Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

One observer describes next week’s economic roundtable this way: “Chalmers has opened a can of worms – and everybody has got a worm”.

Even those close to the roundtable are feeling overwhelmed by the extent of the worm farm. There are many hundreds of submissions, five Productivity Commission reports, Treasury background papers, and stakeholders in the media spruiking their opinions ahead of the event.

Business, unions and the welfare sector have largely settled into their predictable wish lists.

In areas such as the housing crisis, it’s actually not difficult to say what should be done – you hardly need this meeting to tell you. It just seems near impossible to get the relevant players (whether they be states, local councils, the construction industry) to do it, or be able to do it.

On issues of deregulation generally, when it comes to specifics, a lot is contested. As the ACTU’s Sally McManus, who’ll be at the roundtable, says, “one person’s regulations are another person’s rights”.

As much as Treasurer Jim Chalmers might like to project the sunny side of Australia’s situation, independent economist Chris Richardson (who will be at the summit’s day three tax session) puts it more bluntly.

“We have a problem: the average Australian saw their living standards rise by just 1.5% over the past decade,” he posted on X.

“That’s embarrassingly shy of the 22% lift in living standards enjoyed across the rich world as a whole, and way below what Australians achieved in times past.

“You’d have hoped that both sides would have talked about tackling that challenge at the last election, but they didn’t.”

Richardson is hoping the roundtable can achieve “enough consensus to change some things”, which the government can use as a springboard. But he’s worried the meeting could underperform, given its “lead-up hasn’t seen much consensus”,

Economist Richard Holden from UNSW says to be successful, the roundtable needs to get “broad agreement on some version of the ‘Abundance agenda’ [a reference to a currently fashionable book focusing on loosening regulatory blocks] – especially as it applies to housing.

“In addition, to be successful would require that big issues like federation and tax reform are referred to Treasury for serious consideration and to present the government with options by year’s end.”

There are two approaches for a government that wants to promote economic reform.

It can, as then treasurer Paul Keating did at the 1985 tax summit, put up a model and see how much it can make fly.

Or it can, as Chalmers is doing, ask a wide range of participants for their ideas, and then decide how much of what emerges to pursue – in terms of what has wide support and what fits the government’s agenda.

The closer we get to the meeting, the harder it becomes to anticipate its likely import (or lack of). Signposts are there, but they could be false signals, or ignored later.

Despite all the talk about tax, the government – specifically the prime minister – has flagged it doesn’t have the stomach for radical reform. Certainly not this term.

Anthony Albanese said last week, “The only tax policy that we’re implementing is the one that we took to the election”. This doesn’t rule out new initiatives this term – the phrasing is carefully in the present tense – but from what we know of the PM’s approach they would likely be limited rather than sweeping.

Independent economist Saul Eslake said that a few weeks ago he was optimistic the summit would give Chalmers the licence to spend some of the vast political capital the election yielded.

“But the prime minister has made it clear he is not getting that licence. The government is not prepared to venture much beyond its limited mandate from the election.

“The best that can be hoped for is a willingness to have an adult conversation with the electorate between now and the next election with a view to seeking a bold mandate in 2028,” Eslake says.

Predictably, the roundtable is putting the spotlight on the Albanese-Chalmers relationship. This can be summed up in a couple of ways. The PM is more cautious when it comes to economic reform, the treasurer is more ambitious. In political terms, it’s that “old bull, young bull” syndrome.

The different styles are clear. The “old bull” is blunt, sounding a touch impatient, for example, when he’s asked about tax. The “young bull” is publicly deferential to his leader.

One of the most potentially significant discussions at the roundtable will be around AI. Unlike many well-worn issues, this is a relatively new, and quickly changing, area of policy debate. There are varying views within government about whether firm or light guardrails are needed and whether they should be in a separate new act or just via changes to existing laws.

Chalmers is in favour of light-touch regulation. The unions are not on the same page as Chalmers’ regulatory preference, and they want a say for workers.

The unions were the winners from the 2022 jobs and skills summit – the government delivered to them in spades at the meeting, and later. It’s not clear they are in as strong a position this time. Their big claim for the roundtable – a four-day working week – has already been dismissed by the government. The ACTU doesn’t seem much fussed by the rejection – it is on a long march on that one.

Regardless of the diversity of views among those rubbing shoulders in the cabinet room next week, one man will stand out as something of an oddity. Ted O’Brien, shadow treasurer, invited as a participant, will be as much an observer.

O’Brien might say he wants to be constructive, but his role means he will want to be critical. But he has to tread carefully. Others in the room, and outside observers, will be making judgements about him. For O’Brien, the gathering should be a networking opportunity more than an occasion for performative display.

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.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Can Jim Chalmers reap a healthy crop with the help of his big worm farm? – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-can-jim-chalmers-reap-a-healthy-crop-with-the-help-of-his-big-worm-farm-262606

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Maras, Associate Professor in Media and Communication, The University of Western Australia

Celebrated film critic David Stratton has died at the age of 85. He leaves an indelible mark on Australian film culture, and Australian film culture left an indelible mark on him.

Over a long career, he had an intimate relationship with cinema, finding it a place of connection and a kind of shelter. It was where he spent time with his grandmother and time away from the family grocery business that loomed large over his future.

Stratton’s migration to Australia in 1963 as a 10 pound pom became permanent as he took on the role of director of the Sydney Film Festival from 1966 to 1983.

In that role, he shaped a generation of young filmmakers who would come to define the Australian New Wave. He found a new sense of belonging.

His 1980 book, The Last New Wave, is explicitly a homage to

the men and women who work in the Australian film industry [who] make up as fine a group of people as anyone would want to know.

Becoming a critic

The festival director role led to his relationship with SBS, who hired Stratton as a part-time feature film consultant from 1980 – an arrangement which he translated into on screen introductions for what became Movie of the Week, as well as Cinema Classics in 1983.

Here, he met producer Margaret Pomeranz, who became his professional collaborator, co-presenter and loyal friend. Their on-air partnership, lasting 28 years across the SBS and the ABC program, At the Movies, made them icons of Australian film culture.

In writing my book on At the Movies, I heard numerous versions of the question, “are you a Margaret or a David?” The collection of their reviews on Letterboxd can be searched by the tags “Oh, David” and “Oh, Margaret”.

A cultural icon

The words “cultural icon” can be over-used, but in the case of Stratton, the emphasis was on substance over show. He never finished high school or studied at university, but wrote three books on Australian cinema, two movie guides, and a biography, I Peed on Fellini (2008).

He was passionate and protective of film, no more so than when he was battling censorship. In the case of Ken Park (2002), because of restrictions on the viewing of the film, few could argue with the decision on the facts of the case. However, Stratton, who had seen the film, declared “We’re being lied to”.

Stratton was a seasoned critic and performer, and knew how to manage his persona. He worked as a film reviewer for The Weekend Australian for 33 years, was a regular reviewer for Variety from 1984 to 2003, using the moniker “Strat”, while also making contributions to The Age and segments on radio station 2UE.

Following the end of At the Movies, he ventured into reviewing on the internet through “David Stratton Recommends” a collaboration with art house film exhibitors in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, and he ran a history of world cinema course at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education, which he concluded in 2023.

Underpinning all of this is a commitment to the audience. He noted in interview:

I think everybody who is writing about film or talking about film is doing it for the audience that is reading or listening.

In praise of cinema

When I interviewed Stratton in 2019, giving generously of his time, he established quickly that he would only tolerate so much academic jargon and pretentiousness.

When we did The Movie Show, and I think Margaret would back me up, we were never wanting to intellectualise any of this. We wanted to get across to a wide television audience our love of film, or our disappointment in certain things. We always liked to praise films more than to not praise them, and we didn’t have the time or the inclination to analyse them in too much detail.

A cinephile before the age of DVDs and streaming, Stratton retained a certain puritanical approach to film, guarding its preciousness:

When I was growing up, films were hard to see. I would go to see a film in the cinema and very often that film, if it was not a huge success and therefore would be revived, you might not see it again, ever, unless it came on television.

This led to his famously obsessive system of notetaking and cataloguing.

This informed a certain conservativism, most famously expressed in his dislike of badly used hand-held cameras, but manifested in other ways.

It always amazes me when I see people watching movies on their mobile phone on the train and then they say they’ve seen the film. They haven’t seen the film obviously. If somebody thinks they’ve seen Joker on a phone, well good luck to them but they haven’t.

Stratton increasingly saw television reviewing as a demand on his other pursuits, not to mention his habit of watching a film a day.

A final farewell

We have in a sense been saying an extended farewell since the end of At the Movies in 2014.

Attempting to sum up a career is always difficult, but it is a responsibility Stratton lived with constantly. This is captured in one comment, perhaps the closest we will come to his philosophy of reviewing:

the reviewer has a big responsibility I think, a very big responsibility. Because after all it’s only their opinion, they’re obviously being honest – well they should be honest – with their opinion, but it only is their opinion and you’re talking about possibly destroying something that the people who created it spent years of their lives working on. It’s a pretty big responsibility.

Read more:
For the love of cinema: what we’re missing from At The Movies, 10 years after its last season

This article draws on the author’s book At the Movies, Film Reviewing, and Screenwriting: Selective Affinities and Cultural Mediation, published by Intellect Press.

Steven Maras is the author of At the Movies, Film Reviewing, and Screenwriting: Selective Affinities and Cultural Mediation, published by Intellect Press.

– ref. David Stratton was always ‘doing it for the audience’. In this, he had a huge impact on Australian film – https://theconversation.com/david-stratton-was-always-doing-it-for-the-audience-in-this-he-had-a-huge-impact-on-australian-film-263202

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University

Big tech company hype sells generative artificial intelligence (AI) as intelligent, creative, desirable, inevitable, and about to radically reshape the future in many ways.

Published by Oxford University Press, our new research on how generative AI depicts Australian themes directly challenges this perception.

We found when generative AIs produce images of Australia and Australians, these outputs are riddled with bias. They reproduce sexist and racist caricatures more at home in the country’s imagined monocultural past.

Basic prompts, tired tropes

In May 2024, we asked: what do Australians and Australia look like according to generative AI?

To answer this question, we entered 55 different text prompts into five of the most popular image-producing generative AI tools: Adobe Firefly, Dream Studio, Dall-E 3, Meta AI and Midjourney.

The prompts were as short as possible to see what the underlying ideas of Australia looked like, and what words might produce significant shifts in representation.

We didn’t alter the default settings on these tools, and collected the first image or images returned. Some prompts were refused, producing no results. (Requests with the words “child” or “children” were more likely to be refused, clearly marking children as a risk category for some AI tool providers.)

Overall, we ended up with a set of about 700 images.

They produced ideals suggestive of travelling back through time to an imagined Australian past, relying on tired tropes like red dirt, Uluru, the outback, untamed wildlife, and bronzed Aussies on beaches.

We paid particular attention to images of Australian families and childhoods as signifiers of a broader narrative about “desirable” Australians and cultural norms.

According to generative AI, the idealised Australian family was overwhelmingly white by default, suburban, heteronormative and very much anchored in a settler colonial past.

‘An Australian father’ with an iguana

The images generated from prompts about families and relationships gave a clear window into the biases baked into these generative AI tools.

“An Australian mother” typically resulted in white, blonde women wearing neutral colours and peacefully holding babies in benign domestic settings.

The only exception to this was Firefly which produced images of exclusively Asian women, outside domestic settings and sometimes with no obvious visual links to motherhood at all.

Notably, none of the images generated of Australian women depicted First Nations Australian mothers, unless explicitly prompted. For AI, whiteness is the default for mothering in an Australian context.

Similarly, “Australian fathers” were all white. Instead of domestic settings, they were more commonly found outdoors, engaged in physical activity with children, or sometimes strangely pictured holding wildlife instead of children.

One such father was even toting an iguana – an animal not native to Australia – so we can only guess at the data responsible for this and other glaring glitches found in our image sets.

Alarming levels of racist stereotypes

Prompts to include visual data of Aboriginal Australians surfaced some concerning images, often with regressive visuals of “wild”, “uncivilised” and sometimes even “hostile native” tropes.

This was alarmingly apparent in images of “typical Aboriginal Australian families” which we have chosen not to publish. Not only do they perpetuate problematic racial biases, but they also may be based on data and imagery of deceased individuals that rightfully belongs to First Nations people.

