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The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil. Yasha Levine, in his book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, chronicles the linear history of the internet’s birth at the Pentagon to its now ubiquitous use in all aspects of modern life. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to explain the reality of the internet’s history.

It’s a reminder that despite women making up half the population, men outnumber women in most Australian parliaments and most party rooms.

Ten years ago the Liberal and Labor parties set the same target for women’s representation: 50% of parliamentarians to be women by 2025, this year.

While the Labor Party meets that target, the Liberal Party is far short of it.

When The Australia Institute crunched the numbers last year, male Liberal parliamentarians outnumbered female Liberal parliamentarians more than two to one.

The Liberal Party used to lead on women’s representation. Eight of the first 10 female federal MPs and Senators were Liberals.

Gough Whitlam’s “It’s time” win in 1972 included 93 male MPs and Senators – and not a single woman.

While things soon improved (it was not possible for them to get worse), it would be another three decades before the Labor Party was consistently more gender-representative than the Liberals at the federal level.

Nor were early Liberals opposed to quotas. As former Liberal senator Judith Troeth notes, “from 1944 the Liberal Party had reserved 50 per cent of the Victorian Division’s executive positions for women”.

The argument that quotas do not allow women to be selected on “merit” is facile: Coalition Cabinets always have a quota for National MPs.

For more details, see last year’s article here.

The triumphal arch holds a very important place in the annals of Western architecture and urbanism. In Roman times it played a lofty honorific role, even though most Roman arches commemorated civic achievements and personages rather than military victories. The freestanding monumental arch was a syncretic creation, structurally derived from Etruscan gateways and decoratively enriched with Hellenistic architectural and sculptural forms. Its distinctive presence, which accommodated an astonishing variety in massing and detail, enriched towns and cities across the Roman empire, from Spain to Syria.

The monumental arch should be regarded as a universal entity—eminently appropriate, one would think, to a universal nation like these United States. The late, great historian of imperial Roman architecture, William L. MacDonald, noted how the arch corresponds to the classical concept of human proportions as delineated in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in which a male figure is inscribed within an overlapping circle and square. The impost or “springing” of the opening within the arch corresponds, MacDonald noted, to the Vitruvian Man’s arms extended directly outward, while the curvilinear opening itself corresponds to his arms sweeping upward. The arch’s geometry thus addresses us as embodied beings. You can’t get more universal than that.

The PBS is, literally, a life saver for Australian families.

The Australia Institute has compared the staggering difference between the prices Australians and Americans pay for some of the most common medicines in the world.

For example, Atorvastatin – a cholesterol pill which is among the top ten most prescribed drugs in Australia – is 125 times more expensive in the US. Australians pay $21.07 for a prescription of Atorvastatin. Americans are slugged $2,628.39 for the same medication.

A commonly used tablet for high blood pressure, Lisinopril, is almost 25 times more expensive in the US than in Australia.

More than 10 million Salbutamol asthma puffers are prescribed or sold over the counter in Australia each year. For every $30 Australians spend on these puffers, Americans are charged $50.

He and Bridget McKenzie say they will work out which jobs need to be cut when they are in government.

Australians – particularly the thousands who would lose their jobs – deserve better than a slogan without a shred of evidence that it will achieve anything.

Australia Institute research shows:

• The Australian Public Service is not large in historical terms or by any international comparison.
• Keeping public service employment numbers low is not efficient. Experience shows service delivery suffers and/or money is spent on contractors, consultants and labour hire workers to meet demand.
• When the Albanese government took office, there was recognised under-investment in the public service. More staff were needed.
• Underinvestment in the Australian Public Service was due to previous governments keeping public service numbers artificially low by placing a cap on staffing.

“Public service bashing without any detail is nothing more than cheap, nasty politics,” said Fiona Macdonald, Director of The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work.

“Data from Services Australia reveals the recruitment of 5000 staff between 2023 and 2024 cut call waiting times to Centrelink by six minutes and calls to Medicare by nine minutes.

“It also resulted in cutting processing times for Paid Parental Leave claims from 25 days to four days, Job Seeker claims from 22 days to six days and online Medicare claims from 11 days down to two days.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Australia Institute economists Matt Grudnoff and Jack Thrower join Ebony Bennett to discuss the Australian economy and the federal election campaign.

This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 1 April 2025 and things may have changed.

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

Guest: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff

Guest: Jack Thrower, Research Economist, the Australia Institute // @jack-thrower

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

Show notes:

Raising revenue right: Better tax ideas for the 48th Parliament by Greg Jericho, the Australia Institute (March 2025)

Our research has shown that minimum and award wage increases have no impact on inflation.

Those on the minimum wage are the poorest paid workers in Australia and they deserve to see their living standards improve.

