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What are the current rules on truth in political advertising?

Pharmaceutical companies cannot claim to have the cure for cancer. Food companies cannot claim that sugary foods are good for kids. Lawyers cannot say that they will win every case. But under the Electoral Act, politicians can lie about their opponents’ policies—or about their own.

For decades, politicians have argued that it is too difficult to regulate political communication—and, admittedly, some attempts have failed. But a model that has been working quietly in South Australia for almost four decades provides a way forward.

If the Government and Parliament are serious about addressing misinformation and improving debate, they could pass truth in political ad laws in time for the next election.

Truth in political advertising laws work in South Australia and the ACT

South Australia has had truth in political advertising laws for almost forty years. The ACT has had similar laws since 2020; the first election with those laws in effect will occur in late 2024.

How do these laws work?

Section 113 of SA’s Electoral Act 1985 makes it an offence to authorise or cause to be published electoral advertisements that are materially inaccurate and misleading, with similar wording in the ACT. These laws are overseen by the relevant electoral commission. The Electoral Commission of South Australia only needs about five staff to handle all election complaints. This is a tiny fraction of the thousands of people needed to run an election.

Introduction

Jordan Van Den Lamb (aka @PurplePingers) presented at FWD+Organise 2024.

Jordan introduced himself: “I hate real estate agents, make videos on TikTok and sometimes I argue with conservative people.” In fact, his housing activism has played an important part in highlighting the injustice of the housing crisis, empowering renters and agitating landlords, real estate agents and politicians.

@PurplePingers has over 200,000 followers on TikTok and you can follow him on You Tube, Instagram, and other platforms. He also maintains the ShitRentals.org website:

“This website is about giving power back to renters. As a renter, landlords and real estate agents have access to so much information about you, but you don’t get that same level of transparency from them.

Real estate agents often provide photos of properties that are years out of date, and don’t tell you what it’s like to actually live there. You don’t get to enter into a new rental knowing how difficult it might be for you to request basic repairs to be completed.

This website is here to help. It will always be free, and there will be no ability for landlords or real estate agents to pay for reviews to be removed.

On this episode of Follow the Money, acclaimed financial journalist Alan Kohler joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the policies that created Australia’s housing crisis and what governments can do to fix it.

This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 10 December 2024 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: Alan Kohler, author and journalist // @AlanKohler

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It by Alan Kohler (October 2024)

Theme music: Pulse and Thrum; additional music by Blue Dot Sessions

There is a striking similarity between the situation President Reagan faced in 1982 and the state of the Middle East today. There are three valuable lessons from the Reagan era that will almost certainly help inform the future course of President Trump’s approach toward peace: 1) the countries of the region want security above all, and the United States is the only one that can provide it; 2) Saudi leadership is essential for any comprehensive and durable peace; and 3) laying the foundation for relationships between Arabs and Israelis can only take place in private, far from the public view. Liberal institutions and commentators might question the new administration’s ability to make further gains on regional peace absent a comprehensive solution for the Palestinian issue, but their skepticism is more a consequence of their narrow vision for how negotiations should be run.

A doctor known for her work with and advocacy for transgender youth has been named in a lawsuit by a detransitioner, Kaya Clementine Breen, for allegedly rushing her through a transition that she now feels was unnecessary.

Introduction

Better understanding and measuring progress is an important part of strengthening narrative change strategies. This brief by ORS Impact offers insights into some of the questions facing practitioners, funders, and others interested in measuring this kind of work.

Narrative change is an approach with great potential for seeding transformative, durable social change. It is precisely because of this potential that understanding how to measure narrative change is important: it’s not enough to implement your strategy and then hope for the best.

That said, the complex, long-term nature of this kind of work makes measurement a challenge. Among those doing narrative change, there is a desire to better understand what works, how, and with who—and these are not straightforward questions.

→ How do you articulate the progress and value of the work you’re doing in the short term, when its full effects aren’t likely to be seen for some time?

