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Our current agri-food system is unsustainable. It contributes to at least one third of global greenhouse gas emissions and agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation. Meanwhile, 20-40% of agricultural land is degraded, with declining soil health a key food security concern. 2.83 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet and in countries such as the UK, US, and Australia, around 50% of calories consumed come from ultra-processed foods.

From the fallout from Adelaide Writers’ Week, to our gun research referenced several times in Parliament, we had a busy start to the year. Watch just a few of our media appearances from January 2026.

The post January 2026 Media Highlights appeared first on The Australia Institute.

The soaring cost of educating high school students is driven by the unusually high number of Australian students who go to private schools and the unusually high prices of those private schools.

It costs Australian families $4,967 per year to send a child to high school, almost four times the OECD average. This figure is the average for all families with a child at high school. Families who send their children to private schools are paying even more, with fees now reaching up to $55,000 per child, per year.

Key findings:

• More than 40% of Australian high school students now attend private schools. If the current trend continues, most Australian high school students will attend private schools by 2055.
• Despite increasingly high fees, private schools don’t offer a substantially better education than public schools. Research shows gaps in test results are mainly due to differences in the socio-economic background of students, rather than the quality of the teaching.
• Private schools that have enough money to build swimming pools and horse stables still receive significant public support. At the same time, public schools face a funding shortfall of over $4 billion.

“Governments are throwing public money at private schools that clearly don’t need it,” said Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

Australian politics is often unedifying. But watching the latest spill-non-spill-spill (or Schrödinger’s spill, if you will – it being both on and not on at the same time) play out, while Sussan Ley’s team beg for their jobs in a WhatsApp chat group (this columnist is not on the invite list) seems yet another low point.

We have a Nationals MP challenging a leader without canvassing any votes (either a stalking horse move or just another Queensland MP tantrum) and a Liberal Party unable to work out if it has a challenger just yet, or if it wants to wait until the election review is released and that dust settles before stepping in.

The opposition has a stand-in shadow cabinet, while its MPs claim it is still auditioning for government. Branson is riding high on the discontent.

Meanwhile, the government preaches social cohesion. All while preparing to welcome the Israeli president – who posed for content signing bombs that were later dropped on civilians in Gaza – and having just passed hate speech laws that make criticism of Israel’s actions against Palestine a potential crime.

Approximately 10-15% of U.S. couples of reproductive age experience infertility. One response is to pursue in vitro fertilization (IVF), which is fraught with many negative ethical and practical implications. Another way is to get to the root cause of infertility. Shouldn’t that be the MAHA way?

President Trump expanded access to IVF with his February 2025 executive order. In October, he lowered costs for IVF and other fertility treatments.

When Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum last week, he was draped in the tricolor semiotics of American mythology: a bright red tie blazing against a navy suit and a brilliant white shirt, the azure backdrop proclaiming “World Economic Forum” in relentless repetition.

“We are the hottest country in the world,” he declared, as actual temperatures prepared to plummet toward record lows. Yet this apparent contradiction reveals not cynicism but rather a profound understanding of politics and human nature. Trump operates in the order of symbolic truth, where the sign serves not to deceive but to reveal deeper patterns of meaning.

His appearance in Switzerland, swimming in the red, white, and blue of the American flag while surrounded by the gray neutrality of European technocracy, was no accident. It was rather a deliberate act of semiotic resistance, a refusal to surrender national identity to the homogenizing forces of globalist abstraction. Trump understands intuitively what others labor to learn: that in an age of mass communication, the skillful deployment of signs can restore meaning to a world threatened by semantic collapse. His color palette functioned as a vital reminder that symbols still possess power, that representation can serve truth rather than obscure it.

Listeners vote on their favourite songs from the previous 12 months in what has become known as “the world’s largest musical democracy”. Over two million votes were cast for the latest countdown. In this wide-open playing field, the success of Australian artists is a source of national pride.

Since Spiderbait became the first Australian artist to top the countdown with their song Buy Me A Pony in 1996, a total of 16 Australian artists have clinched the number one spot. Although British singer-songwriter Olivia Dean took out this year’s honours, five of the top 10 songs were by Australian artists. This good showing, however, no doubt has something to do with the fact that voters were given a new option of filtering their votes to include Australian artists only. The reason Triple J introduced this initiative probably has something to do with the reality that last year’s countdown featured the fewest artists since 1996.