The cost of living pressures of the past three years have hurt those on low incomes the most because the biggest price rises have been on necessities like food.

“Those on award wages have seen their real wage fall by nearly 4% since 2020 and they deserve a wage increase that will restore their living standards,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.

“It is not surprising that business groups are arguing for a wage rise below inflation because that is what they always do.

“A decent wage rise for Australia’s poorest workers will not fuel inflation; it will only ensure those workers are able to keep their heads above water.”

The post Minimum wage increase would not impact inflation appeared first on The Australia Institute.

Last week, I published an essay at Tech Policy Press: We Need an Interventionist Mindset. This essay is targeted at those who are building or governing tech systems, including AI. I am so grateful that they let me publish it there. If you don't mind clicking on the link, do so to give the great people at TPP some link love. But I've also included it below just in case this is the only way you'll read it. <grin>

In other news, I was elected as a fellow to AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science). w000t!

Yet the policies enjoy widespread support once people are made aware of them.

The results pose big questions about the ability of government to communicate its record in an era of fractured media and news avoidance.

In the poll of 2009 Australians, respondents were given a list of nine policies (including one fake) and asked to answer whether each policy was implemented by the Albanese government.

They were then asked if they supported or opposed each policy.

The results show:

• 84% of Australians support a wage increase for aged care workers and creating a National Anti-Corruption Commission, but only 39% (aged care pay rise) and 20% (creation of NACC) were aware of these reforms.
• Legislating a social media ban for under 16-year-olds is the only reform that most Australians have heard of (55%).
• Each reform is supported by the majority of Australians.
• 12% of Australians incorrectly identified a national ban on native forest logging as an Albanese Government policy, which it is not. 71% support it – more support than for some real Albanese government policies.

“High levels of news avoidance and declining trust in mainstream media make it harder for governments to communicate their policies and achievements, posing issues for democracy,” said Stephen Long, Senior Fellow at The Australia Institute.

Let’s get this out of the way: My new book, The Last American Road Trip, is out today. This newsletter has 51,000 subscribers. Now if all 51,000 of you go out and buy the book, that would be terrific! I would like to stop promoting it and get back to what I love: writing.

You can order The Last American Road Trip at:

Bookshop: The Last American Road Trip a book by Sarah Kendzior - Bookshop.org US
Left Bank Books (signed!): SIGNED Last American Road Trip by Sarah Kendzior | Left Bank Books
Barnes and Noble: The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir by Sarah Kendzior, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble®
Amazon: The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir: Kendzior, Sarah: 9781250879882: Amazon.com: Books

Or get it at your local independent bookseller! Independent booksellers are important bastions of free speech and civic engagement, especially in these times.

The United States needs immigrants. Americans aged 65 or older will nearly double to about 50% of the population from today’s 27% due to declining fertility and rising longevity. The dire warnings we hear about the Social Security and Medicare systems will come true with a vengeance. Immigration, to be sure, is not the only remedy for our demographic problems—we can incentivize child-raising and extend the average working life—but it is an indispensable one. Working-age adult immigrants who pay into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds help keep these systems solvent.

The fall in America’s fertility rate stems from cultural and religious shifts that cannot be undone quickly. In a January 10, 2022 contribution to The American Mind, I reviewed the statistical evidence that the decline in our fertility can be explained by the attenuation of religion in the United States.

By Fernando Monge, Ruth Puttick, and Rainer Kattel

Why do some cities seem to tackle complex challenges more effectively than others? Is Helsinki really able to address housing issues more nimbly than Sydney? If so, why? Or why does Cape Town excel in crisis response but not in addressing persistent problems like informal settlements? Our recently published research suggests that — at least in part — the answer lies not just in the cities themselves but in the broader environment in which they operate.

In his address to Congress this month, President Trump boasted—and justly so—of his administration’s astonishing success in stopping illegal border crossings over just six weeks. “Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded.” This is no Trumpian bombast: A 94% year-on-year reduction in illegal entries really is an unprecedented accomplishment. It is also a popular one: a majority of Americans approve of controlling the border.

An even larger majority—some 76%—approve of his policy of deporting undocumented aliens who have committed felonies. Even some on the Left like Jon Stewart have been wondering: if ICE knew exactly where to find all those murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and human traffickers, as clearly they did, why then did the Biden Administration never act to deport them? Good question.

And a second cut – from 4.1% to 3.85% – is exactly what the Reserve Bank should have delivered today.

The Treasurer and Prime Minister constantly remind us that the bank is independent of government and politics.

Now, suddenly, the RBA doesn’t want to look political.

“Australian mortgage holders are suffering too much for the bank to tiptoe around the sensitivities of our political leaders,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.

“When rates were going up, the bank had no problem slugging borrowers ten times in a row.

