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READERS NOTE: I'm not going to cover this piece asking for Subscriptions. If you get the importance of this moment, you'll get the importance of what I've done this week, and the past two months or so. I'm making big moves you'll hear about soon. I don't need money for me, I need money to expand my operations. So take a subscription, and if you're rich take out a bigger subscription. You can also tip.

Since I will be getting a bunch of new readers for this piece, I’m trying to explain every single moving part so this is very long. I will certainly do abbreviated mainstream Op Eds based on this piece. Skip ahead if you know financial markets well.

In the world that emerged after the Cold War, power moved with container ships and capital markets. Liberalism’s invisible hand was fortified by a visible navy, and its logic was one of frictionless flow: of goods, information, money, and governance standards. The sea was its main artery, and the U.S. Navy its steward.

Today, that world is cracking. Capital markets are fragmenting. Supply chains are shortening. Naval supremacy is increasingly contested not by peer fleets but by $10,000 drones and firmware updates. And, perhaps most significantly, ordinary people—the supposed beneficiaries of the globalized order—are turning against it.

What we are witnessing is not simply a redistribution of power, but a transformation in the very grammar of geopolitical influence. Economic integration no longer secures peace; in many cases, it foments resentment. Technological innovation no longer reinforces traditional hierarchies; it bypasses them. And military might no longer projects primarily from the sea—it radiates from code, chips, and algorithms.

This is a world no longer ruled by frictionless flows, but by points of friction—strategic chokeholds where denial is cheap and control is asymmetric.

The architecture of globalization was strategic, not merely economic. The United States underwrote an open trading system, because it extended American influence while suppressing the rise of challengers. Pax Americana was a naval enterprise. Aircraft carriers were not just tools of war; they were guarantees of commerce.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton released the modelling behind his proposed gas tax ahead of last night’s election debate with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Labor is now the only party that hasn’t rebutted the multi-national gas exporters’ ridiculous claim that there is a shortage of gas in Australia when we are exporting huge quantities of it.

“Peter Dutton’s proposal to put a tax on gas exports is proof of just how fast the world is changing now that Donald Trump has ripped up the free trade rule book,” said Dr Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute.

“Australians have been told for a decade that we had a shortage of gas, but now Peter Dutton is rightfully arguing Australia has an abundance of gas and that all we need to do is to tax gas exports to ensure our gas flows first to Australian businesses and households. This is a big shift.

“Economics 101 says governments should tax things we want less of and subsidise things we want more of.

“So far in this election, we have seen the Coalition proposing a tax on gas exports and Labor proposing a subsidy for home batteries. It seems that after 10 years of ignoring economics, the major parties are starting to take energy policy seriously again.

This is the highest it has ever been, far above the 25,000 voters per MP in 1903 (the first election where most women could vote).

In the intervening 122 years, parliament has significantly expanded twice: from 74 to 121 seats in 1949, and from 125 to 148 in 1984.

Both times, the number of people per seat sat at a then record high: 64,000 and 75,000 respectively. While the number of registered voters is nine times that in 1903, the number of electorates has only doubled.

Australia’s voter–to-MP ratio is higher than Canada’s, the UK’s, and much higher than New Zealand’s. Across the ditch there is a member of parliament for every 30,000 voters, four times more representation than in Australia.

As the number of voters per MP grows, the access any individual voter will have to their member necessarily shrinks – Australia Institute polling in 2018 found that only 13% of Australians had ever spoken to their local MP.

The more voters there are in an electorate, the larger a campaign needs to be to make any difference to the result, making it more difficult for grassroots campaigns to have an impact.

Background Wealth is deeply unequal in the UK and getting more so; recent analysis also suggests this increase is particularly stark for younger generations. Within that inequality, the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey indicates a large ethnic wealth inequality. Household wealth holdings by ethnicity vary enormously, from a low of £34,000 where the head of […]

The post The Challenge of Ethnic Wealth inequalities appeared first on Equality Trust.

Australia’s beleaguered university sector is never far from the headlines these days. Former Labor leader and current University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Bill Shorten probably doesn’t envy his former ministerial colleagues who are currently on the campaign trail, but nonetheless, he’s in the news today.

The Canberra Times reports that Shorten is announcing a new voluntary redundancy program for UC’s professional staff. “We are not looking to achieve certain targets nor have we identified further positions as excess to requirements,” he told reporters.

UC has saved about $30 million by letting go of 150 staff to date. But why were these cuts necessary in the first place? Like most universities, UC has spent big on discretionary things that aren’t education or research.