Read more:
How AI images are ‘flattening’ Indigenous cultures – creating a new form of tech colonialism

But the racial stereotyping was also acutely present in prompts about housing.

Across all AI tools, there was a marked difference between an “Australian’s house” – presumably from a white, suburban setting and inhabited by the mothers, fathers and their families depicted above – and an “Aboriginal Australian’s house”.

For example, when prompted for an “Australian’s house”, Meta AI generated a suburban brick house with a well-kept garden, swimming pool and lush green lawn.

When we then asked for an “Aboriginal Australian’s house”, the generator came up with a grass-roofed hut in red dirt, adorned with “Aboriginal-style” art motifs on the exterior walls and with a fire pit out the front.

The differences between the two images are striking. They came up repeatedly across all the image generators we tested.

These representations clearly do not respect the idea of Indigenous Data Sovereignty for Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander peoples, where they would get to own their own data and control access to it.

Read more:
AI affects everyone – including Indigenous people. It’s time we have a say in how it’s built

Has anything improved?

Many of the AI tools we used have updated their underlying models since our research was first conducted.

On August 7, OpenAI released their most recent flagship model, GPT-5.

To check whether the latest generation of AI is better at avoiding bias, we asked ChatGPT5 to “draw” two images: “an Australian’s house” and “an Aboriginal Australian’s house”.

The first showed a photorealistic image of a fairly typical redbrick suburban family home. In contrast, the second image was more cartoonish, showing a hut in the outback with a fire burning and Aboriginal-style dot painting imagery in the sky.

These results, generated just a couple of days ago, speak volumes.

Why this matters

Generative AI tools are everywhere. They are part of social media platforms, baked into mobile phones and educational platforms, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Canva and most other popular creative and office software.

In short, they are unavoidable.

Our research shows generative AI tools will readily produce content rife with inaccurate stereotypes when asked for basic depictions of Australians.

Given how widely they are used, it’s concerning that AI is producing caricatures of Australia and visualising Australians in reductive, sexist and racist ways.

Given the ways these AI tools are trained on tagged data, reducing cultures to clichés may well be a feature rather than a bug for generative AI systems.

Tama Leaver receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

Suzanne Srdarov receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a research fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

– ref. ‘Australiana’ images made by AI are racist and full of tired cliches, new study shows – https://theconversation.com/australiana-images-made-by-ai-are-racist-and-full-of-tired-cliches-new-study-shows-263117

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Senior Research Fellow, Initiative for Peacebuilding, The University of Melbourne

On August 15 2021, Afghanistan’s democratic republic collapsed.

As the last US and NATO troops departed the country, the Taliban swept back into power and the Afghan people braced for an uncertain future.

Despite promises of moderation and inclusion, four years later, the Taliban has established a repressive, exclusionary regime – one that has dismantled institutions of law, justice and civil rights with ruthless efficiency.

As the Taliban regime has tightened its grip, international attention has waned. Crises in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere have dominated the global agenda, pushing Afghanistan out of the spotlight.

With the Taliban seeking to end its isolation and gain legitimacy, can the international community find the will now to exert real pressure?

The Taliban’s emirate of repression

After coming back into power, the Taliban discarded the country’s 2004 constitution, allowing the regime to operate without a transparent rule of law. Instead, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, the reclusive Taliban leader, rules by decree from his base in Kandahar.

The Taliban’s repression of women and girls has been so severe, human rights groups now call it “gender apartheid” and argue it should be a new international crime.

Edicts have erased women from public life, banning them from education beyond primary school (with the exception of religious education), employment and public spaces. Women also cannot move freely in public without a mahram, or male guardian.

The Taliban also dismantled the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, replacing it with the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. As a central instrument of repression, the ministry reinforces institutionalised gender discrimination through regular raids and arrests, surveillance and monitoring of public spaces.

Taliban rule has also led to the exclusion and persecution of minority ethnic and religious groups such as Hazaras, Shias, Sikhs and Christians.

In the province of Panjshir, the focal point of resistance to the Taliban, human rights groups have documented the Taliban’s severe crackdowns on the local population, including mass arrests and detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings.

More broadly, the Taliban has decimated the civic space in the country. Journalists and activists have been silenced through fear, violence and arbitrary arrests. This has led to widespread self-censorship and an information blackout that allows abuses to continue with impunity.

Despite the immense risks, activists, journalists and ordinary citizens continue to resist the Taliban. Women have staged peaceful protests in the face of harsh crackdowns, while others run secret schools for girls and document abuses in the hope of future accountability.

Humanitarian aid dwindling

Although most countries do not recognise the Taliban as the formal and legitimate government of the country, some regional states have called for an easing of its international isolation.

Last month, Russia became the first country to recognise the Taliban. China is also deepening its economic and diplomatic ties with the group. India’s foreign minister recently met with his Taliban counterpart, after which the Taliban called New Delhi a “significant regional partner”.

International aid continues to flow into Afghanistan, but a report from a US watchdog this week documented how the Taliban uses force and other means to divert it.

The United States had still accounted for more than 40% of all humanitarian support to Afghanistan after the Taliban’s return. But US President Donald Trump’s decision to decimate the US Agency for International Development means this funding has all but disappeared.

This has crippled essential services and threatens to plunge the country into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Health facilities have closed and malnutrition is rising. The mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Afghans from Iran and Pakistan has only further added to the humanitarian catastrophe.

For years, the United Nations has tried to facilitate talks between the Taliban and international community in Qatar with the aim of improving conditions in the country. However, it has faced repeated setbacks.

The Taliban only decided to attend the talks in mid-2024 after the UN conceded to excluding women and civil society groups and restricting the agenda. The meeting resulted in no breakthroughs or concessions.

Another round of talks is anticipated, but the central dilemma remains: how to engage the Taliban without legitimising its repressive rule.

Courts making some progress

The Taliban’s systematic human rights abuses have global repercussions. Experts warn of a rising trend of similarly styled repression, dubbed “Talibanisation”, taking root in other countries.

In Yemen, for example, Houthi leaders have imposed restrictions eerily similar to Taliban edicts, banning women from walking in public without a male guardian and restricting their work.

While individual states have failed to agree on a coordinated response to the Taliban, international institutions have taken steps in the right direction.

In July, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Akhundzada and the Taliban chief justice, accusing them of crimes against humanity for gender-based persecution.

Separately, four countries – Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada – have begun the process of bringing a case against the Taliban to the International Court of Justice for gender discrimination. This would be a first for the court.

To complement these efforts, the UN member states must establish an independent international investigative mechanism to systematically document and investigate crimes committed by the Taliban. Such a mechanism would help preserve evidence and lay the groundwork for future prosecutions.

Without concerted international pressure, the suffering of the Afghan people will only worsen and the Taliban’s brand of repression will continue impact women’s rights far beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

The authors are holding a day-long conference with other academics on Afghanistan, four years after the Taliban takeover, at the Monash University Law Chambers in Melbourne on August 15. More information can be found here.

Nothing to disclose.

Arif Saba and Niamatullah Ibrahimi 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.

– ref. After 4 years of repressive Taliban rule, Afghans are suffering in silence. Is the world still watching? – https://theconversation.com/after-4-years-of-repressive-taliban-rule-afghans-are-suffering-in-silence-is-the-world-still-watching-262801

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Griffith, Professor of Avian Behavioural Ecology, Macquarie University

Living in cities exposes people to all sorts of chemical pollutants. Many are harmful even at low concentrations. But it is hard to know what the risks and consequences might be.

The animals we share our cities with can indicate potential sources and effects of such pollution. In this way, they act as sentinels — just like the canary in the coalmine, used to alert underground miners to the presence of dangerous levels of toxic gases in the 19th century.

Our research on house sparrows in three Australian towns revealed subtle but disturbing effects of pollution on these birds.

In the mining town of Broken Hill, New South Wales, sparrows suffered from exposure to lead in areas where thousands of people live. Similarly, in Portland, Victoria and George Town, Tasmania, sparrows living near aluminium smelters were affected by the smelting byproduct fluoride. The results suggest the health and wellbeing of city people may also be at risk.

Anxiety: aversion to the human gaze

Sparrows have lived alongside people for thousands of years. In that time they have picked up useful skills, such as feeding off food scraps, while avoiding harm.

Most people are familiar with the sight of a sparrow boldly feeding from leftover food at a café, even indoors. If the birds are ignored they often feed within arm’s length. But as soon as someone looks directly at them, they fly away and become very wary.

This is one of the sparrow’s super skills, allowing them to thrive in the urban environment. People mostly ignore them and cause them no harm. But if a person is focused on them, they respond as if they suspect something bad might happen.

Sensitivity to the human gaze is well studied in human psychology. It has also been shown in urban gulls that steal food in Europe.

We explored the effects of lead pollution on sparrow gaze sensitivity in Broken Hill.

Sparrows have small home ranges (about 300 metres). We established enclosed feeding stations at four sites across the city. We also tagged each bird and measured the amount of lead in their blood.

Then we erected boards with a photograph of a man either looking directly at the feeding station, or to the side. We presented different pictures over several days. Our results showed a clear distinction between responses to the images.

Sparrows flocked to the feeding stations. But they took much longer to visit the feeder when the man in the picture appeared to be looking at them. Those living in areas with high lead levels were especially sensitive to the direction of gaze.

Video recordings of sparrows revealed those with high levels of lead in their blood were more anxious. They spent more time looking up and checking for predators than sparrows in areas where lead pollution levels were relatively low.

Anxiety is a common symptom of lead poisoning in people. It is caused by damage to the nervous system during development.

Our research showed sparrows living in contaminated areas of Broken Hill were more anxious. This would help reduce the risk of being caught by a predator. But there are downsides to being an anxious sparrow, not least because less time is spent feeding.

Another common consequence of lead poisoning is impaired mobility. When we analysed video recordings of sparrow escape flight, we found sparrows with high blood lead levels were slower to take off. Every second counts when being attacked by a sparrowhawk or cat.

Longevity: checking chromosomes for ageing

The length of the “telomeres” — caps that prevent chromosomes from damage — has proven to be a good marker of how long an individual will live.

When we measured telomere length in the sparrows across Broken Hill, we discovered sparrows with higher levels of lead in their blood had shorter telomeres. Generally, birds with shorter telomeres die at a younger age.

Previous studies of humans exposed to lead through industrial occupations also found telomere shortening.

Brittle bones and pitted teeth

We also studied sparrows in two towns near aluminium smelters: Portland, Victoria and George Town, Tasmania.

Fluoride is a major byproduct of aluminium smelting. After fluoride is emitted into the air it falls back to Earth where it can contaminate land, water and plants. So animals may breathe it in, drink contaminated water or eat contaminated food. Fluoride then accumulates in the animal’s bones and teeth.

Earlier studies found high exposure to fluoride deposited around the Portland aluminium smelter caused bone lesions in nearby kangaroos and dental problems in koalas.

We found sparrows living up to 10km from these smelters had unnaturally high fluoride levels in their bones.

Excess fluoride uptake changes the balance of the essential bone minerals, calcium and phosphorus. These minerals play an important role in bone structure. Changes in their composition could compromise bone strength, with implications for activities such as flight.

Heed the lessons

Pollution affects virtually all aspects of life — from how organisms behave to how they age and grow. The health of the environment, animals and people are tightly intertwined.

Further, in light of strengthening evidence that even low levels of lead and fluoride exposure might be harmful at times, reviewing environmental management controls and pollution limits is warranted.

We should heed the lessons of sentinels such as the sparrow, and reduce pollution at the source. This will benefit urban ecosystems and, in turn, the health and wellbeing of humans.

Simon Griffith receives funding from The Australian Research Council

Mark Patrick Taylor has received funding from The Australian Research Council. He has also previously received funding from New South Wales Environment Protection Authority (EPA) for research into environmental lead and human health implications at Broken Hill, NSW. He was also a former full-time employee of EPA Victoria, appointed to the statutory role of Chief Environmental Scientist.

Max M Gillings is involved in research affiliated with and funded by EPA Victoria.

