In a world where information is readily accessible, technology has changed how we engage in community and access information. 3000 years ago, the Greeks had an established oral culture, whereby information was relayed through the spoken word. Fast forward to […]

For democracies, all elections are important. Some are just more important than others. It is not our business here to urge a vote for a particular person or party. Rather, we outline the issues that we think are important for […]

  Governments and agencies face the challenge of using data and data analytics to understand problems and improve solutions. This is true across all sectors of society, including government, business, academia and the community sector. And all government officers will […]

In January 2022, the Australia Institute reported that: … the liquefied natural gas (LNG) is big business in Western Australia. In 2019–20, 47 million tonnes were sold generating sales revenue of $27 billion for multinational corporations like Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell […]

Late in 2021, we received an email from a reader of Agora who thought we had gone too far. The criticism was that in the last two editions we revealed ourselves as partisan and party political. We used Agora as […]

And so we say goodbye to 2021. And we’d like to end the year by acknowledging 2 very different individuals who have in very different ways made the world a better place. One The first is Ms Grace Tame. As […]

Last month, as a proof of why we must be extra careful when handling data, Professor Jeffrey Morris analysed if the 1984 movie Ghostbusters was killing people. In an exercise that demonstrates common errors of reasoning and analysis, Professor Morris […]

One The Future Fund invests on behalf of the Australian Government. In November 2021, journalists from the Guardian, Ben Butler and Ben Doherty, asked if the fund had invested in a weapons manufacturer that sold combat aircraft to the Myanmar […]

The Barnaby Joyce Award goes to a person who has contributed in some way to Australian society during the year. For 2021 we give this award to Mr Craig Kelly, the Member for Hughes. In doing so, we were inspired […]

Modelling is part of the analytical toolkit that policy makers use. We estimate what are the consequences of policy A and plan B. If we use modelling or draw on the results of modelling, we know that all modelling is […]

Imagine you’re getting married and you’re writing your vows and you’re thinking about why your beloved is just so amazing. Why they are the one for you. To prepare, you create a list of virtues. Your beloved is kind, fair […]

It’s harder than it looks for superannuation funds that want to write clear documents. Using the online readability application VisibleThread, we measured 3 attributes of text: the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, active voice and sentence length. We used these metrics to […]