“Now that rates are coming down – and the bank board is meeting less often – the RBA is more worried about appearing political than doing the right thing by Australians.

“All the indicators have continued to move in the right direction since the last rate cut. Underlying inflation has now been below 3% for three straight months – so why wait?

“Interest rate cuts never happen as a one-off. The RBA has already indicated that more are coming. So, I repeat, why wait?”

The post Rate hold more political than the cut we should have had  appeared first on The Australia Institute.

Assessing dynamic capabilities in city governments: insights from developing the Public Sector Capabilities Index

By Anna Goulden

This blog shares the latest highlights from our work to develop the Public Sector Capabilities Index. Led by UCL IIPP in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Public Sector Capabilities Index will be a first-of-its-kind measure of city governments’ capabilities to problem-solve and adapt. We call these dynamic capabilities — in simple terms, the abilities of public sector organisations to transform their activities, processes and resources to address both existing and newly-emerging challenges.

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the ongoing fallout from the Signal chat debacle, the dire situation facing Ukraine, and Australia’s failure to adapt to a radically changed world.

This discussion was recorded on Friday 28 March 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

Read more from Emma in the latest edition of Australian Foreign Affairs.

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

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

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

Show notes:

‘Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal’ by Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, The Atlantic (March 2025)

The most popular and encouraging part of the upheaval unleashed by the Trump presidency may be the administration’s fierce determination to break the grip that wokeness, the new racialism, and gender ideology have had on all levels of government, as well as on the commanding heights of civil society. As William Voegeli perceptively argues in the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Trump speaks for the 80% of Americans who are appalled by “anti-racism” being turned into a weapon of war by other means; who want free speech to be respected again; who are alarmed by limitless social engineering, the genital mutilation of the young, and literally open borders; who do not want women’s sports to be dominated by biological men; and who deeply resent the constant invective being directed against the noble American project itself.

President Trump has repeatedly spoken of a “common sense revolution,” a “revolution” that puts the lie to the para-Marxist claim, beloved by academics, journalists, and almost all politicians, that the concerns of citizens are almost exclusively “bread-and-butter” ones, and that “culture war” issues are at best a distraction and at worst an exercise in demagoguery, racism, and homophobia.

Can dynamic capabilities in city governments be analysed through AI-augmented Qualitative Evidence Synthesis?

By Kwame Baafi, Rainer Kattel and Ruth Puttick

The Public Sector Capabilities Index establishes how best to assess dynamic capabilities. As the potential grows for artificial intelligence (AI) augmented research, what can the Public Sector Capabilities Index learn to effectively collect and analyse data about city governments around the world?

Itamar Drechsler, Hyeyoon Jung, Weiyu Peng, Dominik Supera, and Guanyu Zhou

Editor’s note: The second chart in this post has been updated to reflect the revised analysis presented in the research paper—Staff Report No. 1143 (October 16, 2025, 10:00 am).

Previous Australia Institute research showed that 56% of Australia’s gas exports are based on royalty-free gas and Treasury has confirmed that no gas export project has ever paid Petroleum Resource Rent Tax.

Key points:

• Gas export volumes are expected to be maintained at 80 million tonnes per year to 2030.
• This gas is expected to sell for a total of $303 billion.
• 56% of this, or $170 billion is based on royalty-free gas and is unlikely to pay any petroleum tax.

“Big gas is taking the piss,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.

“Last week we saw Opposition Leader Peter Dutton acknowledge that excessive gas exports are harming Australians.

“Unrestricted gas exports have been a disaster, but even worse is that most of it is given away for free.

“It’s important to understand what these forecasts mean – the Australian Government is planning to give away vast volumes of public gas, for free, out to 2030.

“Not only is this fiscally irresponsible, but this is making climate change worse.

“Fossil fuels need to be phased out and kept in the ground, not given away for free.

“The next parliament has a real opportunity to end the gas industry’s free ride and deliver for the Australian public and the climate.”

As chunks of rotting salmon from a massive fish die-off wash up on the shores of Tasmania’s pristine beaches, the Albanese government rammed legislation to shield the salmon industry through Parliament within 48 hours, with the support of the Coalition.

Details of the legislation were made public on Monday. On Tuesday, it was introduced to and passed by the lower house. By Wednesday evening it was law. Forget policy on the run, this was slapdash.

While focus was on the government’s surprise income tax cuts and Peter Dutton’s plans to sack 41,000 public service workers, Australia’s environment laws were gutted with no genuine debate. None of the regular parliamentary scrutiny that accompanies a bill.

No Senate inquiry. No time for public hearings or public input into the legislation. No consultation with scientists, or the local community.

It was pure politics. Both Labor and the Coalition rushed the legislation through with an eye on votes in Bass, Braddon and Lyons.