→ What signals can you look for to indicate you’re moving the needle in the right direction?

→ And how do you understand the reach and impact of your work when it’s happening in a dynamic system, and there’s so much that lies beyond any one organization’s control?

Introduction

Sarah Durieux shares the story of the snap French election of July 2024 and the way the left collaborated to win. Sarah presented this case study at FWD+Organise 2024, a conference hosted by Australian Progress in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

Few expected these results, but I wasn’t surprised. It’s not the first time this year that we’ve achieved a seemingly impossible victory. Who thought France would get abortion enshrined into the constitution, which happened in March this year? Once again, over the last few weeks, we succeeded because we put into practice what we’ve learned, campaign after campaign, over the last few years.

Converging Movements, Accelerated by a Sense of Urgency

By calling for snap elections, President Emmanuel Macron created the most effective fuel for mobilization: a sense of urgency.

Introduction

Celeste Liddle presented the opening keynote at FWD+Organise 2024. Celeste is an Arrernte woman living in Melbourne, Australia. She is a trade unionist and a freelance opinion writer, social commentator and public speaker.

Voice Referendum: Performance not Progress

I think I speak for many mob in the room when I say that in the twelve months that have followed the referendum, I have been called upon to reflect so many times on what its loss has meant to all of us in the Indigenous community. What’s more, I have, at times, felt pressured into a position, particularly by mainstream progressives, as an identifying progressive myself. There are many out there who want us to reiterate that the loss was a win for racism, that it has set the Indigenous rights movement back decades, and that the next steps are always going to be clouded with this failure.

This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Michel Durand-Wood’s blog, Dear Winnipeg. It is shared here with permission.

Introduction

Learn about countering false information with tips to help you avoid the most common mythbusting pitfalls such as using the Truth Sandwich.

Read Article

Anyone familiar with the Common Cause approach to messaging will know we always caution against ‘mythbusting’ – that is, repeating (and thus inadvertently reinforcing) false or misleading information in order to debunk it. 

We recently reviewed the latest evidence from the fields of applied psychology and cognitive linguistics for any new research on mythbusting and its effects on beliefs and behaviours. 

The good news is that research on mythbusting has flourished in recent years – thanks to renewed interest in the science of correcting misinformation during the Trump years and the Covid 19 pandemic, where misinformation ran rife. 

While our literature review on mythbusting didn’t change our minds, we did discover some nuances we think are worth sharing. 

Before we get into the detail, let’s make one thing clear: 

In most cases, mythbusting or debunking misinformation works against us. There are many reasons for this, but here are our top two: 

Two explanations are popular among Democrats for why Donald Trump won: voters are racist and voters (wrongly) blame their economic insecurity on mass immigration.

In a post-election autopsy at The New York Times, correspondent Miriam Jordan admitted that Americans’ immigration attitudes have shifted “to the right,” but argued that this is borne not of intelligent analysis but of a spell cast by a demagogue. Jordan quoted Rodrigo Garcia, a “Mexican American” who was taken in by “Trump’s forceful rhetoric.” “I feel like there should be a certain limit of the people that come into America, instead of just letting everyone come in,” Garcia said.

Garcia’s view is not radical. It’s a sensible one, no matter what nation is being considered. Trump’s “forceful rhetoric” is not what makes people think immigration needs some limits.

The declining major party vote

Fewer Australians give their first preference to a major party. The 2007 federal election is the last at which both Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition won more than 40% of the national vote; the 2022 election was the first time that neither cracked 40%.

The share of Australians voting outside of the major parties has increased from single digits in the 1970s to 31% at the most recent election in 2022, almost as many as the 36% who voted for the Coalition and 33% who voted for Labor. Not since the Great Depression has the combined vote for the two largest parties been so low.

The effect of a lower primary vote for major parties is that minor parties and independents have a better chance of winning seats.

