Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Feeney, Research fellow, Environmental Futures Research Institute, Griffith University; Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD-CSIC)

Language enables us to connect with each other and coordinate to achieve incredible feats. Our ability to communicate abstract concepts is often seen as a defining feature of our species, and one that separates us from the rest of life on Earth.

This is because while the ability to pair an arbitrary sound with a specific meaning is widespread in human language, it is rarely seen in other animal communication systems. Several recent studies have shown that birds, chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants also do it. But how such a capacity emerges remains a mystery.

While language is characterised by the widespread use of sounds that have a learned association with the item they refer to, humans and animals also produce instinctive sounds. For example, a scream made in response to pain. Over 150 years ago, naturalist Charles Darwin suggested the use of these instinctive sounds in a new context could be an important step in the development of language-like communication.

In our new study, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we describe the first example of an animal vocalisation that contains both instinctive and learned features – similar to the stepping stone Darwin envisioned.

A unique call towards a unique threat

Birds have a variety of enemies, but brood parasites are unique.

Brood parasites, such as cuckoos, are birds that reproduce by laying their egg in the nest of another species and manipulating the unsuspecting host to incubate their egg and raise their offspring. The first thing a baby cuckoo does after it hatches is heave the other baby birds out of the nest, claiming the effort of its unsuspecting foster parents all to itself.

The high cost of brood parasitism makes it an excellent study system to explore how evolution works in the wild.

For example, our past work has shown that in Australia, the superb fairy-wren has evolved a unique call it makes when it sees a cuckoo. When other fairy-wrens hear this alarm call, they quickly come in and attack the cuckoo.

During these earlier experiments, we couldn’t help but notice other species were responding to this call and making a very similar call themselves. What’s more, discussions with collaborators who were working in countries as far away as China, India and Sweden suggested the birds there were also making a very similar call – and also only towards cuckoos.

Birds from around the world use the same call

First, we explored online wildlife media databases to see if there were other examples of this call towards brood parasites. We found 21 species that produce this call towards their brood parasites, including cuckoos and parasitic finches. Some of these birds were closely related and lived nearby each other, but others shared a last common ancestor over 50 million years ago and live on different continents.

For example, this is a superb fairy-wren responding to a shining bronze-cuckoo in Australia.

And this is a tawny-flanked prinia responding to a cuckoo finch in Zambia.

As vocalisations exist to communicate information, we suspected this call either functioned to attract the attention of their own or other species.

To compare these possibilities, we used a known database of the world’s brood parasites and hosts. If this call exists to communicate information within a species, we expected the species that produce it should be more cooperative, because more birds are better at defending their nest.

We did not find this. Instead, we found that species that produce this call exist in areas with more brood parasites and hosts, suggesting it exists to enable cooperation across different species that are targeted by brood parasites.

Communicating across species to defend against a common threat

To test whether these calls were produced uniquely towards cuckoos in multiple species, we conducted experiments in Australia.

When we presented superb fairy-wrens or white-browed scrubwrens with a taxidermied cuckoo, they made this call and tried to attack it. By contrast, when they were presented with other taxidermied models, such as a predator, this call was very rarely produced.

When we presented the fairy-wrens and scrubwrens with recordings of the call, they responded strongly. This suggests both species produce the call almost exclusively towards cuckoos, and when they hear it they respond predictably.

If this call is something like a “universal word” for a brood parasite across birds, we should expect different species to respond equally to hearing it – even when it is produced by a species they have never seen before. We found exactly this: when we played calls from Australia to birds in China (and vice-versa) they responded the same.

This suggests different species from all around the world use this call because it provides specific information about the presence of a brood parasite.

Insights into the origins of language

Our study suggests that over 20 species of birds from all around the world that are separated by over 50 million years of evolution use the same call when they see their respective brood parasite species.

This is fascinating in and of itself. But while these birds know how to respond to the call, our past work has shown that birds that have never seen a cuckoo do not produce this call, but they do after watching others produce it when there is a cuckoo nearby.

In other words, while the response to the call is instinctive, producing the call itself is learned.

Whereas vocalisations are normally either instinctive or learned, this is the first example of an animal vocalisation across species that has both instinctive and learned components. This is important, because it appears to represent a midpoint between the types of vocalisations that are common in animal communication systems and human language.

So, Darwin may have been right about language all along.

William Feeney receives funding from the Spanish National Research Council. He has previously received funding from the Queensland Government, Hermon Slade Foundation, Seaworld Research and Rescue Foundation, Fulbright Association, Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Australian Government Endeavour Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Australian Geographic. He is CEO of Wildlife Research and Education.

James Kennerley receives funding from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He has previously received funding from the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and the British Ornithologists’ Union.

Niki Teunissen received funding and support from Monash University, Wageningen University and Research, the Australian Research Council, and Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

– ref. Birds all over the world use the same sound to warn of threats – https://theconversation.com/birds-all-over-the-world-use-the-same-sound-to-warn-of-threats-266618

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karin Hammarberg, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Global and Women’s Health, School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine, Monash University

Reports of several cases of embryo and sperm mix-ups have put the Australian fertility industry in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

These bungles have raised serious questions about the industry’s current model of self-regulation, and demonstrate a lack of transparency about how it handles complaints and misconduct. In response, the federal government commissioned a rapid review of the sector in June.

Last Friday, the report was quietly released. State, territory and federal health ministers had already committed to accepting all the review’s recommendations earlier in September. But we’ve only just learned the details of those recommendations.

So, what are they? And will they work? Here are the main takeaways.

What did the review look at?

The fertility industry is highly lucrative, profit driven, fast growing and increasingly complex. So one of the review’s main questions was whether self-regulation is fit-for-purpose.

Currently, Australian fertility clinics must be accredited and licensed by the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee and adhere to its code of practice. But this body is funded by the industry and run by an arm of the industry peak body, the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand.

The rapid review focused on accreditation and regulation in particular. It looked at:

• how an independent accreditation body and process could work
• how to strengthen existing state-based regulation.

Independent accreditation

The review recommends the existing Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health should be responsible for accrediting fertility clinics. This commission already oversees accreditation of hospitals and other health services.

The review also identified the need for clear, evidence-based standards for clinics and their staff, and a more effective auditing process to pick up when these are breached.

These new standards would align with existing rules that govern other health services. They would protect consumers with minimum standards for patient care, and include measures of clinics’ performance and guardrails for so-called “add-ons”. These are optional extra procedures or medications offered by fertility clinics, which can be costly and often lack evidence they work.

For those involved in delivering fertility care – such as nurses, counsellors, embryologists and doctors – the review recommends introducing minimum requirements for qualifications and ongoing professional development.

Better regulation

Rules for the fertility industry are state-based, and currently vary across states and territories. The review recommended the jurisdictions streamline:

• clinic registration and reporting requirements
• how they monitor compliance with regulation
• how they enforce the regulation.

This would require state and territories to work together so the same rules apply nationally. The review was vague on how this would be done.

Insights from people who use fertility services

The review team also consulted with 18 people who’ve used fertility services as patients, to get their perspectives on the health of the fertility industry.

Their insights suggest the sector has a lot of work to do to improve its relationship with patients.

Problems identified by consumers included:

• clinics advertising misleading success rates
• lack of transparency about cost
• incomplete and inconsistent information, hindering informed decisions
• inadequate counselling services
• providers being more focused on maximising profit than patient care
• complaints processes that are confusing and difficult to navigate.

So, the review recommended better support for people to use existing complaints processes. It also said complaints data should be shared between clinics, the accreditor, regulator and complaints handling bodies.

To help people make informed decisions about treatment, the review recommends adding content to the existing YourIVFSuccess website, which is funded by the federal government. The platform provides independent, personalised estimates of someone’s chance of success, based on their circumstances. The review said it should also provide treatment costs and evidence for add-ons.

What was missing

Consumers were very concerned about the lack of a national donor register. Currently, donors can exceed legislated family limits by donating in several jurisdictions. This means some donor-conceived people discover they have dozens of half-siblings.

But the review kicked this problem down the road, recommending only that the Australian Law Reform Commission should be asked to review state-based donor legislation. This will likely take many years. In the meantime, donor-conceived people remain at risk.

The review also offered no suggestions for how to increase donor supply and reduce Australia’s reliance on overseas donor banks.

Nor did it address issues with clinics advertising to patients. Fertility clinics appear not to be subject to the same restrictions as individual doctors (who are banned from advertising services or products to patients). Similar rules for fertility clinics would ensure more balanced, evidence-based communication with patients.

We also believe making complaints and misconduct information public is essential to improve transparency – but the review didn’t mention this.

While it did consider the option of running public health campaigns about fertility care, this was explicitly not recommended, on the basis it’s too expensive.

This is another missed opportunity, since research shows knowledge about fertility in the community is low. Improving awareness can prevent infertility and reduce the need for treatments.

Will the proposed changes make a difference?

The recommendations will likely improve industry standards, transparency about performance, complaints processes, and accountability when things go wrong.

However, health ministers have provided very little information about when recommendations will be fully implemented. Their joint response says only that “the new accreditation requirements will be in place by January 2027”.

It’s still unclear:

• how the recommendations will be implemented
• who will be responsible
• where the money will come from for the new accreditation system
• how clinics that don’t meet standards will be dealt with.

Let’s hope for clear answers – and prompt reform.

Alex Polyakov is affiliated with Genea Fertility and currently serves as Medical Director of Genea Fertility Melbourne.

Catherine Mills has received industry research funding from Monash IVF, Ferring Pharmaceutical, and Illumina and travel support and honoraria from Organon and Merck. She has also received research funding from government and other sources, including the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund and the Wellcome Trust.

Karinne Ludlow receives and has previously received funding from Australia’s Medical Research Future Fund and the ARC

Karin Hammarberg 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. Here’s what the review of the IVF industry said should change – and what it missed – https://theconversation.com/heres-what-the-review-of-the-ivf-industry-said-should-change-and-what-it-missed-266576

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University

On Taylor Swift’s highly-anticipated new album The Life of a Showgirl, track four, Father Figure, includes the late George Michael as one of the credited songwriters.

But Swift’s song is not a cover of Michael’s 1987 hit of the same name. Rather, it is an “interpolation”. What does this mean, and how is it different from a cover, or a song that uses sampling?

Cover, sample, remix and interpolation

The vocabulary of popular music can be slippery. Terms such as cover, sample, remix and interpolation all describe ways artists reuse existing material, but they are not interchangeable.

A cover is a new performance of an existing song. From jazz standards, to pub rock tribute bands, the cover reproduces a song recognisably intact, albeit with varying degrees of interpretation.

In his book A Philosophy of Cover Songs, philosopher P. D. Magnus argues a cover is best understood as a re-performance of the same song, albeit open to stylistic variation. Although, he also highlights how chronology and authorship problematise this definition.

For example, although Paul McCartney wrote The Beatles’ Let It Be, the first official released version of the song was sung by Aretha Franklin. Yet no one describes the Beatles as having “covered” Franklin.

A sample involves lifting a fragment of an original sound recording, such as a guitar riff, drum loop, or vocal hook, and inserting it into a new track. The sound itself is borrowed – not just the musical idea.

A remix manipulates the audio of an existing track, often altering tempo, instrumentation or structure, while remaining tethered to the original recording. This practice originated with DJs but has since become a standard part of studio production.

An interpolation sits somewhere between covering and sampling. As Magnus and industry sources note, it means re-performing part of a song, such as a melody, lyric, or riff, within a new composition. The material is recognisable, but newly recorded – not lifted from an existing recording.

In Swift’s case, Father Figure does not re-use George Michael’s recording, but it does quote from his song. That could be why Michael is credited as a writer.

Specifically, Swift interpolates Michael’s original track by echoing the lyrics of his chorus (“I’ll be your father figure”) and uses a melody that resembles – but doesn’t copy – the melody in the original track.

These are more subtle references than substantive quotation. So while the track pays tribute to the past, it still asserts itself as a definitive new work.

Creative practice and copyright

These distinctions matter because United States copyright law separates rights in the song composition (melody, harmony, lyrics) from rights in the sound recording (the particular performance captured on a recording).

To cover a song, an artist must license the underlying composition. This is usually straightforward through mechanical licensing schemes.

To sample a recording, however, permission is needed both from the songwriter and from whoever owns the master recording. This “double clearance” can be costly or impossible if rights-holders refuse.

Interpolation avoids this second hurdle. By re-recording the material, artists only require permission from the original songwriters, or their estates, who then receive royalties. This explains why interpolation has become such an attractive creative strategy. It’s also an example of how the law can shape artistic practice.

One well-known example of an interpolation is Ariana Grande’s 7 Rings (2019), which re-sings the melody of Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers My Favourite Things (1959). Because the melody was newly performed, the composers are credited as songwriters, but no use was made of the original recording.

Beyoncé’s track Energy, from her 2022 album Renaissance, re-uses elements of Milkshake, written by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, and performed by Kelis. Again, the original writers are credited, but no part of the original recording is used.

Shifts in authorship and creatvitiy

Prior to the 1930s – back in a time when sheet music drove profits as much, or more, than recordings – different and subsequent performances were not seen in terms of an “original” versus a “copy”. This binary only emerged later with the culture of recorded cover versions.

By the early 1960s, covers and cover bands became a primary means of disseminating popular hits to youth audiences, reflecting both changing social practices and the dominance of recorded music.

Read more:
Why do we ‘like a version’ so much? The history of cover songs, from Elvis to TikTok

Today, the term “cover” often carries connotations of derivativeness. Scholars such as Roy Shuker note covers are frequently equated with a lack of originality, even when the performer substantially reinvents the source material.

An illustrative example is Pat Boone’s 1956 cover of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti (1955). Boone’s version was seen as a sanitised rendition aimed at accessing a broader, predominantly white audience.

Historically, covers were more about marketability and accessibility than artistic reinterpretation. And this commercial dynamic underscores why they have often been perceived as derivative.

Interpolations enjoy higher cultural capital. Artists who interpolate go beyond reproducing, to create a new work that operates in dialogue with the past.

This distinction is especially salient for an artist of Swift’s stature – a songwriter celebrated for creative agency and influencing large-scale trends in popular music.

Timothy McKenry 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. Taylor Swift’s Father Figure isn’t a cover, but an ‘interpolation’. What that means – and why it matters – https://theconversation.com/taylor-swifts-father-figure-isnt-a-cover-but-an-interpolation-what-that-means-and-why-it-matters-265583

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ama Samarasinghe, Lecturer, Financial Planning and Tax, RMIT University

Navigating the money side of buying a home can be daunting – especially if it’s your first time. Unless you’ve recently come into a small fortune, you’ll need to have saved a deposit and take out a home loan.

That means engaging with the world of banks and mortgage brokers, and grappling with what might be intimidating-sounding jargon – terms like “pre-approval”, “offset accounts” and “serviceability buffers”.

Here’s a general guide to some of the essential steps: how to figure out what you can afford, how the loan process works, and some key things to watch out for before taking the plunge.

How much can you afford?

Taking out a home loan means you’ll be required to make regular repayments over many years. So, a bank or other lender will first want to make sure you can afford them.

This article is part of The Conversation’s series on buying a first home.

We’ve asked experts to unpack some of the biggest topics for first-home buyers to consider – from working out what’s affordable and beginning the search, to knowing your rights when inspecting a property and making an offer.

It’s important to understand the difference between borrowing capacity and affordability.

Your borrowing capacity is the amount a lender is willing to offer you, based on your income and debts, and their own stress tests. Affordability, on the other hand, is about you – your lifestyle, choices and actual spending patterns.

These two things are related but don’t always align, so it’s important to factor affordability into your decision. Being clear on both helps you avoid taking on more debt than you can comfortably manage.

Doing your own calculations first

It’s a good idea to start with your own numbers. List all your household expenses over at least the past six months – everything from groceries to streaming subscriptions – and work out the monthly average.

After setting aside some room for savings and unexpected costs, the remainder gives you an indication of what could be available for mortgage repayments.

As a rule of thumb, many suggest keeping repayments to no more than about 30% of your after-tax income.

Here are a few tips to avoid mortgage stress:

• Budget for reality, not hope. Don’t assume you’ll slash spending just because you’ve bought a home.

• Stress-test your budget. Could you still make the repayments if your interest rate rose by 0.25–0.5%? What if it rose by 1-2%?

• Don’t forget the extra costs that come up with home ownership. Factor in insurance, council rates and higher utility bills in a larger home.

How much will the bank lend you?

Your borrowing power depends mainly on:

• household income
• living expenses and debts (credit cards, car loans, buy-now-pay-later arrangements)
• number of financial dependants.

Most banks have online calculators in their banking apps to check your borrowing capacity. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC)’s Moneysmart site also provides calculators for borrowing and repayments.

Lenders are also required by law to check a borrower could still afford repayments if interest rates rose by a certain amount. This “serviceability buffer” is currently three percentage points.

Pre-approval doesn’t guarantee a loan

Getting pre-approval means a lender has reviewed your finances and indicates they’re willing, in principle, to lend you up to a certain amount.

But it isn’t a binding contract. You’re not locked into taking the loan, and the lender isn’t legally bound to provide it.

Still, getting pre-approval can have some benefits, including:

• giving you confidence about your borrowing capacity
• helping set realistic price limits and narrowing a property search
• signalling to real estate agents and sellers that you’re a serious buyer, which can make you more competitive in a hot market.

At auctions, pre-approval is especially important. Once the hammer falls, the sale is binding – there’s no cooling-off period and no finance clause.

If you don’t have pre-approval in place, you could win the bid but may be unable to secure finance, leaving you at risk of losing your deposit.

Different types of loan

One of the first decisions you’ll face is whether to go with a principal and interest loan or an interest-only loan.

Principal and interest is the standard choice. Each repayment reduces both your loan balance and the interest owed. Most first-home buyers opt for this option because it steadily pays down the debt.

Interest-only loans mean that for an agreed period (say five years), you only cover the interest. Repayments are lower during that time, but the loan balance itself doesn’t shrink.

