The prize will be awarded to the best article published in 2024 (online early or in print) in international political economy (IPE) by an Australia-based scholar.
The prize defines IPE in a pluralist sense to include the political economy of security, geography, literature, sociology, anthropology, post-coloniality, gender, finance, trade, regional studies, development, and economic theory, in ways that can span concerns for in/security, poverty, inequality, sustainability, exploitation, deprivation and discrimination.
The overall prize winner will be decided by the selection committee, comprised of AIPEN members. Before that decision can be made, we now require AIPEN members to vote on the longlist to establish the final shortlist of four articles for deliberation.
Voting is being conducted online through Election Buddy and is open to all members of the AIPEN e-list. Voting is open from 9am on Wednesday 24thSeptember and closes 5pm on Friday 17thOctober (AEDT).
Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Monday September 22, at 6:30 - 7:30pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the livestream on YouTube/X. We will discuss the Trump administration’s exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to build out its fascist, technocratic police state, and whether dissidents of the administration should consider fleeing before it’s too late.
Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made abolishing property taxes for homeowners a centerpiece of his second-term agenda. This idea may sound appealing, but it would be unjust, unsustainable, set back Florida’s economic ascendance, and make the state an electorally inefficient “vote sink.” Instead of following Britain’s Tories in taking the easy route of pandering to rentier gerontocracy, DeSantis should return to making Florida a beacon of smart conservative policy.
The property tax reliably polls as America’s most unpopular major tax, primarily because it must be paid in large lump sums and does not fluctuate with family income. Nevertheless, DeSantis’s plan to eliminate property taxes on Florida residents’ primary residences, presumably funded by a sales tax hike, would be a serious mistake.
RFK Jr’s ongoing attacks on COVID vaccine access are getting widespread media and political attention.
Recently, his HHS announced that the FDA was authorizing the fall COVID vaccines only for “high risk groups”. His announcement, posted to X (formerly twitter), claims that vaccines will be available to all patients who want them “after consulting with their doctors.”
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Photo from here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html
I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with assholes. Because I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with all sorts of people.
I was at Berkeley for many years, and argued with all sorts of people–anarchists, Democrats, environmentalists, evangelicals, feminists, Libertarians, Maoists, Moonies (they were terrible-car–crash-can’t-look-away bad at arguing), Republicans, Stalinists, Trotskyites, vegetarians. If you’re paying attention, then you’ve noticed I argued with everyone, including people with whom I agreed, but I disagreed with them on some point that seemed important to me. And some of them, even people with whom I agreed, argued in a way that I’ve come to call “arguing like an asshole.” By the way, so did I from time to time (and not everyone with whom I disagreed argued like an asshole).
What does gender have to do with a city government’s ability to adapt, innovate, and learn?
At first glance, not much. Dynamic capabilities seem to point towards relatively abstract organisational qualities. But scratch the surface and you find they are shaped by who is in the room.
Here’s the puzzle: despite decades of evidence from Brazil, Peru, India, Sweden, and beyond, the link between gender and state capabilities is still overlooked in mainstream debate. Yet studies show that leaders’ gender influences how governments set priorities, manage resources, and build legitimacy. In this blog I look at dynamic capabilities through the lens of policy capacity, using gender as one example of a structuring condition that shapes how these capabilities are deployed. Ignoring this dimension means overlooking a vital part of how state capabilities work.
The accelerating ascent, ubiquity, and commercialization of artificial intelligence require a renewed focus on truly elite human capital if we are to safeguard the future of Western civilization—both from external adversaries like China and also, perhaps even more importantly, from ourselves, especially our postmodern and transhumanist tendencies.
We will need in the coming years an elite cadre of Americans residing at the top levels of national and state government and bureaucracy. And yet we are confronted by a very sad state of affairs across K-12 and postsecondary education, making the creation of such an elite class an increasingly difficult task.
Exhibit A of this problem was illustrated in a recent Atlantic article about the peak of elite credentialing institutions, Harvard. The article, titled “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” documents an alarming trend after decades of grade inflation. This excerpt helps give a sense of the problem’s progression: “In 2011, 60 percent of all grades were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020-21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent.”
