On this episode of Dollars & Sense, replacement Matt (Greg Jericho) and Elinor debunk some long-standing myths about the Australian economy, discuss cuts to HECS and examine the latest in Trump’s beef beef.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 24 July 2025.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @grogsgamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
The court found the Independent Planning Commission failed to take into account the impact of all the carbon pollution associated with the project, including pollution from the exported emissions when the coal is sold and burned overseas.
Mach Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion near Muswellbrook is one of the most polluting coal projects that was seeking approval in Australia.
The project is so big it covers an area which would almost cover the entire electorates of Sydney and Grayndler.
The decision comes after a challenge from the Denman, Aberdeen, Muswellbrook, Scone Healthy Environment Group.
While this is a welcome result, the NSW Land and Environment Court will have to consider whether conditions can be imposed that would validate the approval, or whether the project must return to the planning commission.
“There are two other coal mines that were granted extension by the federal government in the Hunter Valley,” said Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute.
“While it is welcome news that one may not go ahead, these approvals are inconsistent with Australia’s climate goals and reinforces the country’s reputation as one of the world’s major fossil fuel exporters.
“To approve huge new coal mines while bidding to host COP31 is a slap in the face to our Pacific neighbors, who have clearly and repeatedly requested that Australia stop expanding fossil fuel production.
The gutting of public funding for higher education in the United States has led to the takeover of universities by private donors, many of whom are Zionist entities and billionaires. As a result, universities have become, as guest Dr. Maura Finkelstein calls them, “banks and real estate development companies that offer classes.”
When CBS announced it would cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Donald Trump “truthed” as follows: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” Summoning a gilt cartoon frame called the “eloquence cam,” Colbert replied: “Go f**k yourself.”
His fellow talk show host, Jon Stewart, addressed CBS directly with the help of a backup gospel choir: “Go f**k yourself! (Go f**k yourself!) Go f**k yourself!” and so on.
One begins to detect a theme. Powerful as it is to watch two men in their 60s repeatedly shriek a single obscenity at an ever-thinning crowd, maybe Trump had a point?
Australians have elected power-sharing parliaments in New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania – and a single party almost never has a majority in the federal Senate. On this episode of Follow the Money, Leanne Minshull and Eloise Carr join Ebony Bennett to discuss why collaborative parliaments are popular and how our elected officials can make them work.
The radical Left’s indifference to human life in the wake of the Texas floods is shocking. It exposes not just a troubling lack of civil discourse among the next generation of its leaders—but progressives’ long-romanticized destruction of their political foes.
Unhinged reactions to the victims of the Guadalupe River tragedy—with some even expressing satisfaction that potential MAGA supporters died—do not simply reveal the twisted views of a few leftist outliers: they expose the core principle that animates the entire movement. The radical Left increasingly sees political violence as a legitimate option in light of the Democrats’ inability to stop President Trump’s agenda.
That all changed in 2015 when a few corporations started exporting vast amounts of liquefied natural gas, exposing Australians to high global gas prices. The result was a tripling of wholesale gas prices in the country, and a huge transfer of wealth from Australian households and businesses to the handful of gas corporations to which we had given control of our resources.
The gas corporations convinced our governments that if they were allowed to develop the vast onshore reserves in the state of Queensland for export, we would experience enormous economic benefits, while gas prices would remain low.
None of it was true. Instead, large areas of our beautiful country have been transformed into industrial gas fields and we now have expensive gas, rolling gas shortage fears and few economic benefits.
It appears Canada may be making the same mistake.
Prior to 2015, the wholesale price of gas in the country was under $4 a gigajoule (all figures in Australian dollars unless otherwise noted). Gas producers couldn’t ramp up prices because of the laws of supply and demand; we had an ample supply of low-cost gas for the limited domestic market.
But the opening of gas export terminals meant the Australian market was now a small part of the huge global market, where gas prices were three times higher than at home. Gas exporters were able to force Australians to compete with Asian customers who were prepared to pay much more than the long-term price in Australia.