Its 2023 annual report shows that the university spent $16.7 million on consultants’ fees, $9 million on ‘outsource management fees’, $697,000 on ‘sponsorships’, nearly $4.4 million on travel and just shy of $3 million on advertising.

The above graph shows that those items cost more in total than the 150 jobs that UC has since cut to repair its deficit.

News of Britain’s disastrous 30-year experiment with mass migration appears to have left the rainy little island for the sunny uplands of America, where it was picked up by JD Vance. Speaking at a recent Washington, D.C. summit hosted by Andreessen Horowitz, the vice president argued that Britain’s economy is stagnating due to high levels of immigration, and accused Western nations of growing “lazy” by relying on imported “cheap labor” as a replacement for productivity.

The extensive “Notes on the Crises Investigative Journalism Source Wish List” can be found here. All listed items are important to me. As always, Sources can contact me over email or over signal (a secure and encrypted text messaging app) — linked here. My Signal username is “NathanTankus.01” and you can find me by searching for my username. I will speak to sources on whatever terms they require (i.e. off the record, Deep Background, on Background etc.)

This leads to messy disendorsements and a flurry of bad press. When these disendorsements happen late (after the “close of nominations”, after which no new candidates are accepted), the candidate still appears on the ballot as a member of the party that disendorsed them.

Such was the case for Pauline Hanson, who won the 1996 election while listed as a Liberal candidate. The Queensland Liberals expelled her only after nominations had closed in response to highly controversial comments she made to local journalists about Aboriginal issues. Hanson was one of five independents elected in 1996, including others who quit or were expelled from their political party.

Other times, candidates are disendorsed before the close of nominations – which means the party can choose a replacement candidate. In 2016, the seat of Fremantle lost both its Liberal and its Labor candidates, the former for controversial statements about Indigenous politics and same-sex marriage, and the latter for failing to disclose previous criminal convictions concerning drink driving and assaulting a police officer. The replacement Labor candidate, Josh Wilson, won the seat and holds it to this day.

At the upcoming election, three former party MPs are defending their seats: Andrew Gee, who left the Nationals in protest over their opposition to the Voice; and Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough who quit the Liberal Party after losing pre-selection.

Tonight is the first televised debate between Albanese and Dutton. It will go out live on Sky News at 7.30pm.

But leaders’ debates aren’t the crucial campaign events they used to be. Whether they are worthwhile depends on the format – a scrappy and personal debate turns politics into a blood sport, and alienates voters from the political process itself.

Prime minister Robert Menzies abstained from the first ever televised election debate back in 1958, but his deputy Harold Holt and senior minister Billy McMahon faced off against Labor’s leader H. V. Evatt and deputy Arthur Calwell. Barely 18% of TV viewers bothered tuning in, according to one historian.

Prime ministers and opposition leaders didn’t start debating during elections until 1984. A lacklustre PM Bob Hawke faced off against opposition leader Andrew Peacock, who managed to win the debate but not the election. Hawke chose not to debate John Howard in 1987 but performed spectacularly in a rematch against Peacock in 1990. It was, by Hawke’s own account, the ‘highlight of the campaign’.

On this episode of After America, Dr Richard Denniss joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the economic impact of Trump’s tariffs, why Australia has never really had a ‘free’ trade agreement with America, and whether the Australian defence and foreign policy establishment can break free of its old assumptions about how the world works.

This discussion was recorded on Monday 7 April 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

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

Guest: Richard Denniss, Executive Director, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss

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

Show notes:

Polling – President Trump, security and the US–Australian alliance, the Australia Institute (March 2025)

Billionaires are thriving, corporations have raked in massive profits off our cost of living crisis, and global shareholder payouts are the highest they’ve ever been. Yet we’re being asked to swallow billions in cuts. 

The post This Year, We Could Choose an Alternative to Austerity appeared first on Equality Trust.

“Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of Liquified Natural Gas but, despite this fact, the largely foreign-owned gas industry has been making the bizarre claim that there is a shortage of gas in Australia,” said Dr Denniss.

“Peter Dutton’s rejection of that silly claim, and his proposal to tax gas exports to encourage greater local supply, is a watershed in Australian energy policy debate.”

Research by The Australia Institute shows that more than 80 percent of gas produced in Australia has been used for exports, and more than half of those gas exports were given away, royalty-free, to the gas exporters.

“Putting a tax on gas exports is an easy way to ensure that more of Australia’s gas flows to Australians and that they pay less for it,” said Dr Denniss.

“Introducing a cap on gas exports as well would be an even better way to both protect Australians from cost-of-living pressures and protect the climate from increased emissions from burning gas.