The assassination of Charlie Kirk—a law-abiding man peacefully speaking his mind in a public place to a crowd of people gathered to hear him—has touched off a new debate about “cancel culture.” Some on the Right who are understandably disgusted by seeing some on the Left gloat about, or even justify, Kirk’s murder have attempted to get such people fired from their jobs, with success in a number of cases. In response, the Left has accused the Right of hypocrisy for reversing course on the cancel culture that it very recently deplored.
What are we to make of this? Are there any principles to guide us besides the one infamously associated with Lenin: “Who, whom?”
In the first place, there is a difference between cancel culture and the idea that there are just and reasonable limits on the freedom of speech. There is a big difference between getting someone fired for expressing a provocative view on a controversial public question and condoning—or even celebrating—a political assassination.
A free and democratic society can only survive if people feel free to express their views on questions of public import. But such a society cannot survive if we allow the approval of political murder to be normalized.
Hundreds of live music venues have closed. A string of once-popular festivals have been cancelled. Australia’s artists continue to be desperately underpaid.
The cost-of-living crisis has left our creative sector for dead, despite 73% of Australians saying the arts had improved their quality of life during the pandemic.
Art pays its way. It doesn’t just create joy and happiness for Australians and overseas visitors; it creates jobs and economic growth – on a shoestring budget compared to other industries.
The Australia Institute has written a submission to the NSW government ahead of its Art of Tax Reform summit next week.
Key recommendations:
Collect tax properly to pay for arts funding.
Lobby the federal government to reform the GST so it keeps up with economic growth, as it was originally designed to do.
Increase coal royalties and end fossil fuel subsidies in NSW.
Introduce Youth Cultural Passes, similar to the $200 Dine & Discover vouchers during COVID.
Introduce a Book Bounty, like the national bounty which was scrapped by the Howard government after 28 successful years.
Make art prizes and grants tax free.
“The cost of living crisis has had a devastating impact on the arts,” said Skye Predavec, Anne Kantor Fellow at The Australia Institute.
Power is the only measure of a politician that matters. How they win power. How they wield power. How they lose power. This new edition of an Australian classic features a new introduction by the author taking into account the latest developments in Australian politics.
Catch and Kill is an inside account of the beguiling and nomadic nature of that unholy trinity of politics. Taking us into the inner sanctum of state and national politics, Joel Deane investigates how four friends – Steve Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls – beat the factions, won office in Victoria, achieved progressive reforms, then tried to hijack Canberra. ‘We were’, Bracks says, ‘a government that could catch and kill its own’.
Drawing on dozens of interviews with key figures, Deane provides a candid insight into the triumphs and failures of the Bracks-Brumby government, as well as those of its federal and state counterparts. He also shines a light on the personalities behind these decisions – their ambitions, their passions and their disappointments.
Joel Deane joined us for our September 2025 John Cain Lunch to discuss the new edition of his book “Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power.” Watch the recording below.
Policy Hive is Per Capita’s early career policy network for policy professionals, students and anyone interested in learning more about how they can influence policy and politics to build an Australia based on fairness, shared prosperity and social justice. (Long time policy wonks also welcome!)
On Wednesday 17 September 2025 we explored how democracy can survive the rise of AI across industry and politics, with Peter Lewis, convener of the Centre of the Public Square. He is also executive director of the progressive strategic communications agency Essential Media and the founder of the collaborative engagement platform Civility.
Three paradigms for digital transformation: identity-first, user-first, and sovereignty-first
Digital transformation is often sold as a panacea for doing away with the ills of existing public services: sleek interfaces, no forms, no friction. In others words, doing away with bureaucacry. But the paradox is quite obvious: getting to “zero bureaucracy” takes a lot of bureaucracy. The real question isn’t whether we need it, but what kind — and how we design routines and infrastructures so that bureaucracy orchestrates public value rather than obstructs it or enables extraction of value from socities. This blog summarises my talk for a Public Digital organised event for policy makers from the Dominican Republic on September 11.