During the past 20 years in America, a great contest has been waged over what the nation will become in the twenty-first century. Those on the political Left—progressives, statists, academics, and secularists—insist that America was always fundamentally flawed. They say we must become something other than what we have been. For their part, conservative Americans—workers, traditionalists, religious believers, and constitutionalists—hold that America is becoming something they don’t recognize. They claim the Left has betrayed the nation’s founding principles and has rejected the habits and traditions that once defined our national identity.

In short, the political battle between the Left and Right is best understood as an existential fight over what America will be. The Left pushes for a metanoic transformation, while the Right tries to catalyze an epistrophic one.

Metanoia is a forward-looking change—a recognition that one’s past way of life was flawed in some fundamental way. Regret precipitates a self-rejection that drives the transformation, which is a deliberate turning away from one’s previous identity. In contrast, epistrophe is a backward-looking change—a realization that at some point one betrayed the true self and embraced a false mode of being. Epistrophic transformation, then, is a return to one’s essential identity—a return to a previous (and more authentic) way of life.

“An Albanese Labor government will restore Australia’s climate leadership, and listen and act on Pacific island warnings of the existential threat of climate change.”

Despite a clear election campaign commitment to listen to Pacific Island nations and act on climate change, the Australian government continues to enable and encourage new and expanded fossil fuel projects.

When it comes to climate change, Australia’s actions matter. Accelerated by Australia’s continued supply of fossil fuels, climate change poses a serious, direct and immediate threat to human and environmental security.

In the Pacific and the Torres Strait, rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten to inundate entire islands.
Australia has a long and shared history with Pacific island countries and has co-signed legally binding international treaties and agreements, such as the Paris Agreement and the Boe Declaration, pledging action on climate change.

The Labor Party’s election campaign in 2022 boasted climate commitments and intentions to restore Australia’s relationships and reputation with our Pacific “brothers and sisters”.

Perhaps no sector better exemplifies the economic recklessness, inflation, and elitism that Americans rejected last month than academia. What was once a beacon of Western enlightenment has devolved into a profiteering industry that survives on Washington’s tired, cynical bribe: “Vote for us, and we’ll funnel more money to colleges!” As this hollow promise loses its power to persuade, President Trump has a historic opportunity to dismantle the College Cartel and free Americans from the stranglehold of these calcified interests.

Donald Trump’s victory was in part a decisive repudiation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the odious, unconstitutional, racist, and sexist grift concocted by the extreme Left as a radicalized form of affirmative action. DEI is based on Critical Race Theory (CRT), the doctrine that all whites are bigots. It has been fused into the firmament of academia, government, and business by the far Left, those beholden to it (particularly Joe Biden), and those fearful of it (including corporate boards and CEOs).

DEI and CRT have destroyed the careers of straight white men and Asians, humiliated blacks and other minorities who can excel without preferences, reduced government effectiveness and business productivity, savaged American exceptionalism, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and vitiated a century of federal civil rights laws.

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.

A Pardon in a Pear Tree | The Roundtable Ep. 246

It’s time to ramp up the fight against corporate bias. The next four years will be difference-making ones.

For years, corporate activists have infiltrated the boardrooms and governance structures of America’s biggest companies and brands, destroying their focus on fiduciary duty and politicizing them through a plethora of activist-driven ESG and DEI initiatives. As a proxy analyst, I see the fruits of corporate activism everywhere, from shareholder proposals pressuring brands like Walmart into auditing their “racial equity” to existing corporate policies discriminating against religious and/or conservative employees.

For conservatives interested in doing the work of depoliticizing American businesses, it shouldn’t just be about stopping the current ambitions of ESG activists—it should be about undoing all the gains they’ve made in company culture and policy. And it shouldn’t be simply about decrying companies’ biased decisions, but about working to bring them back to a politically neutral baseline so that such decisions don’t happen again.

As much as this election was affected by voters’ concerns about the economy and their dissatisfaction with the past four years, the most decisive factor in Kamala Harris’s loss may well have been a massive cultural transformation currently happening in America. Despite their obsession with vibes, no one on the Harris team seemed to notice the actual vibe shift happening across the country. Briefly put, we are beginning to see a collective rejection of the fake in favor of the real.

