This article was reposted, in slightly different form, from the Practice of Place blog, which focuses on the art and science of creating thriving public and shared places. It is shared here with permission. All images were provided by the author.
A new report has found that despite claiming not to invest in ‘controversial weapons’ 13 of the top 14 Australian super funds are still investing in nuclear weapons companies, in some cases even in an option described as ‘responsible’, new research from The Australia Institute and Quit Nukes has found.
Key results
At least $3.4 billion of Australian retirement savings are invested by these 14 super funds in companies involved in making nuclear weapons.
One of the 14, Hostplus, has excluded nuclear weapons companies across its portfolio since December 2021.
The report analyses financial returns and finds that the exclusion of nuclear weapon companies from portfolios has an immaterial impact on returns.
“It’s frankly unconscionable to sell super fund members a responsible investment option and then use their money to invest in nuclear proliferation,” said Rosemary Kelly, Director at Quit Nukes.
“The thing that makes this baffling is that investing in nuclear weapon companies is just completely unnecessary in the broader scheme of things.
“Superannuation funds should divest immediately from weapons manufacturers who produce nuclear weapons. If you’re a member of 13 of these 14 leading funds you can request that your fund divest or threaten to take your savings elsewhere.
Restricting negative gearing and scrapping the capital gains tax discount would make housing more affordable and increase home ownership rates, the Australia Institute has said in a recent submission.
Key Findings:
A major cause of rising house prices has been increased demand from investors.
Restricting negative gearing to newly built housing and scrapping the capital gains tax discount would reduce speculation in the housing market and allow more first home buyers to get into their own home.
Reducing tax concessions would also raise billions of dollars of revenue that can be used to build more housing.
Negative gearing and the CGT discount cost the budget around $20 billion per year, more than twice the $8.4 billion state and territory governments spent on public and community housing in 2022-23.
Macroprudential policies such as restricting finance for investment properties would also slow housing price growth.
Increasing housing supply is not the only solution. Over the last 10 years, the supply of housing has increased faster than the population, but house prices have still increased 75%.
“The Labor Government is right to look at options to reduce tax concessions for property investors,” said Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist at the Australia Institute.
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.
“We are aesthetically superior” and “The fucking lefties are losing the cultural battle” are two phrases repeated by the Argentinean leader Javier Milei. Through them, he seeks to allude to the supposed creative inferiority of the lefts committed to building alternative options in the face of the global polycrisis. They have confrontational purposes that denigrate otherness and exalt xenophobia and the growing expressions of neoconservative political action. What to do in this situation? How to subvert authoritarian discourses and reactionary communication strategies? How to counteract the appropriation of the language of resistance by neoconservatism?
We are living in an era of overlapping crises: from climate catastrophe to devastating wars, alongside the age-old ravages of inequality at home and across the globe. As these struggles escalate, many ordinary people are questioning their own responsibility, and possibility of their complicity, in these disasters. What prospects are there for responding? What avenues for meaningful action?
With the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, these concerns have come into sharper focus. This panel of experts will examine some of these uncomfortable questions, and our moral and ethical obligations to address adverse human rights and climate justice impacts.
Shortly after the Minerals Council warned the government to undermine mining “at your peril”, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved three new coal mine extensions. This nature-destroying decision has come just a few weeks before the government is set to host the Global Nature Positive Summit. The government is clearly pursuing a small target strategy but, in avoiding conflict, it risks offering voters a small and unexciting platform at the next election.
The government is all over the place with mixed messaging. To avoid angering the gambling industry, bigots and the mining industry, the government made a series of unforced errors that angered some of its key constituencies. It balked at implementing an outright ban on gambling ads, fumbling a policy with almost universal public support. And, in trying to avoid a “nasty” debate over census questions to capture data about Australia’s queer community, it succeeded only in alienating gay and gender diverse citizens.
But in appeasing the mining industry by approving new fossil fuel projects, the government is not just fuelling climate change that is damaging nature, it is contributing to the extreme heatwaves, floods, bushfires and extreme weather events that are driving up the cost of living – every new coal mine that’s approved means some other sector of the economy has to reduce its emissions even more.
It has become quite rare to hear any meaningful accountability for Israel’s actions from Israeli citizens themselves. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy is an anomaly in Israel by today’s standards, as for his entire career he has challenged the apartheid and occupation of the Israeli state. On today’s episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Levy joins host Christ Hedges to discuss his book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, and explain the spiritual destruction, both of Israel and Palestine, that the current genocide in Gaza is causing as well as the implications of new military operations in Lebanon.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved three new coal mine extensions this week, completely undermining the government’s credibility on climate change.
