This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Will Gardner’s Substack,StrongHaven. It is shared here with permission. Images were provided by the writer unless otherwise indicated.
On the 50th episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss nuclear power furphies, the latest inflation data and how much the big four banks are profiting from home loans.
Greg Jericho is Chief Economist at the Australia Institute and the Centre for Future Work and popular columnist of Grogonomics with Guardian Australia. Each week on Dollars & Sense, Greg dives into the latest economic figures to explain what they can tell us about what’s happening in the economy, how it will impact you and where things are headed.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @GrogsGamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @ElinorJ_L
To succeed, it must have the confidence of the Australian public.
Several of its actions and decisions – including the current mess relating to whether or not it will investigate six people referred to it by the Robodebt Royal Commission – risk eroding public confidence.
Now, just 16 months after it was established, the powers and governance of the NACC need to be reviewed to ensure it lives up to the trust placed in it.
The Australia Institute, which campaigned for a decade to introduce a federal integrity commission, recommends five changes to make the NACC more effective and rebuild public confidence.
Key recommendations:
Bring forward the statutory review of the NACC
A statutory review is scheduled to take place in three years. This review should be brought forward and initiated now.
Allow public hearings whenever it is in the public interest to do so.
Implement a Whistleblower Protection Authority.
Ensure the Parliamentary Committee which oversees the NACC is not controlled by the government of the day.
Broaden the powers of the NACC Inspector.
“When the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) was created in 2022, Australians had high expectations, given a string of high-profile integrity issues in government had been identified,” said Bill Browne, Director, Democracy & Accountability Program at the Australia Institute.
Australia’s “broken” superannuation and pension systems are condemning a growing number of retirees to financial misery in their sunset years.
More than one in five Australians live in poverty when they retire. And that number is growing.
With housing affordability at an all-time low, many Australians now face the brutal double whammy of going through their entire working life unable to afford a home and ending up in poverty when they retire.
But there’s a simple change the government could make to slash the nation’s embarrassingly high rate of retirement poverty. It could reduce or remove the massive concessions to those retiring with millions of dollars and use that money to increase to the Age Pension.
It could also allow older Australians to earn income to supplement the Age Pension.
New research by the Australia Institute has found that Australia spends almost as much giving tax breaks to wealthy retirees as it does providing a safety net, the Age Pension, to those with little or no retirement savings.
The research compares Australia’s superannuation scheme and Age Pension program to the equivalent systems in Sweden and Norway, nations with comparable GDP’s to Australia.
Apologies to those who were on my old newsletter for getting this twice. But it's extra exciting news!
When I announced my intention to join Microsoft Research in 2008, my friends set up a betting pool over how long I would "last" there. No one thought that I'd be at MSR more than 7 years. And here we are, almost 16 years later. I still love MSR. I love my colleagues. I am forever grateful for the opportunities I've had to learn and grow and have impact. And yet, there's been this itch that has been growing for years. When I started my PhD, I didn't know if I would want to teach. But every time I've stepped into a classroom in recent years, I feel like I'm able to make a kind of difference that I can't make just as a researcher. And every time I get a chance to work with students, I leave glowing like a proud mama bear. Over the last few years, I've started to wonder if, when, and where becoming a full-time professor might make sense.
A notable trend in Australian politics has been the decline of the share of the vote won by both major parties at federal elections. One effect of this is that there are no longer any safe seats in Australian politics: minor parties and independents win more “safe” seats than they do “marginal” ones.
The declining major party vote
Fewer Australians give their first preference to a major party. The 2007 federal election is the last at which both Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition won more than 40% of the national vote; the 2022 election was the first time that neither cracked 40%.
The share of Australians voting outside of the major parties has increased from single digits in the 1970s to 31% at the most recent election in 2022, almost as many as the 36% who voted for the Coalition and 33% who voted for Labor. Not since the Great Depression has the combined vote for the two largest parties been so low.
