.
Governments are a bit like that, too. It’s not that they don’t see the fire before the smoke, it’s just they figure it will be someone else’s problem to deal with it by the time it’s all ablaze.
We can see this with the gas industry – Labor is now looking at a couple of cabinet proposals for an east coast gas reservation policy, which would either take the form of an exporter permit model (where exporters can’t send gas offshore unless the domestic market has been taken care of) or a market-wide model (where all producers would have to contribute to the domestic market, potentially meaning smaller gas projects would have to purchase excess gas from the major ones in order to meet their supply obligations).
Of the two, the first would mean less gas being dug up. Which means, of course, cabinet is leaning towards the second.
But in terms of how we got here, the flames have been lingering for some time.
This is not the first government to have to consider a domestic gas reserve, but it’s the first one to do so under such undeniable pressure. Back in 2009, the Queensland Bligh government raised the need for a gas reservation policy because the future fires were clear.
That warning was repeated in 2010, when the reservation was rejected following a campaign by the same gas giants fighting against one now.
For half a decade, the Right has debated “free market fundamentalism.” This phenomenon is also known as “zombie Reaganism,” “libertarian neoconservatism,” and “neoliberalism.” Whatever you call it, it never happened. That is to say, the reduction in government expenditure and size that Reaganites promised and liberals feared turned out to be a mirage. What happened instead is that, starting in the 1980s, both parties set the country on a course toward Total Boomer Luxury Communism (TBLC).
TBLC is driving every aspect of American decline—from skyrocketing national debt and the erosion of our defense industrial base to the despair of young people. It’s not the only reason for the decline, to be sure, but it’s a major part of the problem. Yet TBLC has been entirely obscured from view.
The essence of TBLC is that it redistributes wealth from younger families and workers to seniors, who are on average much richer. America has achieved the Marxist paradise of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after dinner. Only it looks more like golf in the morning, horseback riding in the afternoon, drinks at the social club in the evening, and a restful night’s sleep in a million-dollar home—all thanks to the largesse of the U.S. government.
Within 48 hours of the United Nations Security Council approving US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza on 17th November, Israel launched several airstrikes across Gaza that killed 28 people, mostly women and children, and injured over 70 others. In the same time period, Israel bombed numerous locations in Lebanon, including a Palestinian refugee camp that killed 13 people, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, toured parts of Syria illegally occupied by Israel. In this context, the latest overtures towards peace by Western, Arab, and Israeli leaders at the Security Council are resoundingly hollow.
The Trump Administration recently released an extremely promising National Security Strategy (NSS)—but the same cannot be said about the proposed FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The House and Senate’s compromise NDAA, which was published on Sunday night, appears to be in tension with the goals of the NSS. While the National Security Strategy prioritizes a hemispheric defense of the American homeland, the NDAA locks decision makers into maintaining unnecessary overseas troop levels. Despite the stated aims of the NSS, Congress seems to be looking to safeguard the national security priorities and infrastructure of previous eras.
Restricting the drawdown of troops stationed overseas, increasingly murky foreign entrenchment through legally binding efforts to sell arms, and dubious clauses requiring congressional approval at every turn all serve to bind the commander in chief’s hands. All of this reeks of a shadowy order desperately trying to maintain the status quo at the expense of the will of the people who elected Donald Trump in 2024.
A report by the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute and Public Services International has also found that when workers get to Australia, many are being deskilled, underpaid and exploited.
Care workers have been added to the Pacific Australia Labor Mobility (PALM) scheme, traditionally aimed at seasonal agriculture workers like fruit pickers. This has led to skilled health workers – like nurses – quitting their jobs to take up better paid but lower skilled jobs in Australia.
The report details the harrowing state of the health systems in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Many health services and hospitals have been decimated, operating at 30-40 percent capacity or below.
The research reveals that not only are Pacific workers doing lower-skilled care jobs in Australia, they are vulnerable to poor treatment, due to their visa status.
“Workers have the right to cross borders for a better life for themselves and their families,” said Fiona Macdonald, Director of the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute.
“But the current system is broken. It is rich countries taking from poor countries and giving nothing back. Australia and New Zealand are offloading their own care crises to their Pacific neighbours.
“Australia has vowed to invest in the health systems of its Pacific neighbours, not destroy them. It should be helping to build better, safer health facilities and train workers, not lure them away.