Over on the national ARIA charts, not a single Australian song cracked the top 20 in 2025 – in fact Taylor Swift has more songs in the top 40 than all Australian artists put together. It seems that ARIA’s initiative to exclude songs more than two years old (which would weed out evergreen hits) is yet to bear fruit.

So what gives? Surely Australians haven’t just stopped liking Australian music?

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America was a vigorous, growing nation, coming of age in a new era of technological and industrial progress, with all the strains and stressors that develop under periods of mass movements and economic growth. Thousands of people flocked to the United States in search of opportunities. Despite domestic challenges and opposition from the wealthiest, Americans were able to rally in favor of reforms including antitrust legislation and increased food and workplace safety standards.

The Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts, two landmark laws from the era, form the cornerstone of the federal government’s enforcement of antitrust policy. Rapid industrialization after the Civil War allowed corporations in sectors such as railroads, oil, steel, and finance to consolidate market control, suppress competition, fix prices, and wield outsized influence over workers and politics. Farmers, small businesses, and labor organizations argued that these practices distorted markets and undermined democratic governance.

But since then, the usage of antitrust law has varied over the last century. In recent decades, federal regulators have gravitated more toward a “laissez-faire” view of antitrust enforcement. This hands-off approach puts the amorphous concept of the “market” at the core of the government’s concerns instead of taking more proactive measures to prevent unfair monopolies.

For many the economy is something unfamiliar and confusing. Something that happens to us, influenced by forces beyond our control or understanding. Changing this is crucial to building real, inclusive economic justice. The economy should serve us, and not the other way round. That’s why we teamed up with volunteers from London to Scotland and […]

The post Community Economists: Insights from Community Conversations appeared first on Equality Trust.

New data shows Australia’s housing and homelessness crisis is worsening, prompting calls to curb property investor tax breaks and build more social homes.   

The Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services released today shows that 41% of people waiting to get into public housing are homeless or at risk of homelessness – up from 26% in 2015.

New ROGS data shows:

• Social housing makes up only 3.6% of all dwellings, down from nearly 5.7% in the 1980s
• 41% of the public housing waitlist is made up of households that are homeless or at risk of homelessness, up from 26% in 2015.
• Around 190,000 households are on the public housing waitlist, up from around 169,000 in 2024 and around 141,000 in 2018
• 18.3% of Commonwealth Rent Assistance households are in severe rental stress (paying more than 50% of income on rent), up from 8.1% in 2004.
• 27.4% of people using homelessness services are experiencing persistent homelessness (experiencing homelessness for more than 7 months in a 2 year period), up from 22% in 2019.

Separate ACOSS analysis shows:

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.

ICE Storm | The Roundtable Ep. 302

Close on the heels of Renée Good’s death, Minneapolis protestor Alex Pretti was killed in another altercation with ICE agents. Investigation into both incidents will hopefully make judgment easier in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion the situation looks grim. Losing ground on the media battlefield and in polls ahead of the midterms, Trump must consider the extent and nature of his mandate on immigration. This week, the guys take a hard look at the electoral reality and discuss what it means for the Right’s policy agenda. Plus: regulatory bloat (aka Hegel’s revenge) makes it hard to translate political will into meaningful action in the UK, while inclement weather and exploding trees (!) make for an eventful week in the U.S.

The translation from Republic is a little more nuanced – Plato was obsessed with order and assumed everyone was just as obsessed as him, and carried that assumption through to a desire to hold office.

So Plato assumed everyone went into office for the same reason. The whole passage the paraphrased quote comes from goes something like this:

“For they are not desirous of honours. It is indeed necessary to add some compulsion and penalty on them if they are intending to be willing to rule. This is likely the reason that a willingness to go to office without facing compulsion is considered shameful. But the greatest penalty is to be ruled by someone worse if a person is not willing to hold office himself. It seems to me that people of propriety hold office (when they do) because they fear that outcome and that they enter into power not because they are going after something good or because they enjoy it, but because it is necessary and they are not able to entrust it to those better than themselves or their equals.”

Which, obviously, is not true. Some people just like power. Those same people enjoy sowing seeds of discord that they never have to actually solve, in order to keep it. They are able to do that, because many of us in the media work to make their offerings seem sane and normal.