The effect of a lower primary vote for major parties is that minor parties and independents have a better chance of winning seats.
The reality of the situation is that this budget wasn’t enough to meet the demands of any of the crises we face. It could have challenged our unequal system and properly funded public services, allowed people and communities to thrive, and built the greener, more equal future that we all want to see. It didn’t. […]
Last week, Odessa’s city council passed an ordinance barring trans people from the correct bathrooms and allowing anybody to sue suspected violators of this ban. This is, shockingly, a really terrible idea!
Learn about political organising in electoral campaigns from the Leading Change Network’s Political Organizing Series (monthly online learning sessions held from July to October in 2024).
Kick-off: People, Power, Politics
This is a year of elections around the world, and practicing democracy is now more critical than it has ever been before. In this series of learning sessions, we explored with over 200 participants what is often called political organizing, electoral organizing, or field organizing, which is organizing in political campaigns or campaigns to shape what our democracies look like.
We discussed how organizing can build effective campaigns, strengthen our democracies, and win elections, while also being in community with people who share values and interests.
Lacey opened the series with her story about how she learned about organizing during her journey as a political organizer.
A report by Fandom Forward about Fan Activism which is the practice of organizing fans of pop culture for social change.
FANDOM is a human instinct. For as long as people have been telling stories, we’ve been driven to share those stories with one another: through retelling, reimagining, and remixing. Fandom happens when media is consumed in community.
On this episode of Follow the Money, Australia Institute Executive Director Richard Denniss joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the fake fight between the new Queensland Premier and Peter Dutton over nuclear power and the fallout from the state election.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 29 October 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Guest: Richard Denniss, Executive Director, the Australia Institute // @RDNS_TAI
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebony_bennett
Comedian and co-host of Planet America on ABC TV, Chas Licciardello, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss why the campaigns are spending time in states they’re unlikely to win and what their advertising reveals about the campaigns’ strategies.
Guest: Chas Licciardello, comedian and co-host of Planet America and PEP // @chaslicc
Host: Emma Shortis, Director of International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @EmmaShortis
“The crime of all crimes.” That is how the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda declared genocide in the final judgment of Prosecutor v. Akayesu, the case against the mayor of Taba, Rwanda for crimes against humanity. Today, that crime repeats itself as UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese painfully details in her latest report.
Albanese joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to break down her report and present the indisputable evidence that Israel is actively committing a genocide of the Palestinian people.
Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.) Along the way, I’ve also started to recognize how slipperiness between two terms creates confusion — and political openings — and so I wanted to call them out in case this is helpful for others thinking about these issues.
In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”
Addressing polarization and hate through social networks
Many people see the roots of polarization and hate in the information ecosystem in which we are embedded. This leads us to conversations about disinformation, platform power, and the politics of speech. I see the roots differently. In my mind, polarization and hate are expressions of a fractured social graph, of people not being connected to one another in meaningful and deep ways. Divisions in social networks (connections between people, not technologies) have serious consequences.
The social graph of society is civic infrastructure, but too few people really understand how this needs to be nurtured and maintained. Plenty of people do this by feel. You can see this in the military and in higher education. You can see this when organizations build mentorship programs and when social workers build plans to help people leave “the life.” But you can also see how people manipulate the social graph in order to aid and abet a range of political, ideological, and economic agendas. There is nothing “neutral” about the social fabric of society. Ignoring it doesn’t mean that it will be healthy, but it does create a vulnerability that can be abused.
The world’s most urgent challenges — such as climate change, health crisis, and rising inequality — are rooted in the way our economies are structured. Addressing these issues effectively requires a fundamental shift in the way we do public policy. A shift that promotes sustainable, inclusive growth while encouraging the emergence of grassroots solutions. This approach underpins the notion of missions. Missions are concrete goals that, if achieved, will help to tackle a grand challenge. They set a clear direction for the different actors and sectors whose investment, innovation and effort is required to develop solutions.