The importance of civic education is something every American seems to agree on. All U.S. states mandate some form of it in public schools, with 40 states requiring students to pass a civics course to graduate high school. And despite the wave of universities jettisoning their general education classes, many still require some form of American heritage or civics class.
However, underneath the surface, these classes are often taught in a way that undermines citizenship. In what follows we discuss these pitfalls and make a few proposals for rehabilitating civic education. In sum, we suggest that:
A new paradigm is needed for understanding America’s heritage.
Forming students’ love for the United States should be the primary goal of American heritage and civics classes.
We can best help future citizens love their nation by focusing their attention on the most formative, heroic, and beautiful parts of its tradition.
The Use and Abuse of Civics
If you check in on your local college’s American heritage class, you will likely find it’s doing the opposite of what it was intended to do.
Mark Carney’s new liberal government is making it loud and clear that they’re switching things up on economic policy. Following record high public service growth under his predecessor, Carney’s recent call for massive cuts to public services have sounded the alarm for Canadians concerned about a worsening trade war with the Trump administration.
Arundhati Roy has long been one of my favorite and most admired writers. In Spring 2020 she wrote a stunning essay about COVID, The Pandemic is a Portal, which you can read in full here. But I’ll draw your attention to these paragraphs:
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
As ever, Arundhati observed the bigger picture incisively, correctly sensing in early April of 2020 that a “return to normal” would present a missed opportunity for needed, radical change.
It has been a little over 10 years since Donald Trump, with characteristic flair, descended the escalators at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
Today, we can say in the words of Henry Olsen, the always astute political analyst, that “Trumpism is here to stay,” and that “there will be no conservative return to a pre-Trump consensus.” Advocates of such a return claim to represent republican rectitude and fidelity to constitutional norms now under threat from a supposedly reckless and demagogic populism.
In truth, however, whatever the virtues of the old consensus, its adherents were far from perfect or imitable in important respects. They were slow to resist “the culture of repudiation” (in Roger Scruton’s arresting phrase) that had colonized the educational and entertainment worlds, as well as the commanding heights of civil society, including large swaths of the business sector. In recent decades, these quarters hectored Americans and instructed them to hate themselves. Much of our elite class obsessed about race and gender in ways that undermined self-respect and propagandized groups based on accidents of birth to give themselves over to anger and despair.
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
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, one-third of Australian adults use poker machines at least once a year. Excluding Western Australia, where pokies are banned outside of Perth Casino, that equates to 6.6 million people who, between them, lose around $13 billion a year, at an average of more than $1,950 each.
Based on an updated version of the most detailed study of gambling in Australia, the amount an average gambler can afford to lose on poker machines is $301 per year, known as their “low-risk gambling limit”.
For every dollar a gambler loses over that low-risk limit, the risk increases.
Losing more means people who use the pokies have less to spend on other recreational or social activities. But for those who gamble much more, the losses can be devastating.
“Poker machines are making a killing from problem gamblers,” said Skye Predavec, Anne Kantor Fellow at The Australia Institute and author of the analysis.
“If the vast majority of poker machine profits come from risky gambling rather than those who gamble responsibly, it’s time politicians treated the industry in line with the harm it causes.
“The data does not lie. There are Australians who are losing vast sums of money on poker machines who cannot afford to.
Palestine Israel Media Report Monday 21 July 2025 1/ 73 Palestinians killed while waiting for humanitarian aid across Gaza, health ministry says (The Age, SMH, 21/7/2025) [link to article] 2/ A fight at the opera as performer unfurls Palestine flag on stage (The Age, SMH, 21/7/2025) [link to article] 3/ Online hate report exposes ‘overt effort to normalise antisemitism’ (The Age, […]
The UK government published last week the Public Design Evidence Review (PDER), an ambitious attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: How do we create better public policies and services that consistently achieve their intended outcomes? One of the answers, the report argues, lies in public design — a term the report introduces.
From the creation of the Government Digital Service (GDS) to the innovative work of the Cabinet Office’s Policy Lab, the UK has seen compelling proofs of concept that design can help governments not only deliver services better but also imagine and shape them differently. Yet, to move from isolated success stories to widespread impact, public design needs to scale — especially upstream, in the early stages of policymaking. That’s what the PDER set out to explore.
