Incoming Feed Items

For years, I have argued that Africa’s greatest challenge is not a lack of resources. It is the persistence of a colonial economic structure designed to keep the continent structurally trapped at the bottom of the global value chain, exporting raw materials, importing manufactured goods and technology, and serving as the destination for obsolete industries disguised as “development.” The global race for critical minerals risks reinforcing exactly that model, only this time under the banner of the green transition. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I am delighted to announce the launch of a new report that I had the privilege of writing for the Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW): One Voice. One Strategy: A Continental Blueprint for African Strategic Minerals, Joint Industrial Policies, and Diplomacy.

Mark exited his family group chat after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and, shortly after, stopped speaking to his family entirely. He knew his mom and siblings were conservative and pro-life, and though they didn’t really talk politics, his suspicions about their votes were confirmed when he pressed them. They had made a choice, and now he would too.

Mark had taken to social media the day after the election to rant about half the country, but there was little he could do with anger of that scale. His family offered something more manageable: a localized target for a generalized grievance. He couldn’t control how millions of Americans voted, but he could control whether the few he knew who voted for Trump remained in his life.

His mother, recently widowed, is heartbroken by her son’s decision to go no contact. She tries to focus her attention on the rich relationships she still has. Mark’s siblings vacillate between annoyance and deep hurt, bewildered that something so distant from the ordinary life of their family—national politics—could enter their intimacy and overwhelm it.

From our CEOs – with Richard Denniss

Carbon offsets are the trickle-down economics of climate policy. Spoiler, they don’t work.

For decades Australians have been told the best way to help those with the least is to give tax cuts to those with the most. The benefits of rich people spending money on themselves would, we were told, trickle down. Eventually.

Likewise, we’ve been told that instead of investing in high quality public services we should cut taxes, privatise services and trust that market forces would solve our problems. Spoiler, it didn’t work as promised. But to be fair, neoliberalism did deliver enormous profits, record CEO pay and expensive housing.

Just this week NSW Greens Senator David Shoebridge wrote a scathing critique of the divide and conquer strategy of neoliberalism, describing how those with wealth and power are “shamelessly and effectively wielding their wealth to make us fight each other instead of them”. He asks the key question ‘How did we get here?’ His answer? “Decades of privatising public assets”.

Which brings me to recent calls for further privatisation of nature, or as former Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek put it, the need for Australia to become the global “Green Wall St”.

More “Announcement
Righting the Rules – Policy Releases by Game Changers”

Optimists have lately claimed that wokeness was a fad that has gone out of style. To their credit, there has been evidence to support this. “Woke 1 was crazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in August on ABC News. “Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric we would use today.” Progressivism’s biggest champions seem eager to distance themselves from its recent excesses.

But the Jason Arday scandal shows that wokeness is not over, not by a long shot. The fact that Arday held a well-paid position at one of the world’s most prestigious universities is a telling sign that wokeness is alive and well.

More telling still is that powerful and otherwise seemingly intelligent people, such as the autism specialist Simon Baron-Cohen, have leaped to defend Arday. It would have been easy for people on the Left to acknowledge his blatant fraud and dismiss him as an isolated case whose offenses have no bearing on the broader issue of DEI in higher education. They did not.

The lesson for the Right is that there is much more work to do to dismantle wokeness, and it will not simply be a matter of doing more of what we have been doing so far. The power centers of wokeness are not just holdouts we haven’t gotten around to eliminating yet. They are strongholds that have been impervious to our tactics.

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg gets triggered by the growth figures, before he and Elinor discuss how the states and territories have missed out on a lazy quarter-trillion and why access to specialist healthcare is slipping out of reach for many Australians.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 3 September 2026.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest Vantage Point essay from Australia Institute Press, is available now.

Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

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

Show notes:

Historical Materialism | Sydney

Liberation, Now: The Death of Liberal Order and the Fight for Another World |

11-12 February 2027

Call for Papers

The GST was launched in July 2000, with then Treasurer Peter Costello declaring it a solution to states and territories’ seemingly endless battle to fund essential services like hospitals, schools, police and roads.

