Western leaders often use it to describe a framework of rules, norms and institutions designed to guide state behavior. Advocates argue that this framework has provided the foundation for decades of stability and prosperity, while critics question its fairness and relevance in today’s multipolar world.
But what exactly is the international rules-based order, when did it come about, and why do people increasingly hear about challenges to it today?
The birth of a universal vision
The rules-based international order, initially known as the “liberal international order,” emerged from the devastation of World War II. The vision was ambitious and universal: to create a global system based on liberal democratic values, market capitalism and multilateral cooperation.
At its core, however, this project was driven by the United States, which saw itself as the unmatched leader of the new order.
The idea was to replace the chaos of great power politics and shifting alliances with a predictable world governed by shared rules and norms.
Central to this vision was the establishment of institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These institutions, alongside widely accepted norms and formalized rules, aimed to promote political cooperation, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and economic recovery for countries damaged by war.
However, the vision of a truly universal liberal international order quickly unraveled. As the Cold War set in, the world split into two competing blocs. The Western bloc, led by the United States, adhered to the principles of the liberal international order.
Meanwhile, the Soviet-led communist bloc established a parallel system with its own norms, rules and institutions. The Warsaw Pact provided military alignment, while the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance managed economic cooperation. The communist bloc emphasized state-led economic planning and single-party rule, rejecting the liberal order’s emphasis on democracy and free markets.
Emerging cracks
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the liberal international order appeared to have triumphed. The United States became the world’s sole superpower, and many former communist states integrated into Western institutions. For a brief period, the order’s universal vision seemed within reach.
By the 1990s and early 2000s, however, new cracks began to appear.
NATO expansion, the creation of the World Trade Organization and greater emphasis on human rights through institutions such as the International Criminal Court all closely aligned with Western liberal values. The spread of these norms and the institutions enforcing them appeared, to many outside the West, as Western ideology dressed up as universal principles.
In response to mounting criticism, Western leaders began using the term rules-based international order instead of liberal international order. This shift aimed to emphasize procedural fairness – rules that all states, in theory, had agreed upon – rather than a system explicitly rooted in liberal ideological commitments. The focus moved from promoting specific liberal norms to maintaining stability and predictability.
New challenges to the status quo
China’s rise has brought these tensions into sharp relief. While China participates in many institutions underpinning the rules-based international order, it also seeks to reshape them.
The Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank illustrate Beijing’s efforts to establish alternative frameworks more aligned with its interests. These initiatives challenge existing rules and norms by offering new institutional pathways for economic and political influence.
Meanwhile, Russia’s actions in Ukraine – especially the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2022 invasion – challenge the order’s core principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Western inconsistencies have long undermined the credibility of the rules-based order. The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, widely criticized for bypassing international norms and institutions, exemplified a selective application of the rules. This double standard extends toward Washington’s selective engagement with international legal bodies and its inconsistent approach to sovereignty and intervention.
An uncertain future
Supporters argue that the rules-based order remains vital for addressing global challenges such as climate change, pandemics and nuclear proliferation.
However, ambiguity surrounds what these “rules” actually entail, which norms are genuinely universal, and who enforces them.
This lack of clarity, coupled with shifting global power dynamics, complicates efforts to sustain the system.
The future of the rules-based international order is uncertain. The shift from “liberal” to “rules-based” reflected an ongoing struggle to adapt a complex web of rules, norms and institutions to a rapidly changing international environment.
Whether it evolves further, splinters or endures as is will depend on how well it balances fairness, inclusivity and stability in an increasingly multipolar world.
Andrew Latham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Themiya Nanayakkara, Lead Astronomer at the James Webb Australian Data Centre, Swinburne University of Technology
The Big Wheel alongside some of its neighbours. Weichen Wang et al. (2025)
Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It’s a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We’ve dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published today in Nature Astronomy.
This giant disk galaxy existed within the first two billion years after the Big Bang, meaning it formed when the universe was just 15% of its current age. It challenges what we know about how galaxies form.
What is a disk galaxy?
Picture a galaxy like our own Milky Way: a flat, rotating structure made up of stars, gas and dust, often surrounded by an extensive halo of unseen dark matter.
Disk galaxies typically have clear spiral arms extending outward from a dense central region. Our Milky Way itself is a disk galaxy, characterised by beautiful spiral arms that wrap around its centre.
An artist impression of the Milky Way showcasing the dusty spiral structures similar to The Big Wheel.
Studying disk galaxies, like the Milky Way and the newly discovered Big Wheel, helps us uncover how galaxies form, grow and evolve across billions of years.
These studies are especially significant, as understanding galaxies similar to our own can provide deeper insights into the cosmic history of our galactic home.
A giant surprise
We previously thought galaxy disks form gradually over a long period: either through gas smoothly flowing into galaxies from surrounding space, or by merging with smaller galaxies.
Usually, rapid mergers between galaxies would disrupt the delicate spiral structures, turning them into more chaotic shapes. However, the Big Wheel managed to quickly grow to a surprisingly large size without losing its distinctive spiral form. This challenges long-held ideas about the growth of giant galaxies.
Our detailed JWST observations show that the Big Wheel is comparable in size and rotational speed to the largest “super-spiral” galaxies in today’s universe. It is three times as big in size as comparable galaxies at that epoch and is one of the most massive galaxies observed in the early cosmos.
In fact, its rotation speed places it among galaxies at the high end of what’s called the Tully-Fisher relation, a well-known link between a galaxy’s stellar mass and how fast it spins.
Remarkably, even though it’s unusually large, the Big Wheel is actively growing at a rate similar to other galaxies at the same cosmic age.
The Big Wheel galaxy is seen at the centre. In striking contrast, the bright blue galaxy (upper right) is only about 1.5 billion light years away, making the Big Wheel roughly 50 times farther away. Although both appear a similar size, the enormous distance of the Big Wheel reveals its truly colossal physical scale. JWST
Unusually crowded part of space
What makes this even more fascinating is the environment in which the Big Wheel formed.
It’s located in an unusually crowded region of space, where galaxies are packed closely together, ten times denser than typical areas of the universe. This dense environment likely provided ideal conditions for the galaxy to grow quickly. It probably experienced mergers that were gentle enough to let the galaxy maintain its spiral disk shape.
Additionally, the gas flowing into the galaxy must have aligned well with its rotation, allowing the disk to grow quickly without being disrupted. So, a perfect combination.
An illustration of how a massive spiral galaxy forms and evolves over billions of years. This evolutionary path is similar to real-world galaxies like Andromeda, our closest spiral galaxy neighbour, which also developed distinct spiral arms similar to the Big Wheel.
A fortunate finding
Discovering a galaxy like the Big Wheel was incredibly unlikely. We had less than a 2% chance to find this in our survey, according to current galaxy formation models.
So, our finding was fortunate, probably because we observed it within an exceptionally dense region, quite different from typical cosmic environments.
Besides its mysterious formation, the ultimate fate of the Big Wheel is another intriguing question. Given the dense environment, future mergers might significantly alter its structure, potentially transforming it into a galaxy comparable in mass to the largest ones observed in nearby clusters, such as Virgo.
The Big Wheel’s discovery has revealed yet another mystery of the early universe, showing that our current models of galaxy evolution still need refinement.
With more observations and discoveries of massive, early galaxies like the Big Wheel, astronomers will be able to unlock more secrets about how the universe built the structures we see today.
A Fijian academic believes Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s failed attempt to garner enough parliamentary support to change the country’s 2013 Constitution “is only the beginning”.
Last week, Rabuka fell short in his efforts to secure the support of three-quarters of the members of Parliament to amend sections 159 and 160 of the constitution.
The prime minister’s proposed amendments also sought to remove the need for a national referendum altogether. While the bill passed its first reading with support from several opposition MPs, it failed narrowly at the second reading.
Jope Tarai, an indigenous Fijian PhD scholar and researcher at the Australian National University, told RNZ Pacific Waves that “it is quite obvious that it is not going to be the end” of Rabuka’s plans to amend the constitution.
However, he said that it was “something that might take a while” with less than a year before the 2026 elections.
“So, the repositioning towards the people’s priorities will be more important than constitutional review,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A second man has died from Japanese encephalitis virus in New South Wales on March 6, the state’s health authorities confirmed on Friday. Aged in his 70s, the man was infected while holidaying in the Murrumbidgee region.
This follows the death of another man in his 70s in Sydney last month, after holidaying in the same region in January.
Japanese encephalitis is one of the most serious diseases that spreads via mosquitoes, with around 68,000 cases annually across Southeast Asia and Western Pacific regions.
The virus is thought to be maintained in a cycle between mosquitoes and waterbirds. Mosquitoes are infected when they feed from an infected waterbird. They then pass the virus to other waterbirds. Sometimes other animals, and people, can be infected.
Pigs are also a host, and the virus has spread through commercial piggeries in Victoria, NSW and Queensland. (But it poses no food safety risk.)
People with mild cases may have a fever, headache and vomiting.
In more serious cases – about one in 250 people infected – people may have neck stiffness, disorientation, drowsiness and seizures. Serious illness can have life-long neurological complications and, in some cases, the infection can be life-threatening.
There had been no evidence of activity on the mainland since 2004 but everything changed in the summer of 2021–22. Japanese encephalitis virus was detected in commercial piggeries in southeastern Australia during that summer.
This prompted the declaration of a Communicable Disease Incident of National Significance. At the time, flooding accompanying the La Niña-dominated weather patterns and a resulting boom in mosquito numbers, and waterbird populations, was thought responsible.
The virus has spread in subsequent years and has been detected in the mosquito and arbovirus surveillance programs as well as detection in feral pigs and commercial piggeries in most states and territories. Only Tasmania has remained free of Japanese encephalitis virus.
Human cases of infection have also been reported. There were more than 50 cases of disease and seven deaths in 2022.
Due to concern about Japanese encephalitis virus and other mosquito-borne pathogens, health authorities around Australia have expanded and enhanced their surveillance programs.
In Queensland, this includes mosquito monitoring at a number of locations, including urban areas of southeast Queensland. Mosquitoes collected in this monitoring program tested positive for Japanese encephalitis virus, promoting the current health warnings.
Why is its detection in Brisbane important?
Up to now, scientists have thought the risk of Japanese encephalitis was likely greatest following seasons of above-average rainfall or flooding. This provides ideal conditions for waterbirds and mosquitoes.
But the activity of Japanese encephalitis virus over the summer of 2024–25 has taken many scientists by surprise. Before Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred arrived, there had been somewhat dry conditions with less waterbird activity and low mosquito numbers in many regions of eastern Australia.
However there has still been widespread Japanese encephalitis virus activity in Victoria, NSW and Queensland.
To date, Japanese encephalitis virus activity hasn’t extended to the coastal regions of southeast Queensland. The detection of the virus in suburban Brisbane may require authorities to rethink exactly where the virus may turn up next. Authorities are ramping up their surveillance to see just how widespread the virus is in the region.
Health authorities and scientists are also trying to understand how the virus moved from western areas of the state to the coast and what drives virus transmission in different regions.
There is currently no evidence the virus is active in coastal regions of northern NSW.
Mosquitoes collected in Brisbane have tested positive for Japanese encephalitis virus. A/Prof Cameron Webb (NSW Health Pathology)
What can people do to protect themselves?
Avoiding mosquito bites is the best way to reduce the risk of Japanese encephalitis virus.
Cover up with long-sleeved shirts and long pants for a physical barrier against mosquito bites.
Use topical insect repellents containing DEET, picaridin, or oil of lemon eucalyptus. Be sure to apply an even coat on all exposed areas of skin for the longest-lasting protection.
Ensure any insect screens on houses, tents and caravans are in good repair and reduce the amount of standing water in the backyard. The more water there is around your home, the more opportunities for mosquitoes there are.
It may take many weeks following vaccination to achieve sufficient protection, so prioritise reducing your exposure to bites in the meantime.
Cameron Webb and the Department of Medical Entomology, NSW Health Pathology and University of Sydney, have been engaged by a wide range of insect repellent and insecticide manufacturers to provide testing of products and provide expert advice on medically important arthropods, including mosquitoes. Cameron has also received funding from local, state and federal agencies to undertake research into various aspects of management of various medically important arthropods.
Andrew van den Hurk has received funding from local, state and federal agencies to study the ecology of mosquito-borne pathogens, and their surveillance and control. He is an employee of the Department of Health, Queensland government.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has announced a Coalition government would introduce legislation, based on an American law used to pursue the Mafia, to enable police to target the “kingpins” of criminal organisations such as outlaw motorcycle gangs.
This follows new allegations by Nine newspapers and 60 Minutes about the rogue union the CFMEU. The allegations include “the employment of ‘baseball-twirling violent people’ on the [Victorian government’s] Big Build, where women have been bashed and then black-banned after they complained”.
The Nine investigation further alleged that “gangland and bikie-linked figures are receiving large payments from companies on publicly funded projects looking to gain favour with union insiders, leaving state and federal taxpayers in effect underwriting payments to the underworld.”
The Coalition said Monday the proposed new offences would “be based on the highly effective Mafia takedown laws in the US”. Dutton and shadow ministers Michaelia Cash and James Paterson said in a statement:
By targeting groups that engage in a pattern of criminal behaviour, these offences will put police in the position where they can target the criminal organisation and its leadership.
This means the bosses and kingpins of groups such as outlaw motorcycle gangs can be jailed even if they distance themselves from the crimes their organisations commit.
Dutton described the CFMEU as “a modern-day mafia operation”. He added:
The culture of criminality and corruption is so entrenched, and it will never change – especially under the weak and incompetent Albanese Labor government.
Dutton claimed the CFMEU affair was the “biggest corruption scandal in our country’s history”.
The opposition said it would also set up an Australian Federal Police-led taskforce that would bring together federal law enforcement agencies and state and territory police forces to target criminal behaviour.
After the latest revelation surfaced in Nine media at the weekend, Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt said on social media he would refer the allegations to the police.
On Monday, Watt condemned Dutton’s proposal for a new law.
We don’t need to import an American racketeering law – we already have our own laws to go after ‘kingpins’, such as section 390.6 of the Criminal Code, which already deals with directing criminal organisation.
He also condemned the opposition’s long-standing policy to deregister the union, saying this would mean there was no regulation.
Peter Dutton’s reckless desire for a headline puts at risk the investigations and crime-fighting that the Coalition never bothered to commence in their decade in office.
Victoria police is undertaking an investigation into the fresh allegations.
The US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act, dating from 1970, enables prosecutors to take down whole mob-related organisations rather than having only the power to deal with figures individually. It is intended to deal with mob bosses who could not be directly connected to the crimes.
Its use, however, has extended well beyond mob prosecutions to a range of targets, from street gangs to politicians.
US President Donald Trump was charged under Georgia’s RICO act for “knowingly and willfully joining a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the [2020] election”.
The construction and general division of the CFMEU has been in administration since last August.
The union’s national secretary, Zach Smith, said on Facebook: “We cannot let our union or our industry be a safe haven for criminality of corruption”.
He also said that “violence against women is completely unacceptable to our union”.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Australian workers have to overcome some significant barriers in navigating their careers.
Some may lack the training or work experience opportunities needed to make themselves stand out and take the next step. Others may be extensively qualified, but face limited new job or promotional opportunities relevant to their skill set.
But there’s another common barrier that’s often overlooked: post-employment restraints. Among the most well-known are non-compete clauses, but these aren’t the only kind.
These tools are designed to protect employer interests. But their widespread use has far-reaching consequences for job mobility, wages and innovation across Australia.
Our new research, which was commissioned by the Department of Treasury and conducted by researchers at Queensland University of Technology, set out to examine how these agreements are impacting Australia’s workforce.
We zeroed in on two very different occupational groups – hairdressers and IT professionals. Our findings point to an urgent need for regulatory reform in Australia. But we also offer solutions that could better balance business needs with worker rights.
What are post-employment restraints?
Post-employment restraints are contractual clauses that restrict what workers can do after leaving their jobs.
One common type are non-compete clauses, which prevent workers from joining competitors or starting their own businesses, usually (though not always) in the same industry.
Signing a non-compete agreement often prevents you from working for a competing business. G.Tbov/Shutterstock
There are also non-solicitation agreements, which restrict them from approaching former clients or colleagues.
And non-disclosure obligations can limit the use of confidential information concerning the employer’s business – even when created by workers themselves.
Businesses argue these clauses help them safeguard their proprietary interests, such as hard-won client relationships, trade secrets and intellectual property.
However, their application is not limited to high-level executives or sensitive roles. Such restraints are more common than many realise.
Data cited in our report from businesses with 200 employees or less confirms previous Australian research: at least one in five businesses use non-compete, non-solicitation of clients and non-solicitation of co-workers clauses. The number is even higher if non-disclosure agreements are included in the list of restraints.
Overall, half of all Australian workers are reported to have post-employment restraints – including many in low-paid jobs.
As former Fair Work Commission President Iain Ross has pointed out, this raises critical questions about fairness and the broader impacts on the labour market.
A tangle of restrictions in hairdressing
Hairdressing is a predominantly female, low-wage profession. Our interviews with hairdressers reveal the outsized impact that post-employment restraints can have on vulnerable workers.
Restrictions typically include bans on working within a certain radius of their former salon, taking clients to a new employer, or starting their own business.
Many interviewees only learned about these restrictions after accepting a position or deciding to leave. Some reported being barred from telling clients of their departure or facing demands to pay penalties if clients followed them to a new salon.
The personal relationships hairdressers form with their clients are central to their work and professional identity. However, these relationships often become battlegrounds when employment ends.
Hairdressers explained the difficulties that often arose from becoming “friends” with clients. As one put it:
As soon as you leave, it’s almost harder than a breakup.
Financially, these restrictions exacerbate the already precarious conditions in the hairdressing industry.
With limited opportunities for wage growth, many hairdressers establish their own businesses or rent chairs in salons for greater independence.
Yet, non-compete clauses often delay these plans. Hairdressers are then forced to accept lower-paying positions or leave the profession entirely.
Social media has added a whole new layer of complexity. Hairdressers are often required to use their personal social media accounts to promote their employer’s business, only to have their posts deleted or accounts locked when they leave. This can erase years of professional work and connections.
Many young hairdressers we spoke to expressed particular frustration that their social media presence, cultivated under the salon’s brand, could not be carried forward to new roles.
Holding back innovation
Our study found while hairdressers face restrictions on their mobility and client relationships, IT professionals face obstacles that limit their ability to innovate.
IT professionals often develop new technologies, software or processes, sometimes in their own time. However, contracts often claim ownership of these innovations for the employer.
We found non-disclosure agreements, non-compete clauses and intellectual property ownership terms are all common in the industry.
This environment discourages entrepreneurial ventures and independent projects, even as the industry demands agility and creativity.
As one participant explained:
It’s made me pause multiple times, made me think about not developing a code that you’re interested in just for your own development.
Professionals reported feeling “locked in” to roles, unable to pursue side projects or start their own businesses without risking legal action.
Non-compete clauses in IT contracts also restrict job mobility when professionals cannot join competitor companies or use their expertise in new roles.
This impacts not only individual workers but also the broader industry, as firms struggle to recruit skilled talent.
Paradoxically, some employers actively poach talent from competitors while enforcing non-compete clauses against their own staff.
Intellectual property restrictions can discourage IT professionals from working on their own innovative projects. Jacob Lund/Shutterstock
The way forward
By limiting job mobility, post-employment restraints contribute to wage stagnation and reduce workers’ bargaining power.
Australia’s regulatory approach to this issue lags behind other countries. There are no formal limits on the length or breadth of restraints, just a vague test of “reasonableness” that makes it hard to know what is permissible, without costly litigation.
In the United States, California has banned non-compete clauses outright, fostering a thriving tech industry. In Europe, companies like Germany impose strict limits on the duration of restraints and require employers to compensate workers during the restricted period.
These models demonstrate that balancing employer interests with worker rights is possible and can yield positive outcomes.
One option for policymakers in Australia would be to impose new restrictions on the scope and duration of restraints to ensure they serve legitimate business interests without unduly restricting workers.
Employers could be required to provide plain-language explanations around these restrictions at the time of hiring and compensate workers for the duration of any restraint, as seen in some European models.
Post-employment restraints are a double-edged sword. While they may protect legitimate business interests, their overuse undermines job mobility, innovation and worker wellbeing.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor & Principal Fellow in Urban Risk & Resilience, The University of Melbourne
A fire at a nightclub in North Macedonia has killed at least 59 people and injured more than 150. The blaze broke out at the Pulse nightclub in Kočani, where around 500 people were attending a concert.
Witnesses reported that pyrotechnics used during the performance ignited the ceiling, causing flames to spread rapidly.
Authorities have arrested 20 people so far, including the club’s manager. Investigations continue. The North Macedonian government has declared a seven-day mourning period.
While building fires are not limited to nightclubs, many of the most devastating building fires in history have happened in nightclubs around the world. So why are nightclubs such a risky place for deadly fires?
A long history of nightclub fires
A look at past nightclub fires shows just how common and deadly they’ve been in the past 100 years. We identified at least 24 nightclub fires where ten or more people died since 1940.
Collectively, these 24 incidents account for at least 2,800 deaths, with nearly 1,300 in the 21st century alone.
Now, North Macedonia’s Pulse nightclub joins this long list.
Why are nightclubs so risky for fires?
A review of past nightclub fires we’ve collated in our database reveals common patterns. Two key factors have contributed to the frequency and severity of these fire disasters.
1. Pyrotechnics, fireworks and flammable materials
One of the most common causes of nightclub fires has been the use of pyrotechnics in enclosed spaces. Pyrotechnics are controlled chemical reactions designed to produce flames, smoke, or light effects.
They have been involved in at least six of the deadliest nightclub fires, including the recent Pulse nightclub fire in North Macedonia, as well as The Station (United States, 2003), Kiss (Brazil, 2013), Colectiv (Romania, 2015), Lame Horse (Russia, 2009) and República Cromañón (Argentina, 2004).