All organisations are, at their core, bundles of routines. These routines never exist in isolation: they co-evolve with infrastructures — laws, funding arrangements, political systems, and of course with digital infrastructres such as data registries or identity systems. Together, routines and infrastructures generate path dependencies that shape which innovations are possible and what kinds of public value can be produced. Once such patterns settle, they are remarkably difficult to change.
With the release of OpenAI’s Chat GPT-5, artificial intelligence has vaulted forward again. But this is no ordinary tech update. With each new development in this technology, America and the world edge closer to something resembling a world-historical revolution.
Technological and economic shifts have always marched hand in hand, but this wave of automation threatens to upend labor markets like never before, creating what historian Yuval Noah Harari chillingly calls a “useless class.” And in a nation already fractured and struggling to find its shared identity, it would be insane to think of such a transformation without acknowledging that it risks igniting unrest on a scale far beyond mere economic anxiety.
Policymakers must stop treating AI as a purely economic—or geopolitical—matter. They must treat it as a question of national survival.
Throughout history, as Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne remind us, “technological progress has vastly shifted the composition of employment.” John Maynard Keynes famously cautioned that the pain from these changes “often springs not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes.” Both observations may ring true today—but this rupture is unlike any before.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg returns from his holiday to talk about the National Climate Risk Assessment reveals about the future of the Australian economy. Plus: the tricky task of measuring inflation for sectors like health and aged care and why the government’s wellbeing budget is falling flat.
Tickets for our Revenue Summit at Parliament House in Canberra, featuring Hon Steven Miles MP, Senator Larissa Waters, Senator David Pocock, Dr Kate Chaney MP, Greg Jericho and more – are available now. You can buy second release tickets for just $109 via our website.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via Australia Institute Press.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
This blog was written by guest writer Riham Lotfi as part of our place-based organising work and community reporting project in Brent. Becoming a Brent Community Reporter has been more than just a role — it’s been a personal mission. As a mother, an educator, and a resident of Brent, I’ve always cared about social […]
As Bitcoin continues to carve out a larger and larger share of the global financial system, the question of what truly drives its price has never been more important. For years, commentators have pointed to “Fed liquidity” as the main force behind Bitcoin’s price action. But as I argue in my latest video, this explanation doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Instead, the evidence strongly suggests that fiscal flows—not monetary liquidity—are the true driver of Bitcoin’s long-term price trajectory.
Why “Fed Liquidity” Falls Short
In the post-COVID era, analysts have been quick to tie Bitcoin’s movements to changes in so-called Fed liquidity. Whether through quantitative easing (QE), reverse repos, the Treasury General Account (TGA), or reserve balances, the idea was that when the Fed injected liquidity, Bitcoin’s price would rise.
But there’s a fundamental flaw in this argument: Fed liquidity only swaps assets, it doesn’t add new ones. QE and related tools merely change the composition of private sector balance sheets; they don’t create new net financial assets. That means there’s no direct channel for these measures to bid up Bitcoin—or any other financial asset—in a sustainable way.
There is a growing urgency within the Trump Administration to take on what the president has called “the radical left lunatics” following the assassination of conservative icon Charlie Kirk. But despite much of the talk from the Right, including even from the administration itself, there is no easy way to dismantle the far-left’s networks. Defeating the forces arrayed against the American republic will require a detailed understanding of the enemy and a systematic plan to break up their networks, utilizing all methods of national power.
Defining Terms
The biggest initial problem the Trump Administration faces in confronting the radical Left is a refusal by the national security, federal law enforcement, and intelligence apparatuses to even recognize whom the president has identified as a threat.
This blog was written by guest writer Beanica Tripoli as part of our place-based organising work and community reporting project in Brent. As a Politics & International Relations master’s student who has always been passionate about social justice, it has been a privilege to work as a Brent Community Reporter with the Equality Trust. I’ve […]
On this episode of Follow the Money, former Labor Senator for New South Wales Doug Cameron speaks about the Australia-US relationship, the “madness” of AUKUS, and how the federal government can prepare for peace – not war.