To illustrate, if you took out a $200,000 interest-only loan at 5% for five years, you’d pay $10,000 a year in interest. But at the end of the five years, you would still owe the full $200,000.

Interest-only loans can make sense for some investors focused on cash flow, but they’re far less common for first-home buyers.

Finding a loan

There are many ways to find a loan that suits your needs. You can compare products directly with lenders, use comparison sites, or go through a mortgage broker.

Mortgage brokers compare loans on your behalf and are often paid a commission by the lender, meaning you aren’t directly charged a fee.

It’s important to make sure they’re licensed (check ASIC’s professional register), reputable, and – if possible – recommended by family or friends.

A good broker will break down fees, features and hidden costs so you’re comparing more than just the interest rate. Before you sit down with a broker, think about what matters most to you: getting the lowest cost loan, or flexibility through features?

Take offset accounts as an example, where savings can reduce interest on the loan. An offset is a transaction account linked to your loan. If you owe $450,000 but keep $30,000 in the offset, you’ll only pay interest on $420,000.

Another common feature is called a redraw facility. This lets you make extra repayments (thus reducing the amount of interest you pay) and withdraw them later if needed.

Disclaimer: This article provides general information only and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is not intended as financial advice. All investments carry risk.

Ama Samarasinghe 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. How do banks assess you for a home loan? And how do you work out what you can afford? – https://theconversation.com/how-do-banks-assess-you-for-a-home-loan-and-how-do-you-work-out-what-you-can-afford-266389

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Rose, Senior Lecturer, William Angliss Institute

In 2023, a parliamentary inquiry into food security was held in Australia. This involves the government asking for public and expert advice on key issues to make better decisions.

The inquiry drew 188 submissions from experts across the food system, including farmers, health experts, community organisations and advocacy groups. This reflects both the scale of the issue and the vast expertise Australia could draw on to address it.

Two years later, the federal government is now using this advice to develop a national food security strategy, called Feeding Australia. The inquiry’s final report contained 35 recommendations to boost the productivity, resilience and security of Australia’s food system to be better prepared for climate change, natural disasters and other disruptive events.

Household food security helps:

• people lead healthier lives
• reduce the burden on important infrastructure (like hospitals)
• improve mental wellbeing
• create equity and stability in communities
• fulfil a human right.

Australia is at an important moment. Meaningful change and strengthening food security could help millions of Australians well into the future.

And yet, while the inquiry marks a step forward, our analysis of the expert submissions reveals several key areas were left unaddressed.

Key issues from the experts

Our analysis found the experts shared many key concerns about Australia’s food security preparedness.

National food security policy:

Stakeholders strongly supported the need for coordinated national policy. Many submissions called for whole-of-government collaboration and a “national food plan”. They also demanded oversight and accountability to fall under a new “minister of food” role in government.

Cost-of-living pressures and food insecurity:

Another consistent theme was the link between the cost-of-living crisis and food insecurity (struggling to pay for food).

This is due to welfare payments being below the poverty line, stagnant wages and soaring housing costs. Research shows one in eight households are affected by food insecurity.

The experts also emphasised that emergency food relief, while necessary as a crisis response, is not a long-term solution.

Instead, they called for structural reforms. This includes raising government benefits above the poverty line and expanding affordable housing. These suggestions are backed by current research.

Sustainability and climate resilience:

Environmental concerns were also central. Many submissions stressed the need for Australian agriculture to transition toward regenerative practices. These can include limited or no tilling of the soil, using ground-cover crops to support water retention, or rotating livestock to prevent soil damage.

This would reduce reliance on herbicides and synthetic fertilisers, a strategy also backed by recent research.

For many experts, climate change adaptation goes hand-in-hand with food security. Many submissions urged action to protect farmland from urban sprawl, improve funding and education for urban agriculture, and prepare for climate shocks such as droughts and floods.

What was missing?

While the inquiry’s 35 recommendations for a national food security strategy addressed many of these key concerns, there were gaps.

For example, there was no mention of Australians’ basic “right to food” – this has been legislated in 120 other countries.

Also missing: the need for clearer food labelling and stronger trade regulations on food to protect people’s health and the environment.

Roadmap for a food secure Australia

The submissions point to a roadmap for a truly food-secure Australia – one that is just, sustainable and resilient. A national strategy can build on these submissions and be informed by best practices internationally.

Here are our four recommendations, drawn from our research:

1. Legislate the right to food:
Recognising food as a human right would provide a legal framework to guide all policy decisions. This would allow government responses to food insecurity to move beyond band-aid approaches and align with leading international standards.

2. Establish a national food plan and governance framework:
Submissions overwhelmingly called for a fully funded, whole-of-government national food plan, in addition to a dedicated minister for food and a National Food Security Council comprised of diverse stakeholders.

But to ensure success, the future strategy needs to include measurable targets, reporting requirements and annual funding. Further, it should be centred on health, sustainability and equity goals.

3. Address structural drivers of food insecurity:
Poverty and housing insecurity must be treated as food policy issues. Raising income support payments, investing in affordable housing, and ensuring access to local community food resources (including in remote, regional and First Nations communities) are essential.

4. Transform food systems for health and sustainability:
Our health depends on healthy ecosystems. As such, a national food security strategy must invest in regenerative farming. This would protect farmland, encourage local food economies and ensure harmful industries are properly regulated.

It should also boost investment in our national food transport and infrastructure systems (such as storage and warehousing).

And we must limit the power of the supermarket duopoly over food supplies and costs. This would ensure fairer outcomes for farmers and shoppers alike.

The national food security inquiry generated a wealth of evidence and ideas for moving forward. Yet, the final report left many of the most pressing issues unaddressed.

To truly secure Australia’s food future, government action must prioritise the systemic drivers of insecurity, inequality and ecological decline.

Nick Rose works for Sustain: the Australian Food Network. Sustain has received funding from several government and philanthropic foundations for food security and food systems research and associated projects.

Kelly Donati is a co-founder and volunteer board director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network. She also receives grant funding from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Molly Fairweather is a member of Healthy Food Systems Australia (HFSA) and the Public Health Association Australia (PHAA).

Rachael Walshe works as a Senior Researcher at Sustain: The Australian Food Network.

Liesel Spencer 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. Australia’s new food security strategy: what’s on the table, and what’s missing? – https://theconversation.com/australias-new-food-security-strategy-whats-on-the-table-and-whats-missing-264791

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

In the controversy and debate following Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ announcement at the United Nations last week that New Zealand would not yet recognise Palestine as a state, it was easy to overlook a small but telling detail.

The relevant cabinet paper containing the policy background and options, and recommending no change in the country’s current position, was “drafted by the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs”.

It is unusual for a cabinet paper to be drafted in a minister’s office. Typically, they are worked up by public servants in departments that fall within the minister’s portfolio responsibilities.

While not a “one size fits all” process, this division of labour ensures the institutional knowledge of the public service is drawn on when formulating the analysis, advice and recommendations codified in a cabinet paper.

The “voice” of the minister may be paramount, but other voices – whether from the public service, other parties involved in government, or wider stakeholders – will generally be captured.

That the normal process was not followed in this instance raises important questions about who drafts policy advice and how ministers balance the views being put forward.

Ministers and ministries

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) possesses the expertise to provide advice on the issues canvassed in the Palestine paper. And while it is clear ministry input was sought, the details of that contribution are not specified.

Policy positions in foreign affairs tend to have an enduring quality and often enjoy cross-party support. But it is also possible there was a material difference between the course of action recommended by the ministry and that preferred by the minister.

No one is suggesting a minister is a mere conduit for ministry positions. But surfacing any differences in the text of a paper is considered best practice.

To be fair, the paper in question was “proactively released” publicly by the minister. A spokesperson for the minister has confirmed that both employees of MFAT seconded to the Minister’s office, and Ministerial Services staff on events-based contracts, were involved in the drafting and preparation of this paper.

It is the contribution of the second of those categories of staff that is relevant here. Otherwise known as ministerial advisers, they operate differently to public servants employed in government ministries and departments.

It is not unusual for these advisers to contribute to the processes from which cabinet papers emerge: they are, these days, key actors in the sorts of consultations required by multi-party government.

Ministerial advisers are also influential members of a minister’s staff. They are appointed at a minister’s behest, and are formally employed by the Ministerial and Secretariat Services unit within the Department of Internal Affairs on events-based contracts tied to a minister’s tenure in office.

Crucially, they provide partisan or political advice and are not subject to the impartiality requirements that apply to public servants.

There is an important place for such advisers in ministerial offices. But there are also questions about the balance ministers strike between the advice provided by political appointees and that furnished by public servants.

Moreover, there are issues with how the role is regulated in New Zealand – and how difficult it can be to find out anything about these influential political players.

NZ is an outlier

Every other Westminster democracy has clear transparency requirements for political staff. In the United Kingdom, the government must report annually on the total number of political (or “special”) advisers, and the overall public cost of employing them.

Government departments must regularly publish the names of special advisers, the ministers they work for, their job titles and salary bands, and details of their meetings with senior media figures.

Furthermore, advisers themselves must make annual declarations of financial and non-financial interests that might conflict with their public duties.

Canadian government departments are required to disclose the names, roles and responsibilities of what are known as “exempt staff”, as well as salary ranges, benefits and entitlements. Exempt staff must disclose assets, liabilities and outside activities (which are reviewed by the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner).

While Australia is not as transparent as Canada or the UK, it requires each federal government minister to report, twice a year, the number of political staff they employ and their salary level. That information must be tabled in parliament by the Senate Finance and Public Administration Estimates Committee.

None of these requirements applies in New Zealand, which is an outlier on proactive release of information about political staff who work at the heart of government.

The retired British Labour politician Clare Short once described these special advisers as “the people who live in the dark”.

Ultimately, while it seems clear ministerial advisers were involved in drafting the cabinet paper on New Zealand’s options regarding Palestinian statehood, the real questions are about transparency and accountability in general.

Beyond the specifics of this case, it’s time New Zealand’s system of governance let in a little more light.

Chris Eichbaum has worked as a public servant in Wellington and Canberra, as a prime ministerial office adviser to three NZ prime ministers, and as a ministerial adviser to a senior minister. He is a member of the NZ Labour Party.

Richard Shaw 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. Who wrote the cabinet paper recommending NZ not recognise a Palestinian state? – https://theconversation.com/who-wrote-the-cabinet-paper-recommending-nz-not-recognise-a-palestinian-state-266462

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zora Simic, Associate Professor, School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW Sydney

Content warning: readers are advised this article talks about sexual abuse and child sexual abuse.

As a writer who has experienced the trauma of sexual violence – and who reads and writes about it – Jamie Hood admits to a “soft spot” for Hanya Yanagihara’s divisive 2015 bestseller, A Little Life, often derided as trauma porn. She even describes herself as the “Jude” of “several” of her friend groups, a reference to the novel’s relentlessly abused lead character.

“There’s something in its excess that rang true to me when I first read it,” Hood writes in the introduction to her new book, Trauma Plot: A Life, which mixes memoir and criticism. While Yanagihara’s novel is fiction, for Hood, it understands “it’s possible to spend most of a life reckoning with sexual trauma”.

Not all literary critics share Hood’s appreciation. In her now infamous New Yorker essay, The Case Against the Trauma Plot, Parul Sehgal indicts A Little Life as the “exemplary novelistic incarnation” of contemporary culture’s obsessive interest in “trauma theory”. Subject to “unending mortifications”, the novel’s central figure Jude is more “a walking chalk outline” and a “vivified DSM entry” than he is a fully realised person, Sehgal argues.

Sehgal’s essay eloquently captured a rising backlash to trauma narratives. Over the last decade, stories of trauma have appeared everywhere, from case studies embedded in bestselling popular psychology books by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) and physician Gabor Maté, to social media accounts devoted to trauma awareness and recovery, to what Slate journalist Laura Bennett described back in 2015 as the “first-person industrial complex”.

Sehgal’s survey sweeps right across popular culture, taking in television and cinema – but literature is what she knows best. Not surprisingly, Sehgal’s critique gained the most traction among writers and critics.

Her dissection of the trauma plot even partly inspired Australian novelist Diana Reid’s latest novel, Signs of Damage (2025). As she writes in the afterword, it “is about, among other things, the omnipresence of psychoanalytic concepts – not just in art, but in the stories we tell about our own lives”. Reid has also offered her own critique of tragic back stories as contemporary cliché.

In Trauma Plot, Hood takes aim at “the subterranean, insidious idea” she detects lurking beneath the critiques of Seghal and others: that trauma writing is inherently “unexamined, crude, and lacking in competence with self-reflexivity, humor, and play”. Such assumptions, she continues, rehash “an old trick, the same used to argue that autobiography is antithetical to art” or “confessional writing is without tradition”. In this logic, trauma is damned as “only ever individual, and functionally apolitical”, even when authors explicitly position their texts otherwise.

Sehgal largely sidestepped the #MeToo movement as one influential recent catalyst for sharing accounts of trauma, but Hood does not. She is well aware of the critiques of #MeToo’s limitations – and has charted its twists, turns and aftermaths elsewhere, as well as in her memoir. But she acknowledges it, too, as a source of inspiration and solidarity – and one origin of her book.

The knowledge “sexual violence was everywhere, and all the time” helped free her from ego, and from isolating shame: “What a relief to find I wasn’t special. And how devastating.”

However, #MeToo is only one origin story for Trauma Plot. Others include the myth of Philomela, from Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philomela, an Athenian princess, was raped by her brother-in-law Terereus; afterwards, when she “does not go quietly”, he cut out her tongue. For Hood, what happens next – Philomela learns the loom, “creating a tapestry to transmit her torment in a different design” – offers both a “provocative diagnosis of rape as a formal problem” and a solution: “a kaleidoscopic technique of narration”.

The neoclassical rendering of Philomela by early 20th-century American sculptor John Gregory adorns the hardcover edition of Trauma Plot. It’s a striking alternative to the “bloody image” of Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620) by Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, which illustrated many #MeToo testimonials – and for a time, evoked Hood’s own rage at her rapists.

The epigraph to Trauma Plot is from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925):

She had a perpetual sense […] of being out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

Hood’s first section is an homage of sorts to the novel’s day-in-the-life, stream-of-consciousness interiority. Of all Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway is the one most often read as semi-autobiographical and as a reckoning with unresolved trauma: of England’s in the wake of the first world war, and in the novelist’s own life.

Hood’s re-imagining joins an ever-expanding set of creative responses to Mrs Dalloway, most recently – prior to Hood’s – the novel Thunderhead by Australian writer Miranda Darling (2024).

In her case against the trauma plot, Sehgal conscripts Woolf as the counterpoint to the contemporary excesses of Yanagihara and A Little Life. For Sehgal, where the contemporary trauma plot “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority”, Woolf offers nuance, ambiguity, and above all, character. Even writing of her own sexual abuse by her half-brothers when she was a child, Woolf is, for Sehgal, admirably restrained.

Yet as Hood’s memoir attests, Woolf has long been a lodestar for writers grappling with trauma – in their lives, and on the page, especially women writers. French author Neige Sinno in her arresting memoir of child sexual abuse, Sad Tiger, is also drawn to Woolf. Like Sehgal, she’s impressed by the brevity and clarity of Woolf’s autobiographical writing about her half-brothers, but there is recognition too in how Woolf conveyed the “emotions that she felt, what in the future would come to be called traumatic shock”.

For Sinno, Woolf’s essays support her view that “writing can only happen once the work, or part of the work, has been done, that part of the work that consists of emerging from the tunnel”.

Together, Hood and Sinno present a radical challenge to any suggestion the “trauma plot” has exhausted itself and is a literary dead end. They are serious writers, and Trauma Plot and Sad Tiger are genre-bending memoirs arising from – but hardly confined to – their experiences of sexual violence and trauma.

Content warning

To summarise what happened to Sinno and Hood is to issue a content warning.

Sinno’s stepfather first came into her life when she was about six years old and not long after, raped her for the first time, then continued to do so until she was around 14. Later, aged 19, Sinno’s then-lover – an artist, some 35 years older – convinced her to take the case to court to protect her younger siblings.

First, before she could file a complaint, she told her mother, who took over a year to leave her husband (the father of two of her four children). The trial was, of course, an ordeal, but her stepfather confessed to most of the charges and was handed a nine-year prison sentence.

In France – where the case was tried, though by then Sinno had moved to the US to study literature – this outcome was “not typical”, nor is it anywhere else. “Presumably,” writes Sinno, “this is because the rapes began when I was very young, went on for a long time, fulfilled the criteria for a serious crime, and were perpetrated by a figure of authority”.

In 2015, Hood was gang raped by five men, which as she writes on her opening page “wasn’t my first experience of sexual violence, far from it – but it was the worst of them. It nearly killed me.” One night, in the aftermath, she walked into traffic and “waited for death to come”.

These brute details are both shocking and ordinary. Once Hood starts talking about her rapes, she finds out some of her friends have also been raped. Before this, “she felt like an alien marooned on a hostile planet”. Sinno argues the “taboo in our culture is not rape itself, which is commonplace everywhere, it is talking about it, thinking about it, analyzing it”.

Here, Sinno is referring specifically to Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious novel Lolita (1955), written from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, a paedophile who kidnaps and sexually abuses his 12-year-old stepdaughter, claiming obsessive love for his “nymphet”. When she first read it, Sinno “wasn’t expecting to find so much overlap with my own grim history”. Against other readings of Lolita as a defence of Humbert, or a love story, for Sinno, Nabokov captures the “absurdity” of the perpetrator’s “perverse consciousness”.

Following Nabokov, Sinno is a writer interested in confronting the taboo of rape on the page. She begins Sad Tiger with a “portrait of my rapist”, from an adult perspective. Sinno tries to imagine what others – especially her mother – saw in him. “She liked his muscular physique, the energy he gave off.” But Sinno cannot sustain it: her perspective is inevitably that of his child victim.