At the same time Foreign Minister Penny Wong was at the United Nations General Assembly talking about sea level rise being a threat to the Pacific, Plibersek was granting approval for three massive coal mine extensions – one of the key sources of sea level rise – to operate until nearly 2070. Together, the three coal mines approved will produce more than 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over their lifetimes.
As world leaders are gathered in New York for Climate Week, let’s remember the United Nations, the International Energy Agency and the world’s scientists have been clear about what’s required to avoid dangerous climate change: no new gas and coal mines or extensions.
That’s why the Australia Institute united a group of Australia’s leading climate and environment organisations to publish an open letter in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times this week. The letter calls on the federal government to tell Australians when it will stop approving new coal, oil and gas projects and end native forest logging.
Reimagines ‘the great Australian dream’ of housing as ‘the great Australian right’ to housing
Almost everyone in Australia is feeling the impact of the national housing crisis, which is traumatising individuals, families and communities. In the reconstruction period following World War II, governments ensured that access to adequate and affordable housing was virtually universal. But now, many young people and families are finding it almost impossible to buy, or even rent, a home. During the COVID years, government action took the homeless off the streets, yet homelessness is now at a record high. The fact that significant numbers of women are currently living in their cars is just one tragic example of the depths to which the entire system has sunk. We seem to be trapped in a vortex of minimal government ambition, stale non-strategic thinking and maximum profits.
Housing: the Great Australian Right argues that governments have the capacity and the power to resolve this national plight. The first step is for Australia to rethink its approach to housing policy and recognise access to housing – having a home – as a fundamental human right.
This is the transcript from the Hon Kevin Bell’s speech, “‘Housing and human rights”, recorded 19 September 2024 at Per Capita’s John Cain Lunch.
I thank Per Capita for inviting me to speak at the September 2024 John Cain Lunch on the important subject of housing and human rights.
I have very strong memories of John, the 41st premier of Victoria. He was elected the member for Bundoora in 1976 and the opposition leader in 1981. He became premier when the labour government was elected in 1982. He held that high office for three terms of parliament until, following his resignation, he was succeeded, by Joan Kirner. He did not contest the 1992 election, which Labor lost. I saw him frequently in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.
Kosmos Samaras addressed our August John Cain Lunch on the electoral challenges facing the ALP due to the changing nature of Australia’s electoral demographics. Watch the recording of the event below.
Kos is one of Australia’s leading experts in political campaigns and polling. Kos specialises in compiling and interpreting research, statistical data and polling to provide a unique insight into the cause and effects of social and political issues impacting communities across Australia.
Often sought for expert commentary on polling data and its impact on all levels of politics, Kos has a keen understanding of the nature of political parties and government decision-making, drawn from more than 25 years of political experience with Victorian Labor, including as Deputy Campaign Director. This experience has also enabled him to develop an extensive knowledge on how governments and political parties function and what drives them.
This week is Homelessness Week, an annual event hosted by Homelessness Australia aiming to raise awareness and build commitment towards ending homelessness. The theme of this year’s Homelessness Week is “Homelessness Action Now”. It must serve as a reminder of the urgent need to change the future state of housing and homelessness in Australia.
In recent years, several countries have responded to the global crisis of housing unaffordability by preparing whole-of-government plans to improve housing affordability and reduce or eliminate homelessness.
In July 2024, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns announced that a ban on “no-grounds” evictions would be introduced to Parliament in the following month. Under the proposed changes, landlords would have to meet “common-sense and reasonable” grounds for eviction, including the sale of the property and instances of misconduct by tenants.
What are no-grounds evictions?
“No-grounds evictions”, also known as “no-fault evictions”, allow landlords to terminate tenancies in private rental properties without granting a specified reason for doing so, providing that notice periods are followed.
Some jurisdictions restrict termination without grounds to the end of fixed-term agreements (tenancy agreements with a defined ‘end’ date), while Victoria has narrowed this allowance to the end of tenants’ first fixed term in a property. New South Wales, Western Australia and the Northern Territory currently allow landlords to evict tenants without specified grounds during periodic agreements (tenancies which do not have a defined end date, also known as ‘month-to-month’ agreements). These three jurisdictions also allow no-grounds evictions at the end of fixed-term agreements.