– ref. The canary in the concrete jungle: how polluted towns make sparrows frail, anxious and old before their time – https://theconversation.com/the-canary-in-the-concrete-jungle-how-polluted-towns-make-sparrows-frail-anxious-and-old-before-their-time-262788

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Avenell, Professor in Modern Japanese History, Australian National University

This year marks 80 years since Japan’s catastrophic defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. In 1945, the country lay in ruins. Millions had died in battle or in the devastating Allied bombings of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other cities. Across Asia and the Pacific, Japan’s bid to create a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere left millions violated, impoverished, or dead.

Backed into a corner, in August 1945 Emperor Hirohito defied his generals and accepted unconditional surrender under the Potsdam Declaration.

In his unprecedented radio broadcast on August 15, he urged the Japanese to bear the unbearable and endure the unendurable. With defeat, Japan’s empire dissolved, its “divine” emperor became mortal, and a nation that had pursued autonomy through conquest now faced a humbling occupation led by its former archenemy, Amerika.

Standing in the burnt-out fields of 1945, survivors could scarcely have imagined the Japan of today. The country has changed dramatically. In my research, I identify ten key factors that define this “postwar” era — a term that in Japan still refers to the entire period since surrender. The “post” of the postwar speaks to the drive to transcend the past, while the “war” to the enduring shadow of that past in memory, politics, and diplomacy.

1: Post-empire Japan. While Japan’s empire vanished in 1945, former colonies and violated regions could not and would not forget the past. Postwar leaders and their American backers promoted an image of a peaceful and ethnically homogeneous island nation, but wartime memories have repeatedly strained relations with South Korea, China, and others. In this sense, Japan has been as much “post-empire” as it has been “postwar” since 1945.

2: Ambiguous demilitarisation. After defeat, Japan’s wartime military –responsible for a trail of misery and havoc across Asia and the Pacific – was dismantled. The American-authored constitution renounced war and the maintenance of a military.

But with the Cold War, Washington backtracked, pushing Japan to create its Self-Defense Forces in the mid-1950s. Today Japan has a sophisticated military and it exports military equipment, but constitutional constraints constantly force leaders to make incremental reinterpretations over the legal status of the Self-Defense Forces and the scope of its activities. Some have claimed this constraint inhibits postwar Japan from being a normal country.

3: Bastion of democracy in the far east. Although democracy had prewar roots, it was consistently subject to oppression. The postwar constitution finally institutionalised freedoms of speech, assembly, and political participation, while codifying rights for women and others. The Japanese embraced these rights, flocking to polling booths, and organising political parties, unions, and countless civic movements. Long-term conservative rule repeatedly undercut democracy, but it became part of everyday life and survives to the present.

4: America’s embrace. The United States-led occupation ended in 1952, but Japan’s economy, security, and culture remain bound to America. Feelings towards the former archenemy are complex.

The American dream in brands such as Levis, Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Disney, have symbolised a bright and affluent future. But the continued US military presence and memories of the atomic bombings are constant reminders of Japan’s subservience. Nonetheless, the Japanese have never seriously considered breaking from their powerful trans-Pacific patron.

5: One party to rule them all? Politically, postwar Japan is an unusual democracy, with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ruling almost continuously since forming in 1955. The LDP offered political stability, but this was accompanied by recurrent scandal and corruption.

Opposition parties essentially gave up on winning government, remaining fractured and powerless. In fact, the larger story of postwar Japanese politics is one of increasing public disillusionment. Many Japanese see politicians as increasingly out of touch and, as was apparent in its most recent elections, search for radical alternatives.

Read more:
Young Japanese voters embrace right-wing populist parties, leaving the prime minister on the brink

6: Economic rollercoaster. Following defeat, the Japanese built an economy that stunned the world. By the 1970s, Japan was the second largest capitalist economy, powered by exports of cars, electronics, and steel. Rising incomes fuelled mass consumption and international travel, and observers spoke of “Japan as Number One.”

But the economic meltdown in the 1990s triggered an era of stagnation. The economy struggled to keep up with new competitors and technologies. The myth of shared prosperity gave way to widening generational and gender disparity. Ironically, there is a risk Japanese today may end up less well off than their parents.

7: Homogenisation and its discontents. Economic growth drew millions into a culture of mass consumption and standardised life, giving rise to a popular vision of Japan as a totally middle-class society. But this rose-colored vision was as much myth as reality. Homogenisation tended to mask differences while encouraging discrimination based on gender, age, ethnicity, and location. Since the 1990s, the myth of a middle-class nation has collapsed, with no compelling replacement on the horizon.

8: The demographic tsunami. The silent, yet perhaps most profound, factor of postwar Japan is demographic change. The era witnessed three great shifts here.

First, rural-to-urban migration in the late 1950s transformed Japan from an agrarian nation into one of the world’s most urbanised. Second, the fertility rate fell steadily, apart from brief baby booms in the late 1940s and early 1970s. Third, longevity rose to among the world’s highest.

Today, an ageing, shrinking population strains public finances and welfare, while youth face economic insecurity. Indeed, Japan may be the “canary in the coal mine” for other ageing societies.

9: Japan’s return to the world. Unable to project military power, after 1945 Japan used its economic, cultural, and diplomatic influence internationally. Even at the height of the Cold War, it maintained trade with China. Economic strength also helped Japan to restore ties in Asia and secure a respected place in global institutions.

But Japan’s return to the postwar world has been complicated. Leaders must juggle nationalist rumblings, American demands, and the responsibilities of global citizenship. As economic fortunes change and regional geopolitics transform, Japan must rethink its international posture.

10: Environmental laboratory. Economic growth brought prosperity, but also caused severe environmental damage. In the 1960s and 1970s, Japan experienced shocking cases of industrial pollution from methylmercury and other neurotoxins.

Earthquakes and tsunamis killed tens of thousands and, at Fukushima, bequeathed a nuclear catastrophe of generational proportions. Every year, climate change intensifies typhoons, floods, and heatwaves, but energy-vulnerable Japan still struggles to chart a low-emissions pathway to the future.

A universal story

For a country that has long been touted as exceptional, I am struck by the global resonances in this history, like grappling with the past, managing economic highs and lows, navigating demographic change, and confronting environmental crisis.

Japan’s postwar era certainly offers a portrait of one nation’s revival, but it may also represent a microcosm for tackling our own challenges.

Simon Avenell 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.

– ref. Postwar Japan at 80: 10 factors that changed the nation forever – https://theconversation.com/postwar-japan-at-80-10-factors-that-changed-the-nation-forever-263039

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Greste, Professor of Journalism and Communications, Macquarie University

The New York-based media freedom organisation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, is scrupulous with its words. So, when the organisation described the killing of six Palestinian journalists in an Israeli air strike as “murder”, the word was a carefully considered choice.

The CPJ defines “murder” as the “deliberate killing of journalists for their work”.

Why were the journalists targeted?

Israeli authorities said they were targeting one man – a 28-year-old Al Jazeera reporter named Anas al-Sharif – who they said was the leader of a Hamas “cell”. They also accused him of “advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and (Israeli) troops.”

Israel made no claims about the other five; three of them were al-Sharif’s Al Jazeera colleagues and the other two were freelance journalists.

In a post on X, an Israeli military spokesman said:

Prior to the strike, we obtained current intelligence indicating that Sharif was an active Hamas military wing operative at the time of his elimination.

The evidence the Israeli authorities claimed to have was circumstantial at best: “personnel rosters, lists of terrorist training courses, phone directories and salary documents.”

Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee also posted undated photos on X that appeared to show al-Sharif in an embrace with Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind of the October 2023 attack on Israel.

Israel says it has further classified evidence that includes more damning detail.

Without seeing it all, it is impossible to verify the claims but the photograph itself is hardly proof.

Front-line journalists (myself included) will have selfies with those they have interviewed, including some very unpleasant characters.

Many will have phone numbers of extremists – they will appear in call logs and records of meetings.

None of it is evidence of anything other than a well-connected reporter doing their job.

Of course, Israel may well be right. Despite the vigorous denials from Al Jazeera, it is still possible al-Sharif was working for Hamas. And if he was, the Israeli authorities should have no problem allowing independent investigators complete access to verify the claims and settle the matter.

The horrors of covering war

But the strike also fits a disturbing pattern. With 190 media workers now killed since the October 7 attacks, this is the deadliest conflict for journalists since the CPJ began keeping records.

Read more:
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While some of the victims were inevitably caught in the violence along with so many other civilians, many of them died in rocket strikes aimed squarely at their homes, their clearly marked vehicles, or while they were wearing body armour labelled “PRESS”.

In all, the CPJ has identified 24 journalists who appeared to have been targeted – murdered, in the group’s words – specifically because of their work.

The number may well be far higher but those figures alone raise disturbing questions about Israel’s tolerance for critical media reporting. They also demand answers from independent investigators.

We receive horrific reports from Gaza daily, but Israel repeatedly dismisses them as Hamas propaganda.

“A terrorist is a terrorist, even if Al Jazeera gives him a press badge”, the Israeli foreign ministry posted on social media.

If Israel believes the journalism from Palestinian reporters is nothing more than Hamas propaganda, the solution is straightforward: let foreign correspondents in.

Despite the risks, journalists want access

It is worth recalling the reason we cherish media freedom is not because we want to privilege a particular class of individual. It is because we recognise the vital importance accurate, independent reporting plays in informing public debate.

Without it, we are blind and deaf.

International news organisations have repeatedly called for access to Gaza. Now, a group of more than 1,000 international journalists have signed a petition demanding to be let in (I am one of the signatories).

Israel has so far refused. The government says it cannot guarantee their security in such an active battlefield. But that cannot be justification alone.

All those who have signed the petition know well the risks of reporting from hostile environments. Many have crossed active war front lines themselves. Most have friends who have died in other conflicts. Some have been wounded, arrested or kidnapped themselves.

None are naive to the dangers and all are committed to the principles behind media freedom.

Calling for foreign journalists to be let into Gaza is not to deny the extraordinary sacrifice of Anas al-Sharif or any of the other Palestinians who have been killed while doing their jobs.

Rather, it is to assert the importance of the fundamental right of all – the right to information. That applies as much in Gaza as it does in Ukraine, or Russia, or Sudan, or any other crisis where the public needs accurate, reliable information to support good policy.

Peter Greste is a professor of journalism at Macquarie University, and the Executive Director for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. He also worked as a BBC correspondent in Gaza in 2007, and as an Africa correspondent for Al Jazeera from 2011 to 2015.

– ref. Israel must allow independent investigations of Palestinian journalist killings – and let international media into Gaza – https://theconversation.com/israel-must-allow-independent-investigations-of-palestinian-journalist-killings-and-let-international-media-into-gaza-263106

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ana Gamarra Rondinel, Research Fellow, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Melbourne

From paid parental leave to expanded childcare and free kindergarten, Australia has made positive changes over the past two decades to better support families.

But for many parents juggling paid work and kids, research shows those gains are being undermined by a missing piece of the puzzle: fixing our outdated Family Tax Benefit payments.

Who are the biggest losers from leaving those rules unchanged for the past 25 years? Families with two working parents – especially mums trying to go back to paid work.

Ahead of next week’s national economic reform roundtable, the prime minister says he welcomes new ideas to boost productivity – and hopes “there’s some low hanging fruit out there” to act on soon, or to feed into next year’s budget.

A key place to start would be simplifying and updating family payments to better suit working families, support shared parental care and encourage paid work.

Payments affecting millions of Australians

Introduced by the Howard government in 2000, Family Tax Benefit part A and part B are the largest single government program of family assistance spending. Together, the payments are expected to cost close to A$20 billion this financial year.

As of March 2025, there were 1.27 million people receiving part A payments, and 996,005 receiving part B payments.

Around 2.43 million children were being supported by one or both of those payments.

But those payments are long overdue for an overhaul.

How two parents in paid work miss out now

The current rules particularly disadvantage families with two parents in paid work.

For instance, a two-earner couple, each earning $50,000 with a 5-year-old child, receives $1,896 in Family Tax Benefit part A – but no part B payment.

In contrast, a single-earner couple with the same income ($100,000 in total) receives $1,896 part A payment, $3,509 part B payment and up to $460 in part A and B supplements.

That’s $5,865 – almost $4,000 more. Yet both families bear the same costs of raising children.

Means testing and tightening over the past 25 years has led to less than half Australia’s families receiving any family payment support.

The system leads to high marginal effective tax rates on secondary earners, discouraging employment. When some parents return to paid work, most commonly a mother after having a child, they can start losing family payments from the first dollar they earn.