Australia has some of the highest rates of gambling in the world, with a third of Australian adults using poker machines at least once a year. But it’s a past-time that could be riskier than you think: At least $10 billion of the $13 billion that Aussies lose on pokies each year comes from exceeding recommended risk limits.
In 2018, consulting firm ACIL Allen produced the Fourth Social and Economic Impact Study of Gambling in Tasmania. It included a detailed survey of gamblers, including problem gamblers, which was used to calculate a “low-risk gambling limit” for Tasmanians.
The study compared low-risk gambling limits to low-risk drinking guidelines, both designed to allow people to make informed decisions about risk and the potential harms of certain behaviour.
According to the study, the limit for low-risk gambling is $240 per person per year for poker machines, and $510 per year for all gambling. Those who exceeded these spending limits were found to have almost five times the risk of experiencing gambling harm.
As politicians return to Canberra for the first sitting week of the new term, Everybody’s Home said the Albanese government has a chance to deliver a lasting legacy on housing or risk being remembered for letting it slip away.
The national housing campaign warns the housing crisis will get much worse if the government fails to deliver the investment and action needed to make homes more affordable for more Australians.
The call comes as Everybody’s Home’s new report, Out of Reach, shows that once-affordable cities are now suffering from some of the worst rental pressures in the country.
With rents surging 57% across capital cities over the past decade, and social housing declining to around 4% of all homes, the housing crisis has reached unprecedented levels that demand urgent government action.
As parliament starts for this new term, Everybody’s Home is calling on the government to:
The FBI has launched a criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for perjury and potentially other crimes related to the Trump-Russia hoax. This comes shortly after a CIA tradecraft review revealed their manipulation of a December 30, 2016, Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Donald Trump in the 2016 election. And on Friday, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard reported that former President Barack Obama, former DNI James Clapper, Brennan, and others participated in the deception.
“The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government. Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people…. As such, I am providing all documents to the Department of Justice to deliver the accountability that President Trump, his family, and the American people deserve,” Gabbard said on Friday.
In the words of Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, the chickens may be coming home to roost.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman take a step back to reflect on what’s happened since Trump was inaugurated in January.
Tl;dr: it’s all pretty grim.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 21 July 2025.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: July 21-27, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9340
Recent polling commissioned by The Australia Institute shows more Tasmanians agree than disagree that the major parties should seek to form a power-sharing government with Greens and Independents if they cannot form government in their own right.
“This election returned another power-sharing parliament for Tasmania,” said Eloise Carr, Director, The Australia Institute Tasmania.
“One thing this election result should do is dispel the notion that power-sharing governments are punished by the Tasmanian electorate.
“The Rockliff government has faced its second election as a minority government and is arguably in a better position now.
“The narratives that the Liberals and Labor have been pushing do not hold up. Polling – and now this election result – show that voters of the major parties prefer power-sharing governments.
“Indeed, more than twice as many Labor voters support Labor forming government with the Greens and Independent crossbench members as oppose.”
Yet when the United Nations hosts its annual climate conference of the parties (known as COP) to reduce emissions, it’s usually swamped by fossil fuel lobbyists.
The Albanese government is bidding to host next year’s COP31 climate summit in Adelaide, alongside Pacific Island Nations. Turkey is also bidding to host the COP and is Australia’s main rival for the bid. The decision could be announced any day now.
One thing is certain: if fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists get access to COP31, they’ll do their best to sabotage any chance of achieving ambitious climate action.
That’s why The Australia Institute has called on the Albanese government to ban fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists from COP31.
Banning fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists from COP31 could give Australia an edge in winning the bid over Turkey by demonstrating our genuine commitment to tackling the source of the problem.
Let’s be clear – coal, oil and gas companies are causing the climate crisis.
The United Nations, the world’s scientists and the International Energy Agency have all made it crystal clear that to avert the worst consequences of global heating, the world must swiftly phase out fossil fuels.
These companies have no place at UN climate talks.