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 March 11, 2025

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Jeremiah Gridley, leader of the Massachusetts bar when John Adams joined it, said that “a Lawyer ought never to be without a Book of Moral Philosophy on his Table.” In the founding era, moral philosophy was itself part of common law reasoning, as was political philosophy.

This sets the Founders apart not only from the modern academy, with its separate departments for government, philosophy, and law, but even from their British contemporaries of the late 18th century such as the jurist William Blackstone. As James Wilson noted of Blackstone, “He should be read and studied. He deserves to be much admired; but he ought not to be implicitly followed.”

Contra Blackstone, the Founders maintained that if one does not think about common law precedents in particular, and legal reasoning in general, in light of the moral/legal reasoning behind them, one will misread them. The reasoning that justified them was inseparable from the law itself, and informed the scope and limitations of any precedent that followed.

In this election campaign, opposition leader Peter Dutton has set out to defy the weight of his party’s recent history.

Dutton began the year by announcing plans to make the instant asset write-off scheme permanent and to introduce a $20,000 tax deduction for small business meal and entertainment expenses. In his budget reply speech on Thursday night, Dutton promised to temporarily halve the petrol excise, a move which he claimed would save motorists $14 per week.

That’s the extent of the Liberal Party’s tax agenda so far. Shadow ministers have told the media there are no discussions or plans for personal tax relief. When the government unveiled its budget-night proposal to cut the lowest tax rate (from 16 per cent to 14 per cent by mid-2027), Dutton dismissed the measure as a “cruel hoax” and promised to repeal the legislation if elected.

The opposition’s pledge to oppose that measure is truly historic.

Since the Menzies era, there have only been two out of 22 federal elections where the Liberal Party did not offer either personal income tax cuts, family tax relief or company tax cuts.

In elections where the Liberal Party did not make income tax cuts a centrepiece of its policy offering, it still offered proposals such as income tax indexation or half-indexation (particularly under Malcolm Fraser), income tax-splitting (under Andrew Peacock), child tax rebates (under Peacock and John Howard) or changes to the tax-free threshold (particularly under the Howard government) as a form of personal tax relief.

What City Observatory Did This Week

ODOT’s “Strategic Review”: Conflicted consultants whitewashing mis-management. The Oregon Department of Transportation is again trying convince the Legislature and the public that it isn’t incompetent at managing highway construction.  With three major Portland-area highway projects racking up a staggering $4.8 billion in cost overruns in the past five years, the agency has a serious financial and credibility problem.  It has offered up a so-called “strategic review” to try to placate criticism but it shows the agency is more interested in image management than actual project cost control. ODOT commissioned a review that reads more like a public relations exercise than a genuine effort to address systemic problems.

The review, led by consultants with deep financial ties to ODOT, doesn’t even try to meaningfully diagnose or solve the agency’s chronic cost overrun issues. Notably, the panel includes former state DOT directors from states with their own significant infrastructure management challenges, raising questions about the review’s credibility.

More…

North Carolina May End Parking Mandates—Your City Should Be Next

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Friday 28th March 2025

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Unpacking opposition: the contested landscape of life skills-based education in Pakistan

 — Publication: Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms (ALIGN) — Wednesday 26th March 2025

Unpacking opposition: the contested landscape of life skills-based education in Pakistan ESubden Wed, 03/26/2025 - 16:41 26 March 2025 Report Komal Qidwai, Fabiha Moin, Rida Rehan Chughtai, Ziana Shakil ALIGN, Aahung View report Pakistan 133, 64, 1474, 1690

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ODOT’s “Strategic Review”: Conflicted consultants whitewashing mis-management

 — Publication: City Observatory — Friday 28th March 2025

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT’) has a big management problem:  huge cost overruns on highway mega-projects.  Just three Portland area highway projects—The Interstate Bridge Replacement, the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening and the I-205 Abernethy Bridge have chalked up cost overruns totaling $4.8 billion in just the past five years.

ODOT commissioned a “strategic review” which failed to identify the scale or frequency of these cost overruns as a major problem.

The consultant team ODOT hired to perform the strategic review comes from a firm largely dependent on ODOT for consulting work on these same mega-projects.  The consultants are conflicted because they make more money when ODOT has cost-overruns, and stand to lose business if they’re publicly critical of a big client.

These conflicts are accentuated by the revolving door between top state DOT management positions and highly paid consulting gigs. The strategic review was led by ODOT director Kris Strickler’s former boss—who now works for a firm billing $80 million for its work on the IBR.

An independent study published by the Brookings Institution shows that excessive reliance on consultants is a major contributor to high costs, and Oregon’s costs are double the national average.

Just as in 2016, prior to the last big transportation package, ODOT hired a consultant to whitewash its management credibility to convince the legislature to increase its funding.

More…