“The opportunity for Labor to expand on the Coalition’s policy is enormous.

“For decades, the major parties in Australia have seemed afraid to put the interests of Australian taxpayers ahead of the profits of the fossil fuel industry.

“But now that Peter Dutton has made the first step, the opportunities for the new parliament are unprecedented.

Princeton University has invited former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett to speak on Monday April 7 at 7pm. His visit is part of his tour across North American campuses, including Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, which coincides with the deportations, detainments, and disappearances of students at these same campuses by the Trump administration for protesting Israel’s war on the Palestinian people.

In this press conference, the New Jersey community of Palestinian, African-American, Jewish and civil rights advocates stand against the invitation of a man who has a history of racist policies and racist rhetoric. Bennett should be in prison, not in Princeton.

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It can be hard to wrest one's attention from Trump's destruction of the world financial markets, but this morning the United State has moved one step closer to an absolute showdown between Trump's executive branch and the federal judiciary. The way it is shaping up also has the potential to tell us everything we need to know about the Roberts Court's willingness to well and truly destroy U.S. constitutional democracy.

Last week, federal District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump regime to do everthing possible to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison to the United States by 11:59 pm Eastern on April 7, 2025 – tonight. Today, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld this order, refusing the Trump executive's request for a stay, a pause in its taking effect. Both Xinis's opinion below and Judge Thacker's opinion in support of the Fourth Circuit decision deserve to be read in full. Thacker's bottom line:

The Tasmanian salmon industry has conceded that  – following a recent mass death event on the state’s east coast – salmon from diseased commercial pens are being sold for human consumption.

It comes just days after the Albanese government and Dutton coalition worked together to ram through amendments to the Environmental Protection and Biosecurity Conservation Act, weakening the nation’s environment laws, specifically to protect the compromised salmon industry.

Questions now need to be answered by the federal Minister for Fisheries, Julie Collins, who is also the local member of Franklin in Southern Tasmania and has previously brushed aside problems with the salmon industry as a state issue.

It is now open for one of the multiple state ministers responsible for the Tasmanian Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DNRE), including Eric Abetz and Jane Howlett, to show leadership and inform everyone what, if any, steps they will take to protect the Tasmanian community and economy from an industry that is out of control.

“The Saturday Paper’s revelations are deeply disturbing. Anyone still eating salmon should beware,” said Eloise Carr, Director, The Australia Institute Tasmania.

“Salmon Tasmania has admitted that diseased fish are being sold for human consumption. It is now also apparent that fish full of antibiotics are being sold on supermarket shelves.

Sushant Acharya, Ozge Akinci, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, and Paolo A. Pesenti

Introduction

Do you know how to counter misinformation? Here is a decision tree framework and templates for prebunking and debunking.

These resources are from the report Countering Misinformation about Refugees and Migrants.

Templates

How-to Template: Prebunking Anticipated Misinformation

How-to Template: Prebunking Anticipated Misinformation (1 pg PDF)

Hello readers, apologies for my extended absence. It has been a little more than three weeks since my last piece, simultaneously published by Notes On The Crises and Rolling Stone, assessing the extremely alarming implications of the Federal Government taking 80.5 million dollars right out of New York City’s bank account. This temporary hiatus came out of a large set of background organizational and investigative reasons. The organizational reasons include some exciting expansion of Notes on the Crises which I will be able to go into detail about soon. While I will have updated on payments system issues later this week, some of the most challenging aspects of my investigative reporting are still ongoing. Thank you for bearing with me and stay tuned: I think you’ll find that what I have coming is worth the wait. Of course, I have a lot to catch up on…

In 2016, ABC election analyst Antony Green ruefully remarked that it ‘seems impossible to cover an election without referring to bellwether seats’.

A ‘bellwether’ seat is one that predicts the overall election result. For forty years, whichever party won the regional NSW seat of Eden-Monaro also won government as a whole.

But elections – and journalistic fads – change quickly, and 2016 would prove to be the bellwether’s last hurrah. As Green explained, a seat can end up as a bellwether by pure coincidence, not any underlying property of the seat itself. And by the time the bellwether seat is decided, the overall election has usually already been called.

The end of the bellwether seat’s time in the sun is a reminder that what matters are the dynamics in individual electorates, not political cliches or outdated rules of thumb.

‘Bellwether seats’ are so last decade. According to the media database NewsBank, the proportion of metropolitan commercial newspapers using the term ‘bellwether’ to describe political processes during federal election campaigns grew more than threefold between 2001 and 2007. The number of articles was relatively high in 2010, followed by a modest decline in 2013.