At least 36 shot dead near Gaza food site: hospital Canberra Times / AAP | 20 July 2025 https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9020190/at-least-36-shot-dead-near-gaza-food-site-hospital/ At least 36 people have been killed by Israeli fire while they were on their way to an aid distribution site in the Gaza Strip at dawn, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Nasser Hospital […]
Palestine Israel Media Report Saturday 19 July 2025 ABC News Anthony Albanese calls recent actions in Gaza ‘completely indefensible’ in interview from China [link to article] Top church leaders meet in Gaza as Israel strikes kill several in Khan Younis [link to article] Who are the Druze and why does Israel say it is bombing […]
Every year, well-meaning donors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into America’s most prestigious universities. They do so out of sentiment, prestige, or the vague hope that their alma mater will preserve the civilization it once championed. But in 2025, this is delusion. The modern university—especially the Ivy League—is a machine built to erase the memory of the old world, not preserve it. Donors aren’t saving the institutions they love: they’re financing their own irrelevance.
To understand what was lost, one need only look back to the Ivy League of the 1940s, an era in which fraternal culture was not simply an appendage of undergraduate life, but a central organ of elite formation in America.
In those years, the great colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia—still retained the trappings of their founding: small, WASP-dominated, semi-clerical institutions filled with the Yankee elite. But the real crucibles of influence were not the classrooms. They were the clubs, the societies, and the houses.
The great final clubs of Harvard, the eating clubs of Princeton, the secret societies of Yale—these were more than social diversions. They were incubators of elite consensus. Membership in such circles conferred a kind of spiritual citizenship in the American governing class. Men were trained to speak in a certain tone, carry themselves in a certain way, and, above all, recognize one another across institutions and borders. It was a culture that, for better or worse, assumed the right to rule.
In just a few short days the 48th Parliament will sit for the first time and we will start to see the answer to the question we have been asking become clear; what will Labor do with power?
In many ways, we already have the answer, at least when it comes to climate. The second term Albanese government wasted no time in approving the carbon bomb that is the Woodside North West Shelf extension and is tripling down on the delusion that more fossil fuel gas fields need to be opened up to service not just the domestic market, but to ensure the success of the Future Made in Australia manufacturing push.
Albanese made headlines in March by slipping in the line ‘delulul with no solulu’ during question time, as a tongue-in-cheek shout out to the hosts of the Happy Hour podcast, but it could also sum up Labor’s attitude to gas.
That was made clear in the Jubilee Australia Research Centre report: How to Build a Gas Empire, which was released this week and all but ignored by Australia’s mainstream media outlets.
The report, co-published with the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Fossil Free Japan Coalition lays out exactly how hollow many of the claims Australia is told about its gas industry are.
Japan and Korea have contributed $20.5bn USD of public finance into Australian LNG projects between 2008 and 2024.
The Oregon Department of Transportation finds itself in serious financial trouble, aggravated by an increasing dependence on borrowing.
In the last two fiscal years, the agency has added about $700 million in new debt, chiefly to finance freeway widening mega-project (and their hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns).
In the past two weeks, the Oregon Department of Transportation has heaped blame on the Legislature for failing to vote to approve a major increase in gas taxes, vehicle registration costs and other fees. It is in the process of laying off hundreds of employees, because of the financial shortfall. But as we’ve seen at City Observatory, ODOT’s revenues haven’t actually decreased, and much of the problem is related to expensive megaprojects and their cost overruns. All of this has been amplified by the agency’s decision to take on greater amounts of debt, which reduces funds available to pay current staff and support operations.
Palestine Israel Media Report Friday 18 July 2025 PEARLS AND IRRITATIONS THE AGE THE AUSTRALIAN ABC NEWS HERALD SUN NEWS.COM.AU THE GUARDIAN CANBERRA TIMES . JOIN THE MEDIA WATCH GROUP >> Search Google Groups “Palestine Israel Media Monitoring” group. . 9324
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Matt and Elinor discuss the Prime Minister’s China trip, why spending more on defence doesn’t necessarily make us safer, and the unusual situation whereby our biggest bank thinks we should tax wealth better.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
Though he has the pedigree, Elbridge Colby is not a man for the cocktail circuit. As the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the widely read book TheStrategy of Denial, he could easily have settled into elite foreign policy circles. But he does not flatter diplomats, nor does he shield allies from hard truths, which in Washington inevitably provokes friction. In a recent Politico“exposé,” a chorus of disgruntled former officials bemoans the under secretary of defense for policy’s alleged impoliteness and strategic indelicacy. His crime? Speaking too bluntly. Acting too decisively.