The 2025 Laurie Carmichael Lecture was delivered on Wednesday 10 September and presented by the Carmichael Centre at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss are available now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Doug Cameron, former Labor Senator for New South Wales // @DougCameron51
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett
This poem was written by guest writer Barbara Kyei as part of our place-based organising work and community reporting project in Brent. Welcome to OUR Brent? Our commonality is for everyone to be welcomed Welcome not for what you are but rather who you are. Welcomed to our city Welcome to our community Welcomed into […]
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
When Prime Minister Carney agreed to drop the digital services tax under pressure from the United States, Europe was watching closely. Under President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, the US had already unleashed a diplomatic storm against its supposed ally — threatening to sanction EU officials over a European Union law, the Digital Services Act, that aims to increase accountability and limit the spread of illegal content on large platforms. It may seem like a risky time for bold policy leadership, but short-term trade agreements and other giveaways on tech issues will only invite further coercion to bend to the US’s will.
Today marks one year since the publication of the first Tasmanian State of Environment Report in 15 years.
This report provides critical health checks for Tasmania’s environment, which is fundamental to Tasmanians’ health and their economy.
The Tasmanian Government has had more than 12 months to address the threats the environment is facing, and based on the available information, nothing has changed.
The report raised the alarm for an environment in decline and facing multiple threats.
It found the majority of environmental indicators were ‘getting worse’ – ranging from deteriorating beaches and rapid native vegetation loss to the increase in animals and plants threatened with extinction.
Over a third of indicators are now classified as in ‘poor condition’, including Tasmania’s native bird populations.
The government agreed to prioritise developing a long-term vision and strategy for Tasmania’s environment, as recommended by the Tasmanian Planning Commission, to safeguard the long-term environmental health of the state.
It also agreed to prioritise developing an environmental data strategy, to assess which environmental laws need reform, and to improve native vegetation mapping and information.
“Without adequate government investment, the state’s iconic natural assets will continue to degrade, which will likely have a damaging effect on the state’s economy, employment and the health of Tasmanians,” said Eloise Carr, Director of The Australia Institute Tasmania.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a watershed moment in the contest of ideologies—and increasingly of peoples—in America.
On the one hand are what might be called the restorationists, who yearn for a common culture that has been eroding since the 1970s, and mostly vanished in the 2010s. The most recent example of this tendency is Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s press conference announcing that Charlie Kirk’s killer was captured. Cox issued a well-meaning exhortation to all Americans to “find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.” In this vision, Kirk’s brutal murder is an episode that shocks us as a people into pursuing greater concord and amity.
The governor should be credited with categorically rejecting political violence and laying out an optimistic vision. His prescription and analysis are technically correct—but also contextually and prudentially wrong. The restorationists have an aspiration but not a case. It’s a problem worth understanding.
Edmund Burke once wrote, “Circumstances…give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.” The circumstances in America now must be described accurately. There is no roughly equitable contest of sides, each with its own dangerous extremists. It is not, for example, Northern Ireland of a generation past. Instead, we are in a contest in which one side overwhelmingly reserves violence to itself and employs it freely.
On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated for the political sin of showing up on college campuses across our country and taking and answering questions. These queries came from students and guests whether they were allies or adversaries—or simply curious-minded Americans engaging in their unalienable birthright to engage in civics openly.
Charlie Kirk was martyred for the free exercise of his First Amendment rights. And the right to free speech, which he championed, was critically wounded in the attack.
The aftermath marks a turning point in our nation’s “house divided” future.
Let’s do as Charlie did masterfully and probe the mindset of the other—in this case his assassin’s and that of his like-minded enablers. It was Charlie’s way. It is the Socratic way. It is the Western Civ, the American way.
Who will rid us of this meddlesome apostle of free expression?
Progressives don’t like to think of themselves as King Henry, the man who uttered the fateful words that caused four loyalists to murder Thomas Becket. But where else can their constant denunciations of Republicans as “Nazis” or “fascists” lead?