It’s no great revelation that major TV and movie studios have been pumping out repetitive, overproduced, and unimaginative tripe for some time. But whereas big-budget schlock used to be accepted as mildly amusing by a public with few better options, TikTok and the smartphone have totally changed the game. As critic Ted Gioia pointed out in a recent essay, viewers are increasingly turning their attention from “official” sources of entertainment to homemade clips by amateur creators. There are obvious dangers in this, as Gioia points out. But there’s also opportunity: what’s driving people to choose the phone screen over the big screen is a newfound interest in the raw, the real, and the direct. Fake is out. Live is in.

I served in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command on a Cultural Support Team embedded with elite combat units. From this vantage point, I can state with absolute certainty that women do not belong in U.S. military combat units.

Today it has become a perverse badge of progress to claim that equality demands women shoulder the same burdens of war as men, even at the cost of life, limb, and sight. The feminist project seeks full parity within all combat ranks of the U.S. military, the latest effort in a decade-long push for formal gender integration.

But this misguided egalitarianism reflects not progress but a profound cultural regression. Unfortunately, the military has become yet another battleground for the cultural revolution, where the truths of human nature are denied in service of ideological dogma.

The recent nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense has reignited this debate. Hegseth, unlike most generals and policymakers today, understands that combat roles demand capabilities and cultural cohesion that women cannot provide. For his honesty, he has been met with predictable outrage, as contemporary gender ideology admits no dissent. In 2024, to question a woman’s “right” to fight and die on a battlefield is to invite condemnation as a bigot. This is the twisted truth of modern feminism: celebrating a woman’s ability to die in foreign wars over her capacity to build families and communities at home.

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.

Biden’s Parting Gifts | The Roundtable Ep. 245

By September 25, 1789, the U.S. House of Representatives had only been operating for about six months under the Constitution. They were meeting in New York, as they would continue to do until the government was moved to Philadelphia the following year, and then to what became Washington, D.C. Everything was new and uncertain.

On that day in September, Elias Boudinot, a representative from New Jersey, introduced a resolution:  

That a joint committee of both Houses be directed to wait upon the President of the United States, to request that he would recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness.

Not everyone thought this Thanksgiving business was a good idea. Aedanus Burke of South Carolina “did not like this mimicking of European customs, where they made a mere mockery of thanksgivings.”Thomas Tudor Tucker, also of South Carolina,

As you gather with your loved ones this Thanksgiving, passing the turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce, I hope you take time to reflect on the many blessings God has bestowed upon our nation.

And while politics at the dinner table is typically taboo, most of us have at least one relative eager to stir the pot.

Now, I’m certainly not advocating for full-blown debate before the pumpkin pie, but if the conversation happens to shift to politics, and that friend or family member is still reeling from President Trump’s overwhelming win, don’t worry. Here are a few reasons to be thankful for the upcoming Trump Administration.

At the heart of President Trump’s MAGA movement has always been the American people. The bright thread throughout his historic 2024 campaign was promoting policies that will reverse the damage of the Biden Administration and restore America and her citizens to greatness. President Trump’s authentic rock-and-roll campaign resonated with voters weary of stale DNC talking points, and his enthusiastic message resounded far beyond what pollsters anticipated. In fact, the majority of Americans demanded his vision of change.

The transition to this new era of leadership is already off to a promising start with President Trump’s key appointments. From Susie Wiles and Russ Vought to RFK Jr., Pam Bondi, and Elise Stefanik—these individuals will bring fresh perspectives to the White House and will combine their experience and Trump-required work ethic to deliver for the American people.

It did not take long for the Left to demand a consolation prize for their failed leader Kamala Harris. The opening bid was replacing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor with “Justice” Harris. What joy that would be. But it’s also mercifully implausible. Not only would the Wise Latinx Justice need to retire to make way for a proud black Brahmin, but Chuck Schumer would have to wrangle a one-vote majority that includes departing former Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. In his lame duck era, Schumer doesn’t really have the ability to rally this captious crowd behind any nominee. But for Harris? Please.