In some cases, fireworks – which are different from stage pyrotechnics and sometimes illegally used indoors – have played a role. The Lame Horse nightclub fire, which killed 156 people in Russia in 2009, was caused by a spark from fireworks igniting a low ceiling covered in flammable plastic decorations.
Foam insulation, wooden panelling, plastic decorations and carpeted walls have all been key factors in past nightclub fires. In Cocoanut Grove (Boston, 1942), artificial palm trees and other flammable decorations accelerated the blaze.
2. Overcrowding and blocked or insufficient exits
Evacuation failures have been a factor in nearly every major nightclub fire.
In some instances, crowds may not immediately recognise the severity of the situation, especially if they mistake alarms for false alarms or special effects (for example, smoke machines, loud music).
Further, patrons could be intoxicated due alcohol or other drugs. Intoxication combined with potential disorientation due to dim lighting can further reduce judgement during an evacuation.
Clearly, the best way to protect patrons is to prevent a fire from breaking out in the first place. But in settings where fire risks are inherently high, the ability to evacuate people swiftly is crucial.
Nightclubs are among the most crowded indoor spaces. While crowd density is part of a nightclub’s design and atmosphere, overcrowding beyond legal capacity is common.
A crowd that has gradually gathered over several hours must suddenly evacuate in seconds or minutes to survive a fire. This is made more difficult by narrow hallways and limited exits, which quickly become bottlenecks when hundreds of people attempt to escape at once.
What’s more, not all exits are always accessible during a fire. In several past nightclub disasters, locked or obstructed emergency exits have significantly worsened the death toll.
Minimising the risks
Nightclubs are uniquely vulnerable to fires due to a combination of structural risks, unsafe materials, overcrowding and regulatory failures.
While human behaviour plays a role in how fires unfold in confined spaces such as nightclubs, people should be able to go for a night out and expect to come home safely.
Regulatory oversight must ensure strict compliance with fire codes. Venues should have fire suppression systems (such as sprinklers, fire extinguishers and smoke detectors) to control or contain fires before they spread, and adequate exits.
Nightclubs should ban indoor pyrotechnics and fireworks, as history has repeatedly shown their deadly consequences.
Capacity limits must be enforced, and emergency exits should always be accessible.
Public awareness is also key. Patrons need to understand the real risk of fires in nightclubs, and be prepared to evacuate swiftly but calmly if danger arises.
Ruggiero Lovreglio receives funding from Royal Society Te Apārangi (NZ) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA).
Milad Haghani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The US government has sent a 36-point questionnaire to some Australian researchers who are working on joint projects with US colleagues.
ABC Radio National reports at least eight Australian universities are involved. Their research areas include foreign aid, medicine, vaccines and defence. The New York Times reports a similar document has also been sent to other overseas organisations with US funding links.
The questions are wide-ranging and cover academics’ links to China as well as their projects’ focus on topics such as diversity, inclusion and gender identity, as well as climate change.
Some of the specific questions include:
Can you confirm that your organisation has not received ANY funding from PRC People’s Republic of China, Russia, Cuba or Iran?
Can you confirm that this is no DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] project or DEI elements of the project? [sic]
Does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined in the below Executive Order?
Can you confirm this is not a climate or “environmental justice” project or include such elements?
The survey also covers issues such as secure borders with Mexico, ending government waste, terrorism, the war on opioids, and “eradicating anti-Christian bias”.
Concern and anger
In response, the Group of Eight (which represents Australia’s top research universities) and Australian Academy of Science have separately raised concerns with the Australian government about the survey and its impact on Australian research.
The Group of Eight says the US has already suspended or terminated research grants with six of its eight member universities.
The National Tertiary Education Union also labelled the survey “blatant foreign interference”.
A spokesperson for Education Minister Jason Clare says Australia is
“engaging with the US government to understand what these measures mean for future funding and collaboration”.
Are Trump’s orders legal?
Trump’s executive orders are currently the subject of numerous lawsuits in the US. Plaintiffs say Trump’s orders violate the First and Fifth Amendments – those dealing with protection of free speech, equal protection and “due process of law” when depriving a citizen of property.
Whether Trump’s orders are legal or not is a tricky question, and will likely come down the judges hearing each case.
US involvement in Australian research is significant. According to the Academy of Science, US government research funding involving Australian research organisations was $A386 million in 2024.
It is arguable Trump’s orders infringe Australian sovereignty. But the US has always had the capacity to interfere in Australian university research – it just hasn’t actually done it until now.
Research contracts signed between universities and funding bodies can contain all kinds of requirements, so US law can end up applying to Australian researchers. When the AUKUS deal was announced in 2021, a huge question was how universities would comply with notoriously harsh US export control laws.
The survey indicates it was issued by the US Office of Management and Budget and appears to be supported by the US CHIPS and Science Act (which authorises certain research investments) and National Science Foundation policies. So, while Australian researchers could potentially ignore these questionnaires, that would legally give a US funding body grounds to cancel the funding contract.
Our foreign interference laws also weren’t designed for situations like this. Even if they did, Trump is the current head of the US government, and is likely to be immune from prosecution
Statutory tests for foreign interference – including criteria that such acts are covert, and/or involve threats of harm – simply don’t apply to a US president like Trump.
So legally, it doesn’t look like there is much Australia can do about Trump’s orders.
What can Australia do?
Some newly unemployed researchers are now poised to leave the US, taking their research with them. This poses a potential security risk, with countries such as China and Russia both keen to capitalise on Trump’s decisions.
But other nations are also aware of the possibilities. The European Union has already offered displaced US scientists a more “sympathetic place to work”. South Korea and Canada are also marketing themselves as attractive options. Australia could follow suit.
The federal government is currently doing a strategic review of Australia’s research and development system. This could make diversifying our research partners a national priority.
Either way, given such radical changes in the US, Australia needs to seriously reconsider how it is funding and structuring research.
Brendan Walker-Munro has consulted for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, and is also an Adjunct Expert Associate of the National Security College. He has received funding from the Social Cyber Institute and Active Cyber Defence Alliance.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, JOAN. Landscape still.Courtesy of the artist.
Virtuosic digital artistry is on show in Serwah Attafuah’s installation The Darkness Between the Stars, currently showing at ACMI.
The work fiercely challenges stereotypes of black femininity and draws upon the history and culture of the Ashanti people of modern-day Ghana, one of the countries most affected by the Atlantic slave trade and the site of remembrance and pilgrimage for many descendants of the people trafficked as slaves.
Serewah is part of a generation of video artists like Melbourne’s Xanthe Dobbie, British artist Rachel Maclean, and Paris based, French Guianese artist Tabita Rezaire. These artists all channel the moving image culture of gaming and the internet, rather than the cinematic or televisual references of their forebears.
Each of these artists uses exuberant humour and a tough-minded politic to challenge the reductive construction of female and queer identities.
As we pass through the arch at the entry to the gallery, we are greeted by a 3D animation of an ocean reflecting a sky that cycles from starlit to slowly emerging dawn. We are told the arch references the entry to the Elmina castle built by the Portuguese: one of two major points from which enslaved African people were cast into the hell of the Atlantic passage and life in bonds.
African warriors
Beyond the entrance we are faced by a series of five screens in portrait format. Each shows short loops of African warriors, suggesting the idealised – and, here, heroic – forms of game avatars a la Fortnite.
Each of the images is framed in gold e-waste. This brings to mind Congolese street art costumes, similarly made of waste which blend cultural traditions and an Afrofuturist resistance that dares to imagine a better future.
The first portrait is a furred, horn helmeted, and neck ringed warrior woman. Armed with a laser and an automatic pistol, she has further weapons adorning her back ready to be deployed.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, ANANSI, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist
Behind and around her are malfunctioning computer screens. One scrolls through an online dating text exchange which evokes the idealised and reductive self-curation of the online profile. This chat is between Jenny and Mark, a FIFO worker on an offshore oil rig in Western Australia. This ties to the images of oil rigs found elsewhere in the show, evoking the plundering of African resources: human and otherwise; historical and ongoing.
The second screen pictures an armoured woman (or cyborg?) atop a rearing tiger. The tiger is an intriguing choice given it is an Asian animal but potentially points to a pan exoticism rooted in the confusion of cultures.
She wields a curved blade amid a savannah populated with umbrella thorn acacia and what appear to be comfortingly homely (and amusing) ground-hugging waratahs in the foreground.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, JOAN, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist.
Complicating fetishes
Moving around the room, floating robots accompany another warrior who props against a sword supported by a fragmented classical column.
She stands beneath an oversized moon, evoking an off-world setting, a reading compounded by her protective headwear.
Alongside a writhing snake, we catch sight of her Betty Davis (no, the Black one) super heels: a clear link to the under-remembered pioneer of Afrofuturism.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, KING, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist.
Continuing this play of sexual provocation and power is the addition of a techno tutu which further accentuates her already thrusting buttocks.
The problematisation of sexualised imagery is one of the exhibition’s central themes. Attafuah toys with the Western fetishisation and fear of Black women’s sexuality.
Occasionally borrowing cliches from the gaming and pornographic worlds, Attafuah forcefully complicates such fetishes by arming four of her five warriors to the teeth. They take aim at us, challenging their construction as passive objects for our visual consumption.
A further figure, singularly unarmed apart from her thorny armbands, appears in the next frame. She runs through a series of coquettish modelling poses in her mesh bodysuit as she stands amid buzzing screens and computer detritus.
In yet another confusingly (and amusingly) stereotyped African landscape she is pictured among palm trees and sand, in what I took to be an evocation of a North African environment complete with desert fortress, oil rig and passing container ship.
In the final of the five portraits a young, braided, and fantastically eyelashed woman takes aim at us with a pistol straight from Star Wars (Rebel Alliance issue, naturally).
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, VENUS, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist.
She stands hip deep in a lagoon of water lilies and floating CDs. A futuristic city fills the background with a slowly turning wind turbine that sports yellow and black radiation colouring – yet another paradoxical meeting in an exhibition characterised by mixed messages that contradict easy readings.
In The Darkness Between the Stars, Attafuah proves herself to be a powerful, uncompromising and most welcome voice in contemporary Australian art. She proves herself capable of generating sophisticated, nuanced and playful reflections on complex problems that we carry from past to present.
Serwah Attafuah: The Darkness Between the Stars is at ACMI, Melbourne, until June 1.
Dominic Redfern works at RMIT with, and previously taught, Xanthe Dobbie.
It took thousands of years to develop the world’s extraordinary range of domesticated farm animals – an estimated 8,800 livestock breeds across 38 farmed species.
But this diversity is dwindling fast. Advances in selective breeding and artificial insemination have fuelled the global spread of a small number of profitable livestock types. Their popularity has left ever more heritage breeds at risk of extinction.
Why does this matter? Each breed represents vital genetic diversity for the livestock species on which we rely, known as agrobiodiversity. As the number of breeds shrink, we lose their genetics forever.
There are bright spots amid the decline. Hundreds of passionate farmers are working hard to keep heritage breeds alive around Australia. As my new book shows, they do it primarily for love.
Which livestock breeds are disappearing – and why?
Cattle have experienced the highest number of extinctions, with at least 184 breeds lost globally.
Of all chicken breeds, one in ten is now extinct, and a further 30% are endangered.
The fleece of Elliotdale sheep has been used to make woollen carpets. Sue Curliss, CC BY-NC-ND
Pigs fare little better. Australia’s 2.5 million pigs are predominantly Large White, Landrace and Duroc crossbreeds, while none of the eight remaining purebred pig breeds in Australia currently has more than 100 sows registered with the Rare Breeds Trust. While not all sows are registered, we know breeds such as Tamworths are at dangerously low numbers.
How did this happen? Over the past century, the goal of animal husbandry has shifted from breeding hardy, multipurpose animals to increasing performance for economic gain. For livestock, performance means more of what humans value, such as pigs with extra ribs, prolific egg-laying hens and sheep with finer wool.
Huge sums have been spent on selective breeding and artificial insemination technologies. This, in turn, has made it possible for a small number of profitable livestock types to be farmed globally.
For instance, when you buy a roast chicken, it will likely be one of just two types of fast-growing broilers (meat chickens), the Ross or the Cobb. Their genetics are developed and trademarked by two multinational agribusinesses who dominate the global broiler market.
Chicken breed numbers have shrunk too, risking rare breeds such as Transylvanian naked neck cockerel bantams. Scott Carter, CC BY-NC-ND
It’s hard to overstate how big the increases in production have been from reproductive technologies. In the dairy industry, for instance, milk yield per cow has doubled in the past 40 years. These volumes are around six times greater now than a century ago.
Holsteins, the top dairy breed, have become globally dominant. Almost 1.4 million of Australia’s 1.65 million dairy cows are Holsteins. But as Holstein numbers soar, other breeds dwindle. Many farmers have simply stopped rearing other breeds, leading to many becoming endangered or extinct.
For Holsteins themselves, this has come with a cost. Selective breeding for high milk volume has meant Holsteins suffer more medical issues such as metabolic diseases and frequent mastitis. They also have reduced fertility and longevity.
Researchers have found 99% of Holstein bulls produced by artificial insemination in the United States are descended from just two sires. This wide dissemination of limited bloodlines has led to the spread of genetic defects.
Our food systems face growing threats. Genetic diversity provides a safeguard for livestock species against lethal animal diseases such as H5N1 bird flu and African swine fever.
If we rely on just a few breeds, we risk a wipe out. The Irish potato famine is a catastrophic example. In the 1800s, Irish farmers took up the “lumper” variety of potatoes to feed a growing population. But when fungal rot struck in the 1840s, it turned most of the crop to mush – and led to mass starvation.
Some breeds have very useful traits, such as resistance to particular pests and diseases.
Chickens and other birds die in swathes if infected by Newcastle disease, one of the most serious bird viruses. But breeds such as the hardy Egyptian Fayoumi survive better, while the European Leghorn – whose genetics are used in commercial egg-laying breeds – is highly susceptible.
Local breeds can also have better resistance to endemic pests. The Indian zebu humped cattle breed, for example, is less prone to tick infestation than crossbreeds.
Climate change is also making life harder for livestock, and some breeds are better adapted to heat than others.
For different cultural groups, local heritage breeds also have unique symbolic and culinary value.
While it’s well-known eating less meat would benefit ecosystems, animal welfare and human health, eating meat remains entrenched in our diets and the economy. Pursuing more sustainable and higher-welfare approaches to livestock production is crucial.
Some Aussie farmers love heritage breeds
A cohort of Australian farmers is working hard to conserve dozens of endangered livestock breeds such as Large Black pigs, Shropshire sheep and Belted Galloway cattle.
A rare Belted Galloway cow with a one week old calf. Scott Carter, CC BY-NC-ND
But these farmers are hampered by our reluctance as consumers to pay more to cover the cost of raising slower-growing breeds in free-range environments. Not only that, but meat processors are increasingly closing their doors to small-scale producers.
Why persevere? For four years, I’ve conducted ethnographic research with Australia’s heritage breed farmers. I found they were motivated by one of the most powerful conservation tools we have: love.
Of his endangered English Leicester sheep, one farmer told me:
I consider them to be family; they have been our family for over 150 years. I talk to them, and the rams in particular talk to me. Sorry if I sound like a silly old man, but you must talk to them. I gave myself a 60th birthday present by commissioning a large portrait of an English Leicester head, which hangs in our kitchen (I do not have a painting of my wife).
Love doesn’t often feature in agricultural research. But it is an important force. We know from wildlife conservation that humans will act to save what they love. This holds for livestock, too.
Catie Gressier receives funding from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project scheme as well as the European Research Council. She is affiliated with the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia and the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance.
Some have said Christopher Luxon’s pledge to get a free trade deal between New Zealand and India over the line in his first term as prime minister was overly optimistic. But not all trade deals are the same, and Luxon may yet get to claim bragging rights.
Already he is managing expectations, saying a “good” deal will be better than waiting a long time for a “perfect” one. And with formal negotiations confirmed not long after Luxon touched down in New Delhi, we can perhaps expect genuine movement.
At the same time, India’s negotiating style is notoriously rigid, with its bilateral investment treaty model having proved a stumbling block to deals with many other nations or blocs, including the United Kingdom and European Union.
New Zealand first held formal negotiations with India over a decade ago. But talks derailed in 2015 over the inclusion of dairy products in any agreement. We can be fairly sure this will be the compromise Luxon’s government is ready to make now.
Beyond the economic implications, of course, lie domestic political calculations. Luxon needs a win to counter flatlining poll numbers and speculation about his leadership future. Good news in India offers just that.
Playing the Indo-Pacific card
Using diplomatic language that plays up New Zealand being part of the Indo-Pacific region – rather than the traditional Western alliance – will be essential.
New Zealand – despite its relatively small size – is still a significant regional player, with the Indo-Pacific’s fourth highest GDP per capita.
In the context of an imminent “Asian Century”, and the region becoming a crucial zone for economic and military power, New Zealand also provides a strategic pathway into the Pacific, where India is becoming increasingly involved.
All of this will influence Luxon’s keynote address today at the 10th Raisina Dialogue, India’s flagship multilateral conference on global politics and economics. He is the first leader not governing a European country to make such a speech, and is also the chief guest at the dialogue.
Luxon is already on the record as saying New Zealand and India are “very aligned” on Indo-Pacific security and concerns over Chinese regional influence, with scope for more joint defence exercises. This linkage between security and trade mirrors Wellington’s recent relations with Beijing, which have become increasingly difficult to navigate.
Solid foundations
But there is a long way to go. In 2024, India-New Zealand trade was worth a combined NZ$3.14 billion – a fraction of the $208.46 billion generated by trade with China in the same year.
Nevertheless, Luxon and his ministers have made undeniable progress. His “recalibration of a relationship that has long been neglected” bore fruit in October last year when he met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the ASEAN summit, and the countries announced their intention to take the relationship to “greater heights”.
The previous Labour government helped set the scene with a succession of high-level diplomatic visits and parliamentary exchanges. In 2023, the Indian government described relations with New Zealand as having “an upward trajectory”.
And there are clearly good foundations to build on – especially the 292,000 people of Indian ethnicity in New Zealand, who contribute US$10 billion to the New Zealand economy.
Great expectations
Trade is ripe for expansion, too. New Zealand primarily exports wool, iron and steel, aluminium, fruits and nuts, wood pulp and recovered paper, and imports Indian pharmaceuticals, machinery, precious metals and stones, textiles, vehicles and clothing.
There were 8,000 Indian students in New Zealand last year, a number that may well grow given a relative drop in student numbers from China. With the US and UK becoming more hostile to immigration, New Zealand can offer a relatively safe and tolerant alternative.
As such, while Luxon has momentum on a trade deal, he is also part of a long queue. Given the relative power imbalance between the two countries, the weight of expectation sits squarely on his shoulders.
Chris Ogden is a Senior Research Fellow with The Foreign Policy Centre, London.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Peter Cronau for Declassified Australia
Australia is caught in a jam, between an assertive American ally and a bold Chinese trading partner. America is accelerating its pivot to the Indo-Pacific, building up its fighting forces and expanding its military bases.
As Australia tries to navigate a pathway between America’s and Australia’s national interests, sometimes Australia’s national interest seems to submerge out of view.
Admiral David Johnston, the Chief of the Australia’s Defence Force, is steering this ship as China flexes its muscle sending a small warship flotilla south to circumnavigate the continent.
He has admitted that the first the Defence Force heard of a live-fire exercise by the three Chinese Navy ships sailing in the South Pacific east of Australia on February 21, was a phone call from the civilian Airservices Australia.
“The absence of any advance notice to Australian authorities was a concern, notably, that the limited notice provided by the PLA could have unnecessarily increased the risk to aircraft and vessels in the area,” Johnston told Senate Estimates .
Johnston was pressed to clarify how Defence first came to know of the live-fire drill: “Is it the case that Defence was only notified, via Virgin and Airservices Australia, 28 minutes [sic] after the firing window commenced?”
To this, Admiral Johnston replied: “Yes.”
If it happened as stated by the Admiral — that a live-fire exercise by the Chinese ships was undertaken and a warning notice was transmitted from the Chinese ships, all without being detected by Australian defence and surveillance assets — this is a defence failure of considerable significance.
Sources with knowledge of Defence spoken to by Declassified Australia say that this is either a failure of surveillance, or a failure of communication, or even more far-reaching, a failure of US alliance cooperation.
And from the very start the official facts became slippery.
Our latest investigation –
AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE: NAVIGATING US-CHINA TENSIONS
We investigate a significant intelligence failure to detect live-firing by Chinese warships near Australia, has exposed Defence weaknesses, and the fact that when it counts, we are all alone.
— Declassified Australia (@DeclassifiedAus) March 7, 2025
What did they know and when did they know it The first information passed on to Defence by Airservices Australia came from the pilot of a Virgin passenger jet passing overhead the flotilla in the Tasman Sea that had picked up the Chinese Navy VHF radio notification of an impending live-fire exercise.
The radio transmission had advised the window for the live-fire drill commenced at 9.30am and would conclude at 3pm.
We know this from testimony given to Senate Estimates by the head of Airservices Australia. He said Airservices was notified at 9.58am by an aviation control tower informed by the Virgin pilot. Two minutes later Airservices issued a “hazard alert” to commercial airlines in the area.
The Headquarters of the Defence Force’s Joint Operations Command (HJOC), at Bungendore 30km east of Canberra, was then notified about the drill by Airservices at 10.08am, 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
When questioned a few days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to try to cover for Defence’s apparent failure to detect the live-fire drill or the advisory transmission.
“At around the same time, there were two areas of notification. One was from the New Zealand vessels that were tailing . .. the [Chinese] vessels in the area by both sea and air,” Albanese stated. “So that occurred and at the same time through the channels that occur when something like this is occurring, Airservices got notified as well.”
But the New Zealand Defence Force had not notified Defence “at the same time”. In fact it was not until 11.01am that an alert was received by Defence from the New Zealand Defence Force — 53 minutes after Defence HQ was told by Airservices and an hour and a half after the drill window had begun.