“Victim” and “survivor” are loaded words – they carry power, but can be easily flattened at the expense of personhood or by the demands of representation. Sinno claims no special insight: “I’m a survivor. I don’t know why.” For Hood, “there’s a danger in infantalizing survivors of sexual violence, like we have no capacity for decision making.” At various points, to emphasise provisional and hesitant identification, she puts both “victim” and “survivor” in “scare quotes”.

Yet, it’s also the case that both Sinno and Hood were abused as children, and each ponder whether there was something which made them especially vulnerable to predators, or as Sinno puts it, “to being a victim”. In therapy, Hood was confronted by the lingering effects of being molested as a child, and then publicly shamed for it: “I saw I wasn’t a child then, or even a person really, but a place – the place where rape went, and where rape belonged.”

For Hood, this sense of herself as “vacancy” was a necessary phase, but as “time passes, abjection feels less useful to me”. For Sinno, however, where others might feel distance from their childhood self, she – writing as a 44-year-old – does not: “It’s always the present for me. It’s always me, it’s always now.”

Sinno holds two truths. One:

there can never be a happy ending for someone who was abused as a child. It is a mistake and a source of suffering to believe in the myth of the survivor like you see in the movies.

Repurposing the hideous title of a dark web child pornography wing, Sinno presents her book as “proof” of what is means to be “damaged for life”.

The second truth, which does not cancel out the first, “is that once you can talk about the truth, it means that you have been set slightly free”. The court room is one site where Sinno speaks of how she was subjected to “an endless orgy of violation”, though with no illusions that this is justice or a “solution”. (She and Hood are both sceptical of criminal justice approaches, but Sinno wanted to make sure her stepfather was no danger to her siblings.) She’s never been in therapy or analysis, however, because

where I come from, we don’t do that, we’re afraid, we know what awaits in the kinds of places available to us, public services staffed by overworked, often barely qualified practitioners […] where the chances are you’ll end up seeing someone who’s completely snowed under or pretty much incompetent.

Like Sinno, Hood comes from a background of poverty, but in her case, therapy is transformative. Structurally, and in terms of what she ruefully calls her “Chronology of My Life and Trauma”, Hood’s memoir culminates in therapy with “Helen” over Zoom, beginning during Covid.

Their sessions continue into a recognisable “present”, with wars against the Palestinian people, and against trans women. Before this, Hood had not made being trans central to her story – or rather, to how she presents her story – but in this section, in therapy, this fact surges powerfully forward. It compounds the ongoing reality that women are far more often, and more likely, to be raped than men; trans women even more so.

Both authors are acutely aware of how the language of trauma can easily congeal into cliché, or be weaponised.

At his trial, Sinno’s stepfather presented his own experience of childhood sexual abuse, “in the classic style of trauma”, and she finds it credible, though hardly excusable. Hood wrestles with the enduring cliché that surviving trauma “makes you stronger, or makes you the person you are, teaching you profound lessons about the sort of life you should want to lead”. Sinno is similarly “appalled by a hierarchy that makes the person who recovers, in contrast with the person who cannot, a superhuman being”.

Yet in taking their own experiences of trauma seriously, by directing their writing and reading towards understanding and articulating it, Hood and Sinno expand the horizons of what trauma literature can be. Their books mark the arrival of two major literary talents.

Memoirs and #MeToo

The cultural contexts and touchstones which inform Sad Tiger and The Trauma Plot are easily delineated, including by the authors themselves.

Hood plunges the reader right in: she began writing her book a year after she was gang-raped and at the onset of the “Trump era”, just before #MeToo went viral in 2017. The bulk of her memoir is set in 2013, first in Boston, where Hood taught and studied literature as a PhD student. Next, in New York City, where she moved that same year partly to get away from sexual violence, only to encounter more of it.

But #MeToo reverberates throughout, as promise, as disappointment, and as a damning indictment of US culture. “One of the great disappointments of #MeToo,” she reflects, “was its reconsolidation of the status quo, the way it calibrated around monsters and angels”. Hood mocks as absurd the notions women like Christine Blasey Ford and Amber Heard, who clearly paid a heavy price for speaking out about the abuse they suffered from high-profile men, did it simply for attention and “to ruin some poor man’s life”.

Sinno was writing during 2021, “at the very moment France is debating whether or not to abolish the statute of limitations for sexual crimes against children”. That year, partly provoked by the 2020 publication of writer and editor Vanessa Spingora’s memoir Le Consentement, the French government voted into legislation an age threshold of non-consent at 15, meaning no child under this age can be considered to have consented to sex and therefore sex with a minor is rape. In regards to incest, the age of non-consent is set higher, to 18. The statute of limitations, however, remain in place.

In France, memoirs have played an influential role in exposing abusers and the culture which enables them, while also garnering international attention. Spingora’s bracing account of how back in the 1980s she was groomed into a four-year sexual relationship when she was 14 by middle-aged French writer Gabriel Matzneff was published in English in 2021 as Consent. Like Spingora’s memoir, Sinno’s was translated by prize-winning translator and author Natasha Lehrer.

In Sad Tiger, Sinno contemplates the perspective offered in another memoir which attracted major public attention in France when it was published in 2021: Camille Kouchner’s La Familia Grande (the English translation by Adriana Hunter was published in 2022 as The Familia Grande: A Memoir).

A lawyer and academic from a family of famous intellectual and cultural elites, Kouchner sensationally revealed a family secret: her stepfather, the political scientist Olivier Duhamel, had sexually abused her twin brother on a regular basis while they were still children.

La Familia Grande inspired the hashtag #MeTooInceste in France, and further galvanised the push for new child sexual abuse laws. Of particular interest for Sinno, however, is how Kouchner is one step removed from the abuse, thereby offering a “way of discussing incest as a social phenomenon while avoiding the unbearable pathos of direct suffering”.

Yet by bringing such texts into the orbit of her own “head-on” narrative, Sinno also opens up a wider discussion, spotlighting the ripple effects of abuse within and beyond the immediate family, as well as the cultural contexts in which such abuse can be easily concealed by the veneer of sexual openness or family values.

To date, the critical response to both Sad Tiger and Trauma Plot has been overwhelmingly positive. Sad Tiger was originally published in France in 2023, where it swiftly became a bestseller and won some of the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes.

The 2025 English-language edition is emblazoned with a blurb from Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. She described it to the New York Times Book Review as the “most powerful, profound book I’ve ever read about the devastation of one person’s childhood by an adult”.

The hardcover US edition of Trauma Plot features blurbs from cult authors Torrey Peters and Kate Zambreno. On its release, the book was featured everywhere from the literary magazine Bookforum (where Hood is a contributor) to Vogue. In the US, Hood’s first book How to be a Good Girl: A Miscellany, originally published during the Covid pandemic in 2020, was reissued by Vintage the same day Trauma Plot was released.

Annie Ernaux – like Woolf and Nabokov – is a writer both Sinno and Hood seek out. Provocative French novelist Virginie Despentes is another, particularly King Kong Theory, her book of essays about rape. These overlaps point to a canon of (mostly) women writers who have created literature from previously taboo topics. But each memoir is also a highly distinctive account of a reading life, shaped by their own specific experiences and their own desires to find and create meaning from them.

When Hood left Boston, she fled both repeated sexual violation and a stifling Ivy League program. In her abandoned dissertation – a project which, it could be argued, triumphantly lives on in Trauma Plot – Hood sought to draw connections between her beloved poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and “the talk-show era, ‘90s’ women’s rock, the contemporary memoir and the personal essay boom, autofiction, Lena Dunham’s Girls”.

In New York City, time is measured by nights at the bars where Hood works and plays, and by books read and reread, from Charlotte Bronte’s Vilette (1853) to Cruel Optimism (2011) by the late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant.

As her romantic relationship dissolves, Hood returns to a favourite novel, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. First published in 1962, it is widely considered to be Lessing’s masterpiece as well as her most challenging novel. In this instance, rereading The Golden Notebook “doesn’t help matters at home”, but the novel’s multilayered form and its animating concerns – sex, art, relationships, the violence that can erupt between men and women, therapy – are evident influences, among others, on Trauma Plot.

Where Hood clearly knows her feminist theory, and advances some of her own, Sinno has never sought it out. Instead, she “learned to think about violence from novels about slavery, the Shoah, the Algerian War”.

Through the work of French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, she read testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda. Unlike Hatzfeld, she is not surprised the murderers he interviewed revealed no secrets and claimed no nightmares.

The inspiration for her book’s title, Sad Tiger, comes from William Blake’s poem The Tyger, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) and its echo in the title of the controversial memoir by French writer Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger (2011).

Fragoso’s story of being sexually abused by her 57-year-old neighbour from the age of seven until he suicided over a decade later caused a sensation when published. At the time, Sinno “wondered why readers would choose to immerse themselves in such atrocities”. Sinno came to it later, after she had been through treatment for ovarian cancer, the same disease Fragoso died of in 2017, aged 38.

Writing the unthinkable

In their literary and philosophical ambitions, each book recalls Carmen Maria Machardo’s dazzlingly inventive memoir In the Dream House (2019), her polyphonic account of the domestic abuse she endured some years earlier from her then-girlfriend.

All three writers generatively experiment with genre, form and perspective. Hood shifts from third to second to first person, as far as each can productively take her. Sinno contemplates evidence of her life in newspapers, photographs, legal briefs and testimony, including that of her stepfather. At the same time, she ponders her own investments in this material.

Is it about being more accurate? An attempt to fill in the gaps? Or is it a way of trying to extricate myself, to escape this subjective version that haunts and suffocates me?

In Machado’s case, however, she was writing into a void, given the scant existing literature on the topic. Sinno and Hood face down different challenges. Hood offers a defence and reinvention of the “trauma plot” against backlash to its ubiquity in contemporary culture. Among the numerous reasons Sinno lists for “not wanting to write this book” is she “does not want to specialize in rape literature”. The topic is not so taboo that an established genre does not exist.

Doubts, second thoughts and hesitations litter both texts. Sinno is not sure if she “has anything at all to offer victims and their families, or even just someone who wants a better understanding of the subject”. Nor can she be certain if “the book offers me anything, either as a human being or a writer”. She does not “believe in writing as therapy” and even if she did, “the idea of healing myself with this book appals me”.

Hood raises similar questions about her project as it unfolds. She ponders the connection – if at all – between what she has suffered and her desire to create art, to write. “Does art live in me,” she asks, “not because of trauma, but because I sought beauty when there was none?” Hood is more open to the possibility writing can have a therapeutic purpose, but she still places “healing” in quotation marks.

Ultimately, as the publication of these stunning memoirs attests, both Hood and Sinno acknowledge the wider value of their writing, as literature and as a cultural intervention. In doing so, they announce themselves as talented writers, with the promise of more books to come.

Post #MeToo, Hood is “not writing this to be believed. I’m writing to open space in myself for other books, to offer solace – I hope – to others who have lived through this.” Sinno, the more reluctant memoirist, overcomes her resistance to it enough to accept that autobiographical writing has as much claim to literature as fiction.

She writes: “Is that not, after all, the purpose of literature, to get the unthinkable out there at last?”

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Zora Simic receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Friday essay: trauma memoirs can help us understand the unthinkable. They can also be art – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-trauma-memoirs-can-help-us-understand-the-unthinkable-they-can-also-be-art-257018

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Daniel, Associate Lecturer in Communication, Western Sydney University

In recent years, Australian TV has built a reputation for gritty, stylish crime thrillers that linger long after the credits roll. In series such as Mystery Road (2018–), Scrublands (2023–25) and Black Snow (2023–), intimate character drama is blended with thriller tropes, delivering stories that are emotionally resonant and gripping.

Watching You, a new Stan limited series starring Aisha Dee, is a worthy addition to this lineage. It’s tense, seductive and absorbing.

At the centre is Lina (Aisha Dee), a paramedic with a taste for risk. She’s happily engaged to Cain (Chai Hansen), but a fleeting encounter with an enigmatic stranger, Dan (Josh Helman), awakens a desire she can’t resist.

What begins as a reckless one-night stand in a rental property quickly spirals into a nightmare; Lina and Dan discover the affair has been secretly filmed, and the footage is now being used to blackmail her.

As threats escalate and paranoia takes hold, Lina embarks on a desperate hunt to unmask the voyeur. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more dangerous and intimate the threat becomes.

A fresh spin on Australian noir

Watching You has a distinctively Australian noir sensibility.

Lead director Peter Salmon, production designer Virginia Mesiti and cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe said they drew inspiration from Sydney’s oppressive summer heat, using natural elements as active forces in the drama. By exposing for harsh sunlight and embracing deep, enveloping shadows, the team create an atmosphere that amplifies Lina’s internal conflict.

This tactile, elemental approach is blended with Hitchcockian framing and the sensual unease of erotic thrillers such as Basic Instinct (1992) and Unfaithful (2002).

The series walks a tightrope between moments of tension, sensuality and raw emotional truth. This tonal balancing act is no easy feat, but Watching You, for the most part, achieves it.

Aisha Dee commands the screen

The success of the series hinges on Dee’s magnetic performance as Lina. After making waves in Sissy (2022) and the acclaimed Safe Home (2023), this layered and complex performance reminds us why Dee is one of Australia’s most compelling screen talents.

As Lina, she embodies both fierce competence and inner fragility. We understand her as a woman who is used to high-stakes pressure, but we also see the compulsions and vulnerabilities that have lured her into her dilemma. She is captivating throughout.

Helman provides an excellent counterpoint as Dan, the stranger who becomes the catalyst for Lina’s unravelling. Helman plays Dan with the right mix of charm and opacity.

Their chemistry is believable, but there’s also something uneasy about Helman’s Dan. He successfully embodies the central paradox of desire and danger that drives the series.

Themes with bite

Beyond its surface thrills, Watching You engages with some weighty and timely themes. As the story develops, there’s an interesting exploration of coercive control and the insidious nature of male violence towards women.

The show also interrogates addiction and compulsion; the thrill-seeking and danger in Lina’s pursuit of the affair complicate the moral contours of her choices. These psychological dimensions elevate Watching You to beyond a simple crime thriller.

Equally potent is the commentary on surveillance culture. In an era where every phone, security camera and laptop may be a potential tool for voyeurism, the series carries an unsettling familiarity.

It cleverly exploits our technological fears, by reminding us how the very devices meant to provide safety and connection can be turned against us.

Australian crime thrillers on the rise

There has been a marked resurgence in Australian crime dramas that may appeal to both domestic and international audiences. Viewers are hungry for stories that combine local flavour with universal stakes, and Watching You fits neatly into this trend while carving out its own space.

I have a few small nitpicks with the series. There are some red herrings that don’t quite work, some unresolved questions about supporting characters’ behaviours, and some geographical wizardry as characters seem to teleport between Lina’s remote bush property and the city multiple times a day.

That said, the series overcomes these issues with its strengths. Its blend of erotic tension, reinterpretation of noir style, and contemporary social critique raise it above more formulaic fare.

Watching You is a thriller that critiques our voyeuristic culture. It is taut and gripping, but also thought-provoking in its examination of how women may be controlled or endangered – not only by a hidden lens, but by more pervasive and insidious threats.

Adam Daniel 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. Stan’s Watching You is elevated Australian noir – sexy, stylish and suspenseful – https://theconversation.com/stans-watching-you-is-elevated-australian-noir-sexy-stylish-and-suspenseful-265068

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Brayshaw, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

The iconic feathered showgirl was born amid the chaos of the first world war, when the wealthy, global French superstar Gaby Deslys entertained Parisians and Allied soldiers in a 1917 show called Laissez-les tombe! (Let Them Fall), a dazzling spectacle of ostrich feathers, rhinestones and beauty.

Although showgirls first appeared in late-19th century music halls, the red, white and blue feathered costumes in Deslys’ revue offered Paris something new and triumphal. The massed plumes, wild dancing and bodily displays celebrated French aesthetics and extravagance and communicated that France and her allies would not bow to Germany.

Prior to 1914 Deslys’s expensive jewellery, haute couture and expansive feathered hats – along with her affairs with powerful men such as department store magnate Harry Selfridge and King Manuel II of Portugal – created countless headlines.

But she was also outspoken about a woman’s right to support herself financially and worked tirelessly during the war raising funds for the Allies. Deslys was so passionate about aiding the devastated Parisian nightlife that she paid for all the costumes in Laissez-les tombe! herself.

Deslys’s cultural impact has inextricably linked feathers, high fashion, celebrity and showgirls ever since.

From France to Broadway

Feathered showgirl revues were so popular that they quickly went global. In 1920s New York, impresarios such as Florenz Ziegfeld staged luxurious Broadway productions that glorified the American showgirl.

But he made exceptions to American women. One of Ziegfeld’s most famous showgirls, Dolores, was born into poverty in London’s East End as Kathleen Mary Rose. She rose to become a supermodel who walked for the couturier Lady Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile.

Ziegfeld considered Dolores one of the world’s most beautiful women. Tall, slender and graceful, she drove audiences wild when she glided across Ziegfeld’s stage and posed in opulent costumes.

On becoming a showgirl, Dolores used her modelling ability to make her fortune, earning today’s equivalent of US$10,000 a week by 1923.

Other performers harnessed the feathered showgirl aesthetic, including the celebrated twins Jenny and Rosie Dolly, who came from humble origins and used their beauty, talent and hard work to dominate American and European stages in the 1910s and 1920s.

Ziegfeld paid the Dollys the equivalent of US$64,000 weekly in 1915. Like Deslys, they became notorious for their consumption of fashion and affairs with famous men.

However, stage revues became unpopular around 1930 due to their vast expense and the rise of cinema – so the showgirl travelled to Hollywood.

There, she was celebrated in biopics such as The Great Ziegfeld (1936) with its glittering, feathered costumes by the designer Adrian.

In the second world war, showgirls boosted troop morale, like Deslys did in 1917.