We must go back to the beginning of our quest: how to console the hapless Harris? She’ll have to do what she always does: fail upward. And there’s only one logical next step on that path: the governorship of California.

The ghastly Gavin Newsom is termed out in two years. Unless California Rs get their stuff together in a big way, he will inevitably be followed by another progressive D. And there is no bigger progressive D in Cali Town than Kamala D. Harris, D-San Francisco.

Harris recently won three statewide races in California, twice for attorney general and once for the United States Senate. She then appeared twice on presidential tickets that handily won California in 2020 and 2024. She will easily win a race for governor. Yes, she is a disaster in national politics, but for the exact same reasons she is the bespoke lefty for today’s Golden State coasties.

The approach of Thanksgiving invites us to turn our minds to the relationship between religion and the American regime. We now encounter controversy where we once found consensus. With the rise of modern secularism, many Americans now believe that religion should play no role in the nation’s public life, while many other Americans continue to hold to the traditional view that it should.

These divisions were illustrated strikingly in the homestretch of the presidential campaign. Speaking in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris was interrupted by hecklers who called out, “Jesus is Lord.” Harris responded by saying, “You guys are at the wrong rally.” A few days later, in the same state, and apparently in response to this exchange, someone cried out, “Jesus is king!” during a speech by J.D. Vance—and Vance replied, “That’s right. Jesus is king.”

In the wake of Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, social media has been flooded with videos of apartment- or vehicle-bound neurotics screaming, banging pots and pans in sheer disbelief, packing their belongings, or generally convulsing as if Kristallnacht were upon us. The American public has been introduced to the 4B movement, in which liberal women appropriate a South Korean sex strike because justice.

To be sure, social media is at best a caricature of real life. Only the most dramatic individuals will shave their heads for “reproductive rights” (read: for likes), but most people do not express themselves in quite such a hyperbolic register. That said, in this case the memes are imitating real life. Not every ex-Kamala voter is experiencing a full-scale breakdown. But judging based on my own clinical observations as a practicing therapist, I think it may well be true that a significant number of young American leftists are going through a collective mental health crisis.

I speak from some experience, having spent multiple hours per day over the past few weeks hearing from clients about the damage inflicted upon their psyches “by the Trump win.” This is their account of things. My own opinion, however, is that someone has subjected these kids to psychic trauma. But it wasn’t Donald Trump.

First Things

In the waning days of the 2024 campaign, Team Harris made a truly devious effort to revive their flagging poll numbers. Their two-part pitch to the electorate went like this: 1) Men should vote Democrat so their daughters can get abortions, and 2) women should vote Democrat, then lie to their conservative husbands about it.

Part one focused its appeal on the vanishingly small percentage of abortions performed in response to rape. This argument probably appeals to some men. Most Americans are pro-choice in that they don’t much care if their neighbor gets an abortion. And when it comes to their own families, they’d rather have the option than not. Better to keep abortion legal for any reason at all than for my wife or daughter to “need” an abortion and not be able to get one.

In extreme cases, the argument goes, getting your daughter an abortion is an act of fatherly protection. When Charlie Kirk spoke out against rape exceptions, the anonymous X personality known as RadFem Hitler responded with characteristic vitriol. “No genuinely masculine man would ever allow his 10 year old daughter to give birth to her rapist’s baby,” she wrote. “Something is deeply CUCKED within you if you would allow a child molester to pass on his genes at the expense of your own progeny.”

For much of their political history, particularly since the Enlightenment, Jews have identified with the progressive Left. Israel itself, although funded by oligarchs, was launched largely as a socialist experiment, epitomized in the kibbutzim.