A young man, who was being groomed to be a moral monster by our culture and the passions it unleashes, heard the dog whistle call to arms, seized the opportunity of a public event in his home state, and did what was collectively seen by his ilk as necessary and proper.
The Discipline of Political Economy and the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) welcome submissions for our forthcoming Teaching Political Economy Symposium to be held on Monday December 8th at the University of Sydney. This workshop is being held as part of a suite of events celebrating the 50th anniversary of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. In 1975, a full program of study in political economy was offered for the first time at an Australian university, following a significant student-staff campaign for a pluralist and practical economics curriculum. On this important anniversary, we seek submissions on the past, present and future of political economy pedagogy and education both at Sydney and in other institutions in Australia and internationally. Papers presented at the workshop will be considered for inclusion in a dedicated winter 2026 issue of JAPE.
We welcome the submission of abstracts in the areas of:
The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: politics is about what is good.
We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—an unrivalled introduction to politics: “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.”
Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that there are many goods and many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth. Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.
Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: if there is some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good—if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless—it is clear that this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.
The assessment describes “severe” risks to defence and national security; regional, urban and remote communities; health and the environment; as well as “very high” risks to the economy and food production.
These include:
1.5 million Australians living along the coastline would be under threat of rising sea levels by 2050.
Deaths caused by heatwaves will soar by more than 400% in places like Sydney and Darwin.
63 “nationally significant” climate risks identified, including threats to social cohesion, supply chains and essential services.
Australia Institute research shows burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) compromises the fundamental systems underpinning Australia’s security, wellbeing and prosperity.
Coal and gas exports from Australia are also playing a major role in the destruction of the world’s climate, and climate change is having a devastating impact on Australia’s neighbours in the Pacific.
“Coal and gas exports from Australia are playing a major role in destroying the world’s climate, with devastating consequences for all the systems underpinning the security, wellbeing and prosperity of Australians,” said Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute.
“Climate change is making fires, floods and heatwaves more frequent and extreme. This isn’t just devastating in itself; it is driving our insurance premiums through the roof and making many homes uninsurable.
Charlie Kirk died as he lived, publicly debating his fellow citizens.
He had an unparalleled talent for activism, organizing, and fundraising, and for this he was respected in the halls of power. But his signature act, from the beginning of his career to the day of his death, was the basic activity of a citizen in a republic: arguing with his fellow countrymen about what was true and false and what should guide our common life. Indefatigably confident in the importance and efficacy of face-to-face conversations and confrontations, he embodied the political way of life at its most elevated and most fundamental level.
When it came to the roots of the West and the source of meaning in his own life, Kirk favored Jerusalem over Athens, Scripture over Socrates. He never neglected or subordinated his witness to Christ, the true Logos, to the tumult of politics. Nevertheless, as his name suggests (Kirk meaning “church”; Charles meaning “husband” or “free man” or “common man”), Charlie Kirk was both a Christian and a testament to what Aristotle wrote long ago: we are political animals because we have logos, the faculty of speech and reason by which we discern what is good and bad, just and unjust. And it is our partnership in these things that constitutes our domestic and political communities.
Despite the remarkable contribution of various Australian scholars to degrowth scholarly work this century, a formal Australian degrowth movement only emerged with the launch of Degrowth Network Australia (DNA) in February 2023. DNA has inspired various urban and regional groups and Australian media interest, especially given that the controversial and often misrepresented term is becoming visible within publications and research activities of the European Union and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Routledge Handbook of Degrowth published mid- 2025 contains 35 chapters by 56 international contributors. At around 550 pages it is expensive to purchase as a hardback, but the whole collection was released open access simultaneously – and a more affordable paperback will follow in mid-2026. This means it is readily available for use in university courses, for degrowth and degrowth-interested practitioners, for reading and activist groups, for researchers, policy makers and anyone else interested in this relatively novel movement.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk’s latest foray into global far-right politics, and the devastating impact of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda.
This episode was recorded on Monday 15 September.
After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss are available now via the Australia Institute website.
Host: Emma Shortis, Director of International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Sep 15-21, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9745
