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On this episode of Follow the Money, Dr Emma Shortis and Allan Behm join Ebony Bennett to discuss the American bombing of Iran, the Albanese Government’s choice to back the Trump Administration’s decision, and why upholding and strengthening a rules-based global order is more than just “nostalgia”.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Our independence is our strength – and only you can make that possible. By donating to the Australia Institute’s End of Financial Year appeal today, you’ll help fund the research changing Australia for the better.

Guest: Emma Shortis, Director of International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Guest: Allan Behm, Senior Advisor in International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute

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

Show notes:

Innovation is Political: An unlikely source of guidance to navigate the politics of innovation: academic theory

by Fernando Monge, Ruth Puttick, and Rainer Kattel

A couple of combined decades in the trenches of public sector innovation, from Nesta or the World Bank to exploring the dynamic capabilities of city governments, have confirmed the validity of IIPP’s motto, emblazoned across our colleagues’ tote bags and notepads: Innovation is Political.

The romantic view that the best ideas move and spread effortlessly into practice across cities and governments is a lovely notion, but our interactions with officials all over the world suggest otherwise. Politics fundamentally shape who gets to innovate, for what, and on what terms.

Tomorrow, the shortlist will be announced for the biggest prize in Australian literature, the $60,000 Miles Franklin Award.

The winner is likely to hand over at least a quarter of their winnings to the tax office.

Ironically, if someone backs the winner with a bookmaker, even if they won $60,000 on the bet, their winnings would be tax-free.

Similarly, if they won a raffle or pokies jackpot, the tax office would not take a cent.

The new analysis argues there would be enormous artistic and cultural benefit if the government made the prizes awarded to Australian writers, painters, playwrights and artists from other disciplines tax free.

“Taxing art prizes makes no sense,” said Alice Grundy, Research Manager at The Australia Institute and Managing Editor of Australia Institute Press.

“It raises hardly any revenue, and it stifles the creativity of some of the nation’s greatest artistic talents.

“If you win the lottery, Who Wants to be a Millionaire or The Block, you don’t pay tax on your prize money. Win the Stella Prize for writing by Australian women, and you pay tax. Win the Archibald prize for painting, pay tax.

“The median income for Australian authors is $32,760, which is below the poverty line.

Past winners of the award include legendary writers such as Tim Winton, Thomas Keneally, Alexis Wright, Thea Astley and Peter Carey.

And because it’s Australian culture, you can place a bet with a bookmaker on which title on the shortlist will win the award.

The winner of the Miles Franklin can expect prize money of $60,000.

Many will then pay around $20,000 of that back in income tax.

But if you picked the winner of the Miles Franklin with the bookies, your winnings are tax-free.

Isn’t that weird? Winning authors pay tax. Mug punters, no tax.

It gets weirder. If you win the lottery, Who wants to be a Millionaire or The Block, you don’t pay tax on your prize money.

Win the Stella Prize for writing by Australian women – pay tax.

Win the Archibald prize for painting – pay tax. How about the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards? Well in that case, “All prizes are tax-free” is in bold on the website.

This shows that whether prizes are taxed is completely arbitrary. It is a decision for Australian governments to make. And should the Australian government choose to axe the taxes on arts prizes, they would be making a sound investment in Australian culture.

The loss of revenue would be unnoticed by a government that just gave away $215 billion dollars’ worth of natural gas for free.

It would barely register given the $10 billion in subsidies the government handed over in the form of the fuel tax credit to mining companies.

It’s easy in hindsight to say that Donald Trump’s ride down the Trump Tower escalator a decade ago changed everything. It’s more accurate and helpful to say that his journey merely heightened and channeled trends that were likely to emerge anyway.

Ten years ago, virtually no one was talking about populism or a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working-class-based Republican Party. Democrats believed in the Rising American Electorate theory, which held that increased Democratic Party dominance was demographically assured because older, conservative whites were dying off and being replaced by young, Democratic-leaning voters plus people of color. The intra-GOP debate focused on which approach to the future was more compelling: doubling down on fiscal and social conservatism (Senator Ted Cruz was the most visible adherent of this view) or moving to the Left on immigration and same-sex marriage (the infamous RNC 2012 “Autopsy”).

Trump proved all three groups wrong. He ostentatiously ran against both GOP arguments, championing a hard-line immigration policy, attacks on free trade, and a notable unwillingness to compete in the GOP’s quadrennial “who’s the most religious candidate” primary pageant. He then upended the Democrats’ theory by attacking their soft underbelly: their reliance on blue-collar, Northern and Midwestern white votes. He assembled a coalition few had dreamed of, one that sacrificed moderate, college-educated whites for somewhat conservative non-college whites combined with the GOP’s conservative core.

For too long, many conservatives have relied on the Supreme Court to thwart the Left. I cheered over the last few years as President Trump’s appointees shifted the makeup of the Court to the Right, arguably becoming the most conservative Court since before the New Deal. I was thrilled when it handed down 6-3 decisions overturning Roe v. Wade, upholding gun rights, clawing back power from executive agencies, and quashing Biden’s attempts at student loan forgiveness.

The Supreme Court recently handed down two unanimous decisions that were clear conservative victories. The first vindicated the religious (and thus tax-exempt) status of Wisconsin’s Catholic Charities over against scrutiny from the state government. In the second decision, the Court sided with a heterosexual woman in Ohio who sued her state as a result of experiencing reverse discrimination that favored lesbians and gays. And in what is perhaps the biggest conservative win from the Court this term, we witnessed a 6-3 decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on transgender procedures for minors.