Hollywood made feel-good films including the biopic The Dolly Sisters (1945), which reimagined the brunette twins as all-American blondes by casting 1940s pinup stars Betty Grable and June Haver.

From Hollywood to Vegas

From there, the American showgirl arrived in Las Vegas, performing in every hotel and casino on the strip during the 1950s and 1960s.

Like the showgirls of yore, these performers’ allure was their grace, beauty, and extravagant, expensive costumes, produced by the world’s leading designers.

Showgirls remained a fixture of Las Vegas entertainment throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Choreographers including Donn Arden and Madame Bluebell (who also worked in the Parisian revues) created hallmark, visual spectacles featuring costumes by Bob Mackie.

Jubilee!, which opened at the old MGM Grand casino in 1981, was one such revue. In addition to the vast volume of plumes, it was claimed the show had caused a global shortage of Swarovski crystals because the costumes had used them all.

In 1986 the old MGM Grand became Bally’s Casino, but Jubilee! stayed. The costumes, some of which cost more than US$7,000 each (roughly US$25,000 today), were used six nights a year for 35 years and maintained by 18 wardrobe staffers.

Jubilee! closed in 2016, but its costumes live on as valuable cultural artefacts that celebrities borrow to reinterpret the American showgirl for 21st-century audiences.

This includes demonstrating that showgirls are independent, hardworking and talented women.

From Vegas to Taylor Swift

Burlesque performer Dita Von Teese draws on the American showgirls’ legacy by wearing costumes from Jubilee! in her Las Vegas cabaret, and called the 1945 Dolly Sisters film one of her inspirations.

Pamela Anderson wore Jubilee! costumes in The Last Showgirl (2024), a film that highlights the sacrifices female performers often have to make to pursue their dreams.

Taylor Swift is the latest superstar to harness showgirl iconography.
Photographs from her new album show Swift wearing the Jubilee! “Diamond” and “Disco” costumes by Mackie.

Another photograph shows Swift in a cloud of ostrich plumes and rhinestones wearing a dark, bobbed wig: a direct reference to 1920s American showgirls and performers such as the Dolly Sisters.

Swift’s stage costumes are by the world’s leading fashion designers, while her songs often reference historical celebrities to critique how the entertainment and media industry treat female performers.

Choosing Mackie’s Jubilee! costumes allows Swift to become the American showgirl (Taylor’s Version), by tapping into a century of glamour and signalling that she too has worked hard and made sacrifices to reach the top.

Emily Brayshaw 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. Taylor Swift has branded herself a showgirl. These hardworking women have a long and bejewelled history – https://theconversation.com/taylor-swift-has-branded-herself-a-showgirl-these-hardworking-women-have-a-long-and-bejewelled-history-263188

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andonea Jon Dickson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh

Under President Donald Trump, the United States is expanding its efforts to detain and deport non-citizens at an alarming rate. In recent months, the Trump administration made deals with a number of third states to receive deported non-citizens.

In Australia, the Labor government has similarly established new powers to deport non-citizens to third states. The government signed a secretive deal with Nauru in September, guaranteeing the small Micronesian island A$2.5 billion over the next three decades to accommodate the first cohort of deportees.

In both countries, migrants can now be banished to states to which they have no prior connection.

Last year in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour party promised that the previous Conservative government’s plan to deport people to Rwanda was “dead and buried”. Yet, Labour removed close to 35,000 people in 2024, an increase of 25% over the previous year.

Starmer has also proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for people with rejected asylum claims.

Meanwhile, the far-right Reform Party has put forward a “mass deportation” plan involving the use of military bases to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of people, if it wins power in the next general election.

Similar policies may soon come to Europe, too. In May, the European Commission published a proposal that would allow EU member states to deport people seeking asylum to third countries where they have no previous connection.

The deportation of populations deemed problematic is not a new practice. For centuries, states have used forms of deportation to forcibly remove people, as Australia’s own history as a British penal colony illustrates.

Today, deportations are a staple of migration governance around the world. However, the recent expansion of detention and deportations reflects an accelerated criminalisation and punishment of non-citizens, tied to a rising authoritarianism across purportedly liberal Western countries.

Criminalising movement

The expansion and outsourcing of deportation is underpinned by long histories of criminalising migration.

Over the past three decades, legal obstacles and securitised borders have increasingly forced those fleeing war, persecution and insecurity to rely on unauthorised routes to seek refuge.

Governments have simultaneously reframed the act of seeking asylum from a human right to a criminal act, brandishing those on the move as “illegal” as a way of justifying onshore and offshore immigration detention.

Racialised people living in the community have also been subject to increased policing, regardless of their migration status.

In the US, UK and Australia, this criminalising language, once the preserve of the right-wing press, is now echoed by politicians across the political spectrum and enshrined in legislation. This has accelerated what migration expert Alison Mountz has termed “the death of asylum”, and normalising deportations.

In Australia, for example, the government lowered the threshold for visa cancellations in 2014, resulting in people with minor offences being detained and scheduled for deportation. Those who could not be returned to their home countries continued to languish in detention until a 2023 high court ruling mandated their release.

Despite having served their sentences, in addition to protracted periods in immigration detention, a media frenzy framed these people as a major threat to the community. The Labor government then legislated to deport them, in addition to thousands of others on precarious visas, to a third country.

Deportations have also been a central facet of US immigration enforcement for many years.

Former President Barack Obama was branded “Deporter in Chief” for achieving a record three million deportations while in office.

While Obama focused on “felons not families”, Trump has equated migration itself with crime and insecurity. His administration has cast a much wider net, rounding up those with and without criminal convictions, including citizens.

Detentions and deportations have also been used to suppress political dissent on issues, such as the genocide in Gaza.

To expedite his pledge to deport one million people in his first year, the Trump administration hastily set up detention centres in former prisons and military bases, including at Guantánamo Bay.

Reports suggest the government has also approached 58 third countries to accept deported non-nationals. Countries that have agreed, or already received people, are shown in the map below.

In many cases, people are then re-detained on arrival in hotels, prisons and camps, with some subject to further deportation.

Rising authoritarianism

These recent developments reveal an explicit authoritarianism in which deportations are achieved through the elimination of procedural fairness. Reducing notice periods, the ability to appeal decisions, and access to legal counsel allows for rushed and opaque procedures.

In June, eight people were deported from the US to South Sudan without the chance to contest their removal. After a failed court intervention, the three liberal US Supreme Court justices stated:

The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone, anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.

In the UK, the Labour party expanded the “Deport Now Appeal Later” scheme in August, extending the countries to which people can be deported without appeal rights from eight to 23.

And this month in Australia, the Migration Act was amended to expunge the rules of natural justice for people scheduled for deportation.

Across all three countries, the rapid expansion of detention and deportation practices terrorise those targeted, leaving whole communities living in fear. Australian human rights lawyer Alison Battisson described deportation as “a creeping death to the individuals and their families”.

These policies have also legitimised and emboldened far-right, neo-Nazi groups, who have taken to the streets in both the UK and Australia in recent weeks calling for an end to migration. In both countries, the effects of decades of neoliberal policies, such as a lack of affordable housing, jobs, and health care, are redefined as a problem of migration.

How communities are responding

Communities are now organising and making the case for a different sort of politics.

In Los Angeles, for example, grassroots organisations mobilised earlier this year to counter escalating raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Networks also began providing information and support to those targeted by ICE arrests. In July, Detention Watch Network relaunched the Communities Not Cages coalition of grassroots campaigns against detention.

In the UK, far-right rallies at asylum hotels have been met by counter demonstrations, with people insisting on a politics of welcome and unity.

But the challenge remains how to turn local and national opposition into a coalition capable of confronting this rise in authoritarian politics of exclusion and expulsion.

Ċetta Mainwaring is currently funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.

Andonea Jon Dickson and Thom Tyerman 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. Around the world, migrants are being deported at alarming rates – how did this become normalised? – https://theconversation.com/around-the-world-migrants-are-being-deported-at-alarming-rates-how-did-this-become-normalised-264790

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

Should we have more federal politicians? One can anticipate the knee-jerk response from many sceptical voters.

But Special Minister of State Don Farrell believes there’s a case, and has the parliamentary joint standing committee on electoral matters examining the arguments.

Farrell, a right-wing factional heavyweight who has a low profile publicly but holds a lot of power within Labor, drove the political funding reforms legislated last term. They begin operating ahead of the 2028 election. Despite doubts Farrell would land a deal to pass those changes, he managed, very late, to get the Liberals on board.

Whether the enlarged parliament has a chance of flying could depend in part, but not entirely, on the attitude of the opposition – would it go along with the plan or threaten to turn it into a major issue?

The Liberals so far have not stated a position. Liberal Senator Richard Colbeck, deputy chair of the committee, says, “It’s up to the government to make a case. I’m not sure the Australian people are hanging out for more politicians.”

Farrell likes to work with the major parties, so would hope to get the opposition on board. If he could not, the Greens could be crucial: the government now only has to get their support in the Senate to pass contested legislation. The Greens’ spokeswoman on democracy, Steph Hodgins-May, says, “We don’t have a position currently”, but adds, “if something will make our democracy fairer we would consider legislation favourably”.

Farrell has also asked the committee to look at longer and fixed parliamentary terms.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would love to bring in an extended term. He told the British Labour Party conference at the weekend that in the United Kingdom, where there are five-year terms, they had “the most valuable resource for any Labor government. The asset every progressive leader in every positive and ambitious government wishes they had more of: time.

“To give you some sense of that, in Australia, my colleagues and I were re-elected less than five months ago. And yet our next election is due before yours,” he said.

But a longer term would require a referendum, and while overseas Albanese again flagged that after the failed Voice referendum, he is not interested in running another.

While longer terms in theory give more time and stability for serious policy work without an election looming, in practice the advantages might be overstated.

The current example of the UK Starmer government, where the prime minister is under intense pressure early in the term and despite a large majority, shows instability can arise at any point. Also, we live in the era of the “permanent campaign” that might be hard to break even with longer terms.

Making the present three-year term fixed to a certain date, rather than flexible as now, would need only legislation, so that could be an option for a package for change. All the states, except Tasmania, have now moved to fixed terms. (All states have four-year terms.)

Enlarging the parliament would also only need legislation. This would be a big deal politically but it has been done twice before, in the 1940s and the 1980s – both times by Labor governments.

The case for change is built primarily on population increase. The last report of the electoral matters committee, after the 2022 election, said:

Australians’ representation in the House of Representatives has fallen significantly in the last few decades, with no significant change in the number of representatives over a period in which the number of enrolled voters has almost doubled.

On average, a House member represents more than 120,000 enrolled voters; in 1984 (after the parliament was increased) the number was more than 66,000. A key part of a politician’s work, especially that of a lower House member, is tending to constituents’ needs and problems. As the population grows, so does the workload.

Farrell maintains it strengthens democracy if voters feel they can get to their local member.

Those advocating expansion also argue it would bring the parliament more in line with other democracies, increase the talent pool from which to choose frontbenchers, and improve accountability.

The complication with a bigger parliament is that, constitutionally, the ratio between the houses has to remain the same – The House of Representatives must be as nearly as possible just double the size of the Senate. Breaking the House-Senate nexus would need a referendum. A 1967 effort failed.

The expansion most likely to be contemplated would add between 28 and 32 to the 150-member lower house. That would be based on two extra senators per state and either one or two extra for each of the two territories.

If the parliament were to be increased, the expansion would not take effect until the 2031 election.

While an expansion would enable better servicing of constituents, the eyes of party hard heads would be on calculations of potential winners and losers.

Former Liberal Attorney-General George Brandis, writing in the Nine media this week, argues Labor would gain from a larger House (because the population growth would be greatest in the cities where the Liberals are weak), while the Greens would be advantaged by a bigger Senate.

“Although any increase in the number of politicians would be hugely unpopular, Albanese may well calculate that the electoral advantage to Labor would be worth the short-term political pain which, were he to legislate in the second half of next year, would largely have died down by 2028,” Brandis wrote.

Electoral analyst Ben Raue has strongly contested Brandis’ analysis of the outcomes of an increase in the parliament’s size.

Bob McMullan, a former senator and cabinet minister as well as a former Labor national secretary, supports an increase of senators to 14 per state.

In his judgement, such a change “should make it easier for the Greens, One Nation and Jacqui Lambie to maintain their seats, although it will not necessarily enhance their chances of increasing their Senate numbers,” he wrote this week on the Pearls and Irritations site.

In a deep dive into the electoral data, McMullan concludes it shows that “if the teals make the right decisions and commit some resources, it is possible, even likely, that they could win several Senate seats” in an expanded parliament.

Given the smaller quotas that would be required to win a seat in a bigger Senate a change would in general give improved prospects for independents and micro parties.

As with his reform of electoral donations and spending, Farrell’s push for more parliamentarians will face substantial political obstacles. Whether he can negotiate a way around them, and whether the prime minister is willing to spend some political capital on advancing an unpopular cause, are the big questions.

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: believe it or not, there would be a case for more federal politicians – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-believe-it-or-not-there-would-be-a-case-for-more-federal-politicians-265857

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

The Papua New Guinea cabinet has cleared the way for the finalisation of a sweeping new defence treaty between PNG and Australia.

The cabinet’s tick off for the treaty will be a relief to the Australian government after a glitch last month prevented the signing of the treaty when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was visiting PNG for the celebrations to mark the country’s 50th anniversary of independence.

At that time, a quorum of cabinet members could not be gathered to approve the treaty because many had dispersed across the country for the celebrations.

Read more:
With new PNG defence treaty, Australia is delivering on its rhetoric about trust at a critical time

While the Australian government was confident the treaty would get approval, there were inevitably concerns about any last minute problems arising, especially as China had been critical of PNG entering the agreement.

The two prime ministers will now sign the treaty formally finalising the process.

PNG Prime Minister James Marape, who will be in Australia for the NRL Grand Final this weekend, confirmed his cabinet’s decision on Thursday, saying:

Now this treaty elevates our relationship to the highest level, where force synergies, and capacity development for interoperability is reached.

Albanese said in a statement:

I welcome the formal approval of the landmark Pukpuk Treaty by the Papua New Guinea Cabinet.

Our two nations are the closest of neighbours and the closest of friends, and this treaty will elevate our relationship to a formal alliance.

I look forward to signing the treaty with Prime Minister Marape soon.

An earlier communique signed by the two prime ministers said the treaty will include “a mutual defence alliance which recognises that an armed attack on Australia or Papua New Guinea would be a danger to the peace and security of both countries”.

The treaty also covers the recruitment of PNG citizens into the Australian Defence Force.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Defence treaty with PNG ready for signing after its cabinet gives it the tick – https://theconversation.com/defence-treaty-with-png-ready-for-signing-after-its-cabinet-gives-it-the-tick-266610

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

The federal opposition, embattled on many fronts, is trying to gain ground by establishing an alternative economic and fiscal narrative to that of the government.

Labor boasts that the just-released budget outcome for last financial year is better than earlier forecast, but the opposition was quick to criticise, saying with more savings a surplus could have been reached.

On this podcast episode, opposition finance spokesman James Paterson canvasses the economy and the budget, says the opposition needs to sort out its stance on net zero sooner rather than later, insists the Liberals are overwhelmingly behind Sussan Ley’s leadership, and reflects on the evolution of his own political positioning.

Paterson describes the budget outcome as a “Labor deficit of choice”.

[…] We know from the final budget outcome that the government could have delivered a surplus if they chose to, but instead they chose to deliver a deficit. Because the deficit was $10 billion, but the net effect of new spending in the last financial year was $22 billion. Had they offset that spending fully instead of engaging in new spending, they could have had a budget surplus of up to $12 billion. So this is a Labor deficit of choice.

On Sussan Ley’s recent speech attacking middle class welfare, Paterson says,

The principles that Sussan [was] talking about are ones which used to be widely understood and accepted in Australia, which is that governments should live within their means, that it is wrong to pass an intergenerational debt burden onto future generations. And that people who get assistance from the federal government must be people who genuinely need it.

No one is proposing to take away any of the core safety nets that Australians rely on or any of the essential services that Australians rely on.

On the debate within the opposition about net-zero, while Paterson keeps his view for the internal discussion, he flags he wants the issue dealt with as expeditiously as practicable:

We have to be able to answer the question about what we’re going to do on net zero before [people] hear our critique on the short and medium-term policies that Labor’s enacting now that are driving up costs and making our country less competitive. So I think timely resolution is an obvious thing, but we have to land it in the right place, and I’d rather get it right than rush it.

On how to make our tax system fairer, Paterson is open to examining ideas such as indexing income tax and taxing a family unit rather than individuals:

We’re certainly going to look at that [indexation] and other good ideas to return Australians’ hard-earned money to them. There are a couple of other suggestions out there as well, including taxing a family unit rather than taxing individuals to take the burden off families who are really struggling. I’m interested in looking at all of these ideas, examining them carefully.

I think none of these are easy or straightforward, but they’re worthy of examination, particularly because Australians are struggling and are paying more than they ever have before towards the upkeep of the federal government.

Asked about frontbencher Andrew Hastie’s recent public activism on policy issues, Paterson describes Hastie as a “close friend” but says the party strongly backs Sussan Ley’s leadership:

Andrew is one of my closest friends in public life. And we agree on many, many things, although not everything. And I understand why many colleagues after the worst election defeat of the Liberal Party in its 80 years of history, want to have a more open public debate about the future direction of the Liberal party. And I think that’s okay.

I think the key is making sure that they don’t continue forever.

My view is the overwhelming majority of the party room is behind Sussan as leader and want to give her the best chance to succeed. She won the ballot for the leadership fair and square. [The Liberal Party] respect the outcome of ballots and give leaders the opportunity to prove their worth.

On his own political positioning after serving a decade in parliament, Paterson says:

[…] I was certainly much more idealistic when I first joined the parliament about a decade ago, and probably would have been less willing to see the merits of compromise back then, as young, idealistic people often are. And I guess with parliamentary service, I’ve gained some wisdom and perspective that this is a shared enterprise and that we have to work together for it to work. […] I think my worldview is the same, but perhaps the way in which I approach parliamentary life has evolved as I’ve become more experienced.