The Chinese Navy’s stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, sailing south in the Coral Sea on February 15, 2025, in a photograph taken from a RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane. Image: Royal Australian Air Force/Declassified Australia
Defence Minister Richard Marles later in a round-about way admitted on ABC Radio that it wasn’t the New Zealanders who informed Australia first: “Well, to be clear, we weren’t notified by China. I mean, we became aware of this during the course of the day.
“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live firing. By that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines or literally planes that were commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman.”
Later the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, told ABC that two live-fire training drills were carried out at sea on February 21 and 22, in accordance with international law and “after repeatedly issuing safety notices in advance”.
Eyes and ears on ‘every move’ It was expected the Chinese-navy flotilla would end its three week voyage around Australia on March 7, after a circumnavigation of the continent. That is not before finally passing at some distance the newly acquired US-UK nuclear submarine base at HMAS Stirling near Perth and the powerful US communications and surveillance base at North West Cape.
Just as Australia spies on China to develop intelligence and targeting for a potential US war, China responds in kind, collecting data on US military and intelligence bases and facilities in Australia, as future targets should hostilities commence.
The presence of the Chinese Navy ships that headed into the northern and eastern seas around Australia attracted the attention of the Defence Department ever since they first set off south through the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines and through the Indonesian archipelago from the South China Sea on February 3.
“We are keeping a close watch on them and we will be making sure that we watch every move,” Marles stated in the week before the live-fire incident.
“Just as they have a right to be in international waters . . . we have a right to be prudent and to make sure that we are surveilling them, which is what we are doing.”
Around 3500 km to the north, a week into the Chinese ships’ voyage, a spy flight by an RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane on February 11, in a disputed area of the South China Sea south of China’s Hainan Island, was warned off by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Australian protests claiming the Australian aircraft “deliberately intruded” into China’s claimed territorial airspace around the Paracel Islands without China’s permission, thereby “infringing on China’s sovereignty and endangering China’s national security”.
Australia criticised the Chinese manoeuvre, defending the Australian flight saying it was “exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace”.
Two days after the incident, the three Chinese ships on their way to Australian waters were taking different routes in beginning their own “right to freedom of navigation” in international waters off the Australian coast. The three ships formed up their mini flotilla in the Coral Sea as they turned south paralleling the Australian eastern coastline outside of territorial waters, and sometimes within Australia’s 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.
“Defence always monitors foreign military activity in proximity to Australia. This includes the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Task Group.” Admiral Johnston told Senate Estimates.
“We have been monitoring the movement of the Task Group through its transit through Southeast Asia and we have observed the Task Group as it has come south through that region.”
The Task Group was made up of a modern stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, the frigate Hengyang, and the Weishanhu, a 20,500 tonne supply ship carrying fuel, fresh water, cargo and ammunition. The Hengyang moved eastwards through the Torres Strait, while the Zunyi and Weishanhu passed south near Bougainville and Solomon Islands, meeting in the Coral Sea.
This map indicates the routes taken by the three Chinese Navy ships on their “right to freedom of navigation” voyage in international waters circumnavigating Australia, with dates of way points indicated — from 3 February till 6 March 2025. Distances and locations are approximate. Image: Weibo/Declassified Australia
As the Chinese ships moved near northern Australia and through the Coral Sea heading further south, the Defence Department deployed Navy and Air Force assets to watch over the ships. These included various RAN warships including the frigate HMAS Arunta and a RAAF P-8A Poseidon intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane.
With unconfirmed reports a Chinese nuclear submarine may also be accompanying the surface ships, the monitoring may have also included one of the RAN’s Collins-class submarines, with their active range of sonar, radar and radio monitoring – however it is uncertain whether one was able to be made available from the fleet.
“From the point of time the first of the vessels entered into our more immediate region, we have been conducting active surveillance of their activities,” the Defence chief confirmed.
As the Chinese ships moved into the southern Tasman Sea, New Zealand navy ships joined in the monitoring alongside Australia’s Navy and Air Force.
The range of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that theoretically can be intercepted emanating from a naval ship at sea includes encrypted data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, aerial drone data and communications, as well as data of radar, gunnery, and weapon launches.
There are a number of surveillance facilities in Australia that would have been able to be directed at the Chinese ships.
Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) Shoal Bay Receiving Station outside of Darwin, picks up transmissions and data emanating from radio signals and satellite communications from Australia’s near north region. ASD’s Cocos Islands receiving station in the mid-Indian ocean would have been available too.
The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) over-the-horizon radar network, spread across northern Australia, is an early warning system that monitors aircraft and ship movements across Australia’s north-western, northern, and north-eastern ocean areas — but its range off the eastern coast is not thought to presently reach further south than the sea off Mackay on the Queensland coast.
Of land-based surveillance facilities, it is the American Pine Gap base that is believed to have the best capability of intercepting the ship’s radio communications in the Tasman Sea.
Enter, Pine Gap and the Americans The US satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia is a US and Australian jointly-run satellite ground station. It is regarded as the most important such American satellite base outside of the USA.
The spy base – Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) – showing the north-eastern corner of the huge base with some 18 of the base’s now 45 satellite dishes and covered radomes visible. Image: Felicity Ruby/Declassified Australia
The role of ASD in supporting the extensive US surveillance mission against China is increasingly valued by Australia’s large Five Eyes alliance partner.
A Top Secret ‘Information Paper’, titled “NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia”, leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden and published by ABC’s Background Briefing, spells out the “close collaboration” between the NSA and ASD, in particular on China:
“Increased emphasis on China will not only help ensure the security of Australia, but also synergize with the U.S. in its renewed emphasis on Asia and the Pacific . . . Australia’s overall intelligence effort on China, as a target, is already significant and will increase.”
The Pine Gap base, as further revealed in 2023 by Declassified Australia, is being used to collect signals intelligence and other data from the Israeli battlefield of Gaza, and also Ukraine and other global hotspots within view of the US spy satellites.
It’s recently had a significant expansion (reported by this author in The Saturday Paper) which has seen its total of satellite dishes and radomes rapidly increase in just a few years from 35 to 45 to accommodate new heightened-capability surveillance satellites.
Pine Gap base collects an enormous range and quantity of intelligence and data from thermal imaging satellites, photographic reconnaissance satellites, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites, as expert researchers Des Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute have detailed.
These SIGINT satellites intercept electronic communications and signals from ground-based sources, such as radio communications, telemetry, radar signals, satellite communications, microwave emissions, mobile phone signals, and geolocation data.
Alliance priorities The US’s SIGINT satellites have a capability to detect and receive signals from VHF radio transmissions on or near the earth’s surface, but they need to be tasked to do so and appropriately targeted on the source of the transmission.
For the Pine Gap base to intercept VHF radio signals from the Chinese Navy ships, the base would have needed to specifically realign one of those SIGINT satellites to provide coverage of the VHF signals in the Tasman Sea at the time of the Chinese ships’ passage. It is not known publicly if they did this, but they certainly have that capability.
However, it is not only the VHF radio transmission that would have carried information about the live-firing exercise.
Pine Gap would be able to monitor a range of other SIGINT transmissions from the Chinese ships. Details of the planning and preparations for the live-firing exercise would almost certainly have been transmitted over data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, and even in the data of radar and gunnery operations.
But it is here that there is another possibility for the failure.
The Pine Gap base was built and exists to serve the national interests of the United States. The tasking of the surveillance satellites in range of Pine Gap base is generally not set by Australia, but is directed by United States’ agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together with the US Defense Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Australia has learnt over time that US priorities may not be the same as Australia’s.
Australian defence and intelligence services can request surveillance tasks to be added to the schedule, and would have been expected to have done so in order to target the southern leg of the Chinese Navy ships’ voyage, when the ships were out of the range of the JORN network.
The military demands for satellite time can be excessive in times of heightened global conflict, as is the case now.
Whether the Pine Gap base was devoting sufficient surveillance resources to monitoring the Chinese Navy ships, due to United States’ priorities in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, North Korea, and to our north in the South China Sea, is a relevant question.
It can only be answered now by a formal government inquiry into what went on — preferably held in public by a parliamentary committee or separately commissioned inquiry. The sovereign defence of Australia failed in this incident and lessons need to be learned.
Who knew and when did they know If the Pine Gap base had been monitoring the VHF radio band and heard the Chinese Navy live-fire alert, or had been monitoring other SIGINT transmissions to discover the live-fire drill, the normal procedure would be for the active surveillance team to inform a number of levels of senior officers, a former Defence official familiar with the process told Declassified Australia.
Inside an operations room at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra. Image: ADF/Declassified Australia
Expected to be included in the information chain are the Australian Deputy-Chief of Facility at the US base, NSA liaison staff at the base, the Australian Signals Directorate head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra, the Defence Force’s Headquarters Joint Operations Command, in Bungendore, and the Chief of the Defence Force. From there the Defence Minister’s office would need to have been informed.
As has been reported in media interviews and in testimony to the Senate Estimates hearings, it has been stated that Defence was not informed of the Chinese ships’ live-firing alert until a full 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
The former Defence official told Declassified Australia it is vital the reason for the failure to detect the live-firing in a timely fashion is ascertained.
Either the Australian Defence Force and US Pine Gap base were not effectively actively monitoring the Chinese flotilla at this time — and the reasons for that need to be examined — or they were, but the information gathered was somewhere stalled and not passed on to correct channels.
If the evidence so far tendered by the Defence chief and the Minister is true, and it was not informed of the drill by any of its intelligence or surveillance assets before that phone call from Airservices Australia, the implications need to be seriously addressed.
A final word In just a couple of weeks the whole Defence environment for Australia has changed, for the worse.
The US military announces a drawdown in Europe and a new pivot to the Indo-Pacific. China shows Australia it can do tit-for-tat “navigational freedom” voyages close to the Australian coast. US intelligence support is withdrawn from Ukraine during the war. Australia discovers the AUKUS submarines’ arrival looks even more remote. The prime minister confuses the limited cover provided by the ANZUS treaty.
Meanwhile, the US militarisation of Australia’s north continues at pace. At the same time a senior Pentagon official pressures Australia to massively increase defence spending. And now, the country’s defence intelligence system has experienced an unexplained major failure.
Australia, it seems, is adrift in a sea of unpredictable global events and changing alliance priorities.
Peter Cronau is an award-winning, investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentary, The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting, was broadcast on Australian ABC Radio National and featured on ABC News. He produced and directed the documentary film Drawing the Line, revealing details of Australian spying in East Timor, on ABC TV’s premier investigative programme Four Corners. He won the Gold Walkley Award in 2007 for a report he produced on an outbreak of political violence in East Timor. This article was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished here with the author’s permission.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
A national Freshwater poll for The Financial Review, conducted March 13–15 from a sample of 1,051, gave the Coalition a 51–49 lead by respondent preferences, a one-point gain for Labor since the late February Freshwater poll.
Primary votes were 39% Coalition (down two), 31% Labor (steady), 14% Greens (up one) and 16% for all Others (up one). By 2022 election preference flows, this would be about a 50–50 tie.
Anthony Albanese’s net approval improved one point to -10, while Peter Dutton’s slid four points to -12. In the last two months, Albanese is up eight and Dutton down eight. It’s the first time since May 2024 that Albanese has had a better net approval than Dutton in this poll.
Albanese led Dutton by 45.9–42.5 as preferred PM, his best lead in this poll since last September. By 42–40, respondents thought Dutton better suited to negotiate with US President Donald Trump than Albanese (47–36 in November).
The Coalition leads on important issues, but Labor has gained seven points on economic management and three points on cost of living since February.
There has been improvement for Labor across a range of polls in the last few weeks, and the graph below has Labor leads in three of the last five national polls (two YouGovs and a Morgan), with the Coalition still ahead in Newspoll and Freshwater.
In analyst Kevin Bonham’s aggregate, Labor now leads by 50.5–49.5 using 2022 election flows, while it’s a 50–50 tie adjusting for a likely pro-Coalition shift in One Nation preferences.
Last Wednesday Trump imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports into the US, including on Australia. I believe this will assist Labor as the tariff imposition will appear unjustified to most Australians, and the Coalition is the more pro-Trump party. If the stock market continues to fall, this will undermine support for Trump’s economic agenda.
Trump has been threatening Canada with tariffs for much longer than Australia, and the centre-left governing Liberals have surged back in the polls to a near-tie with the Conservatives from over 20 points behind, and have taken the lead since Mark Carney’s March 9 election as Liberal leader.
Labor retains lead in YouGov
A national YouGov poll, conducted March 7–13 from a sample of 1,526, gave Labor a 51–49 lead, unchanged from the February 28 to March 6 YouGov poll. YouGov is conducting weekly polls, and the previous poll was the first Labor lead in YouGov since July 2024.
Primary votes were 36% Coalition (steady), 31% Labor (steady), 13.5% Greens (up 0.5), 7.5% One Nation (up 0.5), 1% Trumpet of Patriots (steady), 9% independents (down one) and 2% others (steady). YouGov is using weaker preference flows for Labor than occurred in 2022, and by 2022 flows Labor would have a lead above 52–48.
Albanese’s net approval improved three points to -6, with 49% dissatisfied and 43% satisfied, while Dutton’s net approval slid two points to -6. Albanese led Dutton as better PM by an unchanged 45–39.
Since the first weekly YouGov poll in late February, Albanese has gained six points on net approval while Dutton has slid four points. This is the first time Dutton has not had a better net approval than Albanese in YouGov since March 2024.
On the ongoing conflict caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 69% of Australians thought we should stand with Ukraine President Zelensky, while 31% wanted us to stand with Trump.
Labor regains lead in Morgan poll
A national Morgan poll, conducted March 3–9 from a sample of 1,719, gave Labor a 51.5–48.5 lead by headline respondent preferences, a two-point gain for Labor since the February 24 to March 2 poll. This is Labor’s second lead in the last three Morgan polls, after they had trailed in this poll since November.
Primary votes were 37% Coalition (down three), 30% Labor (up 1.5), 13.5% Greens (steady), 5% One Nation (up one), 10.5% independents (steady) and 4% others (up 0.5). By 2022 election flows, Labor led by 52–48, a two-point gain for Labor.
By 51.5–33, respondents said the country was going in the wrong direction (52–31.5 previously). Morgan’s consumer confidence index was down 0.8 points to 86.9.
Poll of teal-held seats has the teals struggling
Freshwater took a poll for the News Corporation tabloids of six seats held by teal independents. These are Curtin in WA, Goldstein and Kooyong in Victoria and Mackellar, Warringah and Wentworth in NSW. The poll was conducted March 5–7 from an overall sample of 830.
Across the six seats polled, the Liberals had a 51–49 lead, representing a 5% swing to the Liberals since the 2022 election. On these figures, the Liberals would gain four of these teal seats (Curtin, Goldstein, Kooyong and Mackellar).
Primary votes were 41% Liberals (up two since 2022), 33% teals (steady), 7% Labor (down six), 7% Greens (down two) and 12% others (up six). Albanese and Dutton were tied at 39–39 on better PM. By 47–42, respondents opposed their local MP backing an Albanese Labor minority government.
The YouGov MRP poll that was conducted between late January and mid-February from a sample of over 40,000 had all the teals holding their seats. At the March 8 Western Australian election, swings to the Liberals were lowest in affluent Perth seats.
WA election late counting
With 70% of enrolled voters counted for the WA election, the ABC is calling 43 of the 59 lower house seats for Labor, six for the Liberals, four for the Nationals and six seats remain undecided. The Poll Bludger has Labor ahead in 47 seats, with the Liberals and Nationals ahead in six seats each.
On election night, it had appeared likely that an independent would win Labor-held Fremantle. However, the independent has performed badly on absent and postal votes, and Labor will retain.
In the upper house, all 37 seats are elected by statewide proportional representation with preferences, and a quota for election is just 2.63%. With 63% of enrolled counted, Labor has 15.8 quotas, the Liberals 10.5, the Greens 4.1, the Nationals 2.1, One Nation 1.35, Legalise Cannabis and the Australian Christians 1.0 each, an independent group 0.48 and Animal Justice 0.43.
On current figures, Labor will win 16 seats, the Liberals ten, the Greens four, the Nationals two, One Nation, Legalise Cannabis and the Christians one each and two seats are unclear (Liberals, independent group and Animal Justice contesting). Counting of absents in the lower house has hurt the Liberals, so their vote is likely to drop further. Labor and the Greens will have a combined upper house majority.
Liberals hold Port Macquarie at NSW byelection
A byelection occurred on Saturday in the New South Wales Liberal-held state seat of Port Macquarie. Labor did not contest after finishing third behind the Nationals and Liberals at the 2023 NSW election with 19.2%.
With 59% of enrolled counted, The Poll Bludger is projecting that the Liberals will defeat the Nationals by 52.8–47.2, a 7.9% swing to the Nationals since 2023. Current primary votes are 34.2% Liberals (down 4.1%), 31.2% Nationals (up 5.5%), 12.8% for an independent (new), 10.7% Greens (up 3.7%) and 7.9% Legalise Cannabis (up 3.4%).
Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olga Boichak, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, Australian Research Council DECRA fellow, University of Sydney
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a 30-day ceasefire between the two warring countries may be imminent. But much more needs to happen before a just and lasting peace is achieved.
The Russian-Ukraine war is one of the most visible, analysed and documented wars in human history. Since the night of February 24 2022, millions of Ukrainian citizens, military personnel, journalists, officials and civil society activists have shared first-hand eyewitness accounts, updates, commentaries and opinions on the war.
Around the world, many online communities have also sprung into action to counter Russian propaganda and raise awareness of what is happening inside Ukraine.
We have been studying these communities for the past three years, conducting hours of interviews with members and observing their activity on social media. To conduct much of this research and connect with members, we had to join some of these communities – a common requirement for researchers working in online settings.
Our work reveals a range of skills and strategies activists use in the online fight against Russia. More broadly, it shows how social media users can mobilise during times of war and other international crises and have a material impact offline.
In some cases, social media platforms have aided the Russian cause. At the same time, they have suppressed evidence of war crimes.
For example, in the first year of the Russian invasion, independent investigative journalism organisations such as Disclose documented thousands of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian civilians. These crimes included murder, torture, physical and sexual violence, forced relocation, looting, and damage to civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals.
Much of this content included graphic imagery, violence and offensive language. As a result, it was permanently removed from platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.
On the other hand, content containing disinformation evaded moderation. For example, a 2023 investigation by the BBC revealed thousands of fake TikTok accounts created as part of a Russian propaganda campaign spreading lies about Ukrainian officials.
This often led to a distorted information environment online. Russian disinformation was visible, while the true extent of Russian violence against Ukrainians was hidden.
Boosting Ukrainian voices
In this context, thousands of internet users formed online communities to creatively support Ukraine without attracting the attention of content moderators.
This isn’t new or unique to the war in Ukraine. For example, in 2019, US TikToker Feroza Aziz shared a makeup tutorial in which she subtly raised awareness of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs – a topic that is often suppressed on the Chinese-owned platform.
It started in May 2022 when a young man with the online name Kama mashed up a Reddit meme of a Shiba Inu dog nicknamed Cheems and a picture of a dilapidated Russian tank. This was a celebration of a Ukrainian battlefront victory. It was only intended to mock Russia.
But as Kama changed his profile picture to the meme, the trend started spreading quickly to his followers on X (formerly Twitter). They quickly grew into an online collective dedicated to fighting Russia online. Members – or “fellas”, as they are known – from many regions around the world were brought together by its rituals using internet and popular culture memes.
Calls to action
In many similar posts across Facebook, X and TikTok, users share selfies or other images to achieve high visibility while calling followers to action. In most cases, this involves raising funds for urgent military or humanitarian efforts to benefit Ukraine.
Another common strategy is storytelling. Some users share amusing or ridiculous anecdotes from their lives before closing with a donation request.
These requests often have a clear target and beneficiary. They are also often time-sensitive. For example, they may be aimed at purchasing a particular model of a drone for a particular brigade of Ukraine’s armed forces that will be delivered to the battlefront within days.
Through collaborations with Ukraine’s official fundraising platform, the North Atlantic Fella Organisation has collected more than US$700,000 towards Ukraine’s defence.
Combatting propaganda
Members of the North Atlantic Fella Organisation also try to combat Russian propaganda and disinformation.
Instead of arguing in good faith with highly visible disinformation-spreading accounts (often controlled by the Russian government), members try to derail the disinformation campaigns. They highlight their ridiculousness by responding with memes and jokes. They call this practice “shitposting”.
People spreading Russian disinformation often find themselves annoyed by the swarms of “meme dogs” in their replies. This has led some to respond aggressively. In turn, this has allowed North Atlantic Fella Organisation members to report them for violation of X’s terms of service and have their accounts suspended, as our forthcoming research documents.
However, from late 2022 onward, North Atlantic Fella Organisation members we interviewed as a part of our research reported decreased effectiveness of X’s response to problematic user conduct. This was soon after tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform.
Despite this, members continue to support each other and develop playful tactics to ensure they remain visible on the platform.
It seems war will continue online for as long as Russia wages its war on Ukraine’s territory.
Olga Boichak has received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a director of the Ukrainian Studies Foundation in Australia and an executive committee member of the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand. She has been a member of the North Atlantic Fella Organisation since 2022 for research purposes.
Kateryna Kasianenko has been a member of the North Atlantic Fella Organisation since 2022 for research purposes.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shamit Saggar, Executive Director, Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success and Professor of Public Policy, Curtin University
Two months out from an Australian federal election, the polling is pointing to a very tight race between the two major parties. This means, if the polls are correct, neither party will likely win enough seats to command a parliamentary working majority.
Australia’s most recent experience of a hung parliament was the Gillard-Rudd government of 2010–13. Many still see that as an unhappy era, with internal division within Labor’s party room in Canberra, and yet another leadership coup, as the lasting, bitter memory.
So, it is time to reassess whether – or how well – Australia might be governed in similar circumstances.
Building a stable coalition
The answer depends on us being open to the meaning of a stable, inter-party coalition. This is particularly tricky in Australia for three reasons. First, although the political parties themselves are coalitions of philosophies and factions, this is often masked by high levels of party discipline. With very few exceptions, MPs elected through the major parties pretty much do as they are told when they go to Canberra.
