The Point

OPINION Photo: Panumas Sanguanwong A few weeks ago, Bangkok hosted the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meetings; as governments, banks and corporations came together to shape the economic futures of the Global South, trade unionists, climate activists, Indigenous Peoples, feminist collectives and young people from around the world mobilised alongside these meetings to demand an overhaul of the international financial architecture created by and for the Global North.

OPINION Today, the NSW Parliament will debate the case for truth in political advertising laws. It’s the culmination of a months-long petition in which over 31,000 NSW residents lent their names to the call for a ban on misleading ads. OPINION The Coalition and Labor will most likely be in lockstep on the latest defence changes, a bill that sailed through the last House sitting while attention was mostly on estimates.

WHAT'S NEW This article is licensed under Creative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0). You must credit the author(s) and The Point. You must link back to the original article. You may not edit or modify the article content. Images may be subject to separate copyright and are not included in this licence. Copy the HTML above into your CMS 1. Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is currently presiding over negotiations at the COP31 climate change conference.

VIDEO Join Royce Kurmelovs as he discusses his new Vantage Point essay, Means, motive and opportunity: How Australia cooked the books on climate. A generation of Australians was told that action on climate change would wreck the economy. What Australians weren’t told was that this message came from oil, gas and coal producers, and it was laundered into Australian Government policy via a little-known government agency. Quality research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts you can trust.

OPINION Now a staple of global finance, GSS bonds offer a powerful mechanism to fund pressing environmental and social initiatives that lie outside traditional government budgets. OFF THE CHARTS Last week, when the Reserve Bank announced it had raised the cash rate to 4.85%, it also released its latest forecasts for the economy in its Statement on Monetary Policy. For those hoping for a recovery in lost living standards, the news was very grim.

So while the HIR method itself does not explicitly refer to “cleared land”, any ambiguity is cleared up by the Explanatory Statement, which is the official legal guide to its interpretation.

Have you eaten at McDonald’s recently? If so, or even if not, you’ve probably eaten lettuce and other vegetables grown in Glenaladale, a thriving horticultural area 25 kilometres west of Bairnsdale in eastern Victoria. Growing food for Australians is the easy part of the job here in Glenaladale. The hard part has been fighting a mining project that is proposed to sit just over the Mitchel River from us, directly upwind. You don’t need to be a vegetable expert to see the problems with this.

OPINION Discrimination is literally what private, fee-charging schools are about. They are transactional, designed to provide a private and positional good for the families who can pay their fees. Only public schools have any obligation to the public good – aka educating every child. The clue is in the name.

Australia needs to serve more than just coffee at COP31, say environmental and humanitarian groups that have accused the Albanese government of failing to back its climate leadership ambitions with new funding. As President of Negotiations at the global summit, Australia had been expected to announce additional financial support for vulnerable countries, including its Pacific neighbours.

Two COP speeches in 24 hours. One from the Prime Minister of Australia, one from the Minister for Climate Change and Energy. Again, we witness the PR strategy from our government. First rule of COP Club: do not talk about fossil fuels! Neither the Prime Minister nor the Minister for Climate Change named fossil fuels as the cause of dangerous global warming. Neither said the words coal or gas. Albanese’s speech did not even use “fossil fuels” once.