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: James Paterson on Andrew Hastie, Sussan Ley and himself – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-james-paterson-on-andrew-hastie-sussan-ley-and-himself-266580

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Donald Rothwell, Professor of International Law, Australian National University

The Israel Defence Force has intercepted a flotilla of humanitarian vessels seeking to deliver aid to Gaza, taking control of multiple vessels and arresting activists, including Greta Thunberg.

The interceptions took place in the Mediterranean Sea between 70-80 nautical miles off the Gazan coast. These are international waters where international law recognises high seas freedom of navigation for all vessels.

Israel has countered by arguing it has a maritime blockade which prohibits entry to Gaza by foreign vessels. Israel has also suggested the flotilla was supported by Hamas – an assertion the flotilla organisers have rejected.

Gaza humanitarian aid flotillas

The Global Sumud Flotilla was comprised of more than 40 boats carrying humanitarian aid (food, medical supplies and other essential items), along with several hundred parliamentarians, lawyers and activists from dozens of countries.

The flotilla departed Spain in late August and has been making its way eastwards across the sea, with stops in Tunisia, Italy and Greece. Along the way, the Italian and Greek governments deployed naval escorts to ensure their safe passage.

Passengers on the boats alleged they had been harassed by drones at mulitple points in the voyage.

This flotilla campaign is the latest iteration of a movement that has existed for over 15 years to challenge Israel’s long-running blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Earlier this year, a ship called the Conscience carrying activists and aid bound for Gaza was hit by explosions off the coast of Malta.

Israel then intercepted the Madleen, with Thunberg and other activists on board, in June, and the Handala in July.

And in 2010, a flotilla tried to reach Gaza carrying humanitarian relief and hundreds of activists. Israeli commandos boarded the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, leading to a violent confrontation that resulted in the deaths of ten activists. The deaths drew widespread condemnation and strained Israeli-Turkish ties for years.

Read more:
There are clear laws on enforcing blockades – Israel’s interception of the Madleen raises serious questions

The legality of Gaza’s naval blockade

The international law related to the actions of the flotilla vessels and Israel’s capacity to intervene is complex.

Israel has imposed blockades of Gaza in various forms for nearly 20 years.

The legal basis for the blockades and their consistency with international law, particularly the law of the sea, has been contentious, which was highlighted during a UN inquiry that followed the Mavi Marmara incident.

While Israel’s legal relationship with Gaza has varied during this time, Israel is now considered an occupying power in Gaza under international law.

The roles of occupying powers were codified in the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 and built upon the legal obligations that Allied powers assumed in Germany and Japan at the end of the second world war. The Geneva Convention outlines the clear legal framework for occupying powers.

In recent decades, Israel has been both a de jure (recognised under the law) and de facto occupying power in Palestine.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories was illegal under international law.

As an occupying power, Israel controls all access to Gaza whether by land, air or sea. Aid trucks are only permitted to enter Gaza under strict controls. Foreign air force aid drops that have occurred in recent months have only been permitted under strict Israeli control, as well.

Very little aid has arrived by sea since the war began because Israel has severely restricted maritime access to Gaza. The United States built a floating pier off the coast to deliver aid in 2024, but this was soon abandoned because of weather, security and technical issues.

This clearly indicated, however, that Israel was prepared to permit the flow of maritime aid from its closest ally, the US. This exception to the blockade was not applied to other humanitarian actors.

Intercepting ships in international waters

While delivery of aid by sea is legally problematic at the moment, there are limits to Israel’s ability to disrupt flotillas. The freedom of navigation is central to the law of the sea. As such, the flotilla is entitled to sail unimpeded in the Mediterranean Sea.

Any harassment or stopping of the flotilla within the Mediterranean’s international waters is therefore a clear violation of international law.

Crucial to this is the actual location where Israeli forces intercept and board flotilla vessels.

Israel can certainly exercise control over the 12 nautical mile territorial sea off Gaza’s shores. Its closure of the territorial sea to foreign vessels would be justified under international law as a security measure, as well as to ensure the safety of neutral vessels due to the ongoing war.

Flotilla organisers said their ships were intercepted between 70 to 80 nautical miles from shore, well beyond Gaza’s territorial sea.

No doubt this was done for operational reasons. The closer the flotilla came to the Gazan coast, the more difficult it would be for the Israel Defence Force to successfully intercept each ship, raising the possibility that at least one vessel may make landfall.

Scores of activists onboard the ships have reportedly been detained and will be taken into custody in the Israeli port of Ashdod. They will then likely be quickly deported.

The activists have protections under international human rights law, as well, including access to foreign diplomats exercising consular protection for their citizens.

Donald Rothwell receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. Israel’s interception of the Gaza aid flotilla is a clear violation of international law – https://theconversation.com/israels-interception-of-the-gaza-aid-flotilla-is-a-clear-violation-of-international-law-266254

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vicki Sentas, Senior Lecturer in Law, UNSW Sydney

This week, the Supreme Court of New South Wales delivered a landmark judgment against the NSW Police Force for unlawful strip searches. The class action was brought by lead plaintiff Raya Meredith on behalf of all people unlawfully strip searched at music festivals between July 2016 and July 2022.

The court found Meredith’s strip search was unlawful. It also found there was “a gross failure” by police to follow the law, caused by “wholly inadequate” training and supervision of police in the exercise of strip search powers. This resulted in “a flagrant disregard of the rights of the plaintiff”.

With currently more than 3,000 people involved in the class action, this win is likely to have a significant impact on them too, including potential payouts.

This is the largest class action against police in Australia, and the first to clarify the law on strip searches. The findings apply to strip searches more broadly, beyond music festivals. While it’s about NSW law, it’s a lesson to police forces across Australia about what to stop doing now.

The rules of strip searches

In NSW, police can only strip search a person in the field if they suspect, on reasonable grounds, the strip search is “necessary for the purposes of the search” and that “serious and urgent” circumstances make it necessary.

But as my 2019 co-authored research and the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission’s 2020 report shows, rules weren’t always being followed.

Police have been improperly strip searching people for years on the basis that they were suspected of possessing a prohibited drug, or only because a drug dog showed interest.

The court unequivocally said this is unlawful. This is what happened to Raya Meredith at the Splendour in the Grass musical festival in 2018.

‘Total loss of liberty’

After a drug detection dog sniffed in her direction and then moved on, Meredith was taken to a makeshift cubicle.

A personal (pat) search found nothing, but police then directed her to remove her clothing and lift her breasts. Police also directed her to remove her tampon while a female officer inspected her vagina.

After being directed to bend over naked, a male officer entered the search cubicle without warning.

The court said this was an egregious harm to Meredith’s privacy, dignity and bodily integrity that caused her significant humiliation, degradation, fear, distress and a total loss of liberty.

Police broke mandatory safeguards to protect privacy, including to conduct the least invasive search possible and not question during the search. These rendered the strip search unlawful.

None of the officers who conducted strip searches that day made any record why the strip search was necessary, serious or urgent, or whether safeguards were complied with. Along with the drug dog detection sniff, one officer recorded that Meredith “had a smoke with a joint that morning”. Justice Yehia found Meredith never said this: it was likely a mistake by the officer.

For more than two years, the state denied Meredith’s account of what happened and insisted the search was lawful. Then just before the hearing, the position changed, with NSW Police admitting the search was unlawful on some grounds.

Yet the state maintained there were serious and urgent circumstances that justified it. For example, they relied on statistics about the number of hospitalisations for overdoses and deaths, arrests for drug offences and the fact music festivals are known locations for recreational drug use.

Justice Yehia rejected these grounds. These general police experiences and contexts don’t meet the “serious and urgent” tests. It could not be seriously suggested, the judge said, that smoking cannabis before the festival (which Meredith had not) justified a strip search to prevent drug-related harm to her.

Institutional failure

The judgment gives detailed evidence of the systemic failures of NSW Police. In sum, NSW Police’s education, training and monitoring of police conducting strip searches were “wholly insufficient”.

This case grew out of years of advocacy by Redfern Legal Centre for their clients, resulting in sustained criticism of police strip searches, including in academic research, the NSW State Coroners Court, and the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission’s inquiry.

The court also found “exemplary damages” should be awarded for systemic police failures, but deferred decision on the amount to a later date. This means hundreds of millions of damages could be paid out to those who signed up to the class action.

The NSW government ignored the commission’s 2020 recommendations for law reform, deferring to police. It now faces major legal and financial consequences.

For other Australian jurisdictions, the judgment should be a persuasive checklist for interrogating how their police forces are interpreting and following their own specific laws.

This class action forces public police accountability. The question though, is whether the state and NSW Police will simply see it as the cost of doing business.

Vicki Sentas was commissioned pro bono by Redfern Legal Centre to write the 2019 report ‘Rethinking Strip Searches by NSW Police’ (with Dr Michael Grewcock).

– ref. NSW Police lost a huge strip search lawsuit. It has national implications – https://theconversation.com/nsw-police-lost-a-huge-strip-search-lawsuit-it-has-national-implications-266365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marina Yue Zhang, Associate Professor, Technology and Innovation, University of Technology Sydney

Though they still haven’t been officially confirmed, reports China’s state-owned buyer told steelmakers to stop purchasing iron ore from Australian mining giant BHP have rattled both markets and Canberra.

At first glance, this looks like a simple dispute over price. But step back, and a picture begins to emerge of something possibly far more deliberate.

If true, this ban represents a pressure test from China – one that goes beyond trade and speaks directly to the future of Australia’s economy and the shape of global resource politics.

A dispute over price

The flashpoint appears to be a breakdown in iron ore supply contract talks between BHP and the China Mineral Resources Group (CMRG), a government-run company created in 2022 to consolidate purchases for China’s steel industry. The disagreement centres on stalled negotiations over pricing.

According to reporting by Bloomberg, China applied pressure earlier in September by instructing its mills to stop buying one specific BHP product. Then, at the end of the month, China reportedly expanded the order to suspend all shipments from BHP priced in US dollars.

Neither side has yet confirmed or denied the report, and one Chinese commodity analysis firm, Mysteel, disputed the claim of a ban. But markets were quick to react anyway. BHP’s share price fell on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese voiced concern over the report, and Treasurer Jim Chalmers spoke with BHP chief executive Mike Henry.

For Canberra, it may have carried an unsettling sense of déjà vu: harking back to the 2020–21 trade dispute, when Beijing targeted Australian exports including wine, barley, and coal.

The difference now is that iron ore matters more than any of those products combined. Nearly 60% of Australia’s exports to China in the year to May 2024 were iron ore. Losing access to that trade would strike at the heart of Australia’s economy.

China’s long game

To understand where China sits in these negotiations, it is necessary to rewind two decades.

Despite being the world’s biggest buyer of iron ore, China has long had little influence over the price. Hundreds of steel mills cut deals separately with BHP, Rio Tinto, and Brazil’s Vale. The miners spoke with one voice. The mills did not.

The result was higher costs for China, captured in a phrase often used in its media: the “pain of pricing power”. Whatever China bought, the price went up.

Attempts to push back failed. The China Iron and Steel Association urged boycotts of the miners, but mills broke ranks to secure supply.

In 2009, one Rio Tinto executive was jailed in China for alleged commercial espionage during fraught negotiations.

Then came 2010. BHP’s chief executive Marius Kloppers led a push to replace annual price benchmarks with shorter-term market-based pricing.

This change supercharged profits for Western Australian producers, who could capitalise instantly as China’s demand surged. For China, it was a nightmare – less control, more volatility, bigger bills.

The creation of the CMRG in 2022 was Beijing’s strategic response.

This is not old-fashioned central planning. It is state capitalism with sharper tools: centralised buying, stockpiling, and big data to support national goals. Its purpose is clear – to turn China from price-taker into price-maker.

The standoff: who holds the cards?

Australia and China rely on each other, but not in equal amounts.

Australia is critically dependent on China for revenue. China, in the short term, still depends heavily on Australian ore. BHP alone supplies around 13% of China’s imports – impossible for either side to replace overnight.

BHP is seeking alternative markets, and Beijing is investing billions in Guinea’s Simandou mine, but both things will take years or decades before reaching scale.

That creates a tense balance: fighting without breaking (斗而不破). Both sides can inflict pain, but neither can afford a full rupture.

If the reports are true, the “ban” is less a final break than a negotiation tactic. It is Beijing’s way of showing BHP – and by extension Rio Tinto and Vale – that the old rules no longer apply.

The future: from iron ore to green steel

Beneath this contest lies a bigger question: who will shape the future of steel?

Traditional steelmaking is one of the world’s dirtiest industries. It relies on coal, which pumps out carbon emissions. The next frontier is “green steel”, made with renewable energy and green hydrogen instead of coal.

During his visit to Beijing earlier this year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pitched a vision for Australia to move beyond exporting raw ore and instead sell processed “green iron” – an intermediate product on the path to green steel. With its vast renewable resources, Australia could climb the value chain rather than remain just “the world’s quarry”.

This aligns with China’s own carbon-neutral goals. By flexing now, Beijing may be signalling that future cooperation on green steel will come with conditions. China will not simply be a buyer; it intends to set the rules.

Marina Yue Zhang 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. Is China’s reported ban on BHP a bluff, or a glimpse of the future? – https://theconversation.com/is-chinas-reported-ban-on-bhp-a-bluff-or-a-glimpse-of-the-future-266480

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michele Governale, Professor of Physics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Many governments and tech companies are investing heavily in quantum technologies. In New Zealand, the recently announced Institute for Advanced Technology is also envisioned to focus on this area of research.

As quantum technologies develop, we argue quantum literacy becomes essential for informed discussions and policy on their potentially profound societal implications.

Quantum technologies build on quantum mechanics, a fundamental theory that explains the structure of matter and has enabled the design of many useful devices such as transistors, microchips and lasers.

The term “quantum” comes from German physicist Max Planck, who proposed that energy can only come in discrete packets, or quanta.

When atoms absorb or emit energy quanta, they transition between quantised energy levels. New technologies use the quantum nature of such levels to develop super-fast computers, precision sensors and improved encryption.

One of the key ingredients in almost any kind of quantum tech is the phenomenon known as “quantum entanglement”. It has really bizarre implications which Albert Einstein once called “spooky action at a distance”. Among non-physicists, it typically raises consternation or fascination.

Concepts of quantum mechanics are sometimes incorporated – and in the process occasionally misappropriated – in popular culture.

Entanglement has not been spared this fate. Some science fiction writers are using it as a device for making the impossible seem plausible.

For example, in Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel Three Body Problem, an alien civilisation uses pairs of entangled particles to maintain faster-than-light (super-luminal) communications with Earth. To be clear, this is impossible.

Quantum entanglement can’t beat the speed-of-light limit, but it can still make some wild things work. This includes quantum-enhanced sensors to improve applications in medicine and environmental monitoring, and in precision measurements such as the gravitational wave detector LIGO in the United States.

Quantum computers could also crack certain problems that are practically unsolvable on a classical computer, such as modelling the mechanics of how proteins fold.

And quantum cryptography would protect information better by providing eavesdropper-proof encryption protocols – while also being able to detect earthquakes on the side.

The wild quantum world

Entanglement works only with quantum things and emerges most clearly when there are only two energy levels.

Classical computers store information in bits, where each bit can be either 0 or 1. In a quantum computer, the bits are replaced by “qubits”, each having two energy levels which are usually denoted as |0⟩ and |1⟩.

Unlike the classical bit, a qubit can be in a “superposition”, meaning it can be both |0⟩ and |1⟩, until an observer checks the qubit state.

This measurement yields either 0 or 1, depending on the relative share of the states |0⟩ and |1⟩ in the superposition. If the result is 0, the qubit state after the measurement becomes |0⟩. Likewise, if the result is 1, the state becomes |1⟩.

To discuss entanglement, we need to consider at least two qubits in an entangled state. We use the state described mathematically as |Φ⁺⟩ (see figure below).

Let’s imagine two quantum engineers, who we named Alice and Bob in our illustration. Each takes one qubit from the pair and travels somewhere far apart. When they measure their qubits, they’ll both obtain a 0 or a 1 with equal probability.

If they repeat this experiment with many other entangled qubit pairs prepared in the same |Φ⁺⟩ state and record their results, both will find a random series of 0s and 1s.

But when they compare their lists, they will find something astounding: every time Alice measures a 0, Bob will have also measured 0 for his corresponding qubit, and vice versa. The results are perfectly correlated, even though both their states are undetermined prior to the measurement.

It is as if, when Alice makes her measurement, Bob’s qubit instantaneously “knows” and changes into the same state.

Einstein was so bothered by this non-intuitive behaviour that he strongly believed quantum mechanics must be incomplete, and that a better theory would contain hidden variables that determine the outcome of the measurements before the pair is even separated.

However, experiments in the 1980s have definitively ruled out such local hidden-variable theories. For their demonstration that Einstein was wrong, three physicists were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2022.

New Zealand’s contribution

We have illustrated entanglement using pairs of qubits. But fundamentally, entanglement can occur between all kinds of physical systems, and this is where New Zealand researchers are making significant contributions.

Superconductors are materials that have zero electrical resistance when cooled below a certain temperature and at the same time expel magnetic fields. They are useful for making strong magnets.

To make a metal superconducting, the electrons form entangled pairs, known as Cooper pairs. A research team involving one of us has recently proposed a scheme to extract entangled electron pairs from the superconductor and transfer their entanglement onto photons, the quanta of light.

Another research group has successfully entangled two atoms cooled to almost absolute zero.

To expand research and build an industry based on quantum technologies, we need targeted investment to establish a quantum-ready workforce. Not only must we actively contribute to and capitalise on the global quantum effort, we also have to lift quantum literacy at all levels of society – starting in school.

Michele Governale receives funding from the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

Ulrich Zuelicke receives funding from Te Whai Ao – Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies.