A simpler, fairer single payment

We propose combining those complex part A and part B payments – plus the part A supplements and part B supplements – into one simpler, single, per-child payment.

In two-parent families, under our proposal half the payment would be allocated to each parent. It would be tapered based on each parent’s individual income, so that only income by the parent over the income-free threshold would lead to reduced family payments.

Under our simplified proposal, each parent would have their own income-free threshold. Payments would taper once individual earnings exceed that threshold.

Single parents, with their dual role of primary carer and earner, would receive the full payment, with the same income-free threshold as parents in a couple.

This reform would support parents sharing care responsibilities, as well as giving people greater choice to participate more in paid work.

While our proposal has the potential to cost more than the current system – given it would increase payments to two parents in paid work – we could offset additional spending through higher taxes on high-income or high-wealth individuals.

Alternatively, it could be made budget neutral (not costing the federal government more) or positive (saving taxpayers’ money), depending on the payment rates and thresholds chosen.

Reducing taper rates on family payments by testing on individual income delivers higher net income for working families, which encourages greater workforce participation among second earners.

What’s the evidence this could help families?

There are more than 2 million Australian families of two parents with children. Of those, 1.1 million have one parent not doing paid work, or working part time – almost always the mother.

Gender gaps in earnings, employment and hours worked are driven almost entirely by mothers doing less paid work because of persistent gendered divisions in paid and unpaid work.

Read more:
New study finds the gender earnings gap could be halved if we reined in the long hours often worked by men

Research indicates the introduction of paid parental leave in Australia since 2011 has encouraged mothers to return to employment and increase their hours worked.

The current family tax benefits system is outdated and unfair for families navigating work and care responsibilities.

Simplifying family payments would encourage paid work, while aligning with past parental leave pay and childcare policy changes. This will make life easier for Australia’s working families and contribute to productivity to benefit us all.

Ana Gamarra Rondinel receives funding from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course.

Guyonne Kalb receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, Victorian Department of Education, NSW Department of Communities and Justice, Paul Ramsay Foundation and Perpetual.

Miranda Stewart receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She was also the lead author of the 2023 Growing Pains research report cited in this article, which was done with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence and the University of Melbourne.

– ref. Many parents – mostly mothers – lose family payments from the first dollar they earn. Here’s how we could fix it – https://theconversation.com/many-parents-mostly-mothers-lose-family-payments-from-the-first-dollar-they-earn-heres-how-we-could-fix-it-262119

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Guastella, Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Michael Crouch Chair in Child and Youth Mental Health, University of Sydney

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects around 7% of children and 2.5% of adults.

ADHD causes difficulties holding and sustaining attention over periods of time. People with ADHD also experience hyperactivity and high levels of impulsiveness and arousal. This can make it difficult to plan, coordinate and remain engaged in tasks.

ADHD is linked to problems at work, school and home, and to higher rates of mental illnesses such as anxiety. It’s also associated with higher rates of long-term harms.

Stimulant medication, such as methylphenidate and dexamphetamine, is the most common treatment for managing ADHD symptoms. Most people with ADHD will respond to at least one ADHD medication.

But, rising rates of prescriptions in recent years has prompted concern for their effectiveness and safety.

New research published today in the journal BMJ points to additional longer-term benefits. It found people with ADHD who took medication were less likely to have suicidal behaviours, transport accidents, issues with substance misuse, or be convicted of a crime.

What did the study do?

The study tracked 148,581 people who received a new diagnosis of ADHD between 2007 and 2018.

The authors used population-based data from Swedish national registers, including everyone aged six to 64 who was newly diagnosed with ADHD. The average age was 17.4 years and 41% were female.

Participants either started or did not start medication within three months of their ADHD diagnosis.

The authors examined the effects of drug treatment for ADHD on five critical outcomes: suicidal behaviours, substance misuse, accidental injuries, transport accidents and committing crime. They looked at both first-time and recurrent events.

This study used a method that uses data from health records or registries to mimic the design of a randomised controlled trial, in an attempt to reduce bias.

The researchers accounted for age, education, other mental and physical illnesses, prior history and use of other drugs, to account for factors that may influence results.

What did they find?

Within three months of receiving an ADHD diagnosis, 84,282 (56.7%) of people had started drug treatment for ADHD. Methylphenidate was the most commonly prescribed drug, accounting for 88.4% of prescriptions.

Drug treatment for ADHD was associated with reduced rates of a first occurrence for four out of the five outcomes: a 17% reduction for suicidal behaviours, 15% for substance misuse, 12% for transport accidents and 13% for committing crime.

When the researchers looked at people with recurrent events, the rate reductions associated with ADHD medication were seen for all five outcomes (including accidental injury).

The effect of medication was particularly strong when someone had a history of these events happening frequently. This means those with the most severe symptoms may benefit most.

Stimulant drugs were associated with lower rates of all five outcomes compared with non-stimulant drugs.

It’s likely these benefits are associated with improvements in attention, impulsivity and hyperactivity. People may be less likely to be distracted while driving, to self-medicate and show impacts from other mental health challenges.

What didn’t the study do?

The large sample size, use of national linked registers and sophisticated design give greater confidence that these findings are due to medication use and not due to other factors.

But the study was not able to examine medication dosages or track whether people reliably took their medication as prescribed. It also had no way to track the severity of ADHD symptoms. This means it can’t tell us if this helped most people or just some people with severe symptoms.

We know that ADHD medication helps most people, but it is not effective for everyone. So, we still need to understand why some people don’t benefit from ADHD medication, and what other treatments might also be helpful.

Finally, even though the study was rigorous in its design and adjusted for many factors, we can’t rule out that other unaccounted factors could be associated with these effects.

As prescribing increases, the size of the benefit decreases

A second study, published in June, used the same Swedish national registers and self-controlled case series design.

This study also concluded ADHD medication was associated with reduced risks for self-harm, accidental injuries, transport accidents and committing crime.

However, this study also showed that as prescribing rates increased nearly five-fold between years 2006 to 2020, the size of the observed benefits of ADHD medications reduced.

While remaining significant, the size of the associations between ADHD medication use and lower risks of unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime weakened over this time.

This could mean people who are less likely to need ADHD medications are now receiving them.

What are the impacts for patients and policymakers?

People need to know that if ADHD medications are helpful for them or their children, it might also improve many other areas of life.

These findings can also give governments confidence that their recent initiatives and efforts to increase access to ADHD support and treatment may have positive downstream impacts on broader social outcomes.

But medications aren’t the only ADHD treatment. Medication should only represent one part of a solution, with other psychological supports for managing emotional regulation, executive and organisational skills and problem-solving also beneficial.

Psychological therapies are effective and can be used in combination with, or separately to, medication.

Yet research shows drug treatments are relied on more frequently in more disadvantaged communities where it’s harder to access psychological supports.

Policymakers need to ensure medication does not become the only treatment people have access to. People with suspected ADHD need a high-quality diagnostic assessment to ensure they get the right diagnosis and the treatment most suitable for them.

Adam Guastella receives independent research funding from research organisations (e.g., MRFF, NHMRC, ARC) to investigate the effecicy of supports for children and adults with neurodevelopmental conditions. He is employed as the Michael Crouch Chair in Child and Youth Mental Health at the University of Sydney.

Kelsie Boulton receives funding from research organisations (MRFF) to evaluate the efficacy of interventions for neurodevelopmental conditions.

– ref. For people with ADHD, medication can reduce the risk of accidents, crime and suicide – https://theconversation.com/for-people-with-adhd-medication-can-reduce-the-risk-of-accidents-crime-and-suicide-263044

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nic Rawlence, Associate Professor in Ancient DNA, University of Otago

Islands are natural laboratories where evolution can run rampant as plants and animals adapt to new environmental conditions and vacancies in the ecosystem.

This creates all manner of unique animals, although sadly extinction rates are high on islands and many species are now gone. Examples include a blind, flightless duck with a sensory bill (like a platypus) on Hawaii, and pygmy mammoths on islands off the coast of southern California.

The Rēkohu Chatham Islands, an archipelago 785 kilometres east of mainland Aotearoa New Zealand, are no exception.

The islands were once home to a rich assemblage of unique birds, with 64 breeding species at the time of human arrival. Some 34 species and subspecies were found nowhere else on Earth.

This includes the endangered parea Chatham Island pigeon and the extinct mehonui Hawkin’s rail.

Our new research adds a unique species of shelduck to this group and illustrates just how quickly birds can adapt to life on isolated islands.

The Rēkohu Chatham Islands rose above the waves, taking their present form, around 3.5 million years ago. The archipelago is an ideal place to observe how ecosystems form and new species evolve.

Many of the birds on Rēkohu are closely related to species found on the mainland, but were changed by their new island home. Some are subtly different, such as the extinct Chatham Island kākā, which had a longer bill, larger thigh bones and wider pelvis than its mainland cousin. This suggests it could still fly but spent more time on the ground.

Other birds underwent major changes, such as the extinct Chatham Island duck, which was large, flightless and had bony spurs on its wings which were probably used in fights over territory.

Evolution of the Rēkohu shelduck

Shelducks are a group of semi ground-dwelling ducks found in Eurasia, Africa, Australia and the New Zealand region. In Aotearoa, they are represented by the familiar pūtangitangi paradise shelduck.

During the 1990s, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa palaeontologist Phil Millener found isolated bones and associated skeletons of an extinct shelduck in the rich fossil deposits around the Chatham Islands archipelago. He noted the bones may belong to a new species and they were archived at the museum until scientific advances allowed us to test this idea.

We reconstructed the family tree to uncover the identity of the Rēkohu bird, using ancient DNA from its bones. As Millener hypothesised, the Rēkohu shelduck was most closely related to the mainland paradise shelduck. Its ancestors arrived on the islands a mere 390,000 years ago.

On evolutionary scales, 390,000 years is not a long time, but it was long enough for the Rēkohu shelduck to go down its own evolutionary path. Like the paradise shelduck, males were bigger than females, but the Rēkohu shelduck was taller and more robust. These changes meant Rēkohu shelducks were poorer fliers than their mainland cousins.

Flight is energetically expensive. It is often lost when the cost outweighs its advantages. This is part of the “island syndrome”, a suite of changes in bone shape and behaviour observed in island species. On Rēkohu, an abundance of food, strong winds and a paucity of large predators meant flying wasn’t as beneficial as on the mainland, where predators such as kērangi Eyle’s harrier, Haast’s eagle, whēkau laughing owl and adzebill abounded.

Over time, a preference to spend more time on the ground resulted in the wing bones of the Rēkohu shelduck becoming shorter, more robust and less able to support flight. At the same time, its leg bones became longer and more robust. The Rēkohu shelduck was on a trajectory to flightlessness when it became extinct shortly after humans arrived.

A rich Rēkohu waterfowl community

The rich fossil deposits on Rēkohu continue to reveal much about the history of the islands. There are likely more undescribed species awaiting discovery.

Our lab continues to investigate the fauna of the islands, with ongoing work to determine if an extinct falcon represents another unique Rēkohu bird.

Working with Indigenous communities is paramount if we are committed to the process of decolonising palaeontology. The shelduck’s scientific (Tadorna rekohu) and common (Rēkohu shelduck) names were gifted to us by the Hokotehi Moriori Trust, the tchieki (guardians) of Rēkohu biodiversity, with which they are interconnected through shared hokopapa (genealogy).

The discovery and naming of the Rēkohu shelduck helps connect the Moriori imi (tribe) with miheke (treasure) of the past, allowing people to reclaim some of the pages of their biological heritage that have been lost.

The Rēkohu shelduck is part of a rich native and endemic waterfowl assemblage (nine different species) that was present when people arrived. These birds are survived only by the parera grey duck. We are only just beginning to understand how the ecological community of the islands once functioned.

The Rēkohu shelduck was on a unique evolutionary trajectory when it went extinct after humans colonised the islands but prior to the arrival of Europeans and Māori. This is a fate shared by many of Rēkohu’s birds.

The discovery of the Rēkohu shelduck is a demonstration of the speed at which island species can be changed by their environment. It highlights both the distinctiveness of Rēkohu animals and their close relationship with mainland Aotearoa New Zealand.

Nic Rawlence receives funding from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fund.