Today the political Left has betrayed that loyalty, becoming prime movers against Israel and Jews on the ground. In America, as many as 19 Democratic senators voted with Bernie Sanders to block America from sending several types of weaponry to Israel. Even though most still identify as Democrats, many American Jews are finding that their former “safe spaces”—leftist parties, big cities, universities, the media—have morphed into places where anti-Semitic incidents regularly occur, even though they often are vigorously downplayed. 

Modern political movements have not infrequently laid claim to being based in science, from immigration restriction and eugenics (in the U.S. after WWI), to antisemitism and race ideology (in Hitler’s Germany), to Communism and Lysenkoism (under Stalin). Each of these falsely invoked a scientific consensus that convinced highly educated citizens, who were nonetheless ignorant of science, to set aside the anxieties associated with their ignorance. Since all scientists supposedly agreed, there was no need for them to understand the science. 

Of course, this version of “the science” is the opposite of science itself. Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority. However, the success that science achieves has earned it a measure of authority in the public’s mind. This is what politicians frequently envy and exploit.
 
The climate panic fits into this same pattern and, as in all the preceding cases, science is in fact irrelevant. At best, it is a distraction which has led many of us to focus on the numerous misrepresentations of science entailed in what was purely a political movement.
 

From the start of the climate panic, very prominent scientists opposed the claim that increasing CO₂ was a significant danger to climate due to man’s industrial emissions. A select group of these are listed below:

William Nierenberg: Director of America’s foremost oceanographic research institute, Scripps Oceanographic Institute of the University of California, San Diego. The Institute is located at La Jolla. Nierenberg was also a member of the National Academy, and he chaired the massive 1983 NRC (National Research Council of the National Academy) report on climate. He died in 2000.

Frederick Seitz: Often regarded as one of the fathers of condensed phase physics, he was a professor at the University of Illinois, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and President of Rockefeller University. He died in 2008.

Jerome Namias: Professor of Meteorology at Scripps and former head of NOAA’s long-range forecasting. Namias was also a member of the National Academy. He died in 1997.

Robert Jastrow: First chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Upon his retirement, the bulk of the institute was moved back to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. However, a rump group headed by James Hansen successfully fought to remain in New York. Jastrow continued as Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College. He died in 2008.

Despite the fact that invoking Hitler in arguments is so kneejerk that there’s even a meme about it, a surprising number of people misunderstand the situation. They misunderstand, for instance, that he was elected; he was even voted into dictatorship. So, why was he elected?

I want to focus on four factors that are commonly noted in scholarship but often absent from or misrepresented in popular invocations of Hitler: widespread resentment effectively mobilized by pro-Nazi rhetoric, an enclave-based media environment, authoritarian populism, agency by proxy/charismatic leadership.

I. Resentment

Thomas Patterson has long criticized the “horse race” way of framing elections and politics more generally. It’s so dominant that people can’t imagine talking about elections in any other way. Briefly, the “horse race” frame treats elections as contests between two groups, rather than a call to discuss issues of governance.

The short version is that the federal government will operate as red states like Texas or Alabama have for some time. It will do so in terms of policy agenda (reactionary, neoliberal, evangelical moral panic) and what might be called political structures and practices (competitive authoritarianism).

They believe that their support of Trump is reasonable, and that it isn’t reasonable not to support him for two reasons (so to speak): 1) their media gives them “reasons” to support him; 2) their media gives them “reasons” to refuse to listen to anyone who disagrees.

And all of those “reasons” are unreasonable. The lowest bar for having a reasonable position is: you are open to persuasion on it, you’ve considered the best opposition arguments, and you hold all positions on the issue to the same standards of proof, civility, logic.

Imagine this.

Once again, people are bemoaning the morass that is our political discourse, and, once again, blame is placed on the lack of civility.

Our current political and public discourse is in a bad way, and a lot of people are proposing that the solution is a re-embrace of

I’m reading Donald Stoker’s hilariously (and justifiably) grumpy Why America Loses Wars (2019). One of the points he makes is that American politicians and pundits have been enamored with “limited war” since Korea, without any precise definition of that term (or even of war more generally).