But behind the theatrics of bureaucratic grievance is the truth that Colby is precisely the kind of strategist our moment demands. His critics may fixate on style, but the real discomfort he inspires stems from substance. Many of the former officials I’ve encountered aren’t scandalized because Colby is failing—they’re unsettled because he is, unlike many before him, trying to execute the platform Americans voted for.
Colby is being pilloried by the Washington establishment for being effective. He has advanced the logic of strategic prioritization with a seriousness that rankles them and unsettles allies long accustomed to American indulgence. The problem, it turns out, is that he is right, and unapologetic about it.
1/ Giving business billions of dollars in tax cuts means starving schools, hospitals and other services.
Giving business billions of dollars in tax cuts means billions of dollars less for services like schools and hospitals.
If Australia cut company tax from 30% to 25% this would give business about $20 billion in its first year, or $83 billion over four years. This would cost the budget at least $57 billion over four years, accounting for reduced franking credits (which are effectively a tax refund for company tax paid).
2/ Vital public services and infrastructure will be the first to go.
The United Nations has pointed out that after corporate taxed were cuts in America, welfare benefits and access to health insurance were slashed. The ‘financial windfalls’ for the very rich were funded by cutting public services.
3/ The big four banks would get billions of dollars. Really.
Australia’s big four banks are some of the most profitable banks in the world, and they have been making record profits.
‘Making the Good Society’ is a new video series from the Broadbent Institute and Perspectives Journal that asks progressive leaders and thinkers about their vision for a good society that is humane, just and democratic.
Matthias Ecke, a German Social Democrat and Member of the European Parliament, knows what it takes to counter extremism and defend democratic rights. His advocacy is deeply personal: while campaigning in Dresden in May 2024, he was violently attacked by far-right extremists, an incident German Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned as a “threat to democracy.” Despite this, he refuses to back down, continuing to push for a society based on justice and equality.
Reflections on IIPP’s Applied Learning Programme from the Rethinking the State Forum 2025 by Bridget Gildea, Simangaliso Mpofu, Barbara Chesi and Manuel Acosta Maldonado.
Designing Government Learning for Transformation workshop.
At the recent Rethinking the State Forum, the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) brought together international collaborators, public sector practitioners, and learning partners for a lively, practice-led session on applied learning in government. Hosted by IIPP’s Applied Learning team, the design sprint focused on how governments around the world are using applied learning as a tool for institutional change and what that means for the UK context.
The conversation began with a simple but important question posed by Bridget Gildea, IIPP’s Applied Learning Lead: ‘What can we learn from our global partners in their experience of this work so far, and how can we bring those lessons home?’
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 controversial, and not just because the project is a carbon bomb that will create a huge volume of greenhouse gas emissions.
Woodside’s gas facilities are also adjacent to what many experts consider the most significant Indigenous rock art site in the world: The Murujuga Cultural Landscape.
It contains a huge concentration of images, known as petroglyphs, etched into the rocks. Some date back up to 50,000 years, depicting ancient megafauna and the oldest known image of a human face.
Murujuga has just been listed on UNESCO’s World Heritage Register. But don’t assume that means it is safe.
The trouble is that burning gas releases pollutants that can damage the rock art.
When Watt announced the provisional go-ahead for Woodside’s gas extension, he said he would put “strict conditions” on the project to protect the petroglyphs. He refused to disclose what those conditions were.
Supposedly, the secrecy was about giving Woodside Energy “procedural fairness”.
Woodside was given 10 days to respond but failed to meet the deadline. Watt, it seems, has been happy to give it an indefinite extension.
