The FBI raid on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative appears to be part of a broader Trump administration strategy to intimidate voter registration groups, election officials and citizens exercising democratic rights.
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Category: Politics
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Trump’s FBI is turning voter registration into a target
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The AUKUS mirage: why Australia needs a pragmatic pivot to Plan B
Australia still needs nuclear-powered submarines for long-range sea denial, but the current AUKUS pathway is too slow and risky, making a locally built conventional fleet essential to avoid a dangerous capability gap.
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Specialist fees are out of control. Medicare needs reform
Medical specialist fees have been rising far beyond Medicare support, leaving patients with heavy out-of-pocket costs, long public waiting lists and a health system that needs stronger public controls. (more…)
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Keir Starmer resigns: can any Prime Minister survive in post-Brexit Britain?
Keir Starmer’s resignation exposes the fragility beneath Labour’s 2024 landslide, as Brexit-era divisions, weak personal support and pressure from Reform, the Greens and independents pulled apart his shallow electoral support. (more…)
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Hanson offers whinges, not solutions
One Nation is feeding on real pressure from population growth, housing, health and infrastructure strain, but its politics offers no serious systemic reform – only the familiar scapegoating of outsiders. (more…)
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What Pauline Hanson’s durability tells us about Australian politics
Pauline Hanson’s continuing appeal is less a sudden ideological shift than a symptom of weakening trust, economic frustration and a growing belief that mainstream politics has become distant, managed and closed off.
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Power without power: Is Farrellism Labor’s solution or its problem?
Labor’s challenge is not simply to defeat One Nation or win the next election, but to move beyond a centrist settlement that has become skilled at gaining office while losing sight of transformative purpose.
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Education reform must fix the system, not just the funding
Australia’s education debate must move beyond funding and sector structure to confront a deeper governance problem: school systems that measure constantly but fail to learn from teachers, principals and communities. (more…)
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Australia may feel the shift in US-Israel politics
Israel’s influence over US foreign policy is weakening as the political costs of unconditional support rise, and that shift may also reshape the pro-Israel lobby’s power in Australia. (more…)
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Political science is struggling to explain One Nation’s surge
One Nation’s rapid rise has left political science and orthodox analysis struggling to explain why a chaotic party with little policy depth and a dismal parliamentary record has suddenly become a major force in Australian politics.
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Australia was defeated by Iran too
Australia’s support for the US-Israeli war on Iran has again exposed the reflexive subservience of Australian foreign policy, tying the country to another failed American military adventure that did nothing to serve the national interest.
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Mining needs renewables, whatever Rinehart and Hanson say
Gina Rinehart’s companies acknowledge mining is essential to net zero, yet her public attacks on renewables and Pauline Hanson’s anti-climate agenda clash with the reality that mining projects increasingly depend on clean energy. (more…)
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Mary Kostakidis wins freedom of the press award
Mary Kostakidis has received the 2026 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award, recognising her long record in Australian journalism and her defence of press freedom amid legal action over her criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza. (more…)
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The effect of AI on jobs: a non-mainstream economic view
Many economists argue technical progress does not have to lead to fewer jobs but we should not assume that creating the demand to support new employment opportunities is a given. (more…)
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Sometimes breaking a promise is the moral choice
Labor’s shift on capital gains tax and negative gearing should be judged by whether it makes the tax system fairer, not by a hypocritical “liar” campaign that treats every broken promise as a moral crime. (more…)
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Foreign interference, MAGA and the Hanson insurgency
Australia’s rising right-wing populism reflects real economic and social grievances, but it is increasingly drawing on imported MAGA-style strategies that turn public anger into culture war rather than Australian solutions. (more…)
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Housing policy should build homes, not wealth
Housing policy should reflect the kind of society Australia wants to be: one that treats homes as a human right, builds neighbourhoods and social mixing, and stops privileging wealth accumulation over shelter. (more…)
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South Korea’s middle power diplomacy faces a harder test
South Korea’s middle power diplomacy is shifting from a prestige project to a survival strategy, as Trump’s return, US-China rivalry and alliance dependence force Seoul to seek greater autonomy without abandoning the US security guarantee. (more…)
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Whose grief changes the world?
The suffering in Gaza has forced many people to question whether human rights are truly universal, or whether some lives and some grief are still treated as more politically urgent than others. (more…)
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Indonesia’s new resource nationalism puts the state first
Indonesia’s new commodities regime reflects a sharper form of resource nationalism under Prabowo Subianto, using state power to subordinate private interests while raising serious concerns about discretion, coercion and political targeting.
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The new working class needs more than gentle capitalism
Australia’s working class has not disappeared – it has changed, becoming more female, migrant and white collar, and social democratic parties must speak to its pressures before the populist right exploits them further. (more…)
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Tim Wilson wrote the case for Labor’s tax reforms
Tim Wilson’s 2020 book, The New Social Contract, could be the basis of fruitful debate on tax reform. Instead, we get performative outrage. (more…)
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Environment: Cities swelter as global warming speeds up
Global warming is accelerating, extreme heat is already endangering lives in India, and Australia’s Safeguard Mechanism is failing to deliver meaningful emissions cuts from the country’s biggest industrial polluters.
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Public education needs a level playing field to flourish
Australia’s school system will remain unfair while private schools can combine public funding, fees and selective enrolment practices, and a common framework is needed to give public education a genuinely level playing field. (more…)
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The five best films from Sydney Film Festival
This year’s Sydney Film Festival offered a strong field of films beyond Hollywood’s familiar moral economy, with strange melodramas, existential horror, childhood reverie, sporting tragedy and art-house pleasures among the standouts. (more…)
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Please explain: Hanson blasts away
Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club appearance cannot be judged by normal standards of evidence or logic, because her appeal lies in grievance, demagoguery and a direct rejection of the journalists and institutions trying to scrutinise her. (more…)
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Pauline’s poisonous politics – Message from the Editor
A little while after Pauline Hanson graduated from Ipswich City Council politics to take the Queensland seat of Oxley, I ran into her in a Canberra pub. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. Journalists and politicians often drink together, or at least in close proximity to each other, and in the late 1990s Canberra had so few drinking holes that collisions were inevitable.
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Super El Niño threat, nuclear dead letter, and Beijing’s hunky-male theatre – Asian Media Report
Blistering heat and poor rains warning, Xi’s acceptance of North Korean nukes, the Pope’s Pyongyang visit plan, military crowd control in Jakarta protests, India’s recognition of women’s unpaid work, and China’s new ‘she economy’. (more…)
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Immigration debate needs facts, not inflated numbers
The latest ABS net migration figures expose the misuse of Net Permanent and Long-term movement data by media outlets and anti-immigration campaigners seeking to inflate claims about Australia’s migration intake. (more…)
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The downside of monetising cognition
As AI democratises cognitive labour, there is a risk of reducing the human capacity to think independently. (more…)