Second, the popular vote share that goes to the two major parties has been in long-term decline, from about 90% 40 years ago, to about 70% of late. The drift hasn’t just gone towards populist insurgents and protests, but increasingly to the benefit of the Greens and, more recently, the Teals. The national preferential voting system pushes candidates to compete in the traditional left-right middle ground. But this overlooks the fact that some voters’ sympathies lie in single-issue campaigns.
Third, and most importantly, our model of minority government is conspicuously one-dimensional. For instance, party leaders and managers think purely in terms of confidence and supply agreements. These are important, of course, but they provide artificial stability by limiting disagreement in parliament that might bring down a government.
One eye-catching proposition for stable minority government involves Labor and the Coalition coming together to agree not to topple the other for an arbitrary period of half a parliamentary term.
There are several better options. The UK’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats ran a joint government from 2010–15, with some distinction. A big party and small party formed a coalition, and once they had agreed to disagree, they ringfenced specific policy areas as belonging to one party and the other party signed up to it as a policy priority of the whole government. This resulted in the full implementation of their respectively most prized policies.
And just two months ago, Ireland’s centre-right Fianna Fáil and Fine Gail parties, working with unaligned independents and a more formal Independent Ireland, came up with similar coalition agreement.
The inference is that stable multi-party government involves a mature negotiation on the issues, priorities and policies that can unite across party lines. It also requires a readiness to prioritise policy issues within parties.
Of course, this is an indirect way of asking if the Teals can and wish to operate as a de facto party. And while the Greens are a political party to begin with, the extent of their party discipline has not been tested to the full.
Meanwhile, there is evidence of pressure to keep both the Teals and Greens at a distance from any such agreement, with reports that lobby groups for the hospitality and coal sectors respectively will fund major party candidates to help defeat hostile crossbenchers.
As politicians mull these challenges, we should consider the likely “safe” issues – as against the “tricky” ones – in the coming parliament that a stable minority government or coalition would face. Their appetite to govern will be affected accordingly.
‘Safe’ and ‘tricky’ issues in a minority government
From Labor’s perspective, the nucleus is around a disparate set of economic and social modernisation policies. Since many of these have begun in this parliament, the focus in the next will be on pursuing them to full implementation.
For the Coalition, reshaping tax and spending, increasing housing affordability checking workplace employee rights and a bold nuclear power proposal sit at the core. This is accompanied by wariness of immigration and identity politics. Survey research points to its broad appeal certainly but less is known about the depth of this support.
Finding a middle path on these issues that would satisfy enough crossbenchers to help one of the major parties form government will be the challenge. It is not necessarily a bad outcome for the nation. But it means all MPs will have to take into account the greatly enhanced premium on stable government before any serious horse-trading happens.
Shamit Saggar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
One of the most enduring questions humans have is how long we’re going to live. With this comes the question of how much of our lifespan is shaped by our environment and choices, and how much is predetermined by our genes.
A study recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine has attempted for the first time to quantify the relative contributions of our environment and lifestyle versus our genetics in how we age and how long we live.
The findings were striking, suggesting our environment and lifestyle play a much greater role than our genes in determining our longevity.
What the researchers did
This study used data from the UK Biobank, a large database in the United Kingdom that contains in-depth health and lifestyle data from roughly 500,000 people. The data available include genetic information, medical records, imaging and information about lifestyle.
A separate part of the study used data from a subset of more than 45,000 participants whose blood samples underwent something called “proteomic profiling”.
Proteomic profiling is a relatively new technique that looks at how proteins in the body change over time to identify a person’s age at a molecular level. By using this method researchers were able to estimate how quickly an individual’s body was actually ageing. This is called their biological age, as opposed to their chronological age (or years lived).
The researchers assessed 164 environmental exposures as well as participants’ genetic markers for disease. Environmental exposures included lifestyle choices (for example, smoking, physical activity), social factors (for example, living conditions, household income, employment status) and early life factors, such as body weight in childhood.
They then looked for associations between genetics and environment and 22 major age-related diseases (such as coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes), mortality and biological ageing (as determined by the proteomic profiling).
These analyses allowed the researchers to estimate the relative contributions of environmental factors and genetics to ageing and dying prematurely.
What did they find?
When it came to disease-related mortality, as we would expect, age and sex explained a significant amount (about half) of the variation in how long people lived. The key finding, however, was environmental factors collectively accounted for around 17% of the variation in lifespan, while genetic factors contributed less than 2%.
This finding comes down very clearly on the nurture side in the “nature versus nurture” debate. It suggests environmental factors influence health and longevity to a far greater extent than genetics.
Not unexpectedly, the study showed a different mix of environmental and genetic influences for different diseases. Environmental factors had the greatest impact on lung, heart and liver disease, while genetics played the biggest role in determining a person’s risk of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers, and dementia.
The environmental factors that had the most influence on earlier death and biological ageing included smoking, socioeconomic status, physical activity levels and living conditions.
Interestingly, being taller at age ten was found to be associated with a shorter lifespan. Although this may seem surprising, and the reasons are not entirely clear, this aligns with previous research finding taller people are more likely to die earlier.
Carrying more weight at age ten and maternal smoking (if your mother smoked in late pregnancy or when you were a newborn) were also found to shorten lifespan.
Probably the most surprising finding in this study was a lack of association between diet and markers of biological ageing, as determined by the proteomic profiling. This flies in the face of the extensive body of evidence showing the crucial role of dietary patterns in chronic disease risk and longevity.
But there are a number of plausible explanations for this. The first could be a lack of statistical power in the part of the study looking at biological ageing. That is, the number of people studied may have been too small to allow the researchers to see the true impact of diet on ageing.
Second, the dietary data in this study, which was self-reported and only measured at one time point, is likely to have been of relatively poor quality, limiting the researchers’ ability to see associations. And third, as the relationship between diet and longevity is likely to be complex, disentangling dietary effects from other lifestyle factors may be difficult.
So despite this finding, it’s still safe to say the food we eat is one of the most important pillars of health and longevity.
What other limitations do we need to consider?
Key exposures (such as diet) in this study were only measured at a single point in time, and not tracked over time, introducing potential errors into the results.
Also, as this was an observational study, we can’t assume associations found represent causal relationships. For example, just because living with a partner correlated with a longer lifespan, it doesn’t mean this caused a person to live longer. There may be other factors which explain this association.
Finally, it’s possible this study may have underestimated the role of genetics in longevity. It’s important to recognise genetics and environment don’t operate in isolation. Rather, health outcomes are shaped by their interplay, and this study may not have fully captured the complexity of these interactions.
This study found environmental factors influence health and longevity to a far greater extent than genetics. Ground Picture/Shutterstock
The future is (largely) in your hands
It’s worth noting there were a number of factors such as household income, home ownership and employment status associated with diseases of ageing in this study that are not necessarily within a person’s control. This highlights the crucial role of addressing the social determinants of health to ensure everyone has the best possible chance of living a long and healthy life.
At the same time, the results offer an empowering message that longevity is largely shaped by the choices we make. This is great news, unless you have good genes and were hoping they would do the heavy lifting.
Ultimately, the results of this study reinforce the notion that while we may inherit certain genetic risks, how we eat, move and engage with the world seems to be more important in determining how healthy we are and how long we live.
Hassan Vally does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Livingstone, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University
Casino operator Star Entertainment has been under financial pressure for some time. The company’s share price has tanked, and the business, with its three casino properties, has been bleeding money.
Last year’s opening of a new riverside casino in Queen’s Wharf, Brisbane, was seen as a way to revitalise the business. But Star has swung from one lifeline to another.
Just as it was set to run out of cash on Friday March 7, Star announced a last-minute rescue package. This centred on selling its 50% stake in the Queens Wharf casino to Hong-Kong-based joint venture partners for $53 million.
Star has also started documentation for a $250 million bridging loan but still needs to finalise a proposal for long-term refinancing.
All of this remains subject to details being finalised, and regulatory approvals. An alternative $250 million takeover offer from US casino operator Bally’s currently isn’t Star’s preference because it is considered too low.
But Star is far from out of the woods yet. Whatever happens to it and its casino assets, there are bigger questions about whether the age of unfettered gambling revenue for casinos may have already ended.
Elsewhere, gambling is booming
If Australian casinos are struggling, it’s not because punters are giving up gambling. Whereas most of the gambling market recovered rapidly after the end of pandemic restrictions, casinos floundered.
Between 2018–19 and 2022–23, before and after pandemic restrictions were in place, total Australian gambling expenditure (in other words, gamblers’ losses) grew by 6.8% in real terms (adjusted for inflation).
Real wagering losses grew by 45%. This segment has clearly emerged as the second-biggest gambling market in the country, with gambling expenditure of $8.4 billion.
But over the same period, expenditure at casinos declined by more than 35% nationally, and by 42% in New South Wales.
Both Star and Australia’s other major casino operator, Crown, have emerged from a range of high-profile scandals in recent years.
Media reporting, inquiries, and royal commissions into Crown, and then Star, give some insight into how the casino business used to be run in Australia.
Star’s (and Crown’s) business model appears to have previously relied on two major revenue streams: benefiting from the proceeds of crime (by operating as a cash laundry for organised criminal gangs), and exploiting every vulnerable person who walked onto their premises.
Both casinos facilitated money laundering, particularly via junket operators, organisers of casino visits by high rollers. Unfortunately, many of these people had strong links to organised crime gangs keen to launder their illegally acquired money.
This wasn’t just high rollers. Ordinary people were also encouraged to use poker machines for hours without any attempt at encouraging a break, as mandated by “responsible gambling” codes.
The Victorian Royal Commissioner, investigating Crown, regarded its “responsible gambling” failures as particularly heinous.
Although neither casino chain closed its doors, regulatory breaches led to appointment of special managers to oversee the business and hold the licences. Further change included beefing up regulators’ powers and resources.
Turning a page
Without significant funds from the proceeds of crime, or exploitation of the vulnerable, casinos are clearly struggling.
In NSW and Victoria, the casinos have been required to introduce “cashless gaming” systems.
This takes cash out of the system, deterring money launderers. Gamblers must also set a limit on their gambling spend, and adhere to it. The system is in the process of being introduced in Queensland.
Competition from online wagering and pokie venues may also be playing a part. These businesses are not currently regulated as effectively as casinos.
Precommitment systems for online wagering would be relatively easy to introduce. They would require punters to set a limit on deposits or bets, or indeed the time they spend gambling, and enforce these technically.
Getting these in place, however, may be as formidable a task as getting gambling ads banned from sporting broadcasts, if not more so.
The gambling industry understandably opposes this. After all, these measures would reduce the amount that people lose. From a public health perspective, however, they provide an effective system to prevent harm in the first place, rather than simply picking up the pieces.
Without effective reform of local gambling venues and online wagering, casinos may try to mount an argument for less effective regulation. That would be an admission that their “tourism” attractiveness has waned. It’s also a powerful argument to speed up the transition of effective regulation to all gambling operators.
Charles Livingstone has received funding from the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, the (former) Victorian Gambling Research Panel, and the South Australian Independent Gambling Authority (the funds for which were derived from hypothecation of gambling tax revenue to research purposes), from the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and from non-government organisations for research into multiple aspects of poker machine gambling, including regulatory reform, existing harm minimisation practices, and technical characteristics of gambling forms. He has received travel and co-operation grants from the Alberta Problem Gambling Research Institute, the Finnish Institute for Public Health, the Finnish Alcohol Research Foundation, the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Committee, the Turkish Red Crescent Society, and the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand. He was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council funded project researching mechanisms of influence on government by the tobacco, alcohol and gambling industries. He has undertaken consultancy research for local governments and non-government organisations in Australia and the UK seeking to restrict or reduce the concentration of poker machines and gambling impacts, and was a member of the Australian government’s Ministerial Expert Advisory Group on Gambling in 2010-11. He is a member of the Lancet Public Health Commission into gambling, and of the World Health Organisation expert group on gambling and gambling harm. He made a submission to and appeared before the HoR Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiry into online gambling and its impacts on those experiencing gambling harm.
Including pronouns in introductions, your email signature or your social media bio may seem like a minor detail. Pronouns are just small words we use in place of names all the time. But, like names, pronouns have personal significance. They say something about who we are.
Linguistic shifts towards gender inclusivity are occurring worldwide, and the use of gender-neutral or inclusive pronouns is not a new nor exclusively Western phenomenon.
Chinese, one of the world’s oldest languages and spoken by more than one billion people, illustrates how languages adapt to reflect shifting understanding of gender. Its pronoun system may be on the cusp of significant change.
The modern Chinese pronoun system is fascinating for two reasons.
First, gendered pronouns have only been part of the Chinese language for 100 years: the feminine pronoun 她 (she) was only adopted in the 1920s.
Second, although there are now distinct Chinese characters for “he”, 他, and “she”, 她, these are both pronounced tā in Mandarin. You can have a whole conversation about someone without revealing their gender.
The lack of gender-distinct pronouns in spoken Mandarin has prompted calls for written Chinese to follow suit. Queer Chinese speakers have proposed several gender-inclusive pronouns that would be pronounced tā, just like 他 (he) and 她 (she).
Queer Chinese speakers have proposed several gender-inclusive pronouns. Mogome01/Shutterstock
These include the romanised form “TA” and new Chinese characters 「⿰无也」 and 「⿰㐅也」. These new characters might look strange: they are written like this to clarify that they should be read as one Chinese character. Currently, they take up the space of two Chinese characters because they are not yet in Unicode and cannot be typed properly.
Other people hope to see the now-masculine 他 regain its original function as an ungendered pronoun.
What pronouns do queer Chinese speakers use?
To understand how Chinese pronouns are changing, I surveyed more than 100 queer Chinese speakers across 12 countries. I asked survey respondents, a third of whom were nonbinary or otherwise gender-diverse, about their pronoun preferences and perceptions. I also analysed how pronouns are used in a large database of contemporary Chinese texts.
My research found gender-inclusive pronouns accounted for about a quarter of first-choice pronouns, and nearly half of all pronouns used by survey respondents. TA was overwhelmingly preferred by gender-diverse individuals (70%), with the English “they” (20%) the next most popular option.
While cisgender and transgender men almost exclusively used masculine pronouns, cis and trans women showed significant openness to using gender-inclusive pronouns alongside feminine ones. After 她 (she), TA was the second most common pronoun for women (40%) and second most common overall (17%).
Notably, 他 (he) was not used by any women or gender-diverse people, except one who considered it gender-neutral. This suggests reviving its original ungendered usage may be difficult.
Survey participants were overwhelmingly positive about TA. Chay_Tee/Shutterstock
TA emerged as the most recognised gender-inclusive pronoun, with nearly all respondents (97%) familiar with it regardless of their age, gender, region or language background. In contrast, fewer than 8% had encountered the new character-based pronouns 「⿰无也」 or「⿰㐅也」 and no one reported using them.
What makes TA so popular?
Survey participants were overwhelmingly positive about TA, with 63% expressing favourable views. As one respondent explained:
The look and feel is good, it suits people’s everyday pronunciation habits, and doesn’t create issues with having to specify someone’s gender.
TA functions similarly to English singular “they”. It works in two ways: as a gender-neutral pronoun when gender is unknown (like saying “someone left their umbrella”), and as a gender-inclusive pronoun specifically including gender-diverse people.
Many survey respondents called TA “respectful” and “inclusive” but also simply “convenient”.
However, some respondents were concerned TA is “untraditional” and “pollutes the Chinese language”.
Practical considerations for using emerging Chinese pronouns also extend to the technical challenges of typing new Chinese characters. Before a new character can be typed on computers or phones, it needs to be officially encoded in Unicode, the global standard for digital text.
My research shows this requirement is strongly influencing which emerging Chinese pronouns can gain traction.
While some survey respondents hoped to see a gender-inclusive Chinese character adopted, they weren’t optimistic about 「⿰无也」or 「⿰㐅也」 becoming mainstream.
As one noted:
「⿰无也」is good, but it’s hard to type and it takes a long time to explain.
User-friendly and easily understandable
TA is currently the most popular emerging Chinese gender-inclusive pronoun, crucially because it mimics how people use tā in spoken Mandarin.
It is already part of people’s vocabulary, and already used (at least as a gender-neutral pronoun) by mainstream Chinese media and on online platforms.
This 2023 TEDxSuzhouWomen talk is titled ‘We are all gender misfits’ (你我ta都是”性别酷儿)
Unlike other recently proposed pronouns, TA is versatile, user-friendly and easily understandable for queer and non-queer Chinese speakers alike. This makes TA a strong contender for widespread adoption into contemporary Chinese.
Like the introduction of a Chinese feminine pronoun 她 (she) in the 1920s, the emergence of TA as a gender-inclusive pronoun in the 2020s is about recognising a wider spectrum of identities.
Pronouns are not a political statement, just a personal statement. When you use someone’s correct pronouns, you’re saying, “I see you, and I respect who you are”. That’s something worth talking about, in any language.
Janet Davey is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
When two junior employees bump into each other in the corridor and start chatting about their manager’s overbearing manner, it’s typically considered gossip. But what about when two managers have an off-record catch-up to discuss an under-performing employee?
Both scenarios meet traditional definitions of gossip – the information being shared is about other people, the people it’s about are absent, the information is shared in a way that casts judgement on those people, and it’s informal. Yet the two situations are viewed very differently.
What counts as gossip is much more slippery than we might think. I reviewed 184 academic articles to understand what really constitutes workplace gossip.
The key, I found, is not any set of objective criteria, but rather people’s shared agreement that a situation counts as gossip.
This understanding of gossip helps us make sense of the “workplace gossip paradox” – the idea that gossip can be considered both a reliable source of social information (“the inside word”) and an unreliable information source (“just gossip”).
My work also provides insights into how businesses can manage gossip before it becomes a scandal.
Knowledge is power – but power controls knowledge
How does recognising the slipperiness of gossip help us understand the workplace paradox? The answer has to do with the role of power in legitimising information.
Leaders and managers need information to justify action. If a manager is going to investigate a sexual harassment claim, they can’t do so based solely on a hunch. They need to hear about from it someone.
If the victim of sexual harassment complains directly to their manager, an investigation is automatically justified. But what if the manager hears about harassment indirectly and unofficially (for example, through “gossip”), with the added complication that the alleged perpetrator is another manager?
If the manager does something about what they’ve heard and the source turns out to be unreliable, they could face negative consequences for acting on what was essentially “just gossip.” But if they don’t act, and the information turns out to be credible, they could face repercussions for ignoring the “inside word.”
There is evidence that such paradoxical situations play out quite frequently in real-world workplaces. For example, inside information about negligence towards patient safety in healthcare settings has, in the past, been dismissed as “just gossip” until it provoked a public scandal.
One case study from the United States found managers tended to keep an ear out for information passing through the grapevine and selectively use it to further their own interests.
If gossip threatened their power, they repressed it as “just gossip”. But if gossip provided “useful” information – ammunition against a subversive employee, for example – management legitimised gossip as “official information”.
To avoid workplace scandals when gossip is ignored, managers should co-opt the information and make it safe to address anti-social behaviour. La Famiglia/Shutterstock
How to manage the workplace gossip paradox
To avoid scandals stemming from when gossip is ignored, managers might consider “co-opting” gossip, bringing it into official communication channels.
But there’s a problem with this approach. Gossip gains its credibility as the inside word because it takes place outside official communication channels. Therefore, if managers try to co-opt gossip into formal management processes, it’s likely to have the unintended consequence of discrediting the shared information.
Instead, “managing gossip” requires a better understanding of its functions and motivations.
One function is to reduce uncertainty. Research suggests gossip often arises to fill information gaps. For example, people might speculate about a manager’s salary by gossiping about their expensive car or holiday.
Such gossip is likely to be exaggerated and counterproductive. However, it could be managed simply by being transparent about staff salaries, filling the information gap before gossip does.
Another key function of gossip is to warn against antisocial behaviours like bullying. But if employees feel comfortable speaking up about such behaviour — even when it’s perpetrated by those with official power – managers will not face the dilemma of whether to act on information that could turn out to be “just gossip.”
Gossip is a slippery and paradoxical form of communication. Some would say it’s unmanageable. But what can be managed are the workplace behaviours and hierarchical relationships that gossip loves to sink its teeth into.
The author would like to acknowledge Trish Corner, Helena Cooper-Thomas and Rachel Morrison for their contributions to developing this research.
James Greenslade-Yeats does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Cyclone Alfred will cost the March 25 budget at least A$1.2 billion, hit growth and put pressure on inflation, Treasurer Jim Chalmers says.
In a Tuesday speech previewing the budget, Chalmers will also say that on preliminary estimates, the cyclone’s immediate hit to GDP is expected to be up to $1.2 billion, which could wipe a quarter of a percentage point off quarterly growth.
“It could also lead to upward pressure on inflation. From building costs to damaged crops raising prices for staples like fruit and vegetables,” Chalmers says in the speech, an extract of which has been released ahead of delivery.
The treasurer says the temporary shutting of businesses due to the cyclone lost about 12 million work hours.
By last Thursday, 44,000 insurance claims had been lodged. Early modelling indicated losses covered by the Cyclone Reinsurance Pool were about $1.7 billion.
The estimated costs to the budget, which are over the forward estimates period, are preliminary.
The government has already co-sponsored with the states $30 million in support for immediate recovery costs, Chalmers says. Millions of dollars are being provided in hardship payments.
“The budget will reflect some of those immediate costs and we’ll make sensible provisions for more to come,” he says.
“I expect that these costs and these new provisions will be in the order of at least $1.2 billion […] and that means a big new pressure on the budget.”
This is in addition to the already budgeted for disaster relief.
“At MYEFO, we’d already booked $11.6 billion for disaster support nationally over the forward estimates.
“With all of this extra funding we expect that to rise to at least $13.5 billion when accounting for our provisioning, social security costs and other disaster related support.”
Chalmers will again argue in the speech his recent theme – that the economy has turned a corner. This is despite the global uncertainty that includes the Trump tariff policies, the full extent of which is yet to be spelled out.