Levi Lanauze works for Hokotehi Moriori Trust.

Pascale Lubbe receives funding from Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fund.

Alan Tennyson 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.

– ref. The discovery of an extinct shelduck highlights the rich ancient biodiversity of the remote Rēkohu Chatham Islands – https://theconversation.com/the-discovery-of-an-extinct-shelduck-highlights-the-rich-ancient-biodiversity-of-the-remote-rekohu-chatham-islands-259656

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Martin, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Deakin University

Recently, you may have noticed an increase in the number of shops selling tobacco in your area. Alongside cigarettes, these shops often sell vapes.

In July 2024, the federal government banned the sale of recreational vapes nationwide. The only way to get one legally is from a pharmacist. Some states also require a doctor’s prescription.

So why, then, more than a year on, are these stores still selling vapes, in broad daylight?

In short: it’s because restrictions on the supply of legal nicotine have created a black market so big that it’s grown beyond the capacity of regulators to effectively suppress.

Billions going underground

To better understand the demand for vapes, it’s useful to draw on a close historical parallel: alcohol prohibition in the United States.

In the 1920s, Prohibition did not stop the sale of alcohol, but instead created a thriving black market. Illicit alcohol was easy to obtain, and organised crime groups engaged in violent conflict over territory and market share.

A century later, evidence is mounting that Australia’s nicotine policy – now the most restrictive in the world – has similarly driven the expansion of a black market.

Just as Al Capone and his cronies were the main beneficiaries of Prohibition, billions of dollars are currently flowing into the pockets of organised crime groups who use that money to fund other serious criminal activity.

Just this week, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) seized more than A$40,000 of illegal vapes from a single retail outlet in the Melbourne CBD. It’s a drop in the ocean of a market estimated to be worth up to half a billion dollars in Victoria alone.

Illicit vapes are a major contributor to the “tobacco wars”: a violent, ongoing conflict between rival organised crime groups for control of Australia’s illicit nicotine market.

The huge profits to be made inevitably creates competition, which fuels violence, with more than 230 firebombings linked to the illicit tobacco trade, and a growing number of kidnappings, robberies and assaults since January 2023.

This conflict doesn’t just affect gangsters. There are significant impacts on legitimate businesses through extortion, loss of sales, property damage and rising insurance premiums.

And tragically, at least one innocent bystander has been killed by the so-called tobacco wars.

Persistently high demand

As with alcohol prohibition, the illicit market for vapes is sustained by strong demand.

Nicotine is the third most popular recreational drug in the country, after caffeine and alcohol.

Around 1.5 million Australians vape – the overwhelming majority over the age of 18.

Demand for nicotine is also persistent, with per capita consumption slowly trending upwards nationally since 2016.

Another part of the problem has been the failure of the government’s model for supplying “medicinal” vapes. (Intriguingly, alcohol was also available via prescription during Prohibition).

It failed because consumer demand for medicinal vapes is very low. More than 95% of people who vape source their products from the black market. This is likely due, in part, to bans on popular flavours, which adults prefer to the tobacco and menthol options available legally.

The enforcement problem

In response to the growth of the nicotine black market, state and federal governments have legislated increased penalties, which include up to seven years imprisonment and fines of more than $21 million.

As with Prohibition, increasing penalties has not meaningfully disrupted the demand and supply of illicit vapes.

Counter-intuitively, these laws actually help organised crime by creating economic opportunities that would otherwise be fulfilled by legal businesses.

Legislating penalties is easy. Actual enforcement is hard. Enforcement is also more important, with research showing certainty of punishment is more effective than severity in deterring crime.

The enormous scale of the vaping market makes it a nightmare for law enforcement and other regulatory agencies. Again, the lesson of Prohibition is that once a black market is widely established, it is extremely difficult to eradicate, even when exponentially increasing tax dollars are diverted to bolster enforcement.

It is possible that a wide-scale, sustained law enforcement-led crackdown on illicit nicotine products could have an impact.

This type of operation, however, would require significantly greater resources than the $340 million the federal government has allocated to combating illicit nicotine supply.

It would also divert police resources away from other, arguably more pressing crime problems.

The unintended consequences of such a move would be to push the black market for vapes further underground, as we have seen with illicit drugs. Research shows that raising the risks associated with operating in a black market can also increase potential profits for organised crime groups and make it more violent.

There are also risks to consumers due to the proliferation of unregulated products. Illicit vapes have significantly higher levels of nicotine than those typically sold in regulated markets as well as, in rare cases, potentially lethal adulterants, such as synthetic opioids.

History has shown us time and again that efforts to prohibit popular drugs, often driven by best intentions to protect moral or physical safety, often create more harms.

Keeping everyone safer

Prohibition was eventually abandoned as a policy failure. This wasn’t because it didn’t reduce alcohol consumption – it did – but because it created a range of other more damaging social, health and economic harms.

Policy-makers have not heeded these historical cautionary tales from Prohibition or the more recent example of the war on drugs.

There are better alternatives. Regulated consumer markets for vapes exist in many Western countries. Government health departments in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, for example, actively promote vapes as a less harmful alternative to cigarettes.

Well-functioning legal markets divert people away from illicit ones, providing both safer products and fewer opportunities for organised crime.

The current landscape demands more creative, innovative solutions from our governments. We should expect more than a simple reboot of failed policies from the past.

The challenge is that politicians must first admit that current policy settings are not working. Then, they can seek broad-based expert input, plus the thoughts of nicotine consumers who are most affected by these policies, to create more viable, effective alternatives.

James Martin receives funding from the Department of Home Affairs for research into the national illicit nicotine market. He also has serves in an honorary, unpaid role as Tobacco Harm Reduction Advisor to Harm Reduction Australia.

David Bright has received funding from the Department of Home Affairs, the Australian Research Council, the Australian Institute of Criminology, and the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants program.

– ref. If recreational vapes are banned, why are there still vape shops everywhere? – https://theconversation.com/if-recreational-vapes-are-banned-why-are-there-still-vape-shops-everywhere-262433

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney

Seven months after Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as US president, we are facing the most important moment in Australia’s foreign policy since the Iraq war. Australia needs to have a national conversation on the future of its alliance with the United States.

The alliance was on the line with Trump’s tariff decisions on August 1. The consensus was Australia dodged a bullet, and life goes on.

But this was no flesh wound. By dictating and unilaterally imposing the terms of trade between the US and Australia – affirming the “reciprocal tariffs” of 10% imposed on Australia, plus the tariffs of 50% on both steel and aluminium – Trump has trashed the historic US–Australia Free Trade Agreement.

Trump has not provided a good answer to the question of what he is doing to one of the US’s strongest and most consistent allies. And there is more to come. The president will also place a tariff on US imports of Australian pharmaceuticals.

There is also far more to come on the future of the US–Australia alliance.

Media have been full of opinions on what the relationship between the two countries ought to look like. These interventions have assayed the crucial importance of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meeting personally with Trump; whether Washington was rattled by Albanese’s visit to China, whether Australia should “fortify northern Australia into an allied military stronghold for the region”; and whether the relationship is being mismanaged.

The best model for this conversation would be the economic roundtable Treasurer Jim Chalmers will host in Canberra this month. Its purpose, Albanese said, is to “build the broadest possible base of support for further economic reform”.

Why not apply the same process to the future of our foreign policy and alliance with the US?

A similar roundtable, convened by the foreign minister, and bringing together the smartest and most experienced people from across the political and foreign policy spectrum to discuss all these issues, would provide the best and most sincere guidance for the country.

A new reality

There are three bedrock truths that are unimpeachably clear since Trump reassumed power in the US.

First, Australia has not changed; the US has changed. Albanese and his government has not changed its posture towards the US. Trump has profoundly changed America’s posture towards Australia.

Second, the US is no longer the leader of the free world, because the free world is no longer following America. The democracies with which the US has been allied since the end of the second world war are no longer acting in concert with the US, but in reaction to what Trump is doing across the global landscape – from the Americas, to the Atlantic, Russia, the Middle East, China, the Indo-Pacific and Australia.

Third, Trump has destroyed the economic and trading architecture erected after the second world war to promote growth and prosperity. Nations engaging economically with the US are no longer trading partners but trading victims. The “deals” Trump boasts about are involuntary. Trump’s imposition of tariffs even on countries with a trade deficit with the US shows that his trade policy is at heart the unilateral exercise of US political power to force concessions to US domination.

What is under profound challenge today – 84 years after Prime Minister John Curtin turned to the US and 73 years after the ANZUS treaty came into effect – is whether the US under Trump is still aligned with the vision the two countries have shared for decades.

Australians have serious doubts about the relationship. The latest polling by Resolve Political Monitor documented “a strong desire for the country to assert more independence from the United States amid Donald Trump’s turbulent presidency”.

Fewer than 20% of Australian voters believe Trump’s election victory was good for Australia. Nearly half of voters believe it would be “a good thing” for Australia to act more independently of the US. Pew Research reported in July that only 35% of Australians believe the US is a top ally.

Trump is driving away US allies. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said after winning office, “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over.”

When the leaders of Japan and South Korea received Trump’s insulting letters of demarche on trade, they each said the correspondence was “deeply regrettable”, with Japan’s prime minister adding, “extremely disrespectful”.

Trump has also precipitated a trade war with India. How effective can the Quad – established by the US, Japan, India and Australia to serve as a counterweight to China – be if three of its four members are victims of Trump’s tariffs?

Australia has also broken with Trump on recognition of Palestine – issues of the highest importance to the president. Moreover, if the terms of whatever Trump is conjuring up with Putin to end the war with Ukraine are unacceptable to Ukraine and Europe, and Trump sides with Putin, a further sharp break by Australia with Trump is likely.

The “soft power” wielded by Australia is also involved here. From the UN’s inception, Australia has supported the architecture required to help secure peace, security, stability and the health and welfare of all peoples. But Trump has now withdrawn the US from UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the Paris climate accords, the UN Human Rights Commission and others. He has terminated the USAID programs that delivered crucial health care and crisis relief. Medical studies project that millions of people will die as a result die in the coming years.

Australia uses that architecture to help change the world for the better. Trump is making that work much harder.

Time to talk

Trump is repealing all US programs that combat global warming – the most important environmental issue of our times and the number-one existential security issue for Asia-Pacific nations. Australia shares their urgency.

Since Trump’s inauguration, AUKUS has consistently been viewed as a bellwether for the relationship. Australia’s need for a modern submarine fleet is an existential issue of the country’s defence capability.

Will Trump, during the Pentagon’s review of AUKUS, change its terms to be more favourable to the US? Is Australia spending enough on defence? Will the pace of submarine construction ensure Australia receives the subs in the 2030s? If not, are there better solutions than AUKUS?

But the most important question is the most known unknown. What does Trump want from China? Trump has never outlined his endgame with President Xi Jinping. Yes, of course, the trade deal of the century. But at what price, particularly with respect to Taiwan? What are the consequences of all the scenarios and what does Australia need to do to be prepared?

Trump is president and will continue to act with power and drama. Albanese will respond on behalf of Australia. That would be business as usual. But without the benefit of a considered national conversation about the future of the Australian–US alliance and what is in Australia’s national interest, the current state of play does not rise to the challenges posed by Trump to Australia.

US baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” That’s where we are. Let’s talk about it.

Bruce Wolpe is author of two books on Trump and Australia. He has served on the staffs of the Democrats in Congress and former Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

– ref. The United States has changed. Australia hasn’t. It’s time to talk about where the relationship goes from here – https://theconversation.com/the-united-states-has-changed-australia-hasnt-its-time-to-talk-about-where-the-relationship-goes-from-here-262943

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yuting Zhang, Professor of Health Economics, The University of Melbourne

Australia needs to do better at preventing health conditions from arising and worsening, according to an interim report on delivering quality care more efficiently released overnight by the Productivity Commission.

But the commission’s interim report did not mention a greater role for the private health insurance in delivering more preventive health care.

This is despite Private Healthcare Australia and Bupa wanting to provide GP-like services or fund care by specialist doctors out of hospital.

Sometimes what is excluded from a key report is as telling as what’s included.

Here’s why the Productivity Commission made the right call about private health insurers and what would have happened if they had their way.

What do health insurers want?

