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Public Procurement: Growing British industry, Jobs and Skills BetterforUs Consultation Response supported by the Structural Inequalities Alliance and Equality Trust Summary This document has been produced by BetterforUs, a national campaign run by Aspire Community Works, a Real Living Wage community business with seventeen years’ experience of delivering public contracts in London and the South […]

The post Response to the Public Procurement Consultation appeared first on Equality Trust.

It marks the greatest giveaway of Australian resources ever and will undermine the nation’s energy security, while driving up energy prices.

Environment Minister Murray Watt has not provided details of the conditions on Woodside to protect the ancient, priceless Murujuga rock art or how much Woodside succeeded in watering down those conditions during 12 weeks of secret negotiations. However, it is clear that acid gas emissions from the project will continue corroding Murujuga until 2070.

Massive emissions

The approval will add around 90 million tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere annually, equivalent to building 12 new coal power stations.

Undermine energy security

The extension allows Woodside to export enough gas to supply Western Australia for around 90 years, despite WA facing looming gas shortages and price increases. Analysis here.

My first introduction to American religious debates was a course taught by a prof who came from Yale’s American Studies program (I ended up taking several courses from him), and, as is oddly appropriate for someone from Yale, he was deep into the theological disputes of the 17th century—Yale was founded because of those disputes.

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published September 11, 2025.

Josh Ryan-Collins, Professor in Economics and Finance, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

It has been almost a decade since Mark Carney put climate change on the agenda of central banks and financial authorities with his ‘Breaking the tragedy of the Horizon’ speech made at Lloyds of London Insurers. Carney noted that the catastrophic impacts of climate change would be felt too far into the future for financial institutions or policy makers to shift their decision-making today, but that “once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late”.

Carney’s solution was to leverage the power of the market by helping financial firms better understand the risks they faced from climate change:

“Any efficient market reaction to climate change risks, as well as the technologies and policies to address them, must be founded on transparency of information. A ‘market’ in the transition to a 2-degree world can be built. It has the potential to pull forward adjustment — but only if information is available…”(Carney 2015, 12)

Charlie Kirk was a loving and dedicated husband and father; a pious, learned, and evangelizing Christian; and a hero, inspiration, and mentor to millions of young Americans trying to make sense of our turbulent political times. Many knew him much better (and for much longer) than I, but in recent years he had become my friend. He was always on the move, and yet I found he still managed, over and over again, to be generous with time he didn’t seem to have. He was a patriot—a vital and irreplaceable part of the Right in America. Because he was tireless, passionate, inspiring, and, above all, effective, he was a target. Now, he’s gone.

Charlie was a Lincoln fellow, supporter, and passionate defender of Claremont. When he attended our Lincoln fellowship in 2021, he was already one of the most famous men in American politics. His security detail was always close. And yet, busy and renowned as he was, he was a model Claremont fellowship participant. He was there to learn because he wanted to continue to hone his understanding and arguments on behalf of America and her founding principles.

The Wrap with Amy Remeikis

The world is at a crossroads and so far, Australia is reacting by sticking its head in the sand and pretending nothing is changing.

Leaders from across the globe are about to meet at the 80th UN General Assembly, in a nation which has cancelled the visas of Palestinian Authority delegates, is disappearing people off its streets, carrying out extrajudicial death sentences in its waters, and openly threatening war.

These are not normal times. Pretending they are, is part of what got us here in the first place.

The meeting will kick off on Tuesday, when the incoming president, Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign affairs minister, will outline her agenda which runs until September 8 next year. She is taking the reins at a time where the UN director at the International Crisis Group, Richard Gowan, says “illusions have been rather stripped away” about the world, and how people feel about its leaders. “It’s now very, very clear that both financially and politically, the UN faces huge crises,” he said.

“Now the question is, is there a way through that?”

And indeed, what role does Australia play in that?

Australia is part of the nations who have agreed to give conditional recognition to Palestine, but it remains unclear at this point what that will look like at the meeting.

Woodside Energy is apparently baulking at strict new limits on nitrous oxide emissions the Albanese government wants to impose on its massive gas project to protect the ancient Indigenous rock art at Murujuga in WA.

The emissions limits are the “major sticking point” in the way of final approval for Woodside’s North West Shelf gas development, according to the AFR Rock art protections behind Woodside North West Shelf gas project delay.

Which begs the question: why is this a negotiation?

It tells you a lot about who wields power in Australia that Woodside is being allowed to haggle in secret over the conditions.

In May, Environment Minister Murray Watt gave provisional approval to a 45-year extension of the oil and gas giant’s liquid natural gas export hub on the Burrup, and an associated gas power plant.

This was subject to “strict conditions” – but they were never made public.

Supposedly, the secrecy was imposed to provide “procedural fairness” to Woodside. The gas giant was given 10 days to respond. It missed the deadline.

Four months later, the conditions are still cloaked in secrecy – and Woodside is still chipping away at them behind closed doors. So much for transparency.

Woodside’s gas facilities are adjacent to what many experts consider the most significant Indigenous rock art site in the world: The Murujuga Cultural Landscape.

In a democracy, the right to vote is a cornerstone of civic participation—yet for unhoused individuals across Canada, this right remains largely theoretical. Despite legislative guarantees under the Canada Elections Act, practical barriers continue to disenfranchise one of the country’s most marginalized populations. This article explores the persistent challenges that individuals experiencing homelessness face in accessing the ballot, using the Waterloo Region in Southwestern Ontario during the 2025 Ontario General Election as a case study to better understand these barriers across Canada. Through an analysis of systemic, logistical, and social obstacles, including restrictive identification requirements, inconsistent policy implementation, transportation challenges, and social stigma, this study aims to identify evidence-based strategies for advocacy and outreach that increase voter participation among unhoused individuals. The study combines a thematic analysis of interviews with representatives of organizations in direct engagement with unhoused people, alongside a comprehensive literature review, and offers recommendations to bridge the gap between electoral rights and electoral access for unhoused individuals in the Waterloo Region and across Canada.

This study was conducted as a community partnership with Waterloo Region Community Legal Services (WRCLS) and completed as part of the Policy Research in Action course in the Master of Applied Politics program at Wilfrid Laurier University. 

Scandals have wracked Bell’s tenure, and a variety of surveys have shown widespread dissatisfaction with the ANU’s current leadership.

But the problems at the ANU are systemic.

They will not be solved with the departure of any one figure. Indeed, the governance crisis at Australia’s universities is sector-wide. In May, Dr Joshua Black and I wrote that the ANU’s rolling crises were predictable because they stem from its flawed governance structure.

Like all of Australia’s universities, the ANU lacks effective mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and representation. Every new scandal the sector has seen in the last four months is further proof.

The core problem is a vacuum of accountability. In the university sector, no one is held responsible for failure, at least no one at the top.

While vice-chancellors have CEO-like million-dollar pay packets, the university councils they answer to do not face nearly the same scrutiny as a public company’s board of directors.

The economic headwinds facing Canada are greater than the sum of its parts. The pace and sporadic nature of the United States’ trade war with Canada is unprecedented and has recently dominated headlines, but the underlying structural challenges demand careful attention. The Covid-19 Pandemic-induced economic shock can be blamed for the acute inflationary jump in the cost of housing and food, but the interlinked productivity and cost-of-living crises have been brewing for more than a decade.¹ The OECD predicts Canada’s per capita GDP growth will be last amongst OECD economies in the next 40 years.² Nearly half of Canadians report difficulties meeting day-to-day expenses due to rising costs.³ Recall it was these economic crises that catapulted the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre into dominant polling territory before Trump’s victory changed the narrative.