The founder of Per Capita’s Centre of the Public Square initiative, Peter Lewis, discusses the “Civility Manifesto’, a framework for addressing the division at the heart of our broken politics.
The Civility Manifesto outlines how media, politics and the digital platforms have conspired to build a public discourse driven by conflict and anger, where truth and context are sidelined.
Peter outlines the work of the new Centre, including advocating to constrain the power of Big Tech, campaigning for privacy reform and investing in alternate models of civic engagement based on identifying points of connection and giving citizens real power.
Drawing on his work with the progressive research and strategy firm, Essential, Peter shares his work with Yes 23, the disability sector, renewable energy and the introduction of AI, to show how the tools to build a more collaborative politics already exist.
This event was recorded on 17 July 2024. Watch the recording below.
The impacts of climate change keep getting worse, but the typical framing of the problem and the solutions so far being pursued are seriously insufficient. As a result, the steps we’re taking to build a clean energy economy and move beyond fossil fuels are far too incremental for the existential nature of this threat. So what’s holding us back?
Climate Clangers calls out three bad ideas that are blocking action on climate change at the speed and scale we need right now:
Decarbonising our economy must not impact economic growth.
Net-zero accounting can keep global heating within survivable limits.
Strong action now will cost us more than we can afford.
Clung to by politicians and leaders of industry, and rooted in outdated and wishful thinking, each of these ideas is fundamentally wrong. With the world continuing to warm, the longer we leave these assertions unchallenged, the more dangerous they become.
In this sharp and lively analysis, Dr Jennifer Rayner makes the case for better ways to gauge the health of our clean economy, track real progress on cutting carbon pollution, and account for the gains from immediate, decisive measures. We need new ways of thinking about the life-threatening challenge of global warming so that we can get on with real climate action.
Dr Rayner spoke at our June 2024 John Cain Lunch. Watch the recording below.
Reflections on the 2024-25 Federal Budget, and directions for Australia’s future
Chair of the House Economics Committee, Daniel Mulino joined us for our May John Cain Lunch to unpack the 2024-25 federal budget. Watch the recording below.
Dr Daniel Mulino was elected as the Member for Fraser in the Australian Parliament at the 2019 Federal Election. He is an economist by training, with a PhD from Yale University. He has lectured at Monash University and worked at both the World Bank and the United States Federal Reserve.
Before entering the Australian Parliament, Daniel served the Victorian community as a member of the Victorian Parliament. He was Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer between 2014 and the 2018.
Australia’s history is sprinkled with attempts at tax reform – some successful, some not. Mixed Fortunes explores these efforts at substantive change in our tax system.
Paul Tilley takes us from the establishment of the Australian Constitution at Federation in 1901 and the 1942 unification of income tax, through the seminal Asprey review in 1975 that set up the major tax reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, and up to the lack of tax reform, at both the Commonwealth and state levels, this century. Mixed Fortunes examines the roles of foundational reviews, which establish the case for reform, and determinative reviews, which implement reform. It assesses both the political economy issues of policymaking and the quality of the tax reforms that have been achieved in Australia.
The key questions it addresses include: What makes a reform exercise work – or not? How do we assess the quality of Australia’s tax reforms? And what lessons can be drawn from these experiences to help shape future tax reform exercises?
Paul joined us for our April 2024 John Cain Lunch to discuss his book.
Who is Peter Dutton, and what happened to the Liberal Party? In Bad Cop, Lech Blaine traces the making of a hardman – from Queensland detective to leader of the Opposition, from property investor to minister for Home Affairs. This is a story of ambition, race and power, and a politician with a plan.
Dutton became Liberal leader with a strategy to win outer-suburban and regional seats from Labor. Since then we have seen his demolition of the Voice and a rolling campaign of culture wars. What does Peter Dutton know about the Australian electorate? Has he updated Menzies’ Forgotten People pitch for the age of anxiety, or will he collapse the Liberals’ broad church? This revelatory portrait is sardonic, perceptive and altogether compelling.
Lech Blaine joined Per Capita’s Emma Dawson to discuss this Quarterly Essay.
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Will Gardner’s Substack, StrongHaven.It is shared here with permission. All in-line images were provided by the author.
Video games! The nerds (pejorative) are upset about woke again, this time because an upcoming RPG lets you slap some top surgery scars on your player character. How WILL they survive?!
This essay was written by one of my students at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas, California. I am proud to offer this lovely piece of writing to you.