The demonisation of public spending has long been a strategy of conservative forces around the world – blaming it for any economic ill at hand.
The Liberals’ Treasury spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, has gone back to the old canard that inflation and interest rates are higher because the government is spending too much.
O’Brien likes to say that government spending is now higher than it has been since 1986 (outside of recessions).
This is kind of a dumb point. Because previously the NDIS was not a thing. Takeaway the extra spending due to the NDIS and government spending is not unusually high:
But the full weakness of the argument was highlighted this week when Ted O’Brien and Shadow Finance Minister James Paterson were reduced to massively verballing the Governor of the Reserve Bank in a desperate attempt to suggest they had a point.
Suicide is a growing public health crisis in the United States.
In 2023, approximately 49,300 Americans died by suicide, with an age-adjusted rate of 14.1-14.7 per 100,000 people. The rate for men was 22.8 per 100,000, which is roughly four times higher than that of women, at 5.9 per 100,000. Suicide rates among young men have been rising steadily since 2010, with men ages 15-34 being the fastest-growing segment. In 2023, the suicide rate for men ages 15-24 was 21 per 100,000, compared with 5 per 100,000 for women of the same age.
Today’s suicide prevention efforts must focus more on men, yet public awareness and policy attention remain limited. Unsurprisingly, mainstream media coverage often fails to report these age- and gender-specific trends accurately, making it harder to direct resources and interventions where they are most urgently needed.
With his lead symposium essay, Jesse Merriam revisits the constructive criticism he offered of “A Better Originalism,” the manifesto I, Hadley Arkes, Josh Hammer, and Matthew Peterson co-authored in these pages at the advent of the Biden presidency. As Merriam wrote in 2021, “The failure of legal conservatism is principally a product of how it is structured, not the product of an inadequate legal theory.” By structured, he meant not only the institutions that dominate the conservative legal movement, but also the aims at which those institutions pull oars together to achieve.
Legal conservatism needs substantive goals to which the movement can orient its activities, a point on which Merriam is correct. Indeed, a hyperfocus on the methodologies of the prevailing form of originalism, the original public meaning variety, masks the ultimate ends of a legal conservatism worth pursuing in the first place.
On this episode of After America, Allan Behm and Angus Blackman discuss the American ‘double-tap’ strike on an alleged drug boat, Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal to share sensitive military information, and why Trump spent a night posting 160 times on Truth Social.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 5 December 2025.
The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist Greg Jericho says if the RBA had hiked rates today in response to the most recent inflation data, it would have been a brutal knee-jerk reaction, especially with real wage growth slowing.
He says the slight uptick in inflation is likely to be short-term, due to the ending of government power bill subsidies.
“The inflation increase in October, from 3.6% to 3.8%, was largely a one-off response to the ending of power bill subsidies. That isn’t a trend,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.
“The truth is, market predictions of rate hikes and cuts will swing with new data on inflation, economic growth, real wages and unemployment.
“The RBA has chosen to wait and see. That’s at least a small mercy for mortgage holders a fortnight out from Christmas.”
Given the generation-defining AI race that’s currently moving at breakneck speed, one would think Congress might have a productive thought about it by now. But this assumption would unfortunately be a mistake. Instead, federal legislators have chosen to mostly ignore a crucial issue that has deep ramifications for our nation. By the time they step up and see the bigger picture, it might just be too late.
Recently on Truth Social, President Donald Trump slammed the “patchwork” of state regulations Congress has allowed to flourish. AI policy is being drafted not in Washington but in states like California. It’s being crafted not by sensible, informed actors but by out-of-touch lawmakers who few people know, who won’t be held accountable, and whose motivation lies in appeasing their constituents rather than strengthening U.S. national security.
Subject: Please support mandatory inclusionary zoning in Victoria
Dear [MP Name],
I’m writing to express my concern that the current planning reforms do not include any mechanism to secure affordable housing. Victoria urgently needs mandatory inclusionary zoning to ensure new developments contribute to addressing our housing crisis.
Why this matters
Victoria is planning huge housing growth, including 60 new Activity Centres, but none of this requires affordable housing.
Voluntary agreements have produced almost no affordable homes since introduced.
Developers, planners and councillors prefer mandatory inclusionary zoning because it gives certainty and consistency.
What inclusionary zoning is
A proven planning tool used worldwide that requires or incentivises developers to include affordable or social housing in new developments.