On 29 January, we held a workshop and film screening at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham with one simple goal: re-imagine a better Brum! Led by our intrepid local SED Senior Project Officer Charlie McNeill, we were delighted to be joined by speakers including Kathy Hopkin from Save Birmingham, Dr. Pat Rozbicka from Aston […]

The post Conversations of Change Birmingham appeared first on Equality Trust.

On the first episode of Dollars & Sense for 2026, Greg and Elinor discuss why the Radical Left Lunatics at the OECD think Australia’s property investor tax concessions are busted, why inflation is your fault (*for shame*), AUKUS spending, and that one time Greg went too hard on New Year’s Eve.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 29 January 2026.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘POD5’ to get $5 off the regular price – offer available for a limited time only.

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek

Show notes:

The easy thing for the RBA to do next week is raise interest rates. The smart move is to wait by Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia (December 2025)

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

Donald Trump says many things, some of which should be taken literally and some of which should not. When Trump first mentioned the idea of America acquiring Greenland in 2019, many European leaders assumed, or at least hoped, that this plan fell into the latter category. However, as the last few weeks have demonstrated, Trump is quite serious about America obtaining the largest non-continental island in the world. If accomplished, getting Greenland will likely be remembered as the beginning of Europe’s own century of humiliation, as the reality of its status as essentially a vassal of the U.S. becomes undeniable.

Trump’s Greenland plan has garnered opposition domestically as well. While no small part of this disagreement stems from people who would refuse to brush their teeth if Trump told them it was healthy, there are sincere policy disagreements over the issue, notably within the “realist and restraint” coalition that has opposed the failed foreign policy status quo. Sensible realists have put forward proposals that seek to avoid annexation or invasion while still securing American interests via “dollar diplomacy,” as Justin Logan and Sumantra Maitra recently argued in The National Interest.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Dr Emma Shortis and Greg Jericho join Glenn Connley to discuss how Australia can navigate what Canadian PM Mark Carney calls the Trump “rupture”.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘POD5’ at checkout to save $5 off the price – available for a limited time only.

Guest: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Guest: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

Host: Glenn Connley, Senior Media Advisor, the Australia Institute // @glennconnley

Show notes:

After America, the Australia Institute

Dollars & Sense, the Australia Institute

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

As U.S. hegemony continues to dwindle, Donald Trump and his international allies are making preparations to maintain some grip on world power. One of these methods includes the “Board of Peace,” which was ostensibly created to reconstruct Gaza, but has demonstrated yet another attempt by Trump to undermine international law.

[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]

People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:

DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.

What is unfolding in Minnesota cannot be understood without first confronting a difficult truth: some cultures arrive intact. They do not dissolve on contact with modern society, nor do they gently adapt—they replicate.

Somali society is organized around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract, nor is it civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only insofar as he serves the group. Protection, marriage, honor, silence, and punishment are governed by this code. Obligations flow inward, sanctions flow downward. The clan precedes the individual and outlives him.

This structure is pre-modern, but it is also anti-modern. It resists the very conditions that make liberal societies function: individual accountability, transparency, impersonal law, and trust beyond kin. Ernest Gellner warned that a modern nation-state cannot be built on tribal loyalty. Tribalism fragments authority and dissolves shared obligation. Where it persists, institutions decay.

Industrial societies require a high culture that is transmitted through mass, state-run education, because only such a culture can sustain economic mobility, the bonds of social trust, and full political citizenship within a highly differentiated division of labor. Nationalism in this sense is not an irrational passion but the adjustment mechanism by which politics and culture come into alignment.

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.

Halfway to the Midterms | The Roundtable Ep. 301

As anti-ICE protests escalate in Minneapolis, agitators storm a church mid-service. But Trump’s deportation efforts are combining with economic pain to drive his poll numbers down. Uncertainty about Greenland doesn’t seem to be helping matters, though the breakdown of NATO may be unavoidable or already happening in all but name. With midterms looming, how should the administration approach this delicate moment? Plus: the discipline of classics, and with it the prestige institutions of the American academy, seem determined to self-destruct. Ryan, Mike, and Spencer survey the landscape and offer up a few cultural recommendations.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 301 appeared first on The American Mind.

