In 2025, national and global events have placed pressure on Australian society. This report looks at what impact this has had on Australia's social cohesion, measured across five key areas. Despite the continuing national and global challenges of recent years, most of the indicators of social cohesion have been stable in the last two years.

This paper draws on the OECD's experience working with countries to develop and implement best practice principles for regulatory impact assessment (RIA). It presents a reference methodology and recommendations for national regulatory authorities to systematically adopt RIAs. The methodology provides a complete toolkit covering problem identification through to implementation.

This report presents the First Nations responses to the Australian National Carer Survey from 2020 to 2024. It focuses on First Nations carers’ economic and social needs, caring relationships, carers’ experiences accessing services, and their health and wellbeing. Findings show that many services do not meet First Nations carers’ needs to support their wellbeing.

Students undertaking compulsory placements as part of their university degrees encounter financial stress and often other forms of exclusion. This Australian project worked together with students and educators with lived expertise of placements to co-develop solutions to the issues of placement poverty and placement exclusion. It identified 40 solutions and eight overarching themes with seven...

As Australia prepares its 2026 National Defence Strategy, the nation must recognise that a window of strategic risk exists now and will do so into the early 2030s. This paper explores asymmetric methods of deterrence, as offered by todays' technologies, and asks whether they might be appropriate for Australia.