“Every dollar raised by (the) GST is paid to the state and territory governments,” Mr Costello pledged.

“It is the money that will provide the schools, the hospitals, the police, and the roads of the future.

“From 1 July they have a revenue base that grows in line with the economy. It will provide a secure base to fund their services.”

But the new analysis shows that not only was that initial pledge hundreds of billions of dollars short of the mark, the current cost of-living crisis is making things even worse.

The report calculates that if the GST had grown at the same pace as the economy – as promised – states and territories would have more than $120 billion to spend on essential services over the forward estimates.

“When it comes to the GST, states and territories have been sold a pup,” said Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist at The Australia Institute.

“The GST has failed every Australian who’s had to wait for an ambulance or essential health care.

“It’s failed every child who’s been squashed into a double classroom because their school can’t find or afford a replacement teacher.

“It’s failed anyone who’s suffered because a shortage of police.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The blowback of the failed 2024 Biden-and-then-Harris Democratic presidential campaign, which supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, continues as another grassroots candidate runs for Congress. Dr. Karishma Manzur, a scientist who is running for senate in the September New Hampshire Democratic Primary against Chris Pappas, joins Chris Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about her campaign.

We hosted the 2026 Hugh Saddler Memorial Lecture with former ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury, discussed the war in Gaza with former Human Rights Commissioner Chris Sidoti on After America, and more!

Here are just a few of the things that happened in August!

The post August 2026 Media Highlights appeared first on The Australia Institute.

Will marriage survive the internet?

It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our everyday lives. Yet here we are more than halfway through the 2020s, and it’s fair to say the digitization of our social lives has drastically unsettled the relations between the sexes. As scholar Patrick T. Brown recently wrote, “At this point, anyone who is arguing that phones didn’t change societal scripts in a meaningful way has the burden of proof.”

Yes, the battle of the sexes is as old as civilization itself. But digital technology has introduced a new and disorienting dynamic. It turns humans into avatars. And avatars don’t fall in love or find God or have children. They exist in your phone, as pixels to be rewarded with likes or screamed at with comments, depending on the situation.

The American Mind’s 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.

FIRE Challenges Trump’s Deportation of Pro-Gaza Immigrants | The American Mind Podcast

This is a free piece of Notes on the Crises. Take out a paid subscription to support our work here. 

Publisher Note: I’ve been off for two weeks because of a family medical emergency. Everything is fine now, but as you are likely aware, medical emergencies take up an enormous amount of time. I have a large backlog of pieces, especially OMB pieces, so we should be back to our regular schedule as of this piece. Thank you for bearing with me.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Josh Bornstein and Skye Predavec join Ebony Bennett to discuss Australia’s scandal-plagued big consultancies, the impact of governments’ “orgy of outsourcing” to these firms, and why breaking up the ‘big four’ is the best way to prevent future misconduct.

This episode was recorded on Wednesday 2 September.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest edition in the Vantage Point series, is available now.

Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Guest: Josh Bornstein, Director, Corporate Regulation, the Australia Institute // @joshbornstein

Guest: Skye Predavec, Researcher, the Australia Institute // @skyelark

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

US president Donald Trump attempts to rename Lake Ontario clearly represents a major challenge to Canadian sovereignty. This act may make for better headlines, but some of the most consequential challenges to Canada’s sovereignty and democratic decision making for public policy are considerably less theatrical.

When Parliament passed the Online Streaming Act (OSA) in April 2023, it appeared to address a straightforward problem: Canada’s broadcasting system had been designed for an era of radio and cable television, while Canadians increasingly consumed music, film, and television through online platforms. The legislation amended the Broadcasting Act to recognize “online undertakings” as a distinct class of broadcasters, bringing streaming services into a regulatory system they had been largely exempt from.

According to John Adams, if you cannot fail, you’re not truly free. In his last public statement, honoring the 50th anniversary of American Independence in 1826, Adams wrote that the American Revolution would be

A Memorable epoch in the annals of the human race; destined, in future history, to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be Shaped, by the human mind.

That was not a new thought. In the Preface to his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Adams mused that Americans “have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair.” Should “they betray their trust,” Adams contended, “their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven.”