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

SUBSCRIBE to the Perspectives Journal Podcast and Activists Make History for previous and upcoming interviews with the 2026 NDP leadership race candidates.

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm joins Dr Emma Shortis discuss the global “rupture” identified by Prime Minister Carney, President Trump’s petulant response, why Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland may not save NATO, and what this all means for America’s allies, including Australia.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 22 January 2026.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Usually available for $34.95, use the code ‘POD5’ to get $5 off – offer available for a limited time only.

After America: Australia and the new world order is available from Australia Institute Press for just $19.95.

Guest: Allan Behm, Advisor, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute

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

Show notes:

Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada | World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026, World Economic Forum on YouTube (January 2026)

What can a sepia-toned postcard of Lüderitz Bay (pictured), formerly a German South West Africa naval base, teach us about the dynamics of global capitalism? The answer is a great deal, according to the central argument of Heide Gerstenberger’s Market and Violence: The Functioning of Capitalism in History. For Gerstenberger, Karl Marx and Marxist theoreticians have fallen into a key misunderstanding regarding the role of violence in capitalism, an oversight they share with liberal figures like Adam Smith: namely, the optimistic interpretation of capitalist accumulation as a historically progressive social development that would ultimately eliminate direct, explicit forms of violence. The link between colonial violence and exploitation in German South West Africa is thus mobilised by Gerstenberger as one of several prime examples of the pervasiveness of overt violence in the “concrete historical developments” of capitalism. However, how plausible is this sepia-toned understanding of violence, as it were, in the face of increasingly digitalised forms of social life? With all the rich historical detail it provides, Gerstenberger’s book seems to shine more as a retrospective account of earlier forms of violence than as a prospective analysis of the sharply colourful and AI-mediated violence of contemporary market transactions.

Gerstenberger’s vocabulary of violence

President Trump began the first full week of 2026 with several announcements, one of which was likely to get missed in everything that’s been taking place: he committed his administration to “ban[ing] large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” because “[p]eople live in homes, not corporations.” A fair enough observation.

However, according to the Brookings Institution, large institutional owners account for less than 3% of home ownership nationally. Yet home prices are still absurdly high.

Affordability is a key topic for young people who lived through the post-CARES Act inflation and resent many of their elders for owning homes they don’t think they’ll ever be able to afford. Zohran Mamdani soared into the New York City mayor’s office in part because he repeatedly spoke on this issue. While it is a positive sign that the Trump Administration is looking to tackle exorbitant home prices for young Americans, its ban on institutional investing may miss the forest for the trees, that great expanding forest being the Federal Reserve.

The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who was shot after hitting an ICE officer with her car according to video footage, have many asking the question, “What exactly do these anti-ICE activists think they are doing?”

The seemingly incomprehensible decision by Good, a mother with stuffed animals in the glove box of the vehicle she used to obstruct the enforcement of federal law, is leaving people scratching their heads. Reporting that Good became an activist through a peer group at her child’s progressive, social justice-focused charter school has not provided many answers. Media outlets like CNN have sought to demonstrate that the work Good was involved in was more like a side project of the local Parent Teacher Association than domestic terrorism.

But reality was something else.

Amid heightened political and economic uncertainty with the United States, neoliberalism continues unabated in Canada with the election of former central banker Mark Carney as Prime Minister in 2025. Despite today’s crisis stemming from decades of erosion under the neoliberal economic paradigm, through austerity, wage suppression, and cuts to public benefits, the Carney government’s push to make artificial intelligence (AI) a central part of Canada’s economy would accelerate that erosion.

In the name of protecting Canada’s economic integrity from U.S. instability, Carney has increasingly positioned AI as a pivotal piece of Canada’s future economic growth. Canada’s bet on AI, only if successful as an inflator of growth, would represent another manifestation of trickle-down economics: hype-driven, top-heavy, and disconnected from the lived realities of Canadians. 

The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind.

Today has been a wretched day in a sea of wretched days for the United States of America. I organized, protested, raised money for an Immigrant Rapid Response Fund in Minnesota, read news and legal filings, shared whatever I could on Mastodon. No matter what I was doing, Abraham Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg kept ringing in my mind. I repeat them here, emphasizing the ones I dedicate tonight to Alex Pretti and Renee Good.