One can have the will to carry out a task, but when given a reward and or punishment, that alone can become a factor in one’s behavior, changing the way a certain individual acts. In my opinion, I believe this change is bad because one loses who they are as a person along the way.
This essay was written by one of my composition students at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas, California. These students write their essays entirely by hand and with no Internet resources. I am honored to share this lovely piece of writing with you. If you have a comment that you’d like me to share with Luis, please add it in the Comments section below.
It is said that people can motivate another person through rewards and punishments. Or does all motivation come from within? I think that people can be great motivators for others, but I would argue that the best motivator should come from within, regardless of the reward or the punishment.
Please enjoy this profound essay on happiness by my former student, Fabiola Zamora. This essay inspired and helped me, and I hope you will have the same experience.
I wholeheartedly believe that happiness is a choice, despite the body, the family, or the external circumstances that we may have been born into. We may not have chosen the life that we were dealt, but it’s entirely up to make the best of each and every single second of it. I like to view my life as the prime example of making the best out of a less than ideal situation. My childhood consisted of many back-to-back traumatic experiences, from poverty, bullying, witnessing cartel violence, having a caregiver who regularly endangered us, to being unknowingly tricked into boarding a plane at the age of 5, permanently leaving behind my home-country as well as everybody and everything that I had ever known and loved. Only to arrive in the US and have my life become significantly worse, one version of hell just morphed into another. My first 16 years of life were brutal, and the fact that I never had any emotionally available adults around me to offer me any kind of solace, only made things worse.
For years — decades, really — I’ve been wondering why teaching makes me feel exhausted and utterly depleted, even on a good day. I’ve been wondering why I feel that with every year, I’m becoming more anxious and depressed doing this work, even though I am much better at it than I used to be. As a well-seasoned (aka old) teacher, and someone who has worked hard to improve, I know how to help my students read and write effectively. I can teach them to think for themselves about a challenging question and create arguments and responses to counterarguments. Even when tired, I am able to lead my class in a lively, complicated discussion, keeping the energy high while drawing out quieter students. I can read the room on any given day and make adjustments on the fly. I know how to give feedback that is specific, helpful, and aimed towards the particular needs of the student in front of me. I know when someone could use a pep talk and when someone desperately needs a firm deadline.
I list these attributes in part because I keep trying to remind myself of them. I’m trying to remind myself of them because at the end of a day of teaching, I feel bad about myself. It’s a sinking feeling that can easily veer off into depression. No matter what I put into teaching, no matter how hard I work or how much I care, I always feel that it is not good enough.
The paradox of my life as a teacher is that I feel this work is killing me, yet I also love this work obsessively, with a kind of madness. I dream about teaching, and in my dreams I am sometimes a better teacher than I am in real life.
I just finished my fourth online class in a graduate TESOL program, and I’m left feeling empty. It was clear that the courses were constructed with professionalism and that the instructors cared about their students’ learning. Even so, the experience felt artificial to me. It’s not to say that I didn’t learn; rather, I didn’t engage, and no one engaged with me. Only one of my professors ever gave me any feedback on my work, aside from points, and even her comments were only brief words of praise. Never did any of my teachers engage with my ideas, or ask me questions, or get to know me as a person. This is not their fault. What else were they supposed to do, in a system that rewards efficiency and reduces education to discrete lesson plans attached to point-based assignments?
I suppose the engagement I was craving was there for me on the discussion boards, but to be honest, I never spent much time there. The point-based grading conditioned me to get in and get out, collecting my points for the required posts. I did notice that some of the other students seemed more authentically engaged and spent more time replying to other students. Why couldn’t I do the same?
AS A LONGTIME community college teacher, I have hosted a lot of end-of-the-semester parties that you probably wouldn’t want to attend. There was the party with nothing but a jug of orange soda, four bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and no napkins. At another gathering, students were sprinkling potato chips on ice cream, then putting that on pizza, and no one acted as if this were out of the ordinary.
Last week, I would have paid to go to any of these parties, because despite the questionable food choices, people were having fun. They were laughing and eating and telling jokes. There was eye contact and lots of smiling.
Contrast that with the party I hosted last week, in a classroom where I had 24 semesters of positive memories. At this “party,” such as it was, the students filled up their plates, brought them back to our table, and then took out their phones and started scrolling. Even though we were seated in a circle, no one talked to anyone else. The students ate and scrolled, ate and scrolled. I did not want to lecture or berate them, so I started doing some teaching, just to interrupt the painful silence.