References to ‘bellwether seats’ nearly doubled again in 2016.

Last week, RFK Jr's HHS made headlines as deep cuts saw over 10,000 staff laid off across the department. The move contrasted with RFK’s claim that he would “end the chronic disease epidemic”- although not with his other campaign promise, to take “a break” from infectious disease research for “about eight years”.

To most logical people, RFK’s two stated ambitions appear to conflict with each other. How can we possibly tackle the chronic illness crisis, while slashing- even halting- funding for medical research into infectious disease? Since 2020, it’s only become more clear than ever that infectious diseases like EBV, HIV, HPV, herpes, syphilis, and now COVID-19 lead to chronic illness.

President Trump has put into words what everyone in Washington was already thinking: there is a very real possibility of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities this summer. They would probably be led by Israel, with U.S. support and the quiet acquiescence of several Arab partners allowing the use of their airspace. It would be an enormous undertaking to blow up hardened underground sites in multiple locations at long distances, but the Israelis are almost certainly prepared and capable, having explored this option many times before. It’s probable that they briefed the Trump campaign in the months leading up to the election, setting out the most likely options and contingency scenarios. In the intervening months, it’s been a matter of the administration getting the right team in place at the National Security Council and waiting to see how Iran responds. 

Sushant Acharya, Ozge Akinci, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, and Paolo A. Pesenti

Sushant Acharya, Ozge Akinci, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, and Paolo A. Pesenti

A competitive and diverse news industry is key to a democratic society, keeping institutions accountable and transparent. But the ability of Australia’s Fourth Estate to perform that role is increasingly in doubt.

Australia was once labelled the “land of the newspaper” by British visitors, with a flourishing and diverse news industry, but for over a century its newspaper market has only become more concentrated and less competitive. In 1903 there were 21 daily newspapers in the capital cities, with 17 different owners; By the 1950s it was 15, with ten different owners. Now it’s even worse.

Introduction

For those who want a truthful discussion, yet may sometimes struggle to respond to false claims, this report, Countering misinformation about refugees and migrants: An evidence-based framework, is designed to help you know what to do and when.

With an easy-to-follow decision tree and how-to examples, this report can equip you to respond across a range of situations— and lays the groundwork for you to create responses aligned with your own aims.

False narratives about refugees and migrants are increasingly shaping public opinion—both in Australia and globally. Understanding how misinformation works, and knowing when and how to respond, is crucial for fostering informed, fact-based discussions. Source

While the focus is on addressing misinformation in the Australian debate about refugees and migration, the framework can be adapted for use in other countries and across a variety of issues.

What City Observatory Did This Week

A Non-Denial Denial:  An independent traffic analysis of the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project shows that it won’t solve the actual traffic bottleneck between Portland and Vancouver.  In response, bridge advocates have offered a statement purporting to dispute the study, which actually doesn’t deny its accuracy.

I loathe putting my thesis first (the thesis-first tradition is directly descended from people who didn’t actually believe that persuasion is possible), but here I will. The way that a lot of liberals, progressives, and pro-democracy people are talking about GOP support for authoritarianism is neither helpful nor accurate.

JUAREZ, Mexico – On New Year’s Eve 2020, as President-elect Joe Biden was at home in Delaware celebrating his imminent move into the White House, a mob of some 300 Cubans stormed out of Juárez, Mexico, in a mad banzai charge over one of the international bridges toward El Paso, Texas. 

They swept past Mexican border guards, leapt pell-mell the wrong way over Mexican pay turnstiles, and sprinted for America in a crisscrossing stampede through traffic over the bridge lanes.

But alas, the outgoing Donald Trump was still in office, and his U.S. Customs and Border Protection Mobile Field Force, already riot-ready and waiting behind heavy concrete blocks tipped by concertina wire, stopped the migrant charge cold. Bunched up behind the barricades, the foiled mob loosed a telling chant: 

“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”

“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter. 

It was clear the Reserve Bank was unwilling to make a decision on Tuesday because of uncertainty regarding the leveling of tariffs by the Trump administration.

Although it was clear even at the time that Trump’s tariff policy would result in a slowing of the global economy and risk rising unemployment here in Australia, now that the scale of the tariffs is known, the RBA should reconvene and cut rates rather than wait until May 19-20.

The Reserve Bank should get on the front foot and do what markets and economists know is an almost certain rate cut.

Inflation is well within the target. Indeed, should the inflation figures for the first three months of this year be only slightly below average, the official CPI risks falling below 2%.