– ref. ‘Spooky action at a distance’ – a beginner’s guide to quantum entanglement and why it matters in the real world – https://theconversation.com/spooky-action-at-a-distance-a-beginners-guide-to-quantum-entanglement-and-why-it-matters-in-the-real-world-266227

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

The ancient Athenian writer Isocrates (436-338 BC) once commented:

Many cities judge those who excel in the athletic contests to be worthy of greater rewards than those who, by painstaking thought and endeavour, discover some useful thing.

Why is it so many people are obsessed with big sporting events and the great athletes who perform in them?

With Grand Final season upon us for Australia’s two major codes – the Australian Football League and National Rugby League – it’s worth reflecting on the long history of major sporting events.

The main events on the ancient sporting calendar

Everyone has heard of the ancient Olympics. These games were held at the site of Olympia, in Elis.

The earliest recorded Olympic games occurred in 776 BC but the competition might have existed long before that time.

The ancient Olympic games lasted for more than 1,000 years, coming to an end in the reign of the emperor Theodosius the Younger (408-450 AD).

Not many people now know the Olympics was just one of a group of four main sporting events in the ancient world.

The other main competitions on the sporting calendar were the Pythian games (established in 586 BC), the Isthmian games (established in 582 BC) and the Nemean games (established in 573 BC).

These were all primarily athletic contests, though they also included some musical competitions.

Victors at the Olympic games won an olive wreath to wear as a crown.

At the Pythian games the prize was a laurel wreath, at the Nemean games a wreath of celery leaves, at the Isthmian games a wreath of pine leaves. Wreaths were prized as a sign of great glory and excellence.

These four events were collectively called the “periodos” (meaning “cycle”).

The Olympic and Pythian games were held every four years. The Nemean and Isthmian games were held every two years.

This arrangement meant in a cycle of four years, the first year would feature the Isthmian and Olympic games, the second year Nemean games, the third year Isthmian and Pythian games, and the fourth year Nemean games.

An athlete who won prizes at all four games in one cycle was called a “periodonikes” (meaning “cycle winner”).

Being periodonikes was one of the highest accolades any athlete could achieve in the ancient world. A modern equivalent is the “Grand Slam” in tennis – when a player wins all four major championships (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open) in one year.

Some ancient athletes, like the long-distance runner Ergoteles of Himera (5th century BC), became periodonikes twice.

Ancient sports fans

Ancient people loved to attend all four of these major events.

The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom said people who went to the games had simple motives.

They wanted, Dio tells us,

to watch the athletes and to fill themselves up with food and drink.

Fans sat in the seats, eating and drinking, cheering on the athletes and celebrating the victories.

The Greek writer Philostratus (190-230 AD) described the reaction of fans in the stands when an athlete won:

the spectators jump up from their seats and shout, some wave their hands, some their garments, some leap from the ground, and some grapple with their neighbours for joy … these really amazing deeds make it impossible for the spectators to contain themselves.

Other types of spectacles

Ancient Greeks and Romans did not hold competitions with prizes for games with balls or other types of sporting activities.

For the Greeks, athletics and races with horses were supreme.

The Romans enjoyed creating huge combat spectacles involving gladiators or ships.

For example, to entertain the people, the Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC-54 AD) created a naval battle involving 19,000 combatants at Lake Fucinus. Criminals from Roman prisons were brought in to fight each other to the death for this grim spectacle.

According to the historian Tacitus (56-c.120 AD), people flocked from all Italy to see this event:

The shores, the hills, the mountain-crests, formed a kind of theatre, soon filled by an untold multitude, attracted from the neighbouring towns, and in part from the Rome itself.

Although it’s unlikely Australians will be able to watch massive fights-to-the-death at stadiums any time soon, the people’s love of big sporting spectacles seems unlikely ever to come to an end.

Konstantine Panegyres 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. From gladiators to mock naval battles, what were the major sports events in the ancient world? – https://theconversation.com/from-gladiators-to-mock-naval-battles-what-were-the-major-sports-events-in-the-ancient-world-265073

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

On Sunday, a gunman launched a horrifying attack on people at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan.

Thomas Jacob Sanford allegedly rammed his pickup truck, adorned with American flags, into the doors of the chapel as a service was taking place. Authorities stated he shot at worshippers with an assault weapon, then set fire to the building. Four people died, and police killed Sanford at the scene shortly afterwards.

Media reports and government spokespeople suggest Sanford was motivated by a pronounced hatred of followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), widely known as Mormons.

According to a childhood friend, Peter Tersigni, Sanford became fixated with the church when he started dating one of its members while living in Utah:

He started dating this girl and then investigated and learned about Mormons because she was a Mormon. And I know that also, he got into meth really hardcore. It messed his life up and it messed his head up. And it just happened to be at the time he was around Mormons.

The language Sanford is reported to have used to describe Mormons – calling them “the antichrist” and saying “they are going to take over the world” – taps into a conspiracist suspicion of Mormons that has existed in America since the LDS church was founded in 1830, and which is still widespread in some subcultures today.

Anti-Mormonism in American history

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, had enemies from the beginning. New Christian sects were proliferating in America, but Smith went further than most. He declared himself a “prophet” and claimed to have a new religious scripture that was equal to the Bible.

Many denounced Smith as a fraud, and his neighbours feared the political power he wielded over his growing community of followers. After the Mormons were forced out of Missouri by a state Extermination Order and a subsequent massacre, Smith was assassinated by an anti-Mormon militia in Illinois in 1844.

The Mormons fled to Utah in 1847 under the leadership of Brigham Young. There they endured decades of federal government pressure to abandon the practice of polygamy and submit to the authority of the United States, which sometimes brought in armed forces.

This may seem like remote history, but to this day many evangelical Christians fear the fast-growing but “false religion” of Mormonism will lure people away from true Christianity. There is a cottage industry of YouTubers, some of them ex-Mormons, dedicated to disproving the teachings of Joseph Smith.

Nor has the violent past been forgotten. Earlier this year Netflix released a series depicting the Mountain Meadows Massacre, perpetrated by a Mormon militia in 1857.

Jon Krakauer’s 2003 bestselling book, Under the Banner of Heaven, also made into a streaming series, explored 1980s murders in a Mormon splinter sect. The book emphasised the prevalence of violence in early LDS history.

Anti-Mormonism today

Anti-Mormon violence is relatively rare in America today, but aversion to Mormons is not.

A 2022 YouGov poll of Americans found 39% of respondents held unfavourable views of Mormons, compared to just 17% with favourable views. This net negative approval was comparable to American attitudes towards Muslims, and more negative than American attitudes towards atheists.

I argued in a 2014 study that Mormons face hostility from both sides of America’s culture wars. Many conservative Christians believe Mormons are not real Christians. At the same time, many liberal and secular-minded people associate Mormons with the Christian-right.

In 2012, the high-profile Mormon Mitt Romney became the Republican candidate for the presidential election. The number of liberal and non-religious people who said they would not vote for a Mormon for president increased significantly between 2007 and 2012, despite the fact Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was also a Mormon.

The LDS church was also prominent in campaigns against same-sex marriage in western states in the late 2000s. This led to protests and some acts of vandalism at LDS houses of worship, prompting expressions of solidarity by other conservative religious groups.

The bipartisan nature of anti-Mormonism arguably makes it one of the more socially acceptable biases in the US. But there is a world of difference between not wanting a Mormon president, or enjoying such mockery as the Book of Mormon musical, and physically attacking Mormons.

From prejudice to violence

Between 2015 and 2024, the FBI counted 160 hate crimes reported against LDS victims. These included 63 acts of vandalism and property destruction and 29 assaults. The states with the most incidents were Utah (25), California (23), Washington (14), Tennessee (12), Georgia (10) and Nevada (10).

A 2019 report in the LDS-owned Deseret News expressed concern over rising anti-Mormon hate crimes. But it pointed out this was part of a larger trend of rising hate crime in the US, and that anti-LDS incidents were dwarfed by hate crimes targeting Jews and Muslims during the same period.

Immediately after the Grand Blanc killings, President Donald Trump called the incident “yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America”.

This fits his culture-war framing of Christians being under constant attack. But it glosses over the specific animus Mormons face in American society, often from other Christians and conservatives (the alleged Grand Blanc shooter wore a Trump 2020 shirt in a social media post).

Since 2000, there have been nearly 500 homicides in American places of worship, three quarters of them by firearm. This is a bigger problem than the violence facing any one religious group.

David Smith 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 Michigan church shooting sits within a long history of hatred against Mormons in America – https://theconversation.com/the-michigan-church-shooting-sits-within-a-long-history-of-hatred-against-mormons-in-america-266481

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Maguire, Professor in Human Rights and International Law, University of Newcastle

Between 2019 and 2023, I reported on the Malka Leifer case for The Conversation. As an international lawyer, my focus was on the attempt to extradite Leifer from Israel to Australia for trial. Leifer had been principal of the Adass Israel school in Melbourne and was accused of sexually abusing three sisters who had been students at the school.

Watching Surviving Malka Leifer was revelatory. This new film, directed by Adam Kamien, centres the survivors of Leifer’s abuse. Sisters Nicole Meyer, Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper reveal their trauma and claim their power through this film.

Surviving Malka Leifer is challenging to watch, but can teach viewers much about trauma, persistence and survival.

Ultra-Orthodox upbringing and vulnerability

The girls were born into the ultra-Orthodox Adass community in Melbourne. The community is described in the documentary as insular and fundamentalist. Girls and boys were segregated. The girls’ education focused on preparation for marriage, rather than mastery of curriculum. The sisters received no sex education, and had no access to television or digital media.

The film shows how such communities avoid involving outside authorities. A former mayor of the Immanuel settlement in the West Bank, where Leifer fled from Australian justice, says on camera “we don’t believe in non-Jewish law”. Instead, sex offenders are “treated” by the community rather than handed over for punishment by the state.

The sisters tell the filmmakers that they were abused by their parents throughout their childhood. They were physically beaten, emotionally abused and deprived of food. Dassi says that when Leifer told her “this is what a loving mother does”, she believed it because she had never experienced a loving parental relationship.

Justice delayed is justice denied

Surviving Malka Leifer follows Elly, Dassi and Nicole through the torturous process of seeking justice. The sisters are interviewed alone and together and we see their video diaries.

While the sisters recount their abuse, we are often taken into a constructed dollhouse, classroom and courtroom where the sisters are represented as tiny dolls. A spider moves about these constructed rooms – it appears enormous relative to the dolls.

Alongside Freya Berkhout’s haunting original music and the raw accounts of the documentary subjects, these devices heighten the sense of risk and vulnerability in the film. As we follow the chronology of the sisters’ campaign to bring Leifer to Australia, we become ever more engaged in their rising panic about whether she will face justice.

In 2008, Dassi’s allegations of sexual abuse by Leifer were brought to the attention of a teacher. The school board met and put the allegations to Leifer, who refuted them. The allegations were not taken to police. The same day, the wife of a school board member facilitated travel arrangements for Leifer to flee to Israel.

Dassi discovered her sisters had also been abused by Leifer. In 2011, Dassi, Nicole and Elly made formal statements to Victoria Police. Australia sought Leifer’s extradition from Israel in 2013.

Leifer was arrested in 2014 but later bailed. The prosecutor would later argue she feigned mental illness to escape proper hearings of her matter for many years. In 2018, she was again detained when evidence revealed she was living freely in the Immanuel settlement.

Kamien’s film integrates the complexities of the legal process with the experiences of Leifer’s victim-survivors. We see how Leifer was protected by senior religious and political figures.

Throughout the film we learn about the sisters’ psychological torment, to the point of suicidality and hospitalisation. The delay in justice is central to the film’s narrative. The sisters’ trauma was compounded over their many years of campaigning and waiting.

Retraumatisation through the trial process

Some of the most upsetting sequences reflect the retraumatisation of Nicole, Dassi and Elly through the trial process. By the time of the trial in Melbourne, almost 100 court hearings had been held across two countries. The initial set of 74 charges was reduced to 29.

The sisters had to give evidence separately, without each others’ support in the courtroom. They describe on camera degrading experiences of cross-examination, including the insinuation that sexual activity with Leifer was consensual and that they had contaminated their evidence through collusion.

Retraumatisation is acute for Nicole, some of whose evidence was ruled inadmissible. The trial judge also decided that the jury could not hear evidence regarding how the school board assisted Leifer to flee to Israel. Former Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu, a long time advocate for the sisters, claims in the documentary that these rulings limited the jury’s confidence to reach findings against Leifer.

After a three week trial and ten day jury deliberation, Leifer is found guilty on 18 charges relating to Elly and Dassi, including six charges of rape. She is sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, with an 11.5 year non-parole period.

Leifer is found not guilty of the charges relating to Nicole. Nicole describes this outcome as a “win” for Leifer. Her video diaries reveal grave emotional distress over subsequent months.

Surviving Malka Leifer tells several important stories. We see how the perceived interests of an insular religious community are prioritised over the victims of sexual abuse. We see how legal processes, especially when protracted, re-traumatise victims and maintain their vulnerability as abusers pose counter-narratives before courts.

We also see three women who have persisted through unimaginable trauma in their campaign for justice. Their courage is breathtaking.

Surviving Malka Leifer is on Stan from Sunday.

The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

Amy Maguire receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. New documentary about the Malka Leifer case centres trauma, persistence and survival – https://theconversation.com/new-documentary-about-the-malka-leifer-case-centres-trauma-persistence-and-survival-265199

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lyndsey Collins-Praino, Associate Professor, School of Biomedicine, University of Adelaide

Most of us know dementia – a broad term for several disorders involving declines in memory, language and thinking – can severely affect daily life.

But dementia is now the leading cause of death for Australians.

Earlier this month, data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found 17,400 people died in 2023 due to dementia. This is 9.5% of all deaths.

But it can also be an associated factor in death, accounting for a further 15,000 deaths in 2023. This is considered dying with dementia.

Studies suggest dementia deaths may be even higher, as under-reporting on death certificates is common.

So, how does dementia actually lead to death?

How dementia progresses

Dementia is a neurodegenerative condition associated with progressive death of cells within the brain. The most common form is Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for 60–70% of all cases.

People with dementia experience declines in cognitive function that interfere with their everyday life, including memory loss, difficulty communicating, or trouble thinking. They might also experience changes in their mood, behaviour or personality.

As dementia progresses, cell loss spreads throughout the brain. Eventually it reaches regions such as the brainstem, which are important for vital functions, such as breathing and swallowing.

In some cases, these effects on the brain can cause death. But they can also lead to other complications, which can then be fatal.

Secondary complications can be deadly

When swallowing becomes more difficult late in the disease, serious complications can develop.

People with dementia may accidentally inhale food or liquid into their lungs. This can lead to bacterial infections, such as aspiration pneumonia.

One 2019 review of 19 studies found people with dementia had double the risk of dying from pneumonia, compared to those without dementia.

Pneumonia caused more than one in four (29.69%) deaths of people with dementia. When the cause of death was confirmed via autopsy, rather than based on what was recorded on a death certificate, this was as high as one in two (49.98%).

Difficulties with swallowing can also lead to dehydration, weight loss and malnutrition. These can be further exacerbated by loss of appetite and lead to worse health and a weakened immune system.

This is why in its later stages, people with dementia often find it harder to fight off infections such as pneumonia or flu, and are more likely to experience complications.

Urinary tract infections also become more likely, due to incontinence and challenges maintaining personal hygiene. Communication difficulties may mean these infections go undetected.

Left untreated, infections can cause sepsis in severe cases. This is an extreme response to an infection, where the body attacks its own tissues and organs. It can lead to septic shock, organ failure and even death if not identified and treated.

Beyond infections, dementia can also increase frailty and impair balance and coordination. This can increase the risk of falls: people with dementia are twice as likely as those without the condition to have a fall.

And, when they do, they’re more likely to experience severe consequences, such as fractures, hospitalisation and even death.

Age plays a role

It is also important to acknowledge that age is the biggest risk factor for dementia. Among Australians aged 30–59, only one in 1,000 have dementia. Among those aged 85–89, this jumps to 210 in 1,000.

Older people may experience other age-related health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure (hypertension).

Dementia may make it more difficult to manage these conditions, leading to further health complications, such as stroke or heart attack. In these cases – when dementia is a contributing factor, but is not the primary cause of death – this is usually listed as dying with dementia.

In 2023, the leading causes of death among people who died with dementia were:

• heart disease (more than 1,900 deaths)
• stroke or other cerebrovascular disease (almost 1,500 deaths)
• COVID-19 (around 1,200 deaths)
• accidental falls (almost 1,100 deaths)
• diabetes (around 1,000 deaths).

Ways to reduce your risk

Without a medical breakthrough, the number of Australian dementia cases is projected to rise to more than one million by 2065.

The increase is partly due to our growing ageing population.

But dementia is not inevitable – and is not just a normal part of ageing.

The Lancet Commission on dementia, convened to review the evidence and provide recommendations on how to manage and prevent dementia, has identified 14 modifiable risk factors for dementia. These are:

• less education
• hearing loss
• high low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol
• depression
• traumatic brain injury
• physical inactivity
• diabetes
• smoking
• high blood pressure (hypertension)
• obesity
• drinking excessive alcohol
• social isolation
• exposure to air pollution
• vision loss.

By addressing these – at both the individual level and through government policies – it’s estimated we could prevent up to 45% of dementia cases. This could lead to us not only living longer, but living healthier for longer.

Lyndsey Collins-Praino receives funding from the National Health and Medical Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, the Australian Research Council and various philanthropic organisations. In addition to her academic role, she is affiliated with the Dementia Australia Research Foundation Scientific Panel, the MS Australia Research Management Council and the Hospital Research Foundation- Parkinson’s SA Board of Governor’s.