This lovely essay was written last semester by my student, Basil Rana. Basil is taking a huge course load right now, and I know he is struggling to manage all of his responsibilities. If you have any words of encouragement for him, please share!—Professor Jennifer Hurley
Attaining perfect freedom has always been a common desire amongst society. Freedom is a value that has many definitions through the several perspectives of society. An example of this is in the article “Easy in the Harness” by Gerry Spence in which he states, “Freedom is like a blank white canvas when no commitments, no relationships, no moral restraints have been painted on the free soul” (Spence 2). This statement is a reminder of the importance of certain commitments, as well as having good relationships, and that we must maintain the strive to achieve perfect freedom in other ways. Many people would argue that perfect freedom is not achievable in today’s world. However, I personally believe that freedom may not always be how we would like, or perfect in our eyes, but it is still achievable. When freedom is treated as a belief rather than a state, it becomes easier to refer to our freedom as perfect, since a state of mind is affected by time and place, whereas a belief stands wherever, whenever.
So much of what we call education is small minded. Even something seemingly large, such as a student learning outcome, reduces a layered, individual human experience to a standardized bullet point. Rarely in education do we speak of big, unanswerable questions; rarely do we speak of passion and inspiration; never do we mention dreams aside from the ones involving a good GPA.
Honestly, the longer I am in the system, the more aghast I am at its values. My current institution, with the help of the state of California, has become a factory that turns out transfer-ready widgets. Over the years I’ve made arguments about the educational value of certain courses and certain approaches, but such arguments hold no weight in a place that does not truly value learning.
Over the years I have had to create my own set of values that I try to stick with despite considerable social, cultural, and administrative pressure to do otherwise. What follows are a few of those values:
Remember that learning is about thinking and understanding, not about the mindless memorization and regurgitation of facts.
Involve students in big discussions about real things, and ask for their ideas.
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on the author’s Substack, The Friendly City Urbanist.It is shared here with permission. All images were provided by the author.
Coles and Woolworths seem to take turns offering items on sale, showing that they are more concerned with protecting their market power than competing against each other, Australia Institute research has revealed.
The ACCC this week launched legal action against Coles and Woolworths for misleading consumers through discount pricing claims on hundreds of products at a time when inflation was at its highest. However, this is not the only way the two major supermarkets work to keep their profit margins high.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, we discuss the allegations of dodgy conduct against the big supermarkets and the government’s apparent interest in negative gearing and capital gains tax reform.
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: Hayden Starr, Digital Media Manager, the Australia Institute // @haydenthestarr
Oftentimes the idea of “wokeness” or “woke” ideology, whether calling it as such or acknowledging its existence, can be thought of as coinage of the right wing. Christian Parenti, professor at John Jay College, journalist and author, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to make the case that what he and many others define as “woke” is actually a weapon used to further suppress marginalized people, prevent the awareness of class politics and class struggle and further divide the working class.
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on the author’s Substack, The Post-Suburban Future.It is shared here with permission. The image was provided by the author.
A new Everybody’s Home report reveals that Australians on the lowest incomes are being priced out of renting in virtually every corner of the country, despite a rise in Centrelink payments and rent assistance.
The ‘Priced Out’ 2024 report shows people who primarily rely on Centrelink payments and the full-time minimum wage would be in severe rental stress across all capital cities and most regional areas.
The report applies Friday’s indexation increase to Centrelink payments and 10 percent rise to Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) with indexation on top, with the findings underscoring the need for more social housing and for payments to reflect the cost of housing.
Over the last six months we have been working with a group of young people to co-produce a project which explores ‘Reconstructing the Social Contract’. The idea of a social contract between the government and its citizens, which previous generations understood, has been steadily dismantled over the past four decades. This erosion has left young […]
Everybody’s Home is urging parties and candidates to sign on to a roadmap for housing reform ahead of the election, as new polling reveals most voters want house prices to drop.
The national housing campaign’s ‘Roadmap to Reform’ puts forward real solutions to end Australia’s housing crisis.
RedBridge polling of 2,000 Australian voters released by Everybody’s Home reveals:
More than one in two (54%) want house prices to go down over the next five years, while one in five (21%) want prices to increase
Even people with mortgages want to see house prices come down, with two in five (44%) supporting a drop, compared to one in four (28%) wanting prices to rise
Seven in ten (72%) renters want house prices to fall.