HB 2025 doesn’t fix the Oregon Department of Transportation’s financial problem—it makes it even bigger

The bill promises more than it pays for, and will lead ODOT to start projects it can’t afford to finish–without shortchanging road repair, or causing further tax increases.

There is still no accountability at ODOT:  It’s simply failed to present accurate data on how it will pay for promised projects.  And HB 2025 provides nothing for virtually certain cost overruns on the IBR project

ODOT’s track record of persistent cost overruns, and wildly optimistic schedule, engineering and revenue estimates virtually guarantees an even bigger problem in the years ahead.

Oregon’s Legislature is debating HB 2025, a $14.6 billion tax and fee increase to provide more revenue for transportation.  According to Oregon Public Broadcasting:

As it passed out of committee Friday evening, HB 2025 would have enacted the largest tax hike in Oregon history. Via an eventual 15-cent increase to the state’s 40-cent-per-gallon gas tax, a new 2% tax on new car sales, a new 1% tax on many used car sales, increases in titling and registration fees and other changes, the bill is expected to raise $14.6 billion in the next decade.

On this episode of What’s the Big Idea?, former senator Bob Brown joins Paul Barclay to discuss the ‘price of extinction’, how monetising the environment won’t save it, the corporate capture of democracy and the failure of the major parties to truly protect the environment.

This discussion was recorded on 5 February 2025 and things may have changed since the recording.

Order What’s the Big Idea? 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Bob Brown, Co-Founder, Bob Brown Foundation // @BobBrownFndn

Host: Paul Barclay, Walkley Award winning journalist and broadcaster // @PaulBarclay

Show notes:

Shorting the Environment by Polly Hemming, Rod Campbell and Richard Denniss, the Australia Institute (September 2022)

Carbon credits no excuse for NSW Government to stall on saving koalas, the Australia Institute (April 2024)

The Wrap with Dr Emma Shortis

As Taylor Swift said, if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Last week the Trump administration sent Australia’s national security establishment into a spin when it announced that it was reviewing the Aukus submarine pact to ensure that it fits Trump’s “America First” agenda.

But even before that announcement, Aukus was on shaky ground. The deal was a political stunt foisted on the Australian people with no real plan and no democratic accountability at all.

In fact, Trump’s review means that Australia – the country with the most at stake in this deal – is the only partner not to have subjected it to real scrutiny.

That’s why we’ve launched a petition calling on the Australian government to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the Aukus deal. It’s truly wild that in a democracy, a change in our security policy this big and this expensive hadn’t already been properly and publicly examined.

Thank you to the 9000 of you who have already signed. If you haven’t, please add your name:

To say that we are living through an age of crisis has, by now, become commonplace – almost to the extent of being a truism. It is very evident that the post-Cold War world order is deep in the throes of profoundly turbulent transformations, and that those transformations have thrown up a conjuncture that is not only turbulent, but in many ways also perilous. But how do we understand this age of crisis from a distinctly Southern perspective? That is the question at the heart of the newly published book Southern Interregnum: Remaking Hegemony in Brazil, India, South Africa, and China, which I have co-authored with Karl von Holdt, Ching Kwan Lee, Fabio Luis, and Ruy Braga.

Donald Trump had publicly toyed with the idea of running for president many times before 2015. In fact, he even entered the Reform Party’s presidential primaries for the 2000 election. But the timing was never quite right, until it finally was.

Of the many actions and twists of fate that created the opening for Trump’s presidential candidacy, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is an underappreciated one. Hailed by the conservative legal establishment as a win for free speech (on the merits I would agree), in practice it released a flood of money into the American political system that fundamentally reshaped the landscape of campaigns and how they were conducted. Suddenly the candidates themselves mattered much less, along with political parties. What mattered now were the new players who emerged from the wreckage of campaign finance law.

Super PACs could raise unlimited funds from corporations and billionaires. Dark money nonprofits kept their donors’ identities secret while spending hundreds of millions on attack ads. Labor unions could now spend unlimited treasury funds on elections. A new class of mega-donors wielded influence that dwarfed anything seen in American politics since the Gilded Age.

Gara Afonso, Marco Cipriani, JC Martinez, and Matthew Plosser

On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites, the comparisons with America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and what this decision could mean for Australia.

This discussion was recorded on Monday 23 June 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Join Dr Emma Shortis and Dr Richard Denniss in conversation about After America: Australia and the new world order at the University of Melbourne at 6pm AEST, Wednesday 16 July.

Our independence is our strength – and only you can make that possible. By donating to the Australia Institute’s End of Financial Year appeal today, you’ll help fund the research changing Australia for the better.

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB

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

Text originally published May 26, 2025

Buy my new book “A Genocide Foretold"

So, it’s a bit of mystery why the Liberal Party, in dire need of wooing back women voters in particular, has decided to oppose the changes. It suggests the Liberal Party won’t have much to meaningfully contribute to the serious tax reform debate Treasurer Jim Chalmers foreshadowed in his National Press Club speech.

Australia Institute research shows that twice as many Australians support (52 per cent) the government’s super tax concessions changes as oppose them (26 per cent), with around a quarter still undecided. The polling also found that about one in five of those surveyed thought it would impact their retirement plans when in reality, only one in 200 will be affected.

Perhaps people overestimate how much this will impact them because most people don’t think about their super at all until they get close to retirement, but let’s be clear, collecting more revenue from mostly wealthy men is good for both women and young people.

Only the very richest Australians will be affected by Labor’s plans to reduce the generosity of the superannuation tax concessions for people with earnings over $3 million.

Chalmers’ proposed changes will halve the super tax concession, meaning those will super balances over $3 million will go from paying 15 per cent tax to paying 30 per cent tax. It still represents an enormous tax concession for wealthy people, it’s just slightly less generous.