Australia is bracing for the possibility our beef export trade could be caught in a new tariff round to be unveiled early next month.
Despite last week’s rebuff to its efforts to get an exemption from the aluminium and steel 25% tariffs, the government has vowed to fight on for a carve out from that, as well as trying to head off any further imposts on exports to the US.
In seeking the exemption, Australia was unsuccessful in trying to leverage its abundance of critical minerals, which are much sought after by the US.
Trade Minister Don Farrell told Sky on Sunday:
What we need to do is find out what it is that the Americans want in terms of this relationship between Australia and the United States and then make President Trump an offer he can’t refuse.
In Tuesday’s speech, Chalmers is expected to say the budget will contain fewer surprises than might be the case with other budgets.
This is because this budget – which would have been avoided if the cyclone had not ruled out an April 12 election – comes after the flurry of announcements already made this year and before further announcements in the campaign for the May election.
Those announcements already made include:
$8.5 billion to boost Medicare
$644 million for new Urgent Care Clinics
a multi-billion dollar package to save Whyalla Steelworks
$7.2 billion for the Bruce Highway and other infrastructure
funds for enhanced childcare and to provide some
student debt relief
new and amended listings for contraception, endometriosis and IVF on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Deloitte Access Economics in its budget monitor predicts the budget will have a deficit of $26.1 billion for 2024-25.
Deloitte’s Stephen Smith said that although a $26.1 billion deficit was slightly smaller than forecast in the December budget update, the longer-term structural deterioration should be “a reality check for politicians wanting to announce election sweeteners in the weeks ahead”.
Deloitte projects a deficit of nearly $50 billion in 2025-26.
Open to a ‘small’ Ukraine peacekeeping role
Over the weekend, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took part in the “coalition of the willing” virtual meeting convened by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in support of Ukraine.
The meeting also included Ukraine, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Greece, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, the Scandinavian countries, Canada and New Zealand. The United States did not participate. President Donald Trump is trying to force an agreement between Ukraine and Russia to end the conflict.
Albanese reiterated after the meeting: “Australia is open to considering any requests to contribute to a future peacekeeping effort in support of the just and lasting peace we all want to Ukraine”.
He added the obvious point: “Of course, peacekeeping missions by definition require a precondition of peace”.
Albanese said that any Australian contribution to a Ukraine peacekeeping force would be “small”.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has opposed sending Australians to a peacekeeping force.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A former US diplomat, Nabeel Khoury, says President Donald Trump’s decision to launch attacks against the Houthis is misguided, and this will not subdue them.
“For our president who came in wanting to avoid war and wanting to be a man of peace, he’s going about it the wrong way,” he said.
“There are many paths that can be used before you resort to war.” Khoury told Al Jazeera.
The danger to shipping in the Red Sea was “a justifiable reason for concern”, Khoury told Al Jazeera in an interview, but added that it was a problem that could be resolved through diplomacy.
Ansar Allah (Houthi) media sources said that at least four areas had been razed by the US warplanes that targeted, in particular, a residential area north of the capital, Sanaa, killing 31 people.
The Houthis, who had been “bombed severely all over their territory” in the past, were not likely to be subdued through “a few weeks of bombing”, Khoury said.
“If you think that Hamas, living and fighting on a very small piece of land, totally surrounded by land, air and sea, and yet, 17 months of bombardment by the Israelis did not get rid of them.
‘More rugged space’ “The Houthis live in a much more rugged space, mountainous regions — it would be virtually impossible to eradicate them,” Khoury said.
“So there is no military logic to what’s happening, and there is no political logic either.”
Providing background, Patty Culhane reported from Washington that there were several factual errors in the justification President Trump had given for his order.
“It’s important to point out that the Houthi attacks have stopped since the ceasefire in Gaza [on January 19], although the Houthis were threatening to strike again,” she said.
“His other justification is saying that no US-flagged vessel has transited the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden safely in more than a year.
“And then he says another reason is because Houthis attacked a US military warship.
“That happened when Trump was not president.”
Is the world waiting for hundreds of thousands of people to die of hunger in Gaza to do something to save them ? pic.twitter.com/xMFJBNzJNY
— Ahmed Hassan 🇾🇪 أحمد حسن زيد (@Ahmed_hassan_za) March 14, 2025
Down to 10,000 ships She said the White House was now putting out more of a communique, “saying that before the attacks, there were 25,000 ships that transited the Red Sea annually. Now it’s down to 10,000 so, obviously, sort of shooting down the president’s concept that nobody is actually transiting the region.
“And it did list the number of attacks. The US commercial ships have been attacked 145 times since 2023 in their list.”
Meanwhile, at least nine people, including three journalists, have been killed and several others wounded in an Israeli drone attack on relief aid workers at Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, according to Palestinian media.
The attack reportedly targeted a relief team that was accompanied by journalists and photographers. At least three local journalists were among the dead.
The Palestinian Journalists’ Protection Centre said in a statement that Israel had killed “three journalists in an airstrike on a media team documenting relief efforts in northern Gaza”, reports
“The journalists were documenting humanitarian relief efforts for those affected by Israel’s genocidal war,” the statement added, according to Anadolu.
In a statement, the Israeli military claimed it struck “two terrorists . . . operating a drone that posed a threat” to Israeli soldiers in the area of Beit Lahiya.
“Later, a number of additional terrorists collected the drone operating equipment and entered a vehicle. The [Israeli military] struck the terrorists,” it added, without providing any evidence about its claims.
‘Liberation’ poetry In Auckland on Saturday, protesters at the Aotearoa New Zealand’s weekly “free Palestine” rallies gave a tribute to poet Mahmoud Darwish — the “liberation voice of Palestine” — by reciting peace and justice poetry and marked the sixth anniversary of the Christchurch mosque massacre when a lone white terrorist gunned down 51 people at Friday prayers.
Two of the pro-Palestine protesters hold West Papuan and Palestinian flags – symbolising indigenous liberation – at Saturday’s rally in Auckland. Image: APR
Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has recalled that 20 journalists were killed during the six-year Philippines presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, a regime marked by fierce repression of the press.
Former president Duterte was arrested earlier this week as part of an International Criminal Court investigation into crimes against humanity linked to his merciless war on drugs. He is now in The Hague awaiting trial.
The watchdog has called on the administration of current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to take strong measures to fully restore the country’s press freedom and combat impunity for the crimes against media committed by Duterte’s regime.
“Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch,” Rodrigo Duterte said in his inauguration speech on 30 June 2016, which set the tone for the rest of his mandate — unrestrained violence against journalists and total disregard for press freedom, said RSF in a statement.
During the Duterte regime’s rule, RSF recorded 20 cases of journalists killed while working.
Among them was Jesus Yutrago Malabanan, shot dead after covering Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war for Reuters.
Online harassment surged, particularly targeting women journalists.
Maria Ressa troll target The most prominent victim was Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the news site Rappler, who faced an orchestrated hate campaign led by troll armies allied with the government in response to her commitment to exposing the then-president’s bloody war.
“The arrest of Rodrigo Duterte is good news for the Filipino journalism community, who were the direct targets of his campaign of terror,” said RSF’s Asia-Pacific bureau director Cédric Alviani.
RSF’s Asia-Pacific bureau director Cédric Alviani . . . “the Filipino journalism community were the direct targets of [former president Rodrigo Duterte]’s campaign of terror.” Image: RSF
“President Marcos and his administration must immediately investigate Duterte’s past crimes and take strong measures to fully restore the country’s press freedom.”
The repression carried out during Duterte’s tenure continues to impact on Filipino journalism: investigative journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio has been languishing in prison since her arrest in 2020, still awaiting a verdict in her trial for “financing terrorism” and “illegal possession of firearms” — trumped-up charges that could see her sentenced to 40 years in prison.
With 147 journalists murdered since the restoration of democracy in 1986, the Philippines remains one of the deadliest countries for media workers.
Debate on Guam’s future as a US territory has intensified with its legislature due to vote on a non-binding resolution to become a US state amid mounting Pacific geostrategic tensions and expansionist declarations by the Trump administration.
Located closer to Beijing than Hawai’i, Guam serves as a key US strategic asset, known as the “tip of the spear,” with 10,000 military personnel, an air base for F-35 fighters and B-2 bombers and home port for Virginia-class nuclear submarines.
Local Senator William A. Parkinson introduced the resolution to the legislature last Wednesday and called for Guam to be fully integrated into the American union, possibly as the 51st state.
“We are standing in a moment of history where two great empires are standing face-to-face with each other, about to go to war,” Parkinson said at a press conference on Thursday.
“We have to be real about what’s going on in this part of the world. We are a tiny island but we are too strategically important to be left alone. Stay with America or do we let ourselves be absorbed by China?”
His resolution states the decision “must be built upon the informed consent of the people of Guam through a referendum”.
Trump’s expansionist policies Parkinson’s resolution comes as US President Donald Trump advocates territorially expansionist policies, particularly towards the strategically located Danish-ruled autonomous territory of Greenland and America’s northern neighbour, Canada.
“This one moment in time, this one moment in history, the stars are aligning so that the geopolitics of the United States favour statehood for Guam,” Parkinson said. “This is an opportunity we cannot pass up.”
Guam Legislature Senator William A. Parkinson holds a press conference after introducing his resolution. BenarNews screenshot APR
As a territory, Guam residents are American citizens but they cannot vote for the US president and their lone delegate to the Congress has no voting power on the floor.
The US acquired Guam, along with Puerto Rico, in 1898 after winning the Spanish-American War, and both remain unincorporated territories to this day.
Independence advocates and representatives from the Guam Commission on Decolonisation regularly testify at the UN’s Decolonisation Committee, where the island has been listed as a Non-Self-Governing Territory since 1946.
Commission on Decolonisation executive director Melvin Won Pat-Borja said he was not opposed to statehood but is concerned if any decision on Guam’s status was left to the US.
“Decolonisation is the right of the colonised,” he said while attending Parkinson’s press conference, the Pacific Daily News reported.
‘Hands of our coloniser’ “It’s counterintuitive to say that, ‘we’re seeking a path forward, a path out of this inequity,’ and then turn around and put it right back in the hands of our coloniser.
“No matter what status any of us prefer, ultimately that is not for any one of us to decide, but it is up to a collective decision that we have to come to, and the only way to do it is via referendum,” he said, reports Kuam News.
With the geostrategic competition between the US and China in the Pacific, Guam has become increasingly significant in supporting American naval and air operations, especially in the event of a conflict over Taiwan or in the South China Sea.
The two US bases have seen Guam’s economy become heavily reliant on military investments and tourism.
The Defence Department holds about 25 percent of Guam’s land and is preparing to spend billions to upgrade the island’s military infrastructure as another 5000 American marines relocate there from Japan’s Okinawa islands.
Governor Lou Leon Guerrero delivers her “State of the Island” address in Guam on Tuesday . . . “Guam cannot be the linchpin of American security in the Asian-Pacific if nearly 14,000 of our residents are without shelter . . .” Image: Office of the Governor of Guam/Benar News
Military presence leveraged The island has in recent years leveraged the increased military presence to demand federal assistance and the territory’s treasury relies on at least US$0.5 billion in annual funding.
“Let us be clear about this: Guam cannot be the linchpin of American security in the Asian-Pacific if nearly 14,000 of our residents are without shelter, because housing aid to Guam is cut, or if 36,000 of our people lose access to Medicaid and Medicare coverage keeping them healthy, alive and out of poverty,” Guerrero said.
Parkinson’s proposed legislative resolution calls for an end to 125-plus years of US colonial uncertainty.
“The people of Guam, as the rightful stewards of their homeland, must assert their inalienable right to self-determination,” states the resolution, including that there be a “full examination of statehood or enhanced autonomous status for Guam.”
“Granting Guam equal political status would signal unequivocally that Guam is an integral part of the United States, deterring adversaries who might otherwise perceive Guam as a mere expendable outpost.”
If adopted by the Guam legislature, the non-binding resolution would be transmitted to the White House.
A local statute enacted in 2000 for a political status plebiscite on statehood, independence or free association has become bogged down in US courts.
‘Reject colonial status quo’ Neil Weare, a former Guam resident and co-director of Right to Democracy, said the self-determination process must be centred on what the people of Guam want, “not just what’s best for US national security”.
“Right to Democracy does not take a position on political status, other than to reject the undemocratic and colonial status quo,” Weare said on behalf of the nonprofit organisation that advocates for rights and self-determination in US territories.
“People can have different views on what is the best solution to this problem, but we should all be in agreement that the continued undemocratic rule of millions of people in US territories is wrong and needs to end.”
He said the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence next year can open a new venue for a conversation about key concepts — such as the “consent of the governed” — involving Guam and other US territories.
The nambanga, or banyan tree, is the centrepiece of many a Vanuatu village. Its massive network of boughs provides shade, shelter and strength. I’ve only ever seen one knocked down, and that was in the wake of category 5 cyclone Pam in 2015, whose 250 kph winds had never been seen before or since in Vanuatu.
The blow on hearing of Marc’s passing this week feels the same.
In fairness, Marc Neil-Jones was often more like the wind than the tree. He’s knocked a lot of stuff over since he arrived in Vanuatu in 1989 with a few thousand bucks in his pocket, a Mac and a laser printer.
He also built the nation’s newspaper of record, and a tradition of fairness and truth in the media.
One of my first tasks as Marc’s successor as editor-in-chief at the Vanuatu Daily Post was overseeing coverage of the 2015 bribery trial that saw more than half of the MPs in Sato Kilman’s government convicted and sentenced. The saga had started with a front page photo, showing a hand-high stack of money — a bribe offered to an MP in exchange for his vote to oust the current PM and install Moana Carcasses.
On the witness stand, former Speaker Philip Boedoro was asked, “Why did you send the photo to the Daily Post? Why didn’t you just report it to the police?”
“Because I knew if people saw it in the Daily Post, they would know it was true,” he replied.
That’s a hell of a thing to say on the stand, and the fact that he could say it is indelible evidence of Neil-Jones’ legacy.
Marc was fearless, a swashbuckler in the truest sense. If he smelt a story, he’d swoop in on it, and the devil take the hindmost. His friends are fond of recalling how he broke up an international drug smuggling operation, exposing more than 500 kg of heroin buried in a local beach, and still made it to the kava bar on time.
Marc’s impact on the political scene was undeniable. But far too often, he paid for his courage with blood. He’s been assaulted with fists and furniture, attacked incessantly in the courts and even briefly deported.
In 2011, he was brutally assaulted by then-Minister Harry Iauko and a truckload of henchmen, including current MP Jay Ngwele. I went to check on Marc two days later. He related how it had all played out with trademark bravado, then he chuckled as he turned to go, and said, ‘I’m getting too old for this.’
He tried to laugh it off, but I could see in his eyes that this time was different. Eyewitnesses told me they felt that if Ngwele hadn’t convinced Iauko to relent, he might have killed him then and there.
Trauma, age and hard living took their toll. In 2015, he announced he was going to retire from the newsroom. Marc had struggled to cope with type 1 diabetes throughout his life, and the daily stress of running the paper was affecting both body and mind.
Marc Neil-Jones and Dan McGarry in Port Vila’s Secret Garden in 2016. Image: Del Abcede/Asia Pacific Report
I took over the newsroom in interesting times. The pressure was intense and immediate, but Marc’s staff were more than equal to the challenge, and made my life far easier than it might have been. Due to the paper’s reputation as a bastion of fairness and honest reporting, it attracted the best that Vanuatu had to offer.
When I joined it, there was well over a century and a half of experience in the room.
Personally and professionally, Marc was not the easiest person to deal with. He was driven by passion, and impulse often preceded insight. More than one editorial meeting ended in fury.
A close friend of his described him as “a unique combination of complete arsehole and loyal mate all wrapped up in a British accent and long hair”.
That was Marc. He made you love him or hate him. Those who knew him best did both, and measure for measure, matched his fierce devotion.
I choose to remember Marc as a giant. His shadow still looms across the Pacific, causing corrupt politicians to cast a nervous glance over their shoulder, emboldening those of us who still carry his passion for the truth.
But today, his loss feels like a gaping hole, an absence where once a mighty nambanga stood.
When it comes to antisemitism, politicians in Australia are often quick to jump on the claim without waiting for evidence.
With notable and laudable exceptions like the Greens and independents such as Tasmanian federal MP Andrew Wilkie, it seems any allegation will do when it comes to the opportunity to imply Arab Australians, the Muslim community and Palestinian supporters are trying to destroy the lives of the Jewish community.
A case in point. The discovery in January this year of a caravan found in Dural, New South Wales, filled with explosives and a note that referenced the Great Synagogue in Sydney led to a frenzy of clearly uninformed and dangerous rhetoric from politicians and the media about an imminent terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community.
It was nothing of the sort as we now know with the revelation by police that this was a “fabricated terrorist plot”.
As the ABC reported on March 10: “Police have said an explosives-laden caravan discovered in January at Dural in Sydney’s north-west was a ‘fake terrorism plot’ with ties to organised crime”, and that “the Australian Federal Police said they were confident this was a ‘fabricated terrorist plot’,” adding the belief was held “very early on after the caravan was located”.
One would have thought the political and media class would know that it is critical in a society supposedly underpinned by the rule of law that police be allowed to get on with the job of investigating allegations without comment.
Particularly so in the hot-house atmosphere that exists in this nation today.
Opportunistic Dutton But not the ever opportunistic and divisive federal opposition leader Peter Dutton.
After the Daily Telegraph reported the Dural caravan story on January 29, Dutton was quick to say that this “was potentially the biggest terrorist attack in our country’s history”. To his credit, Prime Anthony Albanese said in response he does not “talk about operational matters for an ongoing investigation”.
Dutton’s language was clearly designed to whip up fear and hysteria among the Jewish community and to demonise Palestinian supporters.
He was not Robinson Crusoe sadly. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns told the media on January 29 that the Dural caravan discovery had the potential to have led to a “mass casualty event”.
The Zionist Federation of Australia, an organisation that is an unwavering supporter of Israel despite the horror that nation has inflicted on Gaza, was even more overblown in its claims.
It issued a statement that claimed: “This is undoubtedly the most severe threat to the Jewish community in Australia to date. The plot, if executed, would likely have resulted in the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil.”
Note the word “undoubtedly”.
Uncritical Israeli claims Then there was another uncritical Israel barracker, Sky News’ Sharri Markson, who claimed; “To think perpetrators would have potentially targeted a museum commemorating the Holocaust — a time when six million Jews were killed — is truly horrifying.”
And naturally, Jilian Segal, the highly partisan so-called “Antisemitism Envoy” said the discovery of the caravan was a “chilling reminder that the same hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust still exists today”.
In short, the response to the Dural caravan incident was simply an exercise in jumping on the antisemitism issue without any regard to the consequences for our community, including the fear it spread among Jewish Australians and the further demonising of the Arab Australian community.
No circumspection. No leadership. No insistence that the matter had not been investigated fully.
As the only Jewish organisation that represents humanity, the Jewish Council of Australia, said in a statement from its director Sarah Schwartz on March 10 the “statement from the AFP [Australian Federal Police] should prompt reflection from every politician, journalist and community leader who has sought to manipulate and weaponise fears within the Jewish community.
‘Irresponsible and dangerous’ “The attempt to link these events to the support of Palestinians — whether at protests, universities, conferences or writers’ festivals — has been irresponsible and dangerous.” Truth in spades.
And ask yourself this question. Let’s say the Dural caravan contained notes about mosques and Arab Australian community centres. Would the media, politicians and others have whipped up the same level of hysteria and divisive rhetoric?
The answer is no.
One assumes Dutton, Segal, the Zionist Federation and others who frothed at the mouth in January will now offer a collective mea culpa. Sadly, they won’t because there will be no demands to do so.
The damage to our legal system has been done because political opportunism and milking antisemitism for political ends comes first for those who should know better.
Greg Barns SC is national criminal justice spokesperson for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations social policy journal and is republished with permission.
Māori contributions to the Aotearoa New Zealand economy have far surpassed the projected goal of “$100 billion by 2030”, a new report has revealed.
The report conducted by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) and Te Puni Kōkiri, Te Ōhanga Māori 2023, shows Māori entities have grown from contributing $17 billion to New Zealand’s GDP in 2018 to $32 billion in 2023, turning a 6.5 percent contribution to GDP into 8.9 percent.
The Māori asset base has grown from $69 billion in 2018 to $126 billion in 2023 — an increase of 83 percent.
Of that sum, there is $66 billion in assets for Māori businesses and employers, $19 billion in assets for self-employed Māori and $41 billion in assets for Māori trusts, incorporations, and other Māori collectives including post settlement entities.
In 2018, $4.2 billion of New Zealand’s economy came from agriculture, forestry, and fishing which made it the main contributor.
Now, administrative, support, and professional services have taken the lead contributing $5.1 billion in 2023.
However, Māori collectives own around half of all of New Zealand’s agriculture, forestry, and fishing assets and remain the highest asset-rich sector.
Focused on need Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira manages political and public interests on behalf of Ngāti Toa, including political interests, treaty claims, fisheries, health and social services, and environmental kaitiakitanga.
Tumu Whakarae chief executive Helmut Modlik said they were not focused on making money, but on “those who need it most”.
Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira tumu whakarae chief executive Helmut Karewa Modlik . . . “We focus on long-term benefits rather than short-term gains.” Image: Alicia Scott/RNZ
Ngāti Toa invested in water infrastructure and environmental projects, with a drive to replenish the whenua and improve community health. Like many iwi, they also invest in enterprises that deliver essential services such as health, housing and education.
“We focus on long-term benefits rather than short-term gains, ensuring that our investments contribute to the sustainable development of our community,” Modlik said.
Between the covid-19 lockdown and 2023, the iwi grew their assets from $220 million to $850 million and increased their staff from 120 to over 600.
Pou Ōhanga (chief economic development and investment officer) Boyd Scirkovich said they took a “people first” approach to decision making.
“We focused on building local capacity and ensuring that our people had the resources and support they needed to navigate the challenges of the pandemic.”
The kinds of jobs Māori are working are also changing.
