Canada and New Zealand cut migration sharply and saw modest rent falls – but only alongside weaker labour markets and stronger housing supply. The lesson for Australia is not imitation, but stability.
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Category: Politics
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Should Australia copy Canada and New Zealand on immigration policy?
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Terrorism – a blow back from western violence in Muslim countries
Terrorism dominates political debate and media coverage in Australia despite causing relatively few deaths. The deeper causes – western military violence, state power, and selective moral language – are rarely examined. (more…)
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How a nuclear test that never happened became news
A US allegation that China conducted a secret nuclear test was widely reported despite clear evidence to the contrary, highlighting how security claims are too often treated as facts before they are proven. (more…)
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How Australia should fix capital gains tax
The 50 per cent capital gains tax discount departs from the original purpose of taxing real gains, entrenches inequality and unfairly advantages wealth over work. (more…)
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Water bankruptcy is no longer a future threat
Across large parts of the world, water demand now permanently exceeds supply. This is not a temporary crisis but a condition of irreversible scarcity driven by overuse, climate change and population pressure. (more…)
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How John Howard reshaped Australia – and not for the better
Many of Australia’s most pressing social and economic problems can be traced to policy choices made during the Howard years, from housing and inequality to wages, tax and public services. (more…)
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Why security-first critical mineral policy risks slowing the energy transition
Western efforts to secure critical mineral supply chains from China are increasingly driven by security logic. That approach risks raising costs, slowing decarbonisation and undermining the global energy transition.
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Values, ethics, fear – Australian women and children in the Al Roj Camp
Politicians frequently appeal to Judaeo–Christian values, yet retreat from them when fear dominates debate. The test is whether those values guide policy when it is hardest to apply them.
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Capital gains tax should increase
Reducing the capital gains tax discount would make the tax system fairer, raise much-needed revenue and have little effect on housing supply, given how constrained that supply already is.
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Albanese’s real opponent is not Angus Taylor
Coalition turmoil has handed Anthony Albanese political space few prime ministers enjoy. Whether he uses it to govern with purpose – or continues to drift – is now the central question.
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Australia’s moral failure over women and children in Syria
Australian citizens and their children remain stranded in Syrian camps as political fear eclipses care, responsibility and legal obligation – with damaging consequences for public decency.
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Malcolm Fraser and Fraser Island
One year after the 1975 Dismissal, Malcolm Fraser overruled state pressure and commercial interests to halt sand mining on K’Gari – a decision that reshaped Australia’s environmental history.
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Death tolls, settlements and the closing space for a two-state future
New research confirms that far more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza than first acknowledged, while settlement expansion and political rhetoric point to deeper structural realities. (more…)
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Carney and Albanese and the collapse of global order?
Ahead of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to Australia next month, it is time to ask will Australia embrace Carney’s call to harness middle power clout. (more…)
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Could old rivalries spur Albanese to act on human rights?
Kevin Rudd had the groundwork, the evidence and the political moment for a Human Rights Act – and still walked away. Anthony Albanese now has the same opportunity, and no obvious excuse not to take it. (more…)
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Globalisation of occupation: when genocide becomes an international project
Thousands of foreign nationals are serving in Israel’s military with the legal tolerance of their home states, while peaceful protest against the war is criminalised. This double standard exposes a deep failure of international law and accountability. (more…)
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Starlink, China and the governance of low Earth orbit
China’s massive satellite filings highlight how low Earth orbit has already been transformed by industrial-scale deployment – and how existing governance is struggling to keep pace.
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One error and damned forever?
Women and children held in Syrian detention camps force Australia to choose between rhetoric and the rule of law.
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Countering bully, tyrant Trump’s intimidating expletives – it could work
Donald Trump’s rise and endurance rest on intimidation, repetition and media amplification – and on the long failure of opponents to confront those tactics directly.
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Deep thinking needed on AI, not shallow predictions
Confident predictions about artificial intelligence dominate public debate – but history suggests forecasting technological futures is a poor guide for policy. What matters more are the conditions that shape how AI is actually used.
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Islamophobia and strategic blindness: Australia in the Asian century
Australia seeks deeper integration with Asia while continuing to send cultural and political signals that undermine trust among its closest neighbours. In a region shaped by Islam, history and proximity, this contradiction carries strategic consequences. (more…)
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When Ramadan and Lent overlap, faiths move in parallel
As Ramadan and Lent unfold simultaneously across Asia, Muslim and Christian communities move through parallel seasons of fasting, prayer and charity – shaping public life in subtle but significant ways.
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A history of assassination reveals how ‘targeted killings’ became an extension of state power
Targeted killing has shifted from a tactic governments disavowed to one they increasingly acknowledge and promote. A new history traces how assassination became embedded in modern state power.
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Environment: State-owned fossil fuel companies dominate CO2 emissions
16 state-owned fossil fuel companies top the CO2 emission charts, nations need to be rich to electrify and need to electrify to get rich, and Norway drives the EV boom.
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How Vietnam reshaped Murdoch’s politics – and The Australian
The Australian’s coverage of the Vietnam War shifted as Rupert Murdoch’s political alliances hardened, revealing how editorial direction followed power more than events on the ground. (more…)
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Reconciliation begins with education
Eighteen years after the National Apology to the Stolen Generations, the failure of the Voice referendum exposed how little many Australians know about the violence that followed colonisation – and why education remains central to reconciliation.
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Bring these Australian children home, PM. They did not make their own beds
Dozens of Australian women and children remain trapped in dangerous detention camps in north-east Syria, despite Australia’s legal obligations, available security powers, and repeated international requests for repatriation. (more…)
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Message from the Editor
I gasped in disbelief when I heard our Prime Minster invoke his beloved mother, when blocking the return of family members of ISIS fighters to Australia this week. He said: “My mother would have said, ‘If you make your bed, you lie in it’.” And he doubled down the next day, saying of the 11 women and 23 children: “I have nothing but contempt for these people.”
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Prince Andrew arrested – why not King Trump?
If no one is above the law in the UK, not even royalty, presumably no one is above the law in the US, not even a president. (more…)
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Let’s not turn back the clock on immigration
Australia needs a forward-looking, evidence-based immigration policy from the Liberal Party. They should drop the slogans, fear mongering and backward-looking thinking. (more…)