– ref. Dementia is now the leading cause of death in Australia. But why is it fatal? – https://theconversation.com/dementia-is-now-the-leading-cause-of-death-in-australia-but-why-is-it-fatal-265678

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tod Jones, Senior Lecturer, Human Geography, Curtin University

Australia relies on seasonal workers, particularly in agriculture and hospitality, to fill shortages of much-needed skills.

But a combination of low pay, strict visa conditions and housing unavailability in regional areas is placing these workers at risk of overcrowded and inappropriate housing conditions.

To provide seasonal workers with safe and secure accommodation, we need to better understand who they are and the housing problems they’re facing.

Our research examined the experiences of these workers. Interviews and focus groups captured the views and experiences of almost 100 workers and other stakeholders in five locations in regional Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.

We found widespread poor accommodation with little storage, safety risks and inadequate enforcement of basic standards.

Who are these workers?

Many seasonal workers come to Australia from other countries. Their working conditions are shaped by the visa they’ve been granted.

Workers coming as part of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme can stay for up to four years and are prevented from moving or changing employer.

Those with Working Holiday Maker visas are under 35 years old. They’re required to work for three or more months annually in regional locations to extend their visa.

Australian seasonal workers are not restricted by visa conditions and tend to be either under 35, or older Australians on working holidays.

We also found another vulnerable group: long-term workers in seasonal industries being forced into temporary or precarious housing due to shortages of affordable and suitable accommodation.

In June 2024, there were 173,216 working holiday makers in Australia (mainly in urban areas) and in December 2024, there were 27,260 PALM workers in regional Australia.

PALM worker numbers increased during the COVID pandemic when working holiday maker numbers declined.

Crowded and cramped conditions

There are large differences in quality and cost among seasonal and vulnerable worker accommodation, even in the same locations.

Often, workers rely on temporary and informal housing, such as shipping containers, caravans and portable buildings.

Even in permanent housing, temporary measures such as bunk beds, sharing rooms and shared facilities are common for extended periods.

Residents reported that crowding and a lack of privacy affected their mental health, productivity and sleep.

Working holiday makers and seasonal Australian workers are willing to tolerate crowded and poor-quality accommodation for short periods. But PALM workers sometimes endure inappropriate conditions for extended periods. As one worker in Victoria described:

the worst thing was the sleeping arrangements: sometimes three of us would share one room, and the beds were just like that, crammed together. One person slept on one side, another in the middle, and another on the other side.

Storage was an issue across all locations, particularly for longer-term residents. PALM workers revealed particularly extreme experiences, such as having to sleep on top of their clothes due to lack of storage space.

Accommodation costs are highly variable even within locations. PALM workers are most at risk of exploitation and poor housing due to their reliance on their employer. A person involved with organising worker accommodation observed:

before [the labour hire company] took over that caravan park, those caravans were going for $200, $300 a week. And then once the PALM workers came, there was a change in the lease arrangement, and they went up to $800.

This group is also the most hesitant to complain and may require culturally competent advocates to assist them with addressing accommodation issues.

What’s causing these problems?

Effective responses should be based on the underlying causes of poor accommodation.

While employer-provided accommodation is an important part of the solution, it has also been found to lead to inappropriate housing at times. This is possibly due to the level of power imbalances involved.

PALM workers are particularly at risk because they cannot change employers and the vast majority of their housing is provided by their employers. Workers in employer-provided accommodation are more reluctant to advocate for improvements than those in private housing.

Second, standards and costs are often inappropriate for workers. This is particularly the case for long-term workers who often reside in accommodation with standards intended for short, seasonal stays.

In Coral Bay, Western Australia there were unacceptable risks to mental health, and from fire and extreme temperatures. Standards were poor and workers were often unwilling, or unaware of how, to make complaints.

These issues were also present for many PALM workers we interviewed on four-year visas.

Third, private investment in worker accommodation is limited due to lower returns on investment, with local governments being increasingly asked to step into this gap.

What can be done?

Our research provided an opportunity to explore solutions with government and industry stakeholders and workers.

While larger businesses can invest in accommodation, such as the Royal Automobile Club has done in Coral Bay, smaller businesses struggle due to the cost.

There is a desire for local collaborative models that understand the realities these smaller businesses face. For instance, the Coral Bay focus group floated a business cooperative model that could co-invest with government to develop accommodation for staff working for small businesses.

As a group often defined as expendable and cheap labour, seasonal and vulnerable workers fall through the many cracks between levels of government and the private sector. Poor accommodation outcomes affect workers, industries and communities.

Australia needs policies that address the social and longer-term aspirations of Australian and international workers and give them the opportunity to make meaningful lives in regional communities.

The authors would like to acknowledge researchers Joseph Cheer and Carla Chung for their contributions to the research this article discusses.

Tod Jones receives funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Australia Research Council.

Amity James receives funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Australian Research Council.

Michael Volgger receives funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. He has previously received funding from a range of entities and organisations including Tourism Western Australia, the WA Government’s Parks and Wildlife Service, Australia’s South West Inc. and the RAC.

Salome Adams receives funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Australian Research Council.

Sara Niner receives funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

– ref. Dangerous, overpriced, crammed full: poor housing for seasonal workers revealed – https://theconversation.com/dangerous-overpriced-crammed-full-poor-housing-for-seasonal-workers-revealed-266049

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Downie, Professor of Political Science, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University

Have you heard offshore windfarms kill whales? (They don’t.) Or that electric vehicles catch fire more often than petrol cars? (It’s the opposite.) Perhaps you’ve heard “natural” gas is clean? (It can be worse than coal.)

This is what climate misinformation looks like. These claims are common, influential and damaging. They’re often spread for a reason: to slow the uptake of clean alternatives to fossil fuels. Unfortunately, they are shaping public opinion.

This week, a Senate inquiry is hearing testimony from officials, climate scientists and researchers about the scale of the problem and its effects on Australian politics. Policymakers are also hearing about the main culprits: oil, gas and coal companies, as well as key enablers such as public relations firms. I was one of the experts called to give evidence.

My research has followed the money trail between the fossil fuel industry and public relations firms. As a co-editor on a forthcoming book on climate obstruction, I can say that large PR firms have too often put their commercial interests, and the interests of fossil fuel giants, ahead of those of the public. My colleagues and I made this clear in our submission to the inquiry.

What’s the point of misinformation?

In the climate domain, researchers typically use the word “misinformation” to refer to any falsehoods about climate change. They can be spread innocuously or through a deliberate campaign.

Misinformation matters because it can influence attitudes and behaviours of both the public and political elites. Tackling climate change effectively requires public support for clean energy and many other changes. Misinformation erodes this support for climate science and climate policies. The more often false information is repeated, the more likely we are to think of it as true.

These campaigns can inflate the sense of opposition to climate action and give policymakers a false sense of how widespread support for climate action is.

Australian policymakers have previously moved to ban or restrict advertising for products known to be dangerous. Cigarette advertising is banned because cigarettes cause cancer, and now there’s a growing push to ban fossil fuel advertising due to the damage done by emissions.

How do PR firms spread climate misinformation?

PR and advertising firms have long been paid to craft political campaigns for oil and gas companies often to block or slow climate policies.

These campaigns involve more than simply running a few television ads for a corporate client. PR firms often run polling, focus groups and media and social media campaigns. Some undertake astroturfing – creating fake community groups to give the impression of widespread support or opposition for an issue or policy.

The largest of these campaigns have been documented in the United States. To gauge how much the oil and gas industry pours into PR firms to run political campaigns, my colleague and I analysed a decade’s worth of the tax records of industry groups active on climate change issues in the US. We found oil and gas lobby groups spent A$1.5 billion on public relations and advertising between 2008 and 2018.

What did this money buy? Here’s one example. Ahead of the US presidential election in 2012, a group named “Energy Citizens” ran an ad campaign titled “I’m an energy voter” across newspapers, television and online, featuring ordinary Americans saying “I vote … for American domestic energy”.

Energy Citizens appeared to be a grassroots campaign. But in reality, it was astroturfing. The oil and gas industry had contracted the large PR firm Edelman to run the campaign. The people in the ads were hired actors. Between 2011 and 2012, our data shows the largest oil and gas industry group, the American Petroleum Institute, paid Edelman A$180 million in contracts for public relations and advertising.

Climate obstruction is common in Australia

This is not a US-specific problem. PR firms have a long history of helping obstruct climate policy in Australia, too. The effective coal industry campaign against an emissions trading scheme in Australia between 2008 and 2010 was created by PR firms and political consultants.

Australia’s poor disclosure practices mean we don’t know how much money industry groups are paying PR companies in Australia.

But we do know PR companies are creating misinformation campaigns and astroturfing groups such as Australians for Natural Gas, which describes itself as a non-government organisation. It was set up by the chief executive of gas company Tamboran Resources, with help from PR firm Freshwater Strategy, according to media reports.

Many PR firms in Australia have worked for the fossil fuel industry, as documented by climate communications charity Comms Declare. In response, some PR professionals are pushing to cut ties with the industry.

Misinformation is dangerous

The problem has been recognised at the highest levels. Last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on PR firms to “stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction”.

Last month, the Australian government released its long-awaited report on the very real and escalating dangers posed by climate change.

This week’s Senate hearings could not be more timely. Climate misinformation is spreading wildly – aided by public relations firms – even as climate change worsens and the risks mount. The question now is, how will policymakers respond?

Christian Downie receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. PR firms are spreading climate misinformation on behalf of fossil fuel companies. Could Australia stop them? – https://theconversation.com/pr-firms-are-spreading-climate-misinformation-on-behalf-of-fossil-fuel-companies-could-australia-stop-them-266353

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Dawel, Clinical Psychologist and Senior Lecturer, School of Medicine and Psychology, Australian National University

Young people today are growing up in an increasingly complex world — and arguably suffering as a result.

Social media and smartphones provide constant distractions, while the rise of AI and misinformation mean nothing online is straightforward.

The pandemic has shown young people the world can be an unpredictable place, the housing crisis makes it hard to make a stable home, while climate change hangs over their future.

It’s no wonder the wellbeing and mental health of young adults has deteriorated across the globe.

Parents and educators teach kids to eat well, stay active, and look after their bodies from when they are little. But what about helping them maintain a healthy mind?

Start early

Prevention is key. Just as early eating habits often carry through to adulthood, we can set the stage for good mental health from birth.

Our brains are more “plastic” early in life, meaning they adapt to the world around them. As a result, childhood experiences shape the mind’s architecture for decades to come.

Stress and trauma can make our brains more vulnerable to poor mental health. But equally, positive early experiences are linked to adulthood wellbeing and cognitive health.

How can we approach mental health prevention for kids? Positive psychology – or the study of wellbeing – offers some clues. Here are three.

1. Prioritise real life relationships

Humans are social creatures and loneliness — which affects many young people — is a key risk factor for poor mental health.

When we connect in-person we “synchronise”. This means people’s behaviour and brains come into harmony, helping them to feel connected and treat each other well.

Interacting online disrupts this synchronisation.

So we need to help young people build good quality relationships in real life.

One of the keys to building good relationships is making time for them. This includes prioritising in-person activities that you enjoy doing together. For example, playing games or sports, taking a walk, or making a meal together.

2. Learn how to overcome challenges

Research also suggests “mastery” is important. This is the sense that we can learn new skills or take on challenges and overcome them. This helps people feel that their actions matter and that they have some control over their world.

Mastery is particularly fulfilling when we tackle something that is intrinsically motivating – where we value the activity in and of itself, not for any extrinsic reward, like winning or wages.

Intrinsic motivation is personal. It could be anything from the joy of playing sport with teammates (even when you lose) to satisfaction experienced in learning the piano.

So it’s important young people have opportunities to pursue things they are genuinely interested in and that challenge them along the way.

3. Create opportunities for positive emotions

All of this ties into a third essential ingredient for human wellbeing: positive emotions.

These range from awe to gratitude, joy and curiosity. They improve both our psychological and physical health.

We can’t positive emotions all the time – life is inevitably up and down. And sometimes sad, bad or unlucky things happen. It’s important that we feel and express these emotions too.

But we can foster a greater balance of positive emotions by deliberately scheduling activities we enjoy and paying attention to how we feel. This does not have to be complicated or expensive. It may involve small things like pausing to appreciate a beautiful butterfly during a walk or noticing the taste of a yummy meal.

It’s like the food pyramid – but for a healthy mind

So, how do we get these ingredients into our children’s lives? Luckily we have a well-known framework to start from: the food pyramid.

The pyramid tells us we need a mix of things. Some of these things we need a lot of. Others things should only be occasional.

In terms of our mental wellbeing, we need a lot of social connection, every day and in large amounts. Social connection is the “vegetables” of a good mind diet, but more enjoyable!

We also need to consume a diverse range of high-quality information. This might include things like learning new skills or subjects at school, which can foster a sense of mastery and positive emotions like curiosity.

And of course, some things are harmful if consumed in excess. Social media, like sugar, should only be consumed occasionally and in small amounts. It may give us a “quick fix” by releasing the brain’s reward chemical, dopamine. But research suggests this may be addictive and lead to long-term harm.

Protect against junk information

In this age of misinformation, there is a lot of junk online. Research suggests misinformation can be harmful for mental health, causing heightened anxiety and stress.

Unfortunately, information doesn’t come with nutrition labels like our food does. But we can teach kids how to identify good quality information they can trust — sources that are fact-checked and reliable. For example, strategies like lateral reading (or searching for other good sources on the same subject) can help with thinking critically about the information we consume.

While we teach these ideas using the healthy “mind diet pyramid” idea, it is equally important adults model healthy information consumption for children — your mind may thank you too.

Amy Dawel receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. We teach kids to look after their bodies – here’s how to do the same for a healthy mind – https://theconversation.com/we-teach-kids-to-look-after-their-bodies-heres-how-to-do-the-same-for-a-healthy-mind-265285

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Bartos, Professor of Economics, University of Canberra

Treasurer Jim Chalmers last week announced the Productivity Commission will review the 2018 deal that gave states a guaranteed minimum share of the goods and services tax (GST).

Within minutes, the Western Australian Treasurer Rita Saffioti responded with a promise to fight to keep WA’s “fair share” of the GST. She announced a “fairness fighter” team would be set up in the WA Treasury.

The reason WA is worried is that the 2018 deal gives it a higher share of funding than it would have received under the previous formula, which took into account states’ own capacity to raise revenue. The WA government has been raking in revenue thanks to mining royalties, which have mushroomed since the mining boom, collecting more than A$10 billion a year for the past three years.

Thanks to high iron ore and gas prices – on top of the special GST deal – WA now has a large budget surplus, when other states and territories are struggling.

A booming surplus

A budget update last week revealed WA had a higher than expected $3.7 billion surplus for 2024-25. The West Australian newspaper said “the strong result is sure to put pressure on the 2018 GST deal”.

The Commonwealth Grants Commission was established in 1933 to advise the Federal government on grants to financially weak states. Since July 2000 that has included advice on how to distribute the billions in revenue collected nationally through the GST.

For much of its history it applied a principle of “horizontal fiscal equalisation”. This meant giving each state and territory roughly equal budget capacity to provide public services such as schools, hospitals and roads. It took account of disadvantages like remoteness and a host of other factors, along with states’ ability to fund services from their own revenue.

The 2018 deal flies in the face of equalisation. It gives all states in theory a guaranteed minimum share of the GST pool, regardless of their revenue. In practice, this gives WA much greater fiscal capacity because of its royalties. Without the deal, WA would receive a lower share of the GST – which, taking account of its own resources, would still put it on the same footing as other states.

Whether WA residents deserve better services because their state sits on mineral resources is a matter of opinion. Obviously WA politicians think this only fair. Other states might disagree.

The problems with the 2018 deal

Most economists and commentators outside WA are critical of the 2018 deal that carved up GST revenues. Economist Saul Eslake calls it “the worst public policy decision of the 21st century thus far”. He notes the cost – over the next four years, WA will receive $26.3 billion more from the carve-up of GST revenues than it would otherwise have done.

Another economist, Robert Breunig at the Australian National University, has called for an end to the deal. He points out that WA benefited from Commonwealth grants continuously from 1933 through 1968, and from 1981 to 2000. WA never complained the system was unfair in that period – nor did other states, even though WA was benefiting.

The deal was introduced by the Morrison government for political purposes, to win WA seats in parliament. Labor supported the deal because it too wanted WA votes. It is enormously popular in WA. So a recommendation to simply abolish the deal may not gain traction; the government will not want a running battle with WA ahead of the next federal election.

A new system is needed

The Productivity Commission will therefore need to think laterally. Fortunately its terms of reference are broad enough to allow it to consider alternatives.

While simply scrapping the 2018 deal might not be feasible, moving to an altogether new system could be a way forward.

An option worth considering is to split the grants system into two parts.

One part would distribute some of the GST – say, half – on a simple per capita (per person) basis. States like New South Wales and Victoria support moving to a per capita formula because at present they get less than a per capita share. This would provide all states and territories with some budget certainty, but smaller ones, and WA, would gain less than at present. They would need a top-up.

That top-up could be delivered by a separate fund, using the remaining half of the GST revenue to provide grants to overcome state and territory disadvantages and to meet special needs. It would remain open to WA to argue, as it does now, that it needs Commonwealth grants to support infrastructure for mining.

Other states could make their own arguments for special needs.

A feature of such a system could be making such grants conditional on the state or territory using the funds to reduce their disadvantages.

One of the frustrations in the system at present is that the Northern Territory is highly subsidised by other states (that is, it receives a higher share of GST funds, meaning others get less) due to remote disadvantage and a high First Nations population. Although it receives higher funding due to these factors, it still puts most of its budget into Darwin and surrounds.

Services for remote communities and meeting the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait island people are comparatively low priorities. A new system of more accountable funding would help to address this anomaly.

No doubt, there are other ways to devise a new and fairer system. There is plenty of time for the Productivity Commission to consider them. It is something that should interest all Australians – because ultimately we pay the price for the WA special deal.