Māori workers now hold more high-skilled jobs than low-skilled jobs with 46 percent in high-skilled jobs, 14 percent in skilled jobs, and 40 percent in low-skilled jobs.
That is compared to 2018 when 37 percent of Māori were in high-skilled jobs and 51 percent in low-skilled jobs.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal and RNZ Pacific correspondent in Majuro
The late Member of Parliament Jeton Anjain and the people of the nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll changed the course of the history of the Marshall Islands by using Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship to evacuate their radioactive home islands 40 years ago.
They did this by taking control of their own destiny after decades of being at the mercy of the United States nuclear testing programme and its aftermath.
In 1954, the US tested the Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, spewing high-level radioactive fallout on unsuspecting Rongelap Islanders nearby.
For years after the Bravo test, decisions by US government doctors and scientists caused Rongelap Islanders to be continuously exposed to additional radiation.
Marshall Islands traditional and government leaders joined Greenpeace representatives in showing off tapa banners with the words “Justice for Marshall Islands” during the dockside welcome ceremony earlier this week in Majuro. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific
The 40th anniversary of the dramatic evacuation of Rongelap Atoll in 1985 by the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior — a few weeks before French secret agents bombed the ship in Auckland harbour — was spotlighted this week in Majuro with the arrival of Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior III to a warm welcome combining top national government leaders, the Rongelap Atoll Local Government and the Rongelap community.
“We were displaced, our lives were disrupted, and our voices ignored,” said MP Hilton Kendall, who represents Rongelap in the Marshall Islands Parliament, at the welcome ceremony in Majuro earlier in the week.
“In our darkest time, Greenpeace stood with us.”
‘Evacuated people to safety’ He said the Rainbow Warrior “evacuated the people to safety” in 1985.
Greenpeace would “forever be remembered by the people of Rongelap,” he added.
The Able US nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 July 1946. Image: US National Archives
In 1984, Jeton Anjain — like most Rongelap people who were living on the nuclear test-affected atoll — knew that Rongelap was unsafe for continued habitation.
There was not a single scientist or medical doctor among their community although Jeton was a trained dentist, and they mainly depended on US Department of Energy-provided doctors and scientists for health care and environmental advice.
They were always told not to worry and that everything was fine.
Crew of the Rainbow Warrior and other Greenpeace officials — including two crew members from the original Rainbow Warrior, Bunny McDiarmid and Henk Hazen, from Aotearoa New Zealand – were welcomed to the Marshall Islands during a dockside ceremony in Majuro to mark the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Atoll. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific
But it wasn’t, as the countless thyroid tumors, cancers, miscarriages and surgeries confirmed.
As the desire of Rongelap people to evacuate their homeland intensified in 1984, unbeknown to them Greenpeace was hatching a plan to dispatch the Rainbow Warrior on a Pacific voyage the following year to turn a spotlight on the nuclear test legacy in the Marshall Islands and the ongoing French nuclear testing at Moruroa in French Polynesia.
A Rainbow Warrior question As I had friends in the Greenpeace organisation, I was contacted early on in its planning process with the question: How could a visit by the Rainbow Warrior be of use to the Marshall Islands?
Jeton and I were good friends by 1984, and had worked together on advocacy for Rongelap since the late 1970s. I informed him that Greenpeace was planning a visit and without hesitation he asked me if the ship could facilitate the evacuation of Rongelap.
At this time, Jeton had already initiated discussions with Kwajalein traditional leaders to locate an island that they could settle in that atoll.
I conveyed Jeton’s interest in the visit to Greenpeace, and a Greenpeace International board member, the late Steve Sawyer, who coordinated the Pacific voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, arranged a meeting for the three of us in Seattle to discuss ideas.
Jeton and I flew to Seattle and met Steve. After the usual preliminaries, Jeton asked Steve if the Rainbow Warrior could assist Rongelap to evacuate their community to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll, a distance of about 250 km.
Steve responded in classic Greenpeace campaign thinking, which is what Greenpeace has proved effective in doing over many decades. He said words to the effect that the Rainbow Warrior could aid a “symbolic evacuation” by taking a small group of islanders from Rongelap to Majuro or Ebeye and holding a media conference publicising their plight with ongoing radiation exposure.
“No,” said Jeton firmly. He wasn’t talking about a “symbolic” evacuation. He told Steve: “We want to evacuate Rongelap, the entire community and the housing, too.”
Steve Sawyer taken aback Steve was taken aback by what Jeton wanted. Steve simply hadn’t considered the idea of evacuating the entire community.
But we could see him mulling over this new idea and within minutes, as his mind clicked through the significant logistics hurdles for evacuation of the community — including that it would take three-to-four trips by the Rainbow Warrior between Rongelap and Mejatto to accomplish it — Steve said it was possible.
And from that meeting, planning for the 1985 Marshall Islands visit began in earnest.
I offer this background because when the evacuation began in early May 1985, various officials from the United States government sharply criticised Rongelap people for evacuating their atoll, saying there was no radiological hazard to justify the move and that they were being manipulated by Greenpeace for its own anti-nuclear agenda.
Women from the nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll greeted the Rainbow Warrior and its crew with songs and dances this week as part of celebrating the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Atoll in 1985 by the Rainbow Warrior. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific
This condescending American government response suggested Rongelap people did not have the brain power to make important decisions for themselves.
But it also showed the US government’s lack of understanding of the gravity of the situation in which Rongelap Islanders lived day in and day out in a highly radioactive environment.
The Bravo hydrogen bomb test blasted Rongelap and nearby islands with snow-like radioactive fallout on 1 March 1954. The 82 Rongelap people were first evacuated to the US Navy base at Kwajalein for emergency medical treatment and the start of long-term studies by US government doctors.
No radiological cleanup A few months later, they were resettled on Ejit Island in Majuro, the capital atoll, until 1957 when, with no radiological cleanup conducted, the US government said it was safe to return to Rongelap and moved the people back.
“Even though the radioactive contamination of Rongelap Island is considered perfectly safe for human habitation, the levels of activity are higher than those found in other inhabited locations in the world,” said a Brookhaven National Laboratory report commenting on the return of Rongelap Islanders to their contaminated islands in 1957.
It then stated plainly why the people were moved back: “The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”
And for 28 years, Rongelap people lived in one of the world’s most radioactive environments, consuming radioactivity through the food chain and by living an island life.
Proving the US narrative of safety to be false, the 1985 evacuation forced the US Congress to respond by funding new radiological studies of Rongelap.
Thanks to the determination of the soft-spoken but persistent leadership of Jeton, he ensured that a scientist chosen by Rongelap would be included in the study. And the new study did indeed identify health hazards, particularly for children, of living on Rongelap.
The US Congress responded by appropriating US$45 million to a Rongelap Resettlement Trust Fund.
Subsistence atoll life All of this was important — it both showed that islanders with a PhD in subsistence atoll life understood more about their situation than the US government’s university educated PhDs and medical doctors who showed up from time-to-time to study them, provide medical treatment, and tell them everything was fine on their atoll, and it produced a $45 million fund from the US government.
However, this is only a fraction of the story about why the Rongelap evacuation in 1985 forever changed the US narrative and control of its nuclear test legacy in this country.
The crew of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior III vessel were serenaded by the Rongelap community to mark the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Islanders from their nuclear test-affected islands this week in Majuro. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific
Rongelap is the most affected population from the US hydrogen bomb testing programme in the 1950s.
By living on Rongelap, the community confirmed the US government’s narrative that all was good and the nuclear test legacy was largely a relic of the past.
The 1985 evacuation was a demonstration of the Rongelap community exerting control over their life after 31 years of dictates by US government doctors, scientists and officials.
It was difficult building a new community on Mejatto Island, which was uninhabited and barren in 1985. Make no mistake, Rongelap people living on Mejatto suffered hardship and privation, especially in the first years after the 1985 resettlement.
Nuclear legacy history Their perseverance, however, defined the larger ramification of the move to Mejatto: It changed the course of nuclear legacy history by people taking control of their future that forced a response from the US government to the benefit of the Rongelap community.
Forty years later, the displacement of Rongelap Islanders on Mejatto and in other locations, unable to return to nuclear test contaminated Rongelap Atoll demonstrates clearly that the US nuclear testing legacy remains unresolved — unfinished business that is in need of a long-term, fair and just response from the US government.
The Rainbow Warrior will be in Majuro until next week when it will depart for Mejatto Island to mark the 40th anniversary of the resettlement, and then voyage to other nuclear test-affected atolls around the Marshall Islands.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand-based Canadian billionaire James Grenon owes the people of this country an immediate explanation of his intentions regarding media conglomerate NZME. This cannot wait until a shareholders’ meeting at the end of April.
Is his investment in the owner of The New Zealand Herald and NewstalkZB nothing more than a money-making venture to realise the value of its real estate marketing subsidiary? Has he no more interest than putting his share of the proceeds from spinning off OneRoof into a concealed safe in his $15 million Takapuna mansion?
Or does he intent to leverage his 9.6 percent holding and the support of other investors to take over the board (if not the company) in order to dictate the editorial direction of the country’s largest newspaper and its number one commercial radio station?
Grenon has said little beyond the barest of announcements that have been released by the New Zealand Stock Exchange. While he must exercise care to avoid triggering statutory takeover obligations, he cannot simply treat NZME as another of the private equity projects that have made him very wealthy. He is dealing with an entity whose influence and obligations extend far beyond the crude world of finance.
While I do not presume for one moment that he reads this column each week, let me suspend disbelief for a moment and speak directly to him.
Come clean and tell the people of New Zealand what you are doing and, more importantly, why.
Over the past week there has been considerable speculation over the answers to those questions. Much of it has drawn on what little we know of James Grenon. And it is precious little beyond two facts.
Backed right-wing Centrist The first is that he put money behind the launch of a right-wing New Zealand news aggregation website, The Centrist, although he apparently no longer has a financial interest in it.
The second fact is that he provided financial support for conservative activists taking legal action against New Zealand media.
When I contacted a well-connected friend in Canada to ask about Grenon the response was short: “Never heard of him . . . and there aren’t that many Canadian billionaires.”
In short, the man who potentially may hold sway over the board of one of our biggest media companies has a very low profile indeed. That is a luxury to which he can no longer lay claim.
It may be that his interest is, after all, a financial one based on his undoubted investment skills. He may see a lucrative opportunity in OneRoof. After all, Fairfax’s public listing and subsequent sale of its Australian equivalent, Domain, provided not only a useful cash boost for shareholders but the creation of a stand-alone entity that now has a market cap of about $A2.8 billion.
Perhaps he wants a board cleanout to guarantee a OneRoof float.
If so, say so.
Similar transactions Although spinning off OneRoof could have dire consequences for the viability of what would be left of NZME, that is a decision no different to similar transactions made by many companies in the financial interests of shareholders.
There is a world of difference, however, between seizing an investment opportunity and seeking to secure influence by dictating the editorial direction of a significant portion of our news media.
If the speculation is correct — and the billionaire is seeking to steer NZME on an editorial course to the right — New Zealand has a problem.
Communications minister Paul Goldsmith gave a lamely neoliberal response reported by Stuff last week: He was “happy to take some advice” on the development, but NZME was a “private company” and ultimately it was up to its shareholders to determine how it operated.
Let me repeat my earlier point: NZME is an entity whose influence and obligations extend far beyond the crude world of finance (and the outworn concept that the market can rule). Its stewardship of the vehicles at the forefront of news dissemination and opinion formation means it must meet higher obligation than what we expect of an ordinary “private company”.
The most fundamental of those obligations is the independence of editorial decision-making and direction.
I became editor of The New Zealand Herald shortly after Wilson & Horton was sold to Irish businessman Tony O’Reilly. On my appointment the then chief executive of O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media, Liam Healy, said the board had only one editorial requirement of me: That I would not advocate the use of violence as a legitimate means to a political end.
Only direction echoed Mandela Coming from a man who had witnessed the effects of such violence in Northern Ireland, I had no difficulty in acceding to his request. And throughout my entire editorship, the only “request” made of me by O’Reilly himself was that I would support the distribution of generic Aids drugs in Africa. It followed a meeting he had had with Nelson Mandela. I had no other direction from the board.
Yes, I had to bat away requests by management personnel (who should have known better) to “do this” or “not do that” but, without exception, the attempts were commercially driven — they did not want to upset advertisers. There was never a political or ideological motive behind them. Nor were such requests limited to me.
I doubt there is an editor in the country who has not had a manager asking for something to please an advertiser. Disappointment hasn’t deterred their trying.
In this column last week, I wrote of the dangers of a rich owner (in that case Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos) dictating editorial policy. The dangers if James Grenon has similar intentions would be even greater, given NZME’s share of the news market.
The journalists’ union, E tu, has already concluded that the Canadian’s intention is to gain right-wing influence. Its director, Michael Wood, issued a statement in which he said: “The idea that a shadowy cabal, backed by extreme wealth, is planning to take over such an important institution in our democratic fabric should be of concern to all New Zealanders.”
He called on the current NZME board to re-affirm a commitment to editorial independence.
Michael Wood reflects the fears that are rightly held by NZME’s journalists. They, too, will doubtless be looking for assurances of editorial independence.
‘Cast-iron’ guarantees? Such assurances are vital, but those journalists should look back to some “cast-iron” guarantees given by other rich new owners if they are to avoid history repeating itself.
I investigated such guarantees in a book I wrote titled Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights. In it I noted that 20 years before Rupert Murdoch purchased The Times of London, there was a warning that the newspaper’s editor “far from having his independence guaranteed, is on paper entirely in the hands of the Chief Proprietors who are specifically empowered by the Articles of Association to control editorial policy”, although there was provision for a “committee of notables” to veto the transfer of shares into undesirable hands.
To satisfy the British government, Murdoch gave guarantees of editorial independence and a “court of appeal” role for independent directors. Neither proved worth the paper they were written on.
In contrast, the constitution of the company that owns The Economist does not permit any individual or organisation to gain a majority shareholding. The editor exercises independent editorial control and is appointed by trustees, who are independent of commercial, political and proprietorial influences.
There are no such protections in the constitution, board charter, or code of conduct and ethics governing NZME. And it is doubtful that any cast-iron guarantees could be inserted in advance of the company’s annual general meeting.
If James Grenon does, in fact, have designs on the editorial direction of NZME, it is difficult to see how he might be prevented from achieving his aim.
Statutory guarantees would be unprecedented and, in any case, sit well outside the mindset of a coalition government that has shown no inclination to intervene in a deteriorating media market. Nonetheless, Minister Goldsmith would be well advised to address the issue with a good deal more urgency.
He might, at the very least, press the Canadian billionaire on his intentions.
And if the coalition thinks a swing to the right in our news media would be no bad thing, it should be very careful what it wishes for.
If the Canadian’s intentions are as Michael Wood suspects, perhaps the only hope will lie with those shareholders who see that it will be in their own financial interests to ensure that, in aggregate, NZME’s news assets continue to steer a (relatively) middle course. For proof, they need look only at the declining subscriber base of The Washington Post.
Postscipt On Wednesday, The New Zealand Herald stated James Grenon had provided further detail, of his intentions. It is clear that he does, in fact, intend to play a role in the editorial side of NZME.
Just how hands-on he would be remains to be seen. However, he told the Herald that, if successful in making it on to the NZME board, he expected an editorial board would be established “with representation from both sides of the spectrum”.
On the surface that looks reassuring but editorial boards elsewhere have also been used to serve the ends of a proprietor while giving the appearance of independence.
And just what role would an editorial board play? Would it determine the editorial direction that an editor would have to slavishly follow? Or would it be a shield protecting the editor’s independence?
Only time will tell.
Devil in the detail Media Insider columnist Shayne Currie, writing in the Weekend Herald, stated that “the Herald’s dominance has come through once again in quarterly Nielsen readership results . . . ” That is perfectly true: The newspaper’s average issue readership is more than four times that of its closest competitor.
What the Insider did not say was that the Herald’s readership had declined by 32,000 over the past year — from 531,000 to 499,000 — and by 14,000 since the last quarterly survey.
The Waikato Times, The Post and the Otago Daily Times were relatively stable while The Press was down 11,000 year-on-year but only 1000 since the last survey.
In the weekend market, the Sunday Star Times was down 1000 readers year-on-year to stand at 180,000 and up slightly on the last survey. The Herald on Sunday was down 6000 year-on-year to sit at 302,000.
There was a little good news in the weekly magazine market. The New Zealand Listener has gained 5000 readers year-on-year and now has a readership of 207,000. In the monthly market, Mindfood increased its readership by 15,000 over the same period and now sits at 222,000.
The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly continues to dominate the women’s magazine market. It was slightly up on the last survey but well down year-on-year, dropping from 458,000 to 408,000. Woman’s Day had an even greater annual decline, falling from 380,000 to 317,000.
Dr Gavin Ellisholds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant, researcher and a committee member of APMN. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. This article was published first on hisKnightly Viewswebsite on 11 March 2025 and is republished with permission.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carolina Quintero Rodriguez, Senior Lecturer and Program Manager, Bachelor of Fashion (Enterprise) program, RMIT University
When you come home from a run or a sweaty gym session, do you immediately fling your clothes into the washing machine for a hot cycle? Or do you leave them on a chair (or the floordrobe) so you can wear them again tomorrow?
Earlier this year, the French government caused a stir with advice about how often you should wash your clothes. For sports clothes, it recommends up to three wears before you wash them.
But what about our health? If the thought of rewearing your stinky t-shirt or damp sports bra makes you squeamish, here’s what you need to know.
Sports clothes and sweat
In the past, exercise clothing was usually made from natural fibres (mainly cotton). Now, it’s mostly made of high-performancesynthetic fabrics. These are designed to manage moisture, regulate temperature, improve breathability and control odour.
However research has shown this kind of exercise clothing, particularly synthetic fabrics, can harbour significant amounts of bacteria after just one use.
Polyester traps moisture, creating the warm, humid micro-environments bacteria prefer.
When clothing is damp, including from sweat, bacteria multiplies substantially much faster. There is a direct correlation between how much bacteria is present and how intense the smell is.
However, research shows innovations in textiles, such as the integration of silver nanoparticles in fibres, essential oil-based treatments, long-lasting antimicrobial treatments and structural fibre innovations are are making garments more durable and better at controlling bacteria.
So, is it safe to rewear gym clothes?
This depends on several factors:
Fabric type
Natural fibres such as cotton multiply fewer odour-causing bacteria than synthetics. So if you wear these fabrics to exercise in, they may last a few wears before needing a wash.
Exercise intensity and sweat level
Low-intensity activities that generate minimal or low sweat (including gentle yoga or walking), may allow for more re-wears than high-intensity workouts, as bacterial proliferation correlates directly with moisture levels in fabrics.
(In fact, the French government advice acknowledges how often you wash your sports clothes depends on how much you sweat.)
Season
Climate (temperature, humidity and airflow) significantly affects how much bacteria grows on fabrics. So it may be more reasonable to wash your clothes less in cooler months, when you sweat less.
Personal health
Some people should exercise greater caution rewearing gym clothes. For example, people with skin conditions, compromised immune systems and those prone to skin infections.
How often you wash exercise clothes can depend on the season and how much you sweat. Ricardo Mattei/Shutterstock
So, if you’re wearing a cotton t-shirt and shorts do something light – such as a walk in the cool morning air – you might get away with wearing them again once or twice (especially if you air them properly between use).
But synthetic performance wear, or any clothes you wear to do moderate or intense workouts, should be washed after each use (a cold wash cycle is fine). This is particularly important for garments in contact with high-bacteria areas such as underarms, groin or feet.
Tips for clothes between wears:
Turn garments inside-out (this exposes the bacteria to the air) and hang them up immediately after exercise
Store in well-ventilated areas, never in closed containers such as a washing hamper or bag
When possible, hang clothes in the sun – brief UV exposure provides natural antimicrobial benefits
Keep items you’ve worn away from clean clothes.
The bottom line
In the end, it’s up to personal choice – each of us has to weigh up the environmental benefits with potential health concerns and exercise habits.
But some items should always be washed after each use: sports bras and underwear, socks, anything visibly soiled or smelly, and any clothing worn during high-intensity workouts or in hot weather.
Carolina Quintero Rodriguez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A battle is underway on the mine sites in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara region. Unions are keen to get back into the iron ore industry after decades on the outer. Mining companies are desperate to keep them out.
At Rio Tinto site Paraburdoo, where both residential and fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) workers are employed, the Western Mine Workers Alliance announced on Thursday it had the signatures necessary to demonstrate majority support for enterprise bargaining. Over 400 workers had signed on.
Once ratified by the Fair Work Commission, the company will be obliged to negotiate an enterprise agreement with the union.
This is huge news, as enterprise agreements have been rare in the industry for many decades. Workers are generally on individual common law contracts which pay higher than the award but lack transparency and have no guaranteed yearly pay rise.
Many workers are FIFO, working 12-hour work shifts. The two weeks on, one week off roster is known colloquially as the “divorce roster”.
Unions are campaigning at Paraburdoo, as well as other Rio Tinto and BHP sites, for the option of “even time” rosters of one week on, one week off. These rosters have lower pay, however, due to working fewer hours per week on average.
Workers want better conditions
Long hours, extended periods away from home and a lack of autonomy can be a poisonous cocktail.
According to a study prepared for the WA government, about 30% of WA mining workers have “high or very high levels of psychological distress”.
Another study of FIFO workers mainly from WA found the likelihood of workers experiencing high or very high levels of mental distress was increased by a factor of four when they felt “very or extremely stressed by their immediate supervisors”.
The problem with insecure work
Job insecurity affects a significant proportion of the workforce. Sexual harassment plagues the industry and in some cases is linked to insecure work.
Haul truck driver Astacia Stevens testified to a parliamentary inquiry that her supervisor told her “if you want your shirt [a permanent position], you have to get on your knees first”.
She refused and was later sacked. What Stevens characterised as an anti-union culture had made her “reluctant to join” her union.
There is now an historic class action against BHP and Rio Tinto, alleging “widespread and systemic sexual harassment and gender discrimination over the past two decades” nationwide.