Last week, 30 of the nation’s top marine scientists urged Ms Plibersek to intervene to save the skate, an ancient ray-like species found only in a remote corner of western Tasmania.
There is a mountain of scientific evidence proving that expanded salmon farming operations in Macquarie Harbour – home to the world’s only Maugean sake population – are almost certain to have a “catastrophic” impact on the skate.
The Minister has had that evidence for more than a year, with scientists urging her to overturn a 2012 decision which allowed toxic, industrial-scale salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour.
Now, the Minister has put off making yet another key decision on the future of the skate. She’s delayed changing the skate’s official threatened species status from “endangered” to “critically endangered” by a year, to October 30, 2025 – after the federal election.
This resource, Un cambio narrativo para ampliar la conversación política: Aportes desde el periodismo feminista del Sur, is available in Spanish only.
Is it possible to change narratives in a world in crisis? Can changing the way we talk about how bad the world is make it better?
On the path to building bridges, forming virtual hives and coming together with colleagues from different movements, territories, organizations and roles, we have created a new station where we can stop and join forces with this workbook – A Narrative Shift to Broaden the Political Conversation: Contributions from Feminist Journalism in the South.
A few years ago, pressed by increasingly regressive situations in terms of rights and increasingly polarized societies, we tried to find the right questions that would move us to change the ways in which we communicate to LatFem audiences and the general public our view of the world, its powers and its multiple crises.
How do we respond to polarization, violence, and misinformation? How do we get beyond our followers and supporters? How do we make people fall in love again? How do we make feminism great again?
This guide aims to support progressive community groups and organisations to make a statement to their supporters to counter the influence of the far-right, particularly in pivotal moments of far-right momentum like the 2024 US election.
By coming together to make strong public statements, we aim to ignite broader discussions on countering far-right narratives and affirm the importance of solidarity and community organising in our justice movements.
Please note: This guide has been written by people in Australia for the Australian context. You may like to adapt this for the context in your country or community.
For further resources, updates and community events on countering the far-right you can sign up for email updates. (Note: Your email would be collected by Will Potter for this purpose only and will never be shared. All resources developed will be for the Australian context).
A list of key resources collated by the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling IRIS exploring narrative change, popular culture, cultural organizing and cultural strategy.
New research by The Australia Institute reveals that while so many Australian families are struggling after 13 interest rate rises, much of what they pay doesn’t go towards paying bank staff, improving services or keeping branches open.
It goes towards making Australian banks among the most profitable in the world.
Key findings:
Between them, the Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Westpac and ANZ made pre-tax profits of $44.6 billion last financial year.
$17.6 billion of that figure came from loans to owner-occupiers.
An owner-occupier with an average 30-year loan of $574,200 with one of the big 4 contributes $200,800 purely to the bank’s profit. Over the life of the average loan, that’s almost 35% of the amount they borrowed.
ABS data shows that banks are sharply cutting staff numbers in Australia. The number of people working in banking, insurance and other financial institutions fell by more than 35,000 between November 2023 and August 2024. At the same time, banks have been hiring hundreds of workers in other parts of the world, predominantly India.
“This report highlights that a lack of competition among the big banks has come at the cost of home owners,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.
“The big 4 are generating massive profits from home loans that far exceed the level of risk the banks undertake.
To mark PPE@10 this feature continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014.
Immanuel Wallerstein placed anarchism as one of the four central ideologies of the world-system. However, anarchist movements/spaces have remained understudied by world-systems analysis. This oversight is particularly striking given the significant role anarchist and anarchistic movements have played in shaping global politics and social movements throughout history. In my Master’s dissertation, I addressed this gap by developing a multi-pronged framework to assess anarchist experiments across five key socio-economic dimensions: economy and food production, geopolitics, feminism, education, and healthcare.