Currently, legislation prohibits health insurers from delivering certain types of health care outside hospital. This means they are mainly restricted to delivering care based in hospital, or what’s known as hospital-substitute care (such as hospital in the home arrangements).

But Private Healthcare Australia, which represents most Australian health funds, and one of its members Bupa submitted requests to the Productivity Commission for the government to remove these legislative barriers.

If these laws were changed, it would enable private health insurers to significantly expand their funding for out-of-hospital care, including primary care, specialist care, chronic disease management, and community-based services.

They argue that allowing private health insurers to pay for out-of-hospital care – especially preventive health and chronic disease management – would reduce the need for costly hospitalisations, and save long-term health-care costs. It’s about shifting the focus from treating illness to maintaining wellness, a goal few would disagree with.

In fact, private health insurers are already allowed to cover preventive care. Many have apps for members to track their exercise, blood pressure and sleep, for example. They already provide extras care for preventive dental care, optical, acupuncture, physiotherapy, and perhaps in the future some more complementary therapies. Members can buy hospital care, extras care, or a general plan covering both.

But the current proposal is different. Health insurers want to cover more GP-like services and specialist care. In other words, they want to be allowed to cover more of the same benefits that Medicare already covers.

Is this a good idea?

This isn’t a new debate. Private health insurers have long tried to expand their role beyond hospital care.

However, the core concern with allowing private insurers to cover more out-of-hospital care is the very real risk of driving up prices of out-of-hospital care and creating a two-tiered system.

About 45% of Australians hold private health insurance to cover hospital care.

If private insurers start paying for GP and specialist consultations too, it is highly likely doctors’ fees would rise. This is because private funds would likely offer a higher payment schedule above Medicare rebates to attract doctors to their networks. This would cause the overall costs of a consultation to rise.

Those without private health insurance, who rely solely on Medicare, would face a shrinking pool of doctors willing to bulk-bill or charge a modest gap, leading to longer wait times, fewer available appointments, and a greater struggle to access care. This would also lead to higher private health premiums as insurers pass on the cost of the higher doctor fees to members.

We already see this dynamic in our hospital system. Surgeons, for instance, earn significantly more for procedures performed in private hospitals compared to public ones. This leads them to disproportionately allocate their time to the private sector.

So people with private health insurance often skip lengthy public waiting lists for elective procedures, while public patients face prolonged delays for essential care.

This disparity doesn’t just create inequities, it strains the public system even further. To entice expensive surgeons to dedicate more time to public hospitals, public hospitals have to pay some of them well above the standard salaries set in enterprise agreements.

This practice diverts precious public resources (funds that could otherwise be used for essential equipment, beds, or more junior doctors and nurses), reduces the overall quality of care for public patients, and increases waiting times further in the public system.

Why the Productivity Commission made the right call

Allowing private health insurers to expand further would fundamentally undermine the universality of Medicare. We would risk creating a two-tiered primary health-care system, replicating the very disparities and challenges that plague our hospital sector. So the Productivity Commission made the right call to not include insurers in its recommendations.

What is needed to deliver quality care more efficiently is for
the government to significantly boost investment in preventive health care. Once chronic conditions set in, they are difficult to reverse and continuously drive up costs. This is something the Productivity Commission acknowledges in its interim report.

We also need to build truly integrated care. This would deliver seamless, coordinated health services around a person’s needs, rather than around individual providers or separate parts of the system.

Imagine a future where your GP, specialists, allied health professionals, and even social support services are connected, sharing information and working together on your care plan. This crucial approach reduces duplication, improves communication, and ensures people don’t fall through the cracks of a fragmented system.

These are the types of policies that would help make Australia’s health system more efficient, and help ensure Medicare delivers what it was intended to, without unnecessary duplication and the inevitable consequences.

Yuting Zhang has received funding from the Australian Research Council, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Victorian Department of Health, National Health and Medical Research Council, and Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network. In the past, Professor Zhang has received funding from several US institutes including the US National Institutes of Health, Commonwealth fund, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has not received funding from the for-profit industry including the private health insurance industry.

– ref. Private health insurers want to fund more out-of-hospital care. But the Productivity Commission has other ideas – https://theconversation.com/private-health-insurers-want-to-fund-more-out-of-hospital-care-but-the-productivity-commission-has-other-ideas-261954

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Jackson, Social Policy Commissioner, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Tasmania

Too often in discussions about productivity, the care economy only gets mentioned as the problem child putting a drag on growth. This week, the Productivity Commission is seeking to change that narrative with the release of its fifth and final report
ahead of the government’s economic reform roundtable next week.

The report, of which I am a co-author, is focused on delivering quality care more efficiently. The care economy is broad and includes health care, childcare, aged care, disability and veterans’ services.

Among our report’s recommendations are a new national screening clearance system for workers across childcare, aged care, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and veterans’ care. That would make it easier to stop people found to be unsafe from simply moving into another sector.

We also propose setting up a new independent advisory board to assess and provide advice on prevention and early intervention across the different levels of government.

By increasing productivity in the care economy, we can reduce current and future costs and, crucially, improve the quality of care for Australians.

Care is central to our lives – and our economy

More than two million Australians work in paid care-related roles. That’s 12% of the workforce: around one in eight workers.

The care sector contributes 8% of Australia’s gross domestic product and is growing fast.

Over the next 40 years, both the number of people working in the care sector and its value to our economy are expected to rise significantly.

Demand for care is growing, but so are the costs

Traditional measures of productivity don’t capture the full story in the care economy.

While care sector productivity is low when you just consider the amount of services provided, when you account for the quality of those services the picture is different. Adjusted for quality, previous commission research has found productivity in a subset of health care grew by 3% annually between 2011-12 and 2017-18 – far above the market-sector average.

While the quality of our services has improved, demand is rising – along with costs.

Increased demand for care services is being driven by an ageing population, rising chronic health conditions, changing family structures, and increased expectations for quality care and independence.

To provide high-quality care more efficiently, we should start by removing silos and enabling a more cohesive, efficient system.

A person might need aged care, disability support, and health services all at once. Our system needs to reflect that reality.

Improving safety and quality with national oversight

Different sectors of the care economy operate under separate regulatory regimes. Providers must navigate multiple audits, standards, and registration systems. Workers often need separate clearances for each sector.

This duplication wastes time and money. It limits workforce mobility. It makes it harder for users to access and compare services.

These fragmented systems can also mean unsafe workers slip through the cracks unnoticed – putting care users at risk.

We are recommending a national screening clearance system and national registration for workers in the aged care, NDIS, veterans’ care and early childhood education and childcare sectors – making it harder for a worker found to be unsafe in one sector to move to another without detection.

This would replace existing clearances such as working with children/vulnerable people checks.

Real-time continuous checking should be undertaken between renewal dates to ensure prompt action if a worker engages in inappropriate behaviour.

We also need a unified approach to worker registration across aged care, the NDIS and veterans’ care.

The commission found more than 42% of aged care providers are also registered NDIS providers, and 82% of veterans’ care providers operate in aged care and/or the NDIS. These are often large providers, delivering a significant share of services. Yet they must comply with separate systems, diverting resources away from frontline care.

All of this is not just about efficiency – it’s also about safety, trust, and quality.

Delivering better care more efficiently

Another key reform is collaborative commissioning, where organisations work together to plan, procure, and evaluate services based on local needs.

In this report, we focus on removing the barriers and supporting collaboration between the federally funded local primary health-care networks and the state-controlled local hospital districts.

Greater collaboration in health care can reduce potentially preventable hospitalisations.

Even modest gains could be transformative. Our report estimates a 10% reduction in preventable hospitalisations could save A$600 million annually. But the real value lies in better care: fewer gaps, smoother transitions, and services tailored to communities.

Prevention is the ultimate productivity lever

Perhaps the most powerful lever for productivity is prevention and early intervention. Stopping problems before they start, or before they escalate, can improve lives and reduce long-term costs across government.

The evidence for this is all around us: from housing-first models that reduce homelessness and hospitalisations, to early childhood programs that boost lifelong outcomes.

However, investment in one area is often not supported because benefits occur over a long timeframe, or accrue to different areas and levels of government.

To address this issue, we’re proposing a national prevention investment framework. A new national independent advisory board would provide expert guidance on the cost effectiveness of new and existing prevention programs.

We need better outcomes

Care is one of the most complex and consequential parts of our economy.

If we don’t act in the face of rising demand, we risk a future where care becomes unaffordable, inaccessible, and inequitable.

But if we embrace reform through aligning regulation, improving collaboration, and investing in prevention, we can build a care economy that delivers better outcomes at sustainable cost. This is what productivity growth is all about.

Angela Jackson is the Social Policy Commissioner at the Productivity Commission, as well as the chair of the Women in Economics Network. She has previously served on the board of Melbourne Health, which operates Royal Melbourne Hospital.

– ref. From childcare to aged care, here’s how to deliver safer, more affordable care for all Australians – https://theconversation.com/from-childcare-to-aged-care-heres-how-to-deliver-safer-more-affordable-care-for-all-australians-262942

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Martin, Lecturer in Screen Studies, Swinburne University of Technology

For half a century, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has lured costumed fans to cinemas for late-night screenings. Its raunchy mix of Broadway musical, science fiction and schlock horror was originally a box-office flop. However, after its first midnight screening on April Fool’s Day 1976 at the Waverly theatre in New York, it never left the late-night circuit and became the ultimate cult film.

Tim Curry’s powerhouse performance as Frank-N-Furter is central to the film’s success. Yet, his truly astounding work often overshadows the film’s many other dynamic performances.

Rocky Horror’s supporting characters and chorus feature alluring oddballs who irreverently challenge norms of physical desirability. Their “imperfect” bodies are not only a tribute to diversity: they radically upturn genre expectations of stage and screen musicals, and discredit broader cultural ideals of beauty.

It’s so dreamy, oh fantasy free me!

Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) are an attractive young couple seeking help at an isolated castle when their car blows a tyre. During their night, they find the castle’s inhabitants are of a variety of sizes, physiques and galaxies.

Adapted from Richard O’Brien’s 1973 stage musical, Rocky Horror’s anti-Broadway aesthetic is apparent as soon as the “butler” Riff Raff (O’Brien) opens the castle door. This wiry framed hunchback with tangled hair is a far cry from the athletic ideal of the Broadway body.

Inside the creepy mansion, we are dazzled by a festive troupe of alien “Transylvanians” wearing off-beat tuxedos and textured waistcoats. It’s a broad assortment of unconventional body types squeezed into colourful costumes.

Lanky actor Stephen Calcutt stands at 198 centimetres tall, and Sadie Corré at just over 120cm. Hugh Cecil, then 62, has alopecia, which exaggerates his stark monocled whiteness. Fran Fullenwider, with her wild, teased-out coiffure and curvy frame, is clad in skin-tight pants.

Cecil and Fullenwider were among a handful of Transylvanians director Jim Sharman recruited from London-based Ugly Models. While this agency’s name and viability is, to say the least, unfortunate, Rocky Horror’s rejection of cookie-cutter casting was celebratory, not diminishing.

The Transylvanians’ subversion of “sameness” is especially powerful because of the history of its film genre. Busby Berkeley, one of film musicals’ founding innovators in the 1930s and 1940s, is famously quoted as approving the “girls” in his ensembles as being “matched, just like pearls”.

Inverting such sexist tropes, the crass collective of Transylvanians is widely adored as the chorus of the film’s legendary song, Time Warp. They are also welcomingly representative of the throngs of fans who the film has continued to assemble these past five decades.

I can make you a man

Once Frank-N-Furter has invited everyone “up to the lab”, we encounter two more vital characters: the dichotomous Eddie and Rocky.

Gregarious rocker Meat Loaf’s Eddie refuses the lean hypersexual image typical of frontmen in 1970s rock acts. Eddie motorbikes around Frank’s lab and delights his sweetheart Columbia (Nell Campbell). He is loud, sexy and very nearly loved.

Overtly parodying Frankenstein’s creation of a grotesque monster, Frank-N-Furter scientifically “births” the perfectly chiselled Rocky (Peter Hinwood).

With Rocky, Frank-N-Furter has made a “perfect specimen of manhood”: muscular, a sharp jawline, blonde hair and a tan. But Rocky does not have Eddie’s charismatic body positivity, which Frank-N-Furter resents.