Unionists are also campaigning on pay, saying recent pay rises haven’t kept up with inflation.
The rise and fall of union power in the Pilbara mines
The Pilbara iron ore industry today has few union members, but used to be a bastion of militant unionism. In its periods of strength and subsequent decline, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the story of Pilbara iron ore unionism mirrors that of Australian unionism more broadly, but in an exaggerated and time-compressed way.
Unions improved work in the 1970s. Low pay, long hours, and “soggy” food were the norm when the Pilbara iron ore industry started in the 1960s. Union pressure changed this. Shifts were reduced to eight hours and workers gained a say over the work process.
Across Australia, the union movement was confident and militant in the 1970s. Yet the Pilbara was particularly so.
While the average Western Australian worker in 1973 went on strike for a quarter of a day, the average Pilbara iron ore worker struck for just over 11 days in that year.
One union delegate, interviewed as part of my PhD research, recounted:
We had industrial muscle and we used it. There was no fear.
Workers’ meetings on site would decide what issues to take up, when to strike and for how long. Often, union officials would only be told afterwards.
While strikes often provoked the ire of management and politicians, they dramatically improved workers’ lives. Unionists campaigned on community issues and even set up a cooperative during the 1979 Hamersley Iron strike.
Workers lived in towns near mine sites, and socialised together after hours, some playing sport every night of the week.
The unions were pushed out
In 1986, Robe River (now owned by Rio Tinto) broke with the other iron ore companies and launched a full-frontal attack on unions. In spite of expectations, unions did not adopt a strike strategy to defend themselves and lost out.
Two years later, amid industrial action and a divided management, Mount Newman Mining (now part of BHP) tried and failed to do the same thing. That company did not de-unionise until 1999.
During the mining boom of the 2000s, the Pilbara mines were a union wasteland, despite rebuilding efforts.
Just last year, BHP train drivers showed how a renewed union presence might address these issues. They are a rare example of unionisation in the industry today, as I write in my book.
On Monday February 12 2024, workers voted for a 24-hour strike on the Friday if their demands weren’t met. At 11am on the Thursday, BHP came to the table to avert the strike. Pay was increased by an initial 4%, and then 4% a year over the following four years.
Rosters are now the even time (two weeks on, two weeks off) roster the workers fought for. The agreement is based on an average 42-hour week, not the 56-hour average work week (for lower pay) that is standard for many across the industry.
This is the context in which hundreds of Pilbara workers are joining their unions and fighting for enterprise agreements.
Alexis Vassiley is the author of Striking Ore: The Rise and Fall of Union Power in the Pilbara, to be published by Monash University Publishing on April 1.
He received an Australian Postgraduate Award and a Curtin Research Scholarship for the PhD research on which this article draws.
Alexis is a National Councillor for the National Tertiary Education Union and a member of Socialist Alternative.
Earlier this week, Saturn gained a whopping 128 new official moons, as the International Astronomical Union recognised discoveries from a team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The sixth planet from the Sun now has a grand total of 274 moons, the most of any planet in the Solar System.
The discovery has raised a lot of questions. How do you spot moons, and why hadn’t anybody seen these ones already? Doesn’t Jupiter have the most moons? What are they going to call all these moons? Are there more out there? And what exactly makes something a moon, anyway?
Counting moons
These new discoveries cement Saturn’s place as the winner of the Solar System’s moon competition, with more confirmed moons than all of the other planets combined. But it hasn’t always been this way.
Jupiter’s four largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – were the first ever discovered orbiting another planet. They were spotted by Galileo Galilei more than 400 years ago, in 1610. Saturn’s first known moon, Titan, was discovered by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens 45 years later.
The new batch of 128 moons was discovered by stacking images from the Canada France Hawaii telescope. Some of Saturn’s other moons were discovered by space voyages, and some during what are called “ring-plane crossings”.
A ring-crossing is where Saturn’s rings seem to disappear from our point of view here on Earth. This is when Saturn is at just the right angle so we’re looking at the rings exactly side-on (that is, when we can only see the edge of the rings).
Titan was discovered during a ring-plane crossing, and so were 12 other moons. Saturn’s rings will be edge-on twice in 2025, in March and November.
The moon race
From 2019 to 2023, Jupiter and Saturn were fighting for first place in the moon race.
In 2019, Saturn surpassed Jupiter with the discovery of 20 new moons. This took the count to 82 for Saturn and 79 for Jupiter.
Just a few years later, in February 2023, Jupiter took the lead with 12 new moons, beating Saturn’s 83 moons at the time. Only a short time later, still in 2023, the same astronomers who discovered the recent 128 moons discovered 62 moons orbiting Saturn. This placed the ringed planet firmly in the lead.
Elsewhere in the Solar System, Earth has one moon, Mars has two, Jupiter has 95, Uranus has 28 and Neptune has 16, for a total of 142 moons. We only need to discover ten more moons around Saturn to give it double the number of all the other planets combined.
Regular or irregular?
The newly discovered moons are all small. Each one is only a few kilometres across. If something that small can be a moon, what really counts as a moon?
NASA tells us “naturally formed bodies that orbit planets are called moons”, but even asteroids can have moons. We crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid’s moon in 2022. Earth has had a few mini-moons, some only a couple of metres in size. The line of what is and isn’t a moon is a bit hazy.
Moons orbiting planets in the Solar System can be either “regular” or “irregular”. The new moons are all irregular.
Regular moons are formed around a planet at the same time as the planet itself forms. Irregular moons are thought to be small planets (planetesimals) that are captured by a planet as it finishes forming. They are then broken into pieces by collisions.
Regular moons tend to orbit their planets in nice, circular orbits around the equator. Irregular moons typically orbit in big ovals further away from planets, and at a range of angles. Saturn has 24 regular moons and 250 irregular moons.
Saturn’s rings are made of small chunks of ice and rock. Astronomers think they formed out of pieces of comets, asteroids and moons that were torn apart by Saturn’s gravity.
So for Saturn in particular, irregular moons can tell us more about the formation of its beautiful rings.
What’s in a name?
Names of astronomical objects are governed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Originally, all moons in the Solar System were given names from Greco-Roman mythology.
But the large number of moons, particularly of Saturn and Jupiter, means the IAU has expanded to giants and gods from other mythology. And it’s all about the details. If binary moons are discovered, they are required to be given names of twins or siblings.
Saturn’s first seven moons were given numbers instead of names. In 1847, John Herschel named them after the Greek Titans. After they ran out of titans and Greek mythological giants, they expanded the naming system to include Inuit and Gallic gods and Norse giants.
Discoverers get to suggest names for moons, and the names they suggest are given priority by the IAU. In the past, there have been competitions to name new moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
With 128 new moons for Saturn, it might take a while to come up with names that follow the IAU rules. Maybe we’ll even see the addition of different mythologies. We’ll have to wait and see. Until then, each moon has a name made of a string of numbers and letters, such as “S/2020 S 27”.
Will we find more moons?
Without a solid definition of what a moon is, it’s hard to say when (or if) we will ever finish finding them. Everyone agrees we shouldn’t call every single chunk of rock in Saturn’s rings a moon, but exactly where to draw the line isn’t clear.
That said, there is probably a limit to the number of moon-like objects astronomers are likely to want to add to the list. Edward Ashton, who led the discovery of the new moons, doesn’t think we’ll be finding too many new moons until our technology improves.
Laura Nicole Driessen is an ambassador for the Orbit Centre of Imagination at the Rise and Shine Kindergarten, in Sydney’s Inner West.
This week, doctors announced that an Australian man with severe heart failure had left hospital with an artificial heart that had kept him alive until he could receive a donor heart.
The patient, a man from New South Wales in his 40s, was not the world’s first person to receive this type of artificial heart. However, he is said to be the first with one to be discharged from hospital to wait for a heart transplant, which he’s since had.
I am a philosopher and bioethicist. I completed my PhD on artificial hearts – particularly how these implants can change people’s lives in profound ways.
Here’s what patients and their families need to consider.
What is an artificial heart?
Artificial hearts began to be developed in the 1960s, sponsored by the United States government and funded in a similar way to space and military programs.
In 1982, a man named Barney Clark received the Jarvik-7 total artificial heart. Doctors removed his failing biological heart and replaced it with a plastic and metal device to circulate blood to his lungs and around his body. He lived for 112 days before dying from multi-organ failure. He never left hospital.
In the 1980s and 1990s, medical device companies began to develop alternatives to total artificial hearts. These partial artificial hearts, known as ventricular assist devices, help out a biological heart by supplementing or replacing one of its two pumping chambers.
These are more straightforward and versatile than total artificial hearts, and can be used for earlier stages of heart failure.
Not all artificial hearts generate a pulse.
Artificial hearts with a pulse generally mimic the biological heart. They pump blood in the same way the heart beats, by filling with blood and squeezing to circulate blood in waves or pulses.
But some devices continuously push blood around the body instead of pulsing. So with these continuous-flow devices neither the patient nor their health team can detect a pulse.
In the US between 2014 and 2024, almost 30,000 patients received continuous-flow ventricular assist devices. In the same period, more than 310 total artificial hearts were implanted.
The total artificial hearts commerciallyavailable today are licensed exclusively as bridging therapies – to keep people alive until a donor heart becomes available – rather than permanent implants.
How about the device making news this week?
The device in the news – the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart – was developed by a US-Australian collaboration. This device is innovative, mainly because it is the first continuous-flow device designed to replace the whole heart. Designers are also aiming for it to be the first total artificial heart suitable as a permanent transplant (known as destination therapy).
A reliable, durable and responsive total artificial heart is, in the words of Paul Jansz, the surgeon who implanted the device, “the Holy Grail”.
The BiVACOR’s clinical success so far gives us reason to be optimistic about an alternative to scarce donor hearts for responding to severe heart failure.
This device is designed to replace the whole heart, and for now, is licensed as a temporary implant, ahead of a heart transplant. BiVACOR TIQ
Transplants can change lives
However, patients do not just resume their old lives when they leave hospital with an artificial heart.
While the pumping component is inside their chest, there are also external components to manage and monitor. A thick tube perforates their abdomen and connects to an external controller unit and power supply, which the patient carries around in a bag. Controllers must be closely monitored, and batteries must be regularly recharged.
My research showed that even a perfectly safe and reliable total artificial heart could transform patients’ lives in at least three major areas.
But it may be difficult for artificial hearts to meet these criteria, especially for devices that do not generate a pulse.
Patients may also question whether their heart is located in their body, or in the controller unit. They may wonder if they even have a heart, particularly if they can’t feel a pulse.
2. Beeps and alarms
An artificial heart also changes how patients live their lives and navigate the world.
Our hearts may be our naturalmetronomes, marking time. So removing someone’s heart rhythm can confuse their sense of time.
The need for batteries to be recharged periodically can also reshape patients’ days.
Waiting around for a transplant heart, or the latest software update, may change patients’ perspectives on what months and years feel like.
We need to give patients the whole picture
Artificial hearts are remarkable devices with great promise. But patients and families also deserve to know how these extraordinary treatments might change how they feel about themselves and the world.
They need to know this before they sign up for them. Artificial hearts don’t just save lives – they also change them.
Pat McConville does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
About 90% of flowering plants rely on animals to transfer their pollen and optimise reproduction, making pollination one of nature’s most important processes.
Bees are usually the first insects to come to mind when people think of pollinators. But many other insects – including beetles, flies, moths and butterflies – also visit flowers to feed on nectar and pollen.
In doing so, they can play an essential role in pollinating plants.
Let’s take a closer look at some of nature’s unsung insect pollinators.
Fabulous flies
An estimated 30,000 species of fly (Diptera) call Australia home, making them the second largest group of insects after the beetles.
Flies have a huge variety of feeding habits including flower-visiting groups such as:
blow flies (Calliphoridae)
bee flies (Bombyliidae)
hover flies (Syrphidae)
noseflies (Rhinidae) and
march flies (Tabanidae).
Blow flies often get a bad rap for their tendency to cluster on faeces and dead animals. But these amazing (and often beautiful!) animals can be important pollinators, especially in alpine regions such as the Australian Alps.
Named for their distinctive hovering flight, stripey yellow-and-black hover flies (Syrphidae) are often mistaken for bees. Hover flies are potential pollinators of several native plants.
The larvae of many common hover fly species prey on pest insects such as aphids, and so play an important role in controlling pest populations.
Another group in the hover fly family, known as drone flies, have larvae that live in stagnant water.
These larvae have a long, slender breathing tube, or “snorkel” that allows them to access air from the surface, earning them the rather unflattering name “rat-tailed maggots”.
Then there are the bee flies. As the name suggests, many species of bee fly (Bombyliidae) have fuzzy, bee-like bodies. Australia boasts around 400 species of bee fly.
Bee flies feed on the nectar or pollen of many native flowering plants and so may act as pollinators.
The larvae of most bee fly species lay their eggs in or on other insects, particularly wasps and solitary bees. The larvae then feed on the insect host, usually killing it.
Being both pollinators and natural regulators of insect populations, bee flies play an important yet often overlooked role in Australia’s ecosystems.
Don’t forget frit flies and march flies
Despite being relatively common, you’ve probably never noticed tiny frit flies (Chloropidae). No, that’s not a typo; frit flies are different to fruit flies (although they are often around the same size).
There are 322 described species of frit fly in Australia, although the actual number is probably much higher as these diminutive flies are understudied.
Frit flies and their relatives, the jackal flies (Milichiidae), are believed to be the pollinators of midge orchids (Genoplesium spp), many of which are rare or threatened in Australia.
Exactly how midge orchids are attracting these tiny flies is not clear, but at least some Genoplesium species may be mimicking the smell of wounded insects.
Biting flies can be annoying, but some are also pollinators. March flies, also known as horse flies (Tabanidae), are often disliked for their painful bites, but these large flies can act as pollinators when they visit flowers to feed on nectar and pollen. In fact, it’s only the females that eat blood to support egg development.
One species, the flower-feeding march fly (Scaptia auriflua), has abandoned blood meals altogether, feeding exclusively on nectar and pollen.
March fly larvae, which develop underground, are formidable predators. Equipped with venomous fangs, they actively hunt and subdue prey.
Friendly flower chafer beetles
Many beetle species visit flowers to feed on nectar and pollen, including the flower chafers (subfamily Cetoniinae). The flower chafer group includes beautiful beetles such as:
green (and occasionally yellow) and black fiddler beetles (Eupoecila australasiae)
big buzzy cowboy beetles (Chondropyga dorsalis), and
the delightfully spotty punctuate flower chafers (Neorrhina punctatum).
Adult flower chafers feed on the nectar and pollen of many flowering plants, especially natives such as eucalyptus and angophoras.
Their larvae live underground, feeding on decaying organic matter. So don’t panic if you find curl grubs in your garden – they might be baby flower chafers.
Nectar scarabs (Phyllotocus spp) are another beetle frequently seen foraging on native flowers.
There are about 28 species in Australia.
Most are smaller and less conspicuous than flower chafers, although some species form large swarms on flowering trees such as Angophora, Eucalyptus and Leptospermum.
The larvae of nectar scarabs feed on decaying organic matter and grass roots in soils.
Even wasps help pollinate
Unlike bees, which mostly get their protein from pollen, wasps are primarily predators, although they may act as pollinators when they visit flowers for a sip of sugary nectar.
Some Australian orchids have evolved a remarkable strategy for attracting their wasp pollinators: they deceive unsuspecting males by mimicking the scent (and sometimes shape) of female wasps. Male wasps attempt to mate with the flower, unwittingly transferring pollen in the process.
Next time you’re outside, say a silent thanks for the many unsung insect pollinators helping to keep our ecosystems healthy.
Tanya Latty co-founded and volunteers for conservation organisation Invertebrates Australia, is former president of the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour and is on the Education committee for the Australian Entomological Society. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council, NSW Saving our Species, and Agrifutures Australia
Nearly 30 years before the Christchurch terror attacks of March 15 2019, New Zealand had to grapple with the horrors of another mass shooting. The Aramoana massacre on November 13 1990 left 13 people dead and a nation reeling.
But the firearms law changes made in the aftermath were inadequate, and the failure to tighten regulations arguably left the door open for the Christchurch atrocity – committed by a licensed firearms owner.
By contrast, after the Port Arthur massacre that killed 35 people on April 28 1996, Australia adopted fundamental changes to its firearms laws and banned semiautomatic rifles.
Later analysis suggests those reforms helped avoid a statistically likely 16 mass shootings. New Zealand didn’t match the Australian example, and it wasn’t until the Christchurch attacks that vast improvements to firearms laws were enacted.
But New Zealand still differs in significant ways from Australian federal and state models. With our Arms Act under review, and with a major rewrite due probably later this year, there are six key areas where we might learn from our nearest neighbour.
The memorial at Aramoana to the 13 people killed in the 1990 mass shooting. Getty Images
1. Genuine reasons to own a firearm
Australia and New Zealand both treat the possession of a firearm as a legal privilege, not a right as it is in the United States. But Australia differs in that a licence applicant must show a genuine reason to possess the firearms.
This is typically associated with other requirements, such as membership of a gun club or proof of other reasons to own a firearm (such as occupational or recreational needs).
Australia also has a 28-day “cooling off” period between an applicant being granted a licence and their ability to buy a firearm.
Like Australia, New Zealand requires firearms owners to be “fit and proper” people. But none of the eight Australian state or territorial jurisdictions accept self-nominated character referees.
Instead, they apply a more investigative approach, during which police may talk to a wider range of people to assess the suitability of applicants. Each step of the process is laid out in greater detail, such as when health risk assessments may be required.
3. A more robust firearms register
Australia has taken firearms registration – and the traceability of every gun – very seriously since the shooting of two police officers and a member of the public in an ambush attack in rural Queensland in 2022. A lack of real-time available information about the offenders was identified as a contributing factor in the tragedy.
A national firearms register, hosted by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, is under construction. This will provide front-line officers with information on owners, firearms and parts, linked to other relevant police and government data.
Unlike in New Zealand, Australian authorities do not accept sales or transfers between individual firearms owners. These must go through registered dealers, who act as brokers for the transfer, adding an extra layer of security.
But the key lesson from Australia is that to be effective, firearms registries should sit within the police, not civilian bureaucracies.
The funeral of the two police officers killed in rural Queensland in 2022. Firearms registration rules are taken very seriously. Getty Images
4. A gradual licence system for young people
In New Zealand, an applicant for a firearms licence must be at least 16 years old. But there is no minimum age requirement for handling a firearm, only the rule that a young person must be under the “immediate supervision” of someone with a firearms licence.
There have been suggestions of adapted firearms licence safety courses in schools, which would see year 11 to 13 pupils receive initial vetting and a certificate as a stepping stone towards a full licence.
It’s a promising idea, but given the known risks of young people and violent extremism, and international experience of school shootings, this would need to be managed carefully.
An alternative might be the Australian approach, where young people are more formally brought into the licensing system with a “minor’s permit”. These are similar to a learner driver’s licence, with the aim of easing young people into responsible firearms ownership.
5. Limits on how many firearms can be owned
Large caches of fully operable firearms (unlike vintage collections, which are permanently inoperable) can attract criminal attention, for obvious reasons.
New Zealand has no limits on how many firearms a licensed holder may possess.
6. Strong firearms prohibition orders
The New Zealand government came late to firearms prohibition orders, only realising their benefit in 2022.
These legal orders seek to prevent high-risk people from using, accessing or being around firearms. Although they have recently been augmented with greater search powers, only about 120 orders have been issued.
By comparison, since its own law was created in 1996, New South Wales has issued thousands of orders. In other words, it requires decades of work to mitigate risks to public safety.
The much needed rewrite of the Arms Act is a chance to learn from best practice around the world. Closest to home, Australia has laws, practices and proven results that should prompt us to ask, why not here?
The author thanks Clementine Annabell for assisting with the research for this article.
Alexander Gillespie is a recipient of a Borrin Foundation Justice Fellowship to research comparative best practice in the regulation of firearms. He is also a member of the Ministerial Arms Advisory Group. The views expressed here are his own and not to be attributed to either of these organisations.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Nason, Research Associate, Foreign Policy and Defence, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
Following the recent imposition of steel and aluminium tariffs, the Australian government is coming to terms with the reality of engaging with a US ally that is increasingly transactional.
The Trump administration’s approach may signal some inclement weather ahead for the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine project. But it’s far from game over.
A flurry of opinion pieces, including one penned by a former chief of the Defence Force, has questioned US capacity to deliver on its commitments under the security pact. AUKUS sceptics are calling for a “Plan B”.
Policymakers should always reassess their foreign policy decisions as new information comes to light. However, at present, there is little conclusive evidence that AUKUS is veering off course.
Worrying about what may or may not happen to AUKUS under Trump is insufficient reason to take a wrecking ball to three years of unprecedented, generational investment in Australia’s most important defence partnership.
The ‘Plan B’ problem
Certainly, AUKUS deserves scrutiny. But clutching for alternatives, including the resurrection of the long defunct French deal, is counterproductive for several reasons.
First, it disregards the enormous investment and political will the partners have sunk into AUKUS since it was announced in September 2021. No convincing evidence has been produced to show alternative sub deals could be delivered significantly cheaper or faster. Nor would they be politically viable.
Secondly, it would destabilise an initiative that helps tether the United States to the Indo-Pacific. Australia’s defence strategy is predicated on the United States remaining essential to a favourable regional balance of power.
AUKUS has become central to Australia’s deterrence strategy, in a way that alternatives would struggle to replicate after a sudden change in course. Steadfast continuity with AUKUS seems most likely to inspire ongoing commitment to the region from the Trump administration.
Thirdly, calls to abandon AUKUS overlook the broader benefits this cooperation unlocks for Australia in the US alliance. The political momentum generated by AUKUS has created new opportunities for Australian businesses in US supply chains. Australia’s efforts in advanced technologies and guided weapons have also been empowered.
AUKUS is bigger than a single arms agreement. The broad implications of revising, or even dumping, the deal must be understood accordingly.