In this blog post, I share the framework as developed for each dimension and discuss how anarchist principles can be applied to create alternative social structures to capitalist and oppressive ones. By focusing on these five dimensions, we can better understand the various creative approaches anarchist movements have taken to address social challenges and their potential for transformative change.
Anarchist Theory Across Five Socioeconomic Dimensions
On Wednesday 30th October, Rachel Reeves will deliver the first Labour budget in 14 years. Naturally, every media organisation and charity will be interested in analysing it – but we’ve repeatedly seen that our system can’t talk about economics without perpetuating misconceptions or outright falsehoods. An independent review of the BBC in 2023 found that […]
UK trans rights organization TransActual has published an open letter, with an impressive number of signatures from experts in the field of gender-affirming care, demanding that the UK government stop implementing the draconian suggestions of the Cass Report.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Alice Grundy discuss Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, Eminem’s appearance at a Harris event in Detroit, and what this election result could mean for Australia.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 28 October 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Host: Emma Shortis, Director of International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @EmmaShortis
Host: Alice Grundy, Research Manager, Anne Kantor Fellows, the Australia Institute // @alicekgt
The Narrative Directory is a co-created international resource to support those using storytelling and narrative strategies to drive progressive change. It is a tool for building narrative power.
About
The Narrative Directory is a tool for activists, civic innovators, independent storytellers, journalists, researchers and funders to locate one another, exchange knowledge and see the bigger picture of the global impact storytelling and narrative change ecosystem. By sharing resources openly with each other, we’re better able to make connections, seed collaborations and build shared narrative power.
The Directory is hosted and curated by IRIS (International Resource for Impact and Storytelling)—a funder collaborative devoted to ensuring the field of narrative change becomes influential, widely accepted and generously supported.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and its central bank partners have successfully demonstrated with Project Mandala that regulatory compliance can be embedded in cross-border transaction protocols.
Erica Chenoweth, a US political scientist known for groundbreaking research work on nonviolent civil resistance movements, shares five paths social movements can take in a disinformation era.
From the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement, civil resistance occurs around the world. But how can nonviolent social movements succeed against the rise of fictional narratives in the media? Erica Chenoweth, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs, discusses these topics and more during this 2020 Wiener Conference Call.
Welcome to Made Not Found, the newsletter that I (danah boyd) write to share random thoughts, ideas, and updates. Much of the content here is also posted on Apophenia, my blog.
If you'd like to join me here, please subscribe and you'll get emails when new content is published!
In an election campaign dominated by law and order and an ‘it’s time’ factor, the Queensland Labor Party released an ambitious raft of popular, progressive policies that has kept the new Liberal National government to a narrow majority. The big swing to the LNP predicted before the election campaign did not arrive, especially in Brisbane.
The implications for the Federal election are clear: voters want progressive policies on cost of living, climate change, reproductive rights, education and more.
New polling research by The Australia Institute, released just days before the election, revealed broad support for 12 progressive policies, even in policy areas which had previously proven controversial.
These policies appear to have been the difference between last night’s narrow defeat of Queensland Labor and electoral wipeout expected by so many commentators at the beginning of the campaign.
We tend to think of ourselves as not having much influence or power in the world, but that’s not true. We’ve led the world on many things – including in our contribution to climate change.
While leaders of Commonwealth countries met in Samoa for CHOGM, a new report shines a spotlight on Australia as a global leader in carbon emissions. We’re second only to Russia in emissions from fossil fuel exports – and the Australian government is busy promising the largest pipeline of coal export projects in the world.
Pacific nations are furious at our determination not just to approve new gas and coal mines, but to subsidise their expansion.
In Samoa this week, President of Tuvalu Feleti Teo described fossil fuel expansion as a “death sentence” for his country. He pointed out that the expansion of Australian fossil fuel exports goes against the “spirit” of the Falepili Union between Tuvalu and Australia, which recognises that climate change is an “existential threat”.