Rocky’s blonde hair and sculpted physique bears more than a passing resemblance to Jack Wrangler or Casey Donovan, superstars in the “Golden Age of Porn” of 1969 to 1984.

Wrangler was a pioneering porn star who adopted a rugged Marlborough Man aesthetic. Not unlike Frank-N-Furter, Wrangler was sexually fluid, working in gay porn for ten years from 1970 before crossing over to straight porn.

Donovan found fame in Wakefield Poole’s successful X-rated film Boys in the Sand (1971). Both Donovan and Poole were newcomers to filmmaking and porn. Poole (himself a Broadway dancer) applied a dreamlike narrative and an artistically verité shooting style to his hardcore yet poetic pornography.

On its release, Boys in the Sand was reviewed in Variety, and ads for the film appeared in the New York Times. Poole’s film achieved an enviable level of critical legitimacy and public appeal, which evaded Rocky Horror until it gained legitimacy via its enduring cult status.

Rocky Horror’s presentation of the creature as a queer ideal of masculine physical perfection spicily mirrors the coveted masculine form on display in much gay pornography.

Yet, among Rocky Horror’s eclectic cast, Rocky’s musclebound physique is positioned as very much the exception.

Don’t dream it, be it

Unlike gay icon Wrangler, the blonde Adonis Rocky figure is not a rugged hero, but the monster: an aberration whose existence is the result of “mad science”.

In this reading, the alluring but destructive Frank-N-Furter represents western society’s beauty machine, intent on artificially creating bodies designed to be looked at as objects of sexual desire, queer or straight.

This insight is far from outdated. Indeed, since 1975, Rocky’s queer-inflected bodily “perfection” has today become a problematic norm in the mainstreaming of men’s body sculpting and the proliferation of homoerotic imagery marketed to men.

However, Rocky Horror remains a place where people of all shapes, sizes, ages, abilities, and colours can dance and sing and celebrate without such constraints. In fact, Riff Raff, the “imperfect” figure who first welcomes us to the castle, ultimately kills Frank-N-Furter and halts his exploitation.

Rocky Horror offers many and varied midnight-movie audiences freedom from society’s troubling and relentless obsession with body image, even 50 years on.

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.

– ref. At 50, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is ‘imperfectly’ good (and queer) as ever – https://theconversation.com/at-50-the-rocky-horror-picture-show-is-imperfectly-good-and-queer-as-ever-261852

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The Reserve Bank’s rate cut this week will help relieve many mortgage holders, but it wasn’t all positive news from the bank. It also underscored the serious productivity and economic growth challenges facing the Australian economy.

The Economic Reform Roundtable next week will be a deep dive into those issues. In its lead up, however, the government is trying to manage expectations, resulting in mixed signals about ambition, outcomes, and timetables for implementing measures.

Meanwhile the union movement has thrown a curveball at the meeting, with the ACTU calling for a four day working week, when industrial relations was supposed to be off the table.

Chair of the roundtable Treasurer Jim Chalmers joins us today to talk about his focus ahead of next week.

On whether there will be more rate cuts this year, Chalmers points to market expectations,

I don’t want to interfere with the independence of the Reserve Bank. The market certainly expects there to be more interest rate cuts. The market is usually – but not always, as we learned last month – right about these things.

But let’s not lightly skip over the good news from this week. The third interest rate cut in six months is welcome news because it’s welcome relief. It puts more money into the pockets of millions of people who are under pressure. It’s meaningful cost-of-living relief, but it’s also welcome because it gives us confidence that we’re on the right track. We are getting inflation down, we are are getting real wages up [and] keeping unemployment low.

Looking ahead to the roundtable, Chalmers says of the ACTU proposal,

It’s not something that we’ve been kind of working up or considering. Our industrial relations priorities are in those areas I nominated, non-competes, penalty rates, paid parental leave. But people will bring all sorts of ideas next week and it’s a good thing that they will.

He highlights the work his ministerial colleagues have done to help prepare for the meeting,

The way that they have grasped this opportunity, picked up and run with it, I’m really just extraordinarily grateful for.

[There are] 41 different ministerial round tables often involving more than one minister at a time. Hundreds of people consulted, key stakeholders and so we’ve got a way to basically funnel the ideas that come from those ministerial round tables into our considerations as a government. But also into the discussions next week as well. We are very aware that once you hold a meeting in the cabinet room with 25 or so chairs, you can’t have everyone in there and so the ministers have done a wonderful, wonderful job making sure that as many voices as possible can be heard.

It has been a very, very useful exercise in making sure that we can collate these ideas and see where there’s common ground.

A focus of the roundtable is set to be housing and Chalmers says:

one of the defining challenges in our economy that we don’t have enough homes. And we think there is a role for better regulation and faster approvals in building more homes. We need to make the sector more productive. We need to get these approvals going faster, we need to make sure the states and territories are playing a helpful role and I think they will. Because this is a huge challenge and the status quo won’t cut it.

We need to build more homes for more Australians and I think that will be one of the primary motivations next week. How do we crack open the fact that it takes so long to approve a house when we desperately need more homes in communities right around the country?

On fears that the growing use of AI may lead to a weakening of copyright law to allow AI data harvesting, Chalmers insists the government will not be weakening existing laws,

We have strict copyright law in Australia. That’s not always the case in other jurisdictions where they’re trying to work this out. And we’ve made it really clear, […] that we’re not in the cart for weakening or watering down those copyright arrangements. In this country we value our musicians, our artists, our writers, our content creators. Even our journalists, dare I say.

On the broader issue of AI, I’ve tried to encourage a sensible middle path here. And by that I mean we need to work out the best way to maximise the game-changing economic benefits of AI, which are extremely substantial, if we get it right, without dismissing by managing the obvious risks.

The objective there is to regulate as much as we need to – to protect people, to respond to their legitimate concerns. But as little as we can – to encourage innovation, productivity, economic growth and all of those upside game-changing economic benefits if we get it right.

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.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Jim Chalmers wants roundtable to ‘crack open’ the challenge of slow housing approvals – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-jim-chalmers-wants-roundtable-to-crack-open-the-challenge-of-slow-housing-approvals-263112

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachael Hains-Wesson, Professor of Education and Associate Dean Learning and Teaching, RMIT University

Once, a university degree was widely seen as a “ticket” to securing high-paying jobs and social mobility.

Now, as artificial intelligence (AI) promises to revolutionise the labour market, it’s university students and recent graduates who face some of the greatest uncertainty.

How do you pick a major or a career when it isn’t obvious what jobs will even exist in 10 years’ time?

Back in May, the chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, claimed AI could eradicate half of all entry-level white collar jobs over the next five years.

At this stage, it’s still up for debate whether AI will lead to such a mass wipe-out of graduate roles, or just change what these jobs look like.

Either way, we have a collective duty to prepare young people for an AI-driven world. Students, educators, employers and the government all have a role to play.

First foot on the ladder

In many white collar or “knowledge work” careers, the “lower rungs” of the career ladder have traditionally consisted of entry-level roles that centre on tasks such as data entry, routine report writing, document review or basic analysis.

These jobs were not only a rite of passage, but also a critical training ground for developing industry-specific skills, professional judgement and workplace confidence.

Many of these tasks are now at risk of being disrupted by generative AI.

This article is part of The Conversation’s series on jobs in the age of AI. Leading experts examine what AI means for workers at different career stages, how AI is reshaping our economy – and what you can do to prepare.

In the United States, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates is now higher than the broader unemployment rate.

Experts say this is due to economic uncertainty, high competition for jobs, and the slowing of white-collar job growth. But some argue the impacts of AI are also a factor, especially in fields like IT.

The International Labour Organization has published a list of “exposure indices” ranking a range of occupations from those deemed “not exposed” to generative AI to those that are highly exposed.

You can search yours below:

Replaced – or enhanced?

To help unpack some of AI’s impacts, it is helpful to quickly differentiate between the idea of “automation” AI, where jobs are replaced, and “augmentation” AI, which improves the output of existing workers.

Findings from a recent study suggest different kinds of work may differ in their exposure to these kinds of disruptions.

The study found in low-skilled occupations, automation AI could negatively impact new work, employment and wages. In high-skilled occupations, augmentation AI may raise wages and help create new work.

The study’s author, David Marguerit, suggests this could have negative implications for wage inequality.

Not the first time

AI is not the first technology to threaten the automation of young workers and early career tasks. From the introduction of calculators and computers to email and communication systems, technological innovations have steadily reshaped the nature of working roles.

Each of these innovations removed or transformed certain routine duties, often sparking fears of job losses, but also creating space for new responsibilities and skills. What makes the current wave of AI distinct is the breadth of cognitive and creative functions it can perform, and the speed at which these capabilities can be deployed across industries.

A 2022 study explored the potential risks of job automation for young Australians as they entered the workforce between 2009 and 2019.

Interestingly, its findings suggest young Australians often began in jobs at high risk of automation but reduced this risk by gaining qualifications, changing roles, or avoiding part-time or casual work.

Fewer options existed for avoiding jobs at high risk of change, such as data entry. Successful strategies for doing so were influenced by parental wealth, computer access, and ability to apply knowledge in new contexts.

This repositions the AI debate. Rather than predicting which jobs will last, we should tackle socio-economic divides by ensuring equal access to technology at home and in education, promoting the developmental use of AI and fostering critical reflection. For example, we could do this through structured classroom discussions about AI’s ethical and social impacts.

We also need to build a labour market that protects entry-level workers from soon-to-be automated roles to augmentation AI roles. In other words, getting them on the ladder.

What we all can do

How can we prepare for an AI-driven future? For those new to choosing career pathways, it’s worth looking at which industries are growing and which skills are hard to automate.

Jobs that require empathy, creativity and complex critical thinking are at less risk of AI automation, such as health care, education, creative arts, renewable energy and construction.

Policymakers and educators can also enhance the value of on-the-job training, such as internships and industry-linked projects, which have been shown to bridge theory and practice and improve career learning.

Recent research showcases a critical gap between the support students expect during placements and what they actually receive from workplace supervisors.

This means an investment in targeted upskilling, relevant AI-focused internships, AI-informed learning and teaching, as well as prioritising career learning as a core graduate outcome.

Rachael Hains-Wesson 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.

– ref. Will AI pull the career ladder up out of reach – or just change what it looks like? – https://theconversation.com/will-ai-pull-the-career-ladder-up-out-of-reach-or-just-change-what-it-looks-like-262866

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Simpson, Senior Lecturer, International Studies, University of South Australia

The war between Russia and Ukraine is taking place in Europe, but its security implications are increasingly being felt in Asia, too.

North Korea has benefited tremendously from its decision to supply enormous quantities of ammunition and soldiers to Russia in return for advanced nuclear and missile technology and diplomatic cover.

North Korea’s involvement in the conflict is transforming it into a much more capable and technologically advanced rogue state in east Asia. This evolving threat may soon prompt South Korea to reassess its security strategies in an increasingly challenging international environment.

How has North Korea helped Russia?

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began to turn into a protracted conflict in late 2022, Moscow faced a problem: it was at risk of running low on ammunition and soldiers to send to the front lines.

Its diplomatic overtures to North Korea began soon after.

In July 2023, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu was warmly received by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a visit to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

In a matter of weeks, high-resolution satellite imagery showed what looked like the establishment of a new munitions supply route from North Korea to Russia.

Around that time, Russia was using about 5,000 artillery shells per day. Around the time the first North Korean shells would have arrived at the front lines several months later, the rate suddenly increased to an average of 15,000 per day.

In September 2023, Kim travelled to Russia for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, where he was given the red-carpet treatment at a space satellite launch facility.

In mid-2024, Putin repaid the favour, making his first visit to Pyongyang in 24 years. He signed a new strategic partnership treaty with North Korea that included mutual defence clauses – each country pledged to provide immediate military assistance if either faced armed aggression.

Soon after, a deployment of 11,000 North Korean troops was headed to the front lines to help Russia retake the Russian region of Kursk, part of which had been captured by Ukraine.

Now, following another visit by Shoigu to Pyongyang in June of this year, Ukrainian officials say another 25,000–30,000 North Korean soldiers are heading to Russia in the months ahead.

North Korea is also sending thousands of builders and deminers to help rebuild the Kursk region.

What is North Korea getting out of the deal?