“The risks of the economy slowing more than anticipated are now heightened due to the Trump tariffs,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.

“The Reserve Bank was wrong not to cut rates on Tuesday. The Australia Institute has been calling for those cuts to help bolster spending and deliver relief to households who have suffered from price rises that are not of their own doing.

“Waiting until nearly the end of May is far too long. The RBA should be nimble enough to realise that the tariffs levied by the USA are an unprecedented move that is already sending shockwaves through the world’s economy.

“It should get out in front and cut rates now rather than wait for Australia’s economy to be damaged further.”

IBR and Metro effectively admit critics are right about problems with their traffic modeling

The real traffic problems on I-5 are outside the IBR project area, and won’t be solved by the $7.5 billion project

The documented errors in traffic modeling undercut the case for this megaproject, and show it would make traffic and pollution worse and would be a tragic waste of resources.

In October, the Just Crossing Alliance released a scathing report from national traffic expert Norm Marshall, finding that the traffic modeling for the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge project is badly flawed, and that the project will do nothing to relieve chronic congestion in I-5, because the critical bottleneck lies outside the project area.  As Marshall said succinctly:

“The congestion is caused by bottlenecks to the south—at North Lombard in the southbound a.m. peak and at Victory Boulevard in the p.m. northbound peak, and there is no possibility that widening the bridge can address those problems.”

James Hankins proposes a guest worker program that would address a half-century of shortcomings in American mass immigration policy. In its rare combination of hardheadedness and empathy, his argument calls to mind Victor Davis Hanson’s 2003 memoir/essay Mexifornia. Hankins is writing neither for economists nor for international lawyers, but for people who actually live in America and wish to do right by their neighbors, including the most recently arrived among them. This is going to be difficult.

We should be clear what Hankins means by “guest worker.” Aren’t illegal immigrants guest workers already? They are guests, after a fashion, and they do work. The expression “guest worker” means something different. Though the specifics can vary from country to country, the term means someone who is in the country where he works on sufferance. A guest worker has the right to work, but not necessarily the right to stay or become a citizen. Guest worker is an intermediate category between citizen and foreigner.

Hankins argues that elaborating such a special status for people would fix a few aspects of the present system that are especially unfair and perverse. By definition, illegal migrants do not belong here legally, but after long residence they may well belong here, and only here, culturally. What is more, their American-born children belong here unambiguously.

Full preferential voting is a proud Coalition reform – one that benefits every political persuasion

Compulsory voting and full preferential voting make up the backbone of Australian democracy, and protect us from voter suppression and disengagement seen in other countries. We owe both to the parties of the centre-right, what would become the Liberal–National Coalition.

Compulsory voting ensures that most Australians participate in elections. It removes the incentive for nasty campaigns to demoralise people so they do not bother to vote at all and deliberate maladministration to make voting so unpleasant for targeted groups that turnout is suppressed.

Both deliberate voter suppression and poor voter turnout are seen in countries without compulsory voting.

The reform was introduced federally in 1924 via a private member’s bill from the Nationalist Party reformer HJM Payne, nine years after a conservative government adopted it in Queensland. In the 1922 election, voter turnout was just under 60%; In 1925 – the first under compulsory voting – it rose to over 90%.

Why full preferential voting ensures your vote can’t be ‘wasted’

As for preferential voting, its great benefit is that it ensures that Australians cannot “waste” their vote. Under full preferential voting, Australians number every candidate according to their preference.

When newspapers began shutting down in big numbers a decade ago, it was hoped that moving online would broaden news diversity and ownership.

Sadly, the opposite has happened.

A new Australia Institute Discussion Paper reveals that many newspapers have moved online in name only.

It also found:

• 11 out of Australia’s 20 biggest cities have just one daily or weekly print newspaper.
• Five of Australia’s eight capital cities have no competition in print news.
• In 2008, there were just over 500 newspapers in Australia. In the following decade 106 shut.
• The COVID pandemic was a mass-extinction event for Australian newspapers, with a further net decline of 184.
• In 2024, 29 Australian Local Government Areas lacked a single local news outline, either in print or online.

“The vast majority of newspapers which stopped printing and told readers they were moving online have become little more than a social media page and subsection of a capital city newspaper website,” said Stephen Long, Senior Fellow and Contributing Editor at The Australia Institute.

“There are now many towns with no news outlet since the local paper shut down.

“That’s been a disaster for local journalism and local storytelling.

“Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was one of those who said newspapers moving online would lead to additional news diversity and avenues to competition.

“In the ten years since, the opposite has happened.