But rather than stop opening new coal mines to address that real threat, the Australian government seems determined to pour vast amounts of money into missiles and nuclear-powered submarines. As the President of Timor-Leste José Ramos-Horta wrote, neither of those things will actually make us safer.
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Will Gardner’s Substack,StrongHaven. It is shared here with permission. In-line images were provided by the writer.
Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, recently alleged disgraced right-wing mouthpieces Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson to be controlled and funded by the Kremlin. Was he totally off base, or is there more to the story… ?
The first title What’s the Big Idea: 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia will be published in November 2024 in time to mark The Australia Institute’s 30 years of big ideas anniversary.
The anthology brings together some of Australia and the world’s brightest thinkers sharing a big idea on topics ranging from the housing crisis to climate change, from mental health to the Australia-US alliance.
Contributors include The Hon. Michael Kirby AC, Yanis Varoufakis, His Excellency Anote Tong, Aunty Pat Anderson, Jennifer Robinson, Professor Fiona Stanley and Nobel prize winners Professor Peter Doherty and Professor Brian Schmidt and more.
Australia Institute Press will also launching a new series of public policy essays, Vantage Point: Big ideas in small packages to be released every three months starting with Dr Emma Shortis’ analysis of the American election, to be published in February 2025.
Australia Institute Press will be managed by Alice Grundy, whose previous trade publishing experience includes working at Allen & Unwin, Murdoch, Giramondo and Brio Books where she was Associate Publisher.
The Australia Institute’s inaugural 2024 Transparency Summit brought together experts, whistleblowers and those working to ensure the interests of all Australians are represented in our policy-making process.
We are sleepwalking towards disaster when we accept the idea that the more secret we are about decision-making, the safer we’ll be.
– Richard Denniss, Executive Director of the Australia Institute
Here are six big ideas to reverse Australia’s culture of secrecy:
The first title What’s the Big Idea: 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia will be published in November 2024 in time to mark The Australia Institute’s 30 years of big ideas anniversary.
The anthology brings together some of Australia and the world’s brightest thinkers sharing a big idea on topics ranging from the housing crisis to climate change, from mental health to the Australia-US alliance.
Contributors include The Hon. Michael Kirby AC, Yanis Varoufakis, His Excellency Anote Tong, Aunty Pat Anderson, Jennifer Robinson, Professor Fiona Stanley and Nobel prize winners Professor Peter Doherty and Professor Brian Schmidt and more.
Australia Institute Press will also launching a new series of public policy essays, Vantage Point: Big ideas in small packages to be released every three months starting with Dr Emma Shortis’ analysis of the American election, to be published in February 2025.
Australia Institute Press will be managed by Alice Grundy, whose previous trade publishing experience includes working at Allen & Unwin, Murdoch, Giramondo and Brio Books where she was Associate Publisher.
Australian Super—Australia’s largest fund—was the biggest investor, with nearly $1.5 billion of its members’ money funnelled into nuclear weapons companies. Hostplus was the only fund out of the top 14 that had excluded nuclear weapons from its portfolio.
If that wasn’t enough, two of the funds—Australian Super and Spirit Super—invest in nuclear weapons companies with their ethical investment options. You read that right: “ethical” investments in nuclear weapons.
Most people would be shocked to hear their money is being used to fund nukes.
How do super funds get away with it? It comes down to the way they define nuclear weapons.
All super funds apply various “screens” to exclude certain types of investments from their portfolios, for example companies involved in fossil fuels or tobacco.
Decades of Islamophobia, relentless propaganda campaigns and heavily financed lobbying efforts have made it difficult to understand the political realities of the Middle East. John Mearsheimer, prominent political scientist, University of Chicago professor and self-proclaimed realist, has consistently demonstrated the courage and ability to bypass the noise, delivering honest and well-informed analysis on global affairs. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to lay out what’s happening in the Middle East, from Israel’s genocide in Gaza to its escalating attacks on Lebanon and Iran.