Estimates from a German think tank suggest North Korea has earned anywhere from US$1.7 billion to $5.5 billion (A$2.6 billion to $8.5 billion) from selling war materiel to Russia since 2023. The think tank also estimates North Korea may also be receiving up to half a billion US dollars annually from the troop deployments.

Russia is also helping North Korea modernise its ageing Soviet-era military.

For example, Russia appears to have provided assistance to Pyongyang in building a critical new air-defence system, an airborne early warning system, tanks with improved electronic warfare systems, a naval destroyer with supersonic cruise missiles, and air-to-air missiles.

In addition, North Korean soldiers have received valuable modern combat experience using artificial intelligence and drones against a highly skilled Ukrainian military.

And Russian soldiers have also tested North Korea’s weapons in combat, such as ballistic missiles, which will assist in their future research and development.

With Russian expertise, North Korea has also made recent progress on technologies associated with launching satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can deliver numerous miniaturised nuclear warheads.

These developments mean South Korea and its allies will need to deal with a much more battle-hardened and technologically advanced North Korean military. Its antiquated systems, historically limited by isolation and a range of international sanctions, are now being rapidly transformed, making it a much more formidable foe.

How can South Korea adapt to the new threats?

South Korea’s new liberal president, Lee Jae Myung, is much less hawkish on North Korea and Russia than his predecessors.

Instead, Lee is doing his best to ease tensions with the North. For instance, he recently ordered propaganda speakers to be removed from the North Korean border, which I visited this week.

Though North Korea also dismantled its own propaganda speakers from the border, it has largely rebuffed other overtures from South Korea. The regime’s rapidly expanding Russian ties give it little incentive to resume international talks aimed at reducing sanctions.

Lee may soon find the evolving situation across the border requires a much more proactive security policy.

South Korea may seek to bolster coordination with its main ally, the United States, and others in the region, such as Australia.

For example, joint military exercises between South Korea and the US later this month will specifically focus on the threats posed by the North’s advancing missile program, as well as drones, GPS jamming and cyber attacks.

Current South Korean law prohibits it from sending arms to war zones, but Seoul has helped Ukraine indirectly and stepped up its sales of weapons elsewhere in Europe.

And though Lee skipped the recent NATO summit that his predecessor had attended three years in a row, he may need to reverse course and continue deepening ties with the bloc if his soft diplomacy approach with the North doesn’t bear fruit.

Adam Simpson 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.

– ref. With new weapons, cash and battleground experience from Ukraine, North Korea has become much more formidable – https://theconversation.com/with-new-weapons-cash-and-battleground-experience-from-ukraine-north-korea-has-become-much-more-formidable-262939

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucy Hardie, Research Fellow in Population Health, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

Youth vaping is a major public health concern in many countries, with New Zealand’s youth vaping rates among the highest in the world, and rising.

In 2017, 3% of New Zealanders aged between 15 and 24 vaped daily, but by 2024, this was up to 21.3%.

Globally, one of the main drivers is the promotion of vapes on social media. Like many other countries, New Zealand introduced vape advertising restrictions, including on social media, as part of efforts to curb this problem.

But vape manufacturers mirror the techniques of traditional tobacco marketing, including stylish branding, flavours and sponsorship, and use global channels to get around domestic regulations.

This raises the question of whether New Zealand’s rules can be effective in a globalised digital world.

Our new study investigates the content posted to the global Instagram account of British American Tobacco’s vape brand Vuse, which holds more than 25% of the global market. We identify and describe the marketing strategies used to promote the brand to a global audience.

Collaborations and sponsorship

We assessed the marketing strategies used by the account by analysing all posts made by @Vuse.Worldwide – including imagery, audio and text – during the year from August 2023 to 2024.

We looked for brand and influencer collaborations and posts with high engagement (likes and views). We found the company formed several high-profile collaborations as a major part of its marketing strategy.

The most notable collaboration is with the Formula 1 motor racing team, McLaren. As a key sponsor, the car is heavily emblazoned with the Vuse logo and is frequently promoted on the Instagram account.

Sharing content between the McLaren and Vuse Instagram accounts increased the @Vuse.Worldwide audience from around 17,000 followers to the nearly 14 million followers of the McLaren race team.

The four most viewed video posts in our study featured the motorsport partnership, with one clip viewed more than 225,000 times.

British American Tobacco has maintained a decades-long partnership with Formula 1, dating back to when traditional cigarette advertising was still allowed.

Social media influencers

The Vuse Instagram account also features other lifestyle and entertainment collaborations. In a series of posts related to music festivals, Vuse employed DJs, artists, digital content creators and social media influencers to create engaging and stylish videos and photographs.

The tobacco industry has undertaken music festival marketing for generations as an effective strategy to reach young people.

“Get ready with me” videos are popular on Instagram, especially among young women. Four of the ten most viewed posts on the Vuse account were in this style, featuring young women filming themselves selecting fashion, makeup and hairstyles, and explaining their choices or setting the video to popular music.

In these videos, the vape may appear only briefly, for example slipped into a handbag as the final touch before a night out. Yet this placement connects the product and brand with glamorous, fun or exciting settings, creating an important association between the brand and appealing lifestyles and experiences.

The influencers often shared this content directly with their existing followers.

Instagram policy requires users to disclose paid partnerships with the #ad hashtag or paid partnership tag. Of the nearly 700 times an influencer or brand was tagged in the posts, only 14 were disclosed in this way.

Workarounds and weak policies

Vape companies often use workarounds to bypass restrictions on marketing to maintain a presence in youth-oriented settings.

Instagram lists @Vuse.Worldwide as a verified account, based in the UK, where advertising standards permit only “factual” vape content on a company’s social media account, but paid influencer marketing and “imagery unrelated to the product” are banned. The official @Vuse.UK account appears to align more clearly with these parameters.

Instagram’s own policies on vape marketing are difficult to decipher, with complicated rules that leave significant loopholes. For example, vape advertisements and paid influencer marketing for vape products are banned on Instagram. However, these rules do not extend to the brand content on a company’s own account.

Our research shows Vuse uses the worldwide account to promote brand associations, an indirect but powerful form of marketing that sits outside Instagram policies. Cross-posting to other accounts enables Vuse to reach new audiences without paid advertising on the platform.

Researchers suggest social media policies are intentionally unclear to enable platforms and the industry to capitalise on lucrative, instant and borderless sharing of digital content to new audiences.

Dealing with these issues will require global cooperation to require social media platforms to prohibit vape marketing more broadly. It will also require active monitoring and enforcement of breaches to hold social media platforms and vape brands to account. Domestic laws and rules must also apply to international content.

Lucy Hardie has received funding for public health-related e-cigarette research from the University of Auckland, Maurice & Phyllis Paykel Trust and the Auckland Medical Research Foundation. She is an advisor for the Health Coalition Aotearoa.

Becky Freeman is an unpaid expert advisor to the Cancer Council tobacco issues committee and a member of the Cancer Institute vaping communications advisory panel. She has received relevant competitive grants from the NHMRC, MRFF, NSW Health, the Ian Potter Foundation, VicHealth, and Healthway WA; consulting fees from the World Health Organization, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Department of Health, the US FDA, the NHMRC e-cigarette working committee, NSW Health, and Cancer Council; and travel expenses from the Oceania Tobacco Control Conference and the Australia Public Health Association preventive health conference.

Christina Watts has received consultancy payment from Cancer Council NSW, on behalf of Cancer Council Australia and the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care relating to adolescent and young adult e-cigarette use.

Judith McCool receives funding from the Health Research Council NZ.

– ref. Vape brands bypass regulations on marketing to young people by using global social media accounts – https://theconversation.com/vape-brands-bypass-regulations-on-marketing-to-young-people-by-using-global-social-media-accounts-262691

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator, Vertebrate Palaeontology, Museums Victoria Research Institute

Australia is home to a unique bunch of native land mammals, such as koalas, wombats and wallabies. These furballs evolved in isolation on this island continent and have become Australian symbols.

But between 27 and 23 million years ago, the coastal seas of Australia were also home to sea mammals found almost nowhere else: whales.

But not just any old whales. These creatures were among the strangest of all whales, called mammalodontids. If alive today, mammalodontids would be as iconically Australian as kangaroos.

Recent fossil discoveries from coastal Victoria reveal that not just one or two species, but a cornucopia of these wonderfully weird whales once called Australia home.

Our latest find, a roughly 25-million-year-old fossil of a newly named whale species Janjucetus dullardi, joins their bizarre ranks. Our discovery is published today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Baleen whales without baleen

Today, some of the most iconic whale species, such as blue and humpback whales, are baleen whales. These ocean giants use hair-like structures in their mouths, called baleen, to filter plankton – their main food source.

By contrast, mammalodontids were small-bodied (no longer than three metres), big-eyed, and had short jaws lined with teeth. Despite this description, we know that mammalodontids were, in fact, baleen whales … that lacked baleen. They were like an offshoot from the main evolutionary branch leading to today’s toothless giants.

All mammalodontid fossils date from the late Oligocene epoch – 27 to 23 million years ago. And three out of four named species have been found on Victoria’s Surf Coast, south-east of Melbourne.

The first mammalodontid was found in 1932, and in 1939 was given the name Mammalodon colliveri. It had blunt jaw bones with extensive blood and nerve supply for face and lip muscles. Curiously, the teeth were worn down to the gums, suggesting it fed by slurping prey (along with abrasive grit) from the seabed.

In 2006, local naturalist Staumn Hunder found the first fossil of a species later named after him, Janjucetus hunderi. This whale sported a robust triangular snout with sharp teeth and powerful jaw-closing muscles.

If Mammalodon’s skull proclaims “I’m a sucker”, the skull of Janjucetus screams “biter and ripper”. It’s about as heavy metal as whale skulls get, departing radically from those of all other whales.

Although Mammalodon colliveri and Janjucetus hunderi hint at a surprisingly wide range of lifestyles for mammalodontids, the details of exactly how and when they became so different from other whales remain murky.

A tiny new whale

In 2019, school principal Ross Dullard found a whale fossil eroding out of rocks along the coast at Jan Juc in Victoria.

Dullard donated his find to Museums Victoria, where it was painstakingly cleaned and repaired in the laboratory so we could study it.

As we describe in our new paper, Dullard’s find is a mammalodontid like Janjucetus hunderi, yet with different enough teeth and ear bones to warrant the naming of a new species: Janjucetus dullardi.

Incomplete fusion between skull bones, minimal tooth wear, and open tooth root canals tell us the animal was not fully grown when it died, possibly being a juvenile.

But just how small was it?

Using an equation that takes into account measurements of skull width compared with the total length of whales, we predicted that Janjucetus dullardi was about two metres long – small enough to fit on a standard single bed.

This makes it the smallest fossil whale discovered in Australia, and perhaps the first fossil of a juvenile whale found here.

A warm-water paradise

Janjucetus dullardi and its fellow mammalodontids lived during the Late Oligocene Warming, between 26 and 23 million years ago. The coastal waters of Victoria were as warm as those off present-day northeast New South Wales, and the sea level was higher.

Small, toothy whales clearly didn’t mind this long summer of balmy, sunlit waters: 80% of the dozens of whale fossils found in Victoria from that era are mammalodontids – mostly unnamed species. In contrast, rocks of the same age in New Zealand have yielded just one mammalodontid from a century of intensive fossil whale collecting.

Unfortunately, the mammalodontid paradise was lost. By about 22 million years ago, mammalodontids had gone extinct, no longer playing a part in the ongoing saga of baleen whale evolution. Global cooling at about 23 million years ago resulted in lower sea levels and the loss of the mammalodontids’ shallow coastal habitat.

If we know how their story ends, the beginning is still a mystery. Our research on Janjucetus dullardi and its kin suggests mammalodontids must have originated long before the age of their oldest known fossils, maybe 34 million years ago.

We suspect that the cradle of their evolution was here, in splendid isolation off southern Australia – home of the mammalodontids.

Ruairidh Duncan receives funding from the Australian Government Research Program scholarship and the Monash University–Museums Victoria Robert Blackwood scholarship.

Erich Fitzgerald 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.

– ref. A cornucopia of tiny, bizarre whales used to live in Australian waters – here’s one of them – https://theconversation.com/a-cornucopia-of-tiny-bizarre-whales-used-to-live-in-australian-waters-heres-one-of-them-262806