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Those who control the Democratic Party despise America, our Constitution, and our history. Their goal is a repressive society based on Marxist and intersectional ideologies. Their claim to be champions of democracy is hypocrisy of the highest order. Through subterfuge and force they have moved the United States to the precipice of the abyss. Their radical views, vitriol, and violence are intolerable. Only by the strongest medicine, intravenously administered, can we turn the tide.

Donald Trump’s goal is to restore individual liberties, a constitutional republic, and American exceptionalism. He is fallible, and his flaws have been exacerbated by a decade of political, legal, and financial attacks. Yet, blemishes and some dark impulses aside, there is a broad chasm between the hellscape sought by Democratic activists and leaders and the America Trump seeks.

It has modest sweeteners, in the form of tax cuts, electricity rebates, cheaper medicines and incentives to increase bulk billing.

The tax cuts are well-targeted and cost-of-living measures are not inflationary.

There is nothing in the budget which should stand in the way of more interest rate cuts.

National housing campaign Everybody’s Home has acknowledged the federal government’s housing measures in tonight’s budget but warns they fail to tackle the scale of the crisis.

With housing stress and homelessness deepening as sky-high rents continue to price Australians out, Everybody’s Home is urging all parties to deliver bold, ambitious commitments ahead of the election. 

Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said: “This federal budget has measures that may make housing more affordable for a small number of people but it doesn’t deliver solutions that will make housing more affordable for everybody. 

“Expanding the Help to Buy scheme may help some, but it will not move the needle on the housing crisis which is affecting millions of Australians.

“The housing crisis is deepening and hurting more and more Australians. We need a response that matches the scale of the crisis. We need leaders that will take bold leaps forward.

“The election is an opportunity for the federal government to offer the ambitious, visionary, and transformative solutions that voters are crying out for. 

Winners

Well, everyone who earns more than $18,200. Everyone gets a tax cut – up to $268 in 2026-27 and another one in 2027-28. It’s a smart tax cut – mostly benefitting those earning less than $45,000.

People who go to the doctor/use the PBS – as was previously announced – cheaper PBS medicine, cheaper GP visits (hopefully) and the energy rebate is extended for another 6 months (tune back in 6 months to see if it gets extended again).

Beer drinkers – the Government will pause indexation on draught beer excise and excise equivalent customs duty rates for a two‑year period, from August 2025 – also previously announced.

Gas companies who are projected to pay less PRRT over the next 4 years – $1.95bn than $1.8bn then $1.65bn then $1.45bn. As a result, beer drinkers – even with the pause of excise indexation will still pay $4.8bn more than gas companies do on PRRT over the next 4 years.

Wealthy people who live using the superannuation system to avoid paying tax – no changes to the super tax concessions.

Wealthy people who like using the tax system to speculate in the housing market. No changes to that nor negative gearing.

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

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Text Originally posted Mar. 22, 2025

Globally, authoritarianism has been on the rise, and political freedoms have been steadily declining. This is a concern for us all – as authoritarian regimes rely on and fuel violence. These political actors deepen divisions, label vulnerable groups as enemies, and magnify people’s grievances – all to distract from unpopular or ineffective policies, including those that consolidate power in a single individual or political party. 

Underlying this is a politics of us versus them: Narratives that construct a guilty and threatening “them” that endangers “our physical security,” “our way of life,” and “our women and children;” and a virtuous “us” in need of protection. This rhetoric dehumanizes marginalized groups, criminalizes opponents, and justifies political and identity-based violence that advances authoritarian goals.

Prosper Australia urges the government to embrace real reform that ensures prosperity is shared by all.

Introduction

Two frameworks for assessing the different kinds of policy and political spaces activists can engage in or create to effect change. 

These frameworks are explained in Just Power: A Guide for Activists and Changemakers by JASS Just Associates. The excerpt below is from Chapter 6: Power and Strategy – Theme 5: Engaging and Resisting.

Engaging and Resisting

Policy and legal advocacy – focused on visible power – tend to dominate public perceptions about how change happens.

In many contexts, engaging with, reforming, and using the mechanisms of formal decision-making – whether through government, corporate, civil society, trade union, or religious structure (among many other examples) – remains a critical tool for influencing and changing power.

Policy and advocacy efforts may be strategic in specific moments or contexts, but not always.

Some movements choose not to get involved in formal lobbying or advocacy directed at governments and to focus instead on shifting power in other arenas, such as generating new narratives, investing in political education that challenges the dominant norms and beliefs of invisible power, building their own alternatives, creating autonomous communities – self-defined and self-governing groups – or resisting through protests, marches and occupations.

Like any young right-winger, I follow Vice President JD Vance closely on X. He’s one of the most interesting and inspiring figures in the Trump Administration. Recently, he discussed an interaction he had with a Ukrainian American that got my attention. The gentleman accused Vance of abandoning “his” country, to which Vance retorted that his country is America. He then said a line that has stuck with me, something I had never heard a politician express before: “I always found it offensive that a new immigrant to our country would be willing to use the power and influence of their new nation to settle the ethnic rivalries of the old.”