Trump’s AUKUS
President Donald Trump’s apparent confusion about AUKUS, and his treatment of European allies, has understandably fomented hand-wringing about the future of the deal. Still, an undertaking this central to Australia’s long-term defence merits a pragmatic approach, rather than alarm.
There is cause to feel cautiously optimistic about AUKUS under Trump. Key personnel across the administration – including Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – have expressed their support.
Trump has promised renewed focus on growing the US industrial base by establishing a new White House shipbuilding office and a maritime action plan. These could set the United States on a firmer footing to meet the production targets tied to the Australian submarine sales.
US Studies Centre analysis reinforces the willingness of key figures in Congress to reform export controls and acquisition policy to see AUKUS succeed, pending improvements to US industrial capacity.
The effectiveness of recent investment cycles in the US submarine base is still to be determined. But Canberra has agency here. Washington is looking, in part, to Australia for answers to prevailing challenges.
Numerous components for US submarines are currently sourced from a single supplier. Achieving supply chain resilience will depend on seeking out alternate manufacturers, including from Australian industry, for valves, pumps, steel and beyond.
From the Australian government’s recently announced A$800 million investment in the US industrial base to the 129 Australian shipbuilders undergoing specialised training in Pearl Harbour, AUKUS will benefit the US in ways that have perhaps been understated.
Australia’s AUKUS challenge
At present, there is little evidence to suggest the Trump administration will tear up the pact. Nonetheless, Australia must remain alert to obstacles that may arise in the partnership.
Trump may seek to elicit additional financial contributions from Australia by trying to cut a better deal than his predecessor.
Unanticipated costs could be absorbed by an existing contingency fund. However, greater investment in AUKUS would risk crowding out competing programs in the Australian defence budget.
In addition, any potential breach between the collaborative spirit of AUKUS and the administration’s transactional instincts could create headaches for Australian stakeholders.
Perceptions AUKUS could be leveraged in strategic competition with China may buoy support for the pact in Congress. But Australian policymakers must communicate a broader strategic rationale for AUKUS that resonates more strongly here at home.
The Australian government will need to adapt its approach to AUKUS cooperation to weather the new political climate. To minimise risks, Australia should continue to strengthen other defence partnerships and embrace greater defence self-reliance, as the “Plan B” commentators suggest.
AUKUS isn’t perfect. But it will endure and continue to be Australia’s best bet.
Alice Nason works at the United States Studies Centre, an independent research centre at the University of Sydney that receives grant funding from the Australian Department of Defence, Bechtel, HII, and Babcock. The author maintains intellectual freedom and sole editorial control.
Pacific delegates have been left “shocked” by the omission of sexual and reproductive health rights from the key declaration of the 69th UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting in New York.
This year CSW69 will review and assess the implementation of the 1995 Beijing Declaration, the UN’s blueprint for gender equality and rights for women and girls.
The meeting’s political declaration adopted on Tuesday reaffirmed the UN member states’ commitment to the rights, equality and empowerment of all women and girls.
It was the product of a month of closed-door negotiations during which a small number of countries, reportedly including the U.S. and Russia, were accused of diluting the declaration’s final text.
The Beijing Declaration three decades ago mentioned reproductive rights 50 times, unlike this year’s eight-page political declaration.
“It is shocking. Thirty years after Beijing, not one mention of sexual and reproductive health and rights,” Pacific delegate and women’s advocate Noelene Nabulivou from Fiji told BenarNews.
“The core of gender justice and human rights lies in the ability to make substantive decisions over one’s body, health and sexual decision making.
“We knew that in 1995, we know it now, we will not let anyone take SRHR away, we are not going back.”
Common sentiment It is a common sentiment among the about 100 Pacific participants at the largest annual gathering on women’s rights that attracts thousands of delegates from around the world.
“This is a major omission, especially given the current conditions in several (Pacific) states and the wider pushback and regression on women’s human rights,” Fiji-based DIVA for Equality representative Viva Tatawaqa told BenarNews from New YorK.
Tatawaqa said that SRHR was included in the second version of the political declaration but was later removed due to “lack of consensus” and “trade-offs in language.”
“We will not let everyone ignore this omission, whatever reason was given for the trade-off,” she said.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the CSW69 town hall meeting with civil society on Tuesday. Image: Evan Schneider/UN Photo/BenarNews
The Pacific Community’s latest survey of SRHR in the region reported progress had been made but significant challenges remain.
It highlighted an urgent need to address extreme rates of gender-based violence, low contraceptive use (below 50% in the region), lack of confidentiality in health services and hyperendemic levels of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), which all fall under the SRHR banner.
Anti-abortion alliance Opposition to SRHR has come from 39 countries through their membership of the anti-abortion Geneva Consensus Declaration, an alliance founded in 2020. Their ranks include this year’s CSW69 chair Saudi Arabia, Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia and the U.S. under both Trump administrations, along with predominantly African and Middle East countries.
“During negotiations, certain states including the USA and Argentina, attempted to challenge even the most basic and accepted terms around gender and gender equality,” Amnesty said in a statement after the declaration.
“The text comes amid mounting threats to sexual and reproductive rights, including increased efforts, led by conservative groups, to roll back on access to contraception, abortion, comprehensive sexuality education, and gender-affirming care across the world,” adding the termination of USAID had compounded the situation.
Since coming to office, President Donald Trump has also reinstated the Global Gag Rule, prohibiting foreign recipients of U.S. aid from providing or discussing abortions.
Meeting between civil society groups and the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in the general assembly hall at the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York on Tuesday. Image: Evan Schneider/UN Photo/BenarNews
In his opening address to the CSW69, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning on progress on gender equality across the world.
‘Poison of patriachy’ “The poison of patriarchy is back, and it is back with a vengeance, slamming the brakes on action, tearing up progress, and mutating into new and dangerous forms,” he said, without singling out any countries or individuals.
“The masters of misogyny are gaining strength,” Guterres said, denouncing the “bile” women faced online.
He warned at the current rate it would take 137 years to lift all women out of poverty, calling on all nations to commit to the “promise of Beijing”.
The CSW was established days after the inaugural UN meetings in 1946, with a focus on prioritising women’s political, economic and social rights.
CSW was instrumental in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Beijing Declaration.
One of the declaration’s stated goals is to “enhance women’s sexual and reproductive health and education”, the absence of which would have “a profound impact on women and men.”
The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action identified 12 key areas needing urgent attention — including poverty, education, health, violence — and laid out pathways to achieve change, while noting it would take substantial resources and financing.
This year’s political declaration came just days after International Women’s Day, when UN Pacific released a joint statement singled out rises in adolescent birth rates and child marriage, exacerbating challenges related to health, education, and long-term well-being of women in the region.
Gender-based violence It also identified the region has among the highest levels of gender-based violence and lowest rates of women’s political representation in the world.
A comparison of CSW59 in 2015 and the CSW69 political declaration reveal that many of the same challenges, language, and concerns persist.
Guterres in his address offered “antidote is action” to address the immense gaps.
Pacific Women Mediators Network coordinator Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls told BenarNews much of that action in the Pacific had been led by women.
“The inclusion of climate justice and the women, peace, and security agenda in the Beijing+30 Action Plan is a reminder of the intersectional and intergenerational work that has continued,” she said.
“This work has been forged through women-led networks and coalitions like the Pacific Women Mediators Network and the Pacific Island Feminist Alliance for Climate Justice, which align with the Blue Pacific Strategy and the Revitalised Pacific Leaders Gender Equality Declaration.”
The future of Māori radio in Aotearoa New Zealand requires increased investment in both online platforms and traditional airwaves, says a senior manager.
Matthew Tukaki, station manager at Waatea Digital, spoke with Te Ao Māori News about the future of Māori radio.
He said there was an urgent need for changes to ensure a sustainable presence on both AM/FM airwaves and digital platforms.
“One of the big challenges will always be funding. Many of our iwi stations operate with very limited resources, as their focus is more on manaakitanga (hospitality) and aroha (compassion),” Tukaki said.
He said that Waatea Digital had been exploring various new digital strategies to enhance viewership and engagement across the media landscape.
“We need assistance and support to transition to these new platforms,” Tukaki said.
He also highlighted the continued importance of traditional AM frequencies, particularly during emergencies like Cyclone Gabrielle, where these stations served as vital emergency broadcasters.
The Albert Park circuit for the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix has 14 turns over 5.278 kilometres. F1 drivers can tell you the braking points, cornering speeds and preferred line for every one of those corners without actually being there.
In the early years, drivers were bigger and stronger so they could wrestle cars without power steering. Now, they are shorter, leaner and incredibly fit to deal with the increased G-forces from higher cornering speeds in modern cars.
Beyond the physical demands of F1 racing – like cornering G-forces in excess of 5Gs, the 600 newton forces needed to operate the brake pedal and cockpit temperatures that can exceed 50°C – drivers are subjected to high cognitive demands.
These include synthesising information about the track conditions, opponents and their environment, to help them to anticipate and execute precision driving.
In the past, F1 teams had unlimited opportunities to test cars and athletes on the track: some drivers accrued more than 100,000 km of testing across their careers.
But since 2009, F1 drivers and teams have been limited in the number of testing days and kilometres.
Following these changes, teams have focused on technology to train drivers and test cars.
Simulators provide drivers and teams with additional testing not otherwise available under current rules.
Drivers typically have access to “factory” simulators owned by their team. These provide an experience as close to actually driving an F1 as you can get without being in the car.
They allow teams and drivers to change almost every aspect of the environment – car setup, tyre wear and even track temperature and humidity.
Drivers will also have a “home” simulator made up of multiple monitors, a steering wheel with force feedback and pedals.
These are used mostly for learning tracks and identifying racing lines, rather than for testing specific car setups.
The benefits of this technology
Arguably, the greatest benefit is safety: crashing a car in an F1 simulator won’t hurt the driver or damage an actual car.
Modern methods and mathematics allow teams to simulate damage without the costs associated with traditional crash testing.
Advanced racing simulators are expensive, costing up to £8M ($A15.9 million). But by eliminating the need for fuel, tyres and track hire, they significantly reduce expenses.
Drivers can also refine their skills, familiarise themselves with circuits and practise high-risk manoeuvres in a risk-free environment.
Simulators enable drivers to hone their overtaking and defensive manoeuvres by adjusting variables such as track conditions, the number of AI-cars on track, AI-car aggression and proximity.
This controlled yet dynamic training enhances problem-solving, sharpens reaction times and strengthens strategic decision-making.
These are all crucial for real-world racing.
At a track, it may take upwards of 20 minutes to make a single change to the settings on a car. In a simulator, changes can be made in seconds.
This allows teams to take a car to the race track with a tested set-up, ready for practice sessions where they can experiment with strategies including engine maps, fuel strategies and pit-stop timing.
Post-race, teams use simulators to analyse performance data, identify potential improvements and gain insights for future races and car development.
What might the future hold?
Electronic racing (e-racing) is a virtual form of motorsport where competitors drive a computer-generated car on a virtual track.
sim racing (using realistic physics, tyre wear, fuel consumption and damage)
simcade (incorporating some realistic elements but with reduced complexity)
arcade racing (using simpler controls and physics like Mario Kart).
These online and electronic variants have surged in popularity, bridging the gap between virtual and real-world motorsport.
This is showcased in the movie Gran Turismo. It tells the true story of Jann Mardenborough, who transitioned from simulator racing to professional motorsport after winning a competition in 2011.
However, while simulators provide a controlled environment for skill development, they lack factors such as psychological and emotional stress, g-forces, thermal strain, and the unpredictable elements that exist in real-world competition.
Despite these differences, e-racing has gained credibility, with several F1 drivers regularly competing in virtual events.
Four-time F1 world champion Max Verstappen, for example, is also one of the best simulator racers in the world. He uses virtual racing to sharpen his skills and remain competitive between real-world races.
As e-racing continues to evolve, the role of simulators remains a key area of exploration.
Advancements in simulator technology — including enhanced motion feedback, physiological stress replication and AI-driven race dynamics – may further bridge the gap between virtual and real-world racing.
The question is no longer whether simulators can aid driver development but how they can be refined to better replicate the demands of on-track competition, ultimately shaping the future of motorsport training and performance.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
US President Donald Trump appears to have abruptly upended America’s most trusted alliances with European countries since taking office just two months ago. But are we misreading the cues?
In addition to putting pressure on Ukraine to secure a deal to end the war, he has suggested the US may no longer honour its commitment to protect NATO allies that aren’t meeting the bloc’s guideline of spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defence spending.
These tough tactics have had some results. European countries have committed to spending beyond 2%, as Trump has demanded. And his drastic positions on Ukraine have suddenly been reversed. The horsetrading over what this means for NATO isn’t over yet, but Trump’s resourcefulness in this second term should not be underestimated.
A top Pentagon official is now calling on Australia to similarly increase its defence spending from 2% to 3% of GDP.
Australia has not managed to avoid Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium, although this accounts for a small fraction of its output and international trade – and no allies have been exempt from his tariffs. Other countries have chosen to retaliate, but Australia would be wise not to do so.
Should Trump’s recent actions, however, make Canberra worry about his commitment to the broader US-Australia alliance?
Emotional reactions over Trump should be avoided. There’s no real reason to fear a potential alliance abandonment. The US and Australia have plenty of compelling, enduring and overlapping interests that make a Trump about-face unlikely.
Deep, mutual ties
Those inclined to be critical of the US alliance and the AUKUS agreement have barked loudly about Trump’s recent actions. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in particular, has warned of Australian leaders being part of a “conga line of sycophants” paying homage to Trump and not being more forthright in their criticism of his policy decisions.
Turnbull is arguably trying to shame Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton into following his lead and challenging Trump more forcefully. But how would that help with a man who evidently revels in escalating tensions?
There is a clear need to put emotional reactions to the side and weigh Australia’s national interests dispassionately.
Australia is heavily invested in the United States for its security and wellbeing. The AUKUS agreement alone will see Australia spending A$368 billion in the coming decades on nuclear-powered submarines.
Australia is also hugely invested in American defence technology across the sea, air, land, space and cyber domains. Overall, Australia invests over A$1 trillion each year in the US – by far its largest destination for overseas investment.
The US, in turn, has a demonstrated interest in having a bigger security presence in the Indo-Pacific region in a way that might even improve great power relations. And as defence expert Des Ball once said, Australia is a “suitable piece of real estate” to accommodate this increased presence.
Australia already hosts shared intelligence facilities at Pine Gap, US Marine Corps facilities in Darwin and shared submarine facilities near Perth. Jointly funded upgrades of the Tindal air base will soon accommodate American B-52 bombers, too.
With so much in flux, though, Australia does need to increase its defence spending.
Australia’s boutique force, structured as it was for the unipolar moment, when the world was dominated by one power (its ally, the US), is no longer fit for purpose. It needs to muscle up, and quickly. A scheme for national and community service would help.
Indeed, what most critics are calling for reflects many of the arguments made in the Australian Foreign Policy White Paper of 2017, written when Trump last came to office. I describe this as Australia’s “Plan B”. It was not dismissive of the US alliance, but looked to mitigate the risks associated with a more transactional and less predictable US leadership.
As part of this, Australia should avoid cutting its aid to the region and offer better options to Pacific partners – what I have called a “grand compact” with Pacific Island states, or even a Pacific federation.
In addition, more security and development cooperation is needed with nations further afield, such as Japan, India and South Korea.
We should avoid making upfront commitments to a land war in Asia or Europe, though. We have only recently recovered from the setback in regional defence relations from the distraction of the distant, US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We need to muscle up, yes. But let’s not think we can make much of a difference on the ground as part of a peacekeeping force for Ukraine. It’s best to support Ukraine with resources from afar and remain focused on bolstering regional ties.
The danger of overreacting
Pundits are also questioning whether the US can still be counted on in regional long-term defence and security planning.
I contend we are in danger of overreacting to the early moves of a presidency in a hurry to make significant changes. Rather than the sky falling in, we are in the midst of a storm.
It is not pretty. But we should wait for the dust to settle.
We also should recognise the limits of Australian power, authority and reach when it comes to influencing US behaviour. We have tended to be a middle power without large-power pretensions. We no doubt can do more to stand up for ourselves, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves in terms of what this means for the relationship with Washington.
Trump evidently sees the world as “multipolar”, meaning a world dominated by several powers, notably the US, China and Russia.
While comparisons between Trump’s interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Franklin D Roosevelt’s wartime dealings with Joseph Stalin are flattering to the US president, they aren’t as far-fetched as some critics would claim. They reflect a hyper-realist and transactional approach to foreign policy, where (to quote Thucydides) “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
While Trump advances such an approach to international relations, it is important to remember how invested the US and Australia are in one another.
Like Australia, the US is a continent-spanning, federal, cosmopolitan, English-speaking, New World, common-law, free-market, bicameral, constitutional and broadly still liberal democracy. We still talk about “shared values” because of these persistent overlaps. And these overlaps have driven the alignment of these two countries’ priorities for generations.
In Trump’s new, transactional and multipolar world view, the US needs Australia more than it needs Europe. (Though, it should be noted, despite Trump’s tough words for Europe, the US still has more than 100,000 US military personnel there.)
Over the longer term, Australia’s unique geography and shared history mean it matters in the great game of containing its main competitor, China, from dominating East Asia and the Pacific.
This is an enduring American interest and a longstanding Australian concern. Australia, therefore, will continue to be a Pacific partner. The deterrent effect from this solidarity remains the best bet to help prevent the outbreak of another war in the Pacific.
John Blaxland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Almost half of Australians will experience mental health problems in their lifetime. Recent floods, droughts, cyclones, bushfires and the COVID pandemic have increased distress in the community.
Yet, many people who need mental health services are unable to access them. Cost, stigma and availability of mental health workers are barriers to care. Australia also has a critical shortage of mental health workers. And by 2030, it’s predicted we will be missing 42% of the mental health workforce needed to meet the demand.
To partially address this gap, the Australian government has committed to investing A$135 million in digital mental health programs if re-elected.
Online mental health programs can be more innovative and less expensive than other types of therapy. But do they actually work? Let’s assess the evidence.
What are digital mental health services?
Digital mental health services vary widely. They include online or app-based mental health information, symptom tracking tools, and learning or skills programs. These tools can be accessed with or without support from a therapist or coach, with some using generative generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
The umbrella term “digital mental health services” also includes peer-support networks, phone helplines and human-delivered phone, chat, or video-based telehealth services.
Services such as Mindspot, for example, offer online assessment, feedback and referrals to online treatments that have optional therapist support.
Digital mental health services target a range of mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, trauma and eating disorders. Some are designed for specific groups of people, including culturally diverse communities, LGBTQIA+ people, new parents and young people.
With so many digital options available, finding the right program can be challenging. The government-funded Medicare Mental Health portal was set up to help Australians find evidence-based services.
A 2020 review of the evidence found almost half of people who used online programs for common mental health conditions benefited.
This review included online programs with self-directed lessons or modules to reduce symptoms of depression or anxiety. These programs were as effective as face-to-face therapy, but face-to-face therapy required on average 7.8 times more therapist time than online programs.
The evidence for other types of digital mental health programs is still developing.
The evidence for smartphone apps targeting mental health symptoms, for example, is mixed. While some studies have reported mental health benefits from the use of such apps, others have reported no differences in symptoms. Researchers suggest these apps should be used with other mental health supports rather than as standalone interventions.
Similarly, while AI chatbots have received recent attention, there is uncertainty about the safety and effectiveness of these tools as a substitute for therapy.
Chatbots, such as the AI “Woebot” for depression, can give users personalised guidance and support to learn therapeutic techniques. But while chatbots may have the potential to improve mental health, the results are largely inconclusive to date. There is also a lack of regulation in this field.
Early studies also show some benefits for digital approaches in treating more complex mental health conditions, such as suicidal thoughts and behaviours, and psychosis. But more research is needed.
Do users like them?
Users have reported many benefits to digital mental health services. People find them convenient, accessible, private and affordable, and are often highly satisfied with them.
Digital services are designed to directly address some of the major barriers to treatment access and have the potential to reach the significant numbers of people who go online for mental health information.
Digital supports can also be used in a “stepped care” approach to treating mental health problems. This means people with less complex or less severe symptoms try a low-intensity digital program first before being “stepped up” to more intensive supports. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service’s Talking Therapies program uses this model.
The NHS Talking Therapies program includes the option of learning self-guided cognitive behaviour therapy techniques. NHS/Every Mind Matters (screenshot)
But some people still prefer face-to-face services. Reasons for this include problems with internet connectivity, a perceived lack of treatment tailoring and personal connection, and concerns about quality of care.
Some Australians face challenges with digital literacy and internet access, making it difficult to engage with online services.
Privacy concerns may also discourage people from using digital platforms, as they worry about how their personal data is stored and shared.
What do clinicians think about them?
Mental health professionals increased their use of digital mental health tools (such as telehealth consultations) markedly during the COVID pandemic. Yet many clinicians struggle to use these tools because they have not received enough training or support.
Even when willing, clinicians face workplace barriers which make it difficult to incorporate them into their practice. These include:
limited funding and reimbursement
unclear policies related to liability and risk management, data storage and security
workflow disruptions, such as integrating these tools into existing systems, training clients to use them, and monitoring their use.
Some clinicians remain sceptical about whether digital services can truly match the quality of in-person therapy, leading to hesitation in recommending them to those who might benefit.
What needs to happen next?
With mental illness and suicide estimated to cost the Australian economy $70 billion per year, there are strong personal, social and financial reasons to support innovative solutions that increase access to mental health services.
But for digital approaches to reach their full potential, we need to upskill the mental health workforce and support organisations to include digital technologies into their practice.
It’s also important to improve awareness of digital mental health programs and reduce the barriers to accessing these services, or we risk leaving behind the very people who need them the most.
For Australians with more complex mental health issues, or those for whom digital mental health treatment hasn’t worked, access to in-person therapy and other mental health treatments should remain available. Digital mental health programs are one part of the mental health care system, and not a replacement for all types of care.
If you or anyone you know needs help or support, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Lou Farrer has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and Australian Rotary Health for digital mental health research.
Aarthi Ganapathy and Bonnie Clough do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