What Vice President Vance succinctly outlined is a problem that naturally seems to come with empire building: becoming international waters. The United States has become a place where other nations fight to win money, power, and influence for themselves while the American people are left in the dust. Client states at the outer edges of our empire have become the constituency of our politicians and bureaucrats. Taxpayers of the empire suffer as they’re forced to fund the outer colonies, getting hardly anything tangible in return for their labors.

As Donald Trump and his cronies escalate their assault on client representation by attorneys, some lawyers and law firms are standing up to the Republican Fascist bullying and some are capitulating. I am proud of the heroes and utterly disgusted by the knaves.

ODOT and WSDOT are over-estimating future traffic on the I-5 bridge because they’re over stated the willingness to pay for travel time savings

The result will be an under-utilized, over-built I-5 bridge, and congestion on I-205

Over-estimating the willingness to pay for travel time savings causes IBR to underestimate diversion and negative environmental effects from tolling I-5
Metro’s case for a $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge rests on a critical assumption that doesn’t survive serious scrutiny: how much local drivers value their time. This seemingly technical detail has massive implications for the entire project’s justification.

There are currently no tolled roads in the Portland area.  Drivers react to tolls in an unsurprising way:  if a road is tolled, drivers tend to use it less.  That’s a key feature of the IBR project:  project proponents count on tolling to manage the flow of traffic over a much expanded I-5 bridge.  Without tolls, the phenomenon of induced demand means that a wider bridge would simply generate even more traffic, more pollution and more congestion.  Project proponents claim that a tolled, but much larger bridge would attract less traffic.  How much less?

When the then-coalition government sought to weaken the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, Mr. Albanese said “the right of citizens with standing to challenge their governments in court is a fundamental pillar of a robust democracy”.

Tomorrow, the Albanese government is planning to do exactly what Mr. Albanese warned against in 2015.

The government will introduce amendments to parliament tomorrow seeking to change subsection 78(3) and subsection 78C(1) of the EPBC Act, which will limit the ability to review decisions and have major consequences for our natural environment.

Science is constantly evolving. Australia needs laws which enable decisions to be reviewed based on the latest evidence. These amendments stop us from doing that.

Introduction

Factors and questions to consider when shaping strategic choices in developing your campaign strategy. Factors are the trends, forces, and questions to consider in making strategic choices.

The choice and mix of strategies are shaped by many factors unique to every place, people, moment, set of issues and organisations. Careful (power) analysis of all of these determines the pathways for contesting and changing power. – Source

The factors below are from the JASS Power Guide. There is also a handout and an activity to explore as a group.

For years, I would repost studies on my private Instagram account. As more research emerged about what SARS-COV-2 was doing to the heart, brain, blood vessels and immune system, I shared citations. I didn’t want to come across as some ranting conspiracy theorist who’d fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole so, surely, I thought, linking to scientific studies would be persuasive.

I organized the studies into story highlights. COVID INFO was the first. Each highlight can only contain up to 100 stories, so when the first was full I moved on to MORE COVID INFO. Looking back now it appears I made it up to COVID INFO 6, alongside COVID ACTION and COVID RESOURCES and SUBSTACK (where I began posting links to my articles when The Gauntlet launched).

But at some point, somewhere between 500 and 600 research papers deep, I realized that studies could not compete with vibes. People either did not care, did not understand, or did not want to know. I stopped posting the information. Other than links to my own articles, I generally stay off Instagram these days.

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An inside look at effective policy making, realised through hard-won public policy battles

What does successful public policy look like, and how has it been achieved in Australia? What strategies are needed to overcome petty partisanship and narrow self-interest? And who gets to decide what a ‘better Australia’ even looks like? In A Better Australia John Brumby, Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells examine policy design, implementation and reform, and show what can be achieved when engagement is sincere and intent clear. Leading policymakers and political insiders – Julia Gillard, Malcolm Turnbull, Cheryl Kernot, John Hewson, Ken Wyatt, Christine Milne and more – dissect the development of successful policy in energy, gun control, natural resources taxation, disability insurance, marriage equality, gender equality in the workplace, superannuation, reproductive healthcare reform, Closing the Gap and the pandemic response. A Better Australia takes us behind the scenes of the hard-won policy battles, showing the wide-ranging effects of good policy.

John Brumby and Stuart Kells joined us for our March 2025 John Cain Lunch. Watch the recording below.

The Wrap with Amy Remeikis

What Peter Dutton and the Coalition are offering Australian voters is a fiction.

It’s headlines without substance, chimeras and half-truths that never stand up to scrutiny, but comprehensively misdirects the media’s gaze.

The nation has been in election mode since the beginning of the year, when Anthony Albanese used his January press club address to remind voters of what he had spent the better part of the last three years doing.

Dutton fronted his own quasi election opening campaign launch in Victoria, the state he hopes will help deliver a Labor defeat, complete with a new slogan ‘let’s get Australia back on track’.

If it sounds as though someone in Coalition headquarters ran ‘Make America Great Again’ through ChatGPT with the instruction to make something similar for Australia, but different, congratulations – your neurons are firing in exactly the way someone receiving big money worked to manipulate.

But on the eve of the election being formally called, one has to ask – what track is a Dutton led Australia heading towards?  An imaginary fantasy of the 1950s, when ‘strong’ men made decisions and women did what they were told, and migrants were indistinguishable from their neighbours, as long as their name wasn’t printed on the letter box?