Stephen Bartos 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 controversial GST deal with the states is under review. There are better alternatives – https://theconversation.com/the-controversial-gst-deal-with-the-states-is-under-review-there-are-better-alternatives-266054

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacqueline Burgess, Lecturer in International Business, University of the Sunshine Coast

Video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA), one of the biggest video game companies in the world behind games such as The Sims and Battlefield, has been sold to a consortium of buyers for US$55 billion (about A$83 billion). It is potentially the largest-ever buyout funded by private equity firms. Not AI, nor mining or banking, but video games.

The members of the consortium include: Silver Lake Partners, an American private global equity firm focusing on technology; the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund; and the investment firm Affinity Partners, run by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of American President Donald Trump.

The consortium will purchase all of the publicly traded company’s shares, making it private. But while the consortium and EA’s shareholders will likely be celebrating – each share was valued at US$210, representing a 25% premium – it’s not all good news.

PIF acquiring EA raises concerns about possible “game-washing”, and less than ideal future business practices.

EA’s poor reputation

Video games are big business. The global video game industry is worth more than the film and music industries combined. But why would these buyers specifically want to buy EA, an entity that has won The Worst Company in America award twice?

It has been criticised for alleged poor labour practices, a focus on online gaming (even when it’s not ideal, such as in single-player stories), and a history of acquiring popular game studios and franchises and running them into the ground.

Players of some of EA’s most beloved franchises, such as The Sims, Dragon Age and Star Wars Battlefront II, believe the games have been negatively impacted due to the company meddling in production, and wanting to focus on online play and micro-transactions.

Microtransactions are small amounts of money paid to access, or potentially access, in-game items or currency. Over time, they can add up to a lot of money, and have even been linked to the creation of problem gambling behaviours. Unsurprisingly, they are not popular among players.

Current global economic stresses have affected video games and other high-tech industries. The development costs of a video game can be hundreds of millions of dollars. EA has reacted to its slowing growth by cancelling games and laying-off close to 2,000 workers since 2023. So a US$55 billion offer probably looked enticing.

Saudi Arabia’s investment spree

In recent years, the Saudi wealth fund has been on an entertainment investment splurge. Before this latest acquisition, PIF invested heavily in both golf and tennis.

It is a sponsor and official naming rights partner of both the Women’s Tennis Association rankings and the Association of Tennis Professionals rankings.

The wealth fund also helped establish the LIV Golf tour in 2022, in opposition to the Professional Golf Association (PGA). By offering huge sums of money, it was able to attract players away from the PGA. One player was reportedly offered US$125 million (A$189 million). This tactic worked; a merger was announced between LIV, the DPA (European golf tour) and the PGA (North American golf tour) in 2023, with PIF as the main funder.

PIF, via its subsidiaries, has also been acquiring stakes in other video game companies. For example, it is one of the largest shareholders in Nintendo, the developer behind Mario, and purchased Niantic (the company behind Pokémon Go) earlier this year for US$3.5 billion (A$5.3 billion)

Why does PIF want video game companies?

Live sport and video games have a few things in common: they are fun, engaging and entertaining. And being known for entertainment is good PR for a country that has been accused of human rights abuses.

PIF’s investment in sport has been called “sportswashing”: using an association with sport to counteract bad publicity and a tarnished moral reputation. Video games, with their interactivity and entertainment value, represent an opportunity for game-washing.

The fact EA owns many sports games’ franchises would also be a bonus, potentially allowing for further video game and sport collaboration. And the fact the video game industry is projected to keep growing globally makes it a good investment for an oil-rich nation looking to economically diversify.

Beyond game-washing concerns, we also need to pay attention to the type of buyout happening here. This is a “leveraged” buyout, meaning part of the purchase price – in this case US$20 billion (A$30 billion) – is funded as debt taken on by the company. So once the acquisition is complete, EA will have US$20 billion of new debt.

With all that new debt to service, it would only be natural to have concerns about more lay-offs, cost-cutting and increasing monetisation via strategies such as microtransactions. Ultimately, this would result in a poorer experience for players. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jacqueline Burgess is the treasurer of the Digital Games Research Association of Australia (DiGRAA), has collaborated with Screen Queensland, the South Australian Film Corporation, Level Her Up, The Array in Darwin, CODE NZ and has received research funding from the Federal and Queensland governments.

– ref. What Saudi Arabia’s role in the Electronic Arts buyout tells us about image, power and ‘game-washing’ – https://theconversation.com/what-saudi-arabias-role-in-the-electronic-arts-buyout-tells-us-about-image-power-and-game-washing-266359

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Kvalsvig, Research Associate Professor of Public Health, University of Otago

Each day, we breathe more than 7,000 litres of air. Unsurprisingly, the quality of this air really matters. And given most of us spend a significant part of the day inside, clean indoor air is essential.

It keeps us alert and focused and protects us from the harmful effects of air pollution, including cancers and asthma. It can also slow the spread of respiratory infections through the community.

During last week’s 80th United Nations General Assembly, indoor air experts launched the first international effort to formally recognise clean indoor air as essential to health.

The global pledge for healthy indoor air, championed by the Australian Academy of Science and the Burnet Institute, one of the country’s leading medical research groups, has already been signed by more than 150 organisations. It represents a landmark in building a global community to demand better indoor air conditions.

Australia leadership in initiating the pledge is in stark contrast to New Zealand, which is not active on the global stage and as yet has no indoor air agency, strategy or national standards.

Clean air is as important as clean water

The COVID pandemic has accelerated understanding of the importance of healthy indoor air and how to achieve it.

There is compelling evidence of the value of healthy indoor air. On the flip side, we also have evidence of the cost of inaction, estimated to be in the billions of dollars from the loss of health and productivity.

Clean air is a universal health protection, just like clean drinking water.

It was once common for major cities such as London to experience cholera epidemics. But public health initiatives during the 19th century to separate drinking water from wastewater ensured there was no way for cholera to spread.

Thanks to the foresight and persistence of those early pioneers of public health, a cholera epidemic would be unthinkable in London today. What’s more, high-income countries have no need to fear other waterborne outbreaks. Effective prevention is already hardwired into cities and communities.

The enduring benefits of being able to control the risk of waterborne infectious disease outbreaks suggest prevention of airborne epidemics and pandemics should be a logical next step.

The human and financial cost of respiratory infections is colossal, with an estimated cost of influenza at US$11.2 billion in the United States alone. For respiratory infections other than influenza, the yearly cost (in the US) stands at $40 billion.

We are well overdue for a shift in the perception that we cannot afford better ventilation systems. We need to follow the example of the 19th-century investment in clean water, this time to clean the air.

Pandemic preparedness

Investment in clean indoor air is vital preparation for the pandemics and climate emergencies to come. Indeed, since future pandemics are highly likely to be airborne, countries can measure their pandemic and climate preparedness in terms of how well, or otherwise, they are able to clean the air in public settings.

The global scorecard is in poor shape: every year, multiple viruses spread unchecked in schools, workplaces and healthcare settings.

Every COVID wave and winter flu season is a reminder of vulnerability to a new pandemic; every wildfire highlights the escalating threats to the quality of the air we breathe.

Once we experience the benefits of clean indoor air – imagine getting through winter without needing to take time off work or school – we’ll never want to go back.

But where to begin? Here are three principles to start translating evidence into meaningful action.

1. To improve indoor air, governments need to take a strategic approach with clearly articulated priorities and timelines. We cannot solve poor quality of indoor air everywhere at once.

A good starting point for respiratory infections, for example, would be to direct resources to the places where people gather every day to work, learn and access healthcare.

2. Healthy indoor air needs to be recognised for what it is: a human right and essential protection for population health. This means setting mandatory indoor air standards for buildings, including housing, and establishing national agencies to implement them.

There must be accountability. We know recommendations and guidelines aren’t enough to deliver safe drinking water, and the same applies to clean air.

3. We need to lead from the community, too, and identify clean air champions. Young people are already taking up the challenge. Schools and workplaces have a responsibility to protect the health of everyone who visits or attends. They need appropriate resources to meet that responsibility.

Occupational protections and citizen science initiatives can focus collective action to clean the air, one office or classroom at a time. Each action, no matter how small, becomes a building block of our everyday public health infrastructure, our pandemic preparedness and our climate response.

The authors acknowledge the contribution by Bronwyn King, of Tobacco Free Portfolios.

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. Why investment in clean indoor air is vital preparation for the pandemics and climate emergencies to come – https://theconversation.com/why-investment-in-clean-indoor-air-is-vital-preparation-for-the-pandemics-and-climate-emergencies-to-come-265743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marie Gerdtz, Professor and Dean School Nursing and Midwifery, La Trobe University

Australia’s health system is one of the highest quality and most equitable in the world.

Yet our rapidly ageing population, rising rates of chronic disease and poor access to doctors means patients can’t always access the medicines they need. These shortages are particularly prevalent in poorer, rural and regional areas.

To strengthen the skilled workforce and reduce delays in care, from September 30, registered nurses can prescribe a range of medicines, after undergoing additional training and supervision.

What will nurses be able to prescribe?

Registered nurses who are eligible for endorsement as a nurse prescriber will be able to prescribe the following types of medicines, in partnership with a doctor or nurse practitioner:

• schedule 3 medicines, which usually require pharmacist advice but not a prescription, such as emergency contraception known as the morning-after pill

• schedule 4 prescription-only medicines, such as antibiotics and medicines for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. These require a prescription due to potential side effects and interactions

• schedule 8 controlled drugs, which are prescription substances with a high potential for dependence or misuse, such as morphine and methadone.

It’s unclear whether nurse prescribers will work in primary care clinics, aged care, community health centres, or hospitals – or all of these settings. And we don’t know what proportion of registered nurse prescribers will be needed, or who will seek to work in these settings.

It’s also uncertain whether patients will be able to access the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) subsidies for medicines a registered nurse prescribes. Nor do we know whether patients will be able to access the Medicare Benefits Schedule for consultation rebates.

What education and oversight will prescribing nurses need?

Registered nurses who want to prescribe will need endorsement from the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia.

For this, they must hold current general registration, have the equivalent of three years’ full-time clinical experience after initial registration, and complete a board-approved postgraduate qualification or equivalent units of study in registered nurse prescribing. This may take four to six months of part-time study, or more.

The education program will include:

• physical health assessments
• pharmacodynamics – the biological and physical effects of drugs
• pharmacokinetics – how drugs are absorbed, distributed, metabolised and excreted
• the quality use of medicines.

Candidates must also undertake a six-month period of structured clinical mentorship with a doctor or nurse practitioner, work within a defined governance framework, and adhere to state/territory legislation.

During the mentorship phase, the doctor or nurse practitioner will oversee the nurse’s prescribing practices. This will develop into a collaborative model, as the nurse’s skill develops. This type of oversight is similar to that provided in nurse practitioner education programs.

In the longer term, the collaborating doctor or nurse practitioner is expected to monitor the nurse’s prescribing practices. They will also ensure the nurse is following other safety and quality assurance processes, such as adhering to evidence-based guidelines and documenting any drug sensitivities or reactions, as well as any errors.

These requirements are designed to ensure safe, effective prescribing.

Lessons from countries where nurses have long prescribed

Nurses have prescribed for decades in some countries. In Sweden, nurse prescribing was first introduced in 1994, initially limited to a small number of medicines for specific conditions.

In the United Kingdom, legislation enabling nurse prescribing also began in 1994, with gradual expansion over the following decades to include independent prescribing of most medicines, including controlled drugs.

These reforms were driven by the need to improve access to medicines, reduce delays in care and make better use of the skills of health professionals other than doctors.

A 2016 Cochrane systematic review of 46 studies with more than 37,000 participants found patients with nurse (and pharmacist) prescribers had comparable outcomes to medical prescribers when managing chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol.

Other international evidence highlights further benefits of registered nurse prescribing, as well as important considerations for implementation.

Nurse prescribers often provide more personalised medication counselling and spend more time with patients. This can improve the chance a person will take their medicine and result in higher rates of patient satisfaction, particularly when nurses are managing chronic diseases.

However, early evaluations of nurse prescribing in Sweden revealed professional tensions and concerns about boundaries between doctors’ and nurses’ roles, especially in primary care, where responsibilities weren’t clearly defined.

More recently in New Zealand, registered nurse prescribing has broadened access to care. A 2020 study found nurse prescribers experienced greater job satisfaction and delivered more holistic care, while patient wait times reduced.

A descriptive survey also from 2020 found NZ nurse prescribers worked safely within their scope of practice. However, the authors emphasised the need to regularly update the prescribing formulary: the list of drugs approved for prescribing within a certain context and scope of practice.

What about in Australia?

In Australia, studies
) have found nurses perceive prescribing as a natural extension of their clinical role, particularly in settings where they already exercise significant autonomy. This includes sexual and reproductive health, drug and alcohol services, and palliative care.

However, registered nurse prescibers will not be able to autonomously prescribe, or order diagnostic tests.

Nurse prescribing has the potential to leverage the expertise of the nursing workforce to address persistent gaps in access to health care and medicines.

But it’s important for nurse prescribers to be supported by appropriate education, governance and collaborative practice models to ensure safety, clarity and their integration within the broader health system.

Implementation must also be carefully evaluated to ensure the scheme is meeting its aims and protecting patients.

Marie Gerdtz 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 extra study, nurses will be able to prescribe medications. Here’s what to expect – https://theconversation.com/with-extra-study-nurses-will-be-able-to-prescribe-medications-heres-what-to-expect-266367

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was diplomatic on his return to Australia this week when quizzed about the ongoing negotiations for the COP31 climate summit with rival Turkey.

“We’re just engaging through,” Albanese told The Guardian. “A clear majority of nations want Australia’s bid, but it’s clear also that this is a complex situation and we’ve got to try and resolve it.”

Behind the scenes, what geopolitical sweeteners could Australia offer to Turkey to encourage it to retire gracefully from the race to host COP31? This will be the focus of talks between Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Pacific leaders when they meet in Sydney later this week.

Pointy end of negotiations

COP meetings are the world’s largest annual climate change gathering. There, governments negotiate to cut emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

If Australia’s bid succeeds, the COP31 summit would be held in Adelaide late next year. It would be the largest diplomatic meeting this country has ever hosted.

COP hosting rights alternate between groups of nations. Australia is in the “Western European and Others group”, whose turn it is to host the summit. Australia’s bid has support from 23 of the 28 countries in our group.

But if consensus is not reached with Turkey – which is also in the group – the conference will be held in the German city of Bonn. Bonn has the capacity to step in, because it regularly hosts interim climate meetings.

So far, neither nation has backed down. At last month’s UN General Assembly in New York, Albanese tried but failed to meet Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, Bowen met with Turkey’s climate minister, Murat Kurum, and Turkey’s first lady, Emine Erdoğan, who is a key player in her country’s bid.

Kurum has said his country is working on “innovative solutions” to the impasse, arguing both Australia and Turkey can win from negotiations over next year’s summit. But he’s offered no detail.

What could Australia offer Turkey?

All this raises the question of how Australia could convince Turkey to drop its bid.

Australia could, for example, offer Turkey hosting rights for a “pre-COP” meeting, usually held ahead of the main event. These meetings are attended by thousands of people. For example, when the UK co-hosted COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 with Italy, Italy hosted the youth and climate summit in the leadup.

But it’s likely Turkey wants a political gathering of world leaders – a meeting Australia would also be loathe to lose.

Australia could also offer diplomatic concessions to Turkey that are completely unrelated to COP, such as backing its bid for other UN roles, or giving funding for aid and development.

This occurred ahead of the COP26 conference bid in 2021, when the UK faced a similar impasse with Turkey. UK officials offered a package of incentives, such as promising to host a Turkish investment conference in London and backing Turkish candidates for several international and UN posts.

Another option is for Australia to hold the COP presidency and act as official host, but allow Turkey to hold some meetings linked to the summit.

Climate credibility on the line

Australia is bidding to co-host this COP with Pacific nations. So, what Australia offers Turkey will in part be determined by Pacific leaders.

Pacific leaders, for their part, recently wrote to Turkey asking it to “clear the way” for the Australia-Pacific bid.

Pacific governments will want an event in their region to promote Pacific priorities and attract international finance for their clean energy transitions.

There’s much for Australia to gain by hosting COP31. It positions Australia as a top-tier global citizen and climate leader. It also offers Australia a chance to broker pledges beneficial to its interests – such as promoting global cooperation around sustainably processed “green iron”. It could also attract international investment to our clean energy transition.

But Australia’s reputation will also be on the line. Australia is one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel exporters and is still approving heavily emitting projects, such as the North West Shelf gas project in Western Australia.

This record will be heavily scrutinised if Australia wins the COP. The meeting should be the moment Australia signals a vital shift: from a fossil fuel heavyweight to a clean energy superpower.

Wesley Morgan is a fellow with the Climate Council

– ref. What will it take? The sweeteners Australia could offer Turkey to snatch COP31 – https://theconversation.com/what-will-it-take-the-sweeteners-australia-could-offer-turkey-to-snatch-cop31-266479

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tristan Moss, Senior Lecturer in History, UNSW Sydney

This week, Sydney hosts the world’s largest space conference, attracting astronauts and heads of space agencies from around the planet. It’s a great time to ask: what does the average Australian think about space?

The answer is they’re conscious of space being important, but know little about what we are doing, or where we are going.

Two years on from the first-ever survey on Australian opinions about space, this week we released a new report on the subject.

Both show we have a long way to go when it comes to informing the Australian public about space as something that’s relevant to their everyday lives.

Australians don’t know what we’re doing in the space sector

At the International Astronautical Conference, excitement about space is very much on show. Rockets, satellites and spacesuits dot the exhibition hall. But our research shows the average Australian isn’t fully aware of what the country is doing in the sector.

We surveyed 1,500 Australians in July of this year and weighted that sample to be nationally representative.

The responses show Australians are ready to care about space, three times as likely to want to spend more on it than less, and more than half of Australians see the commercial space sector as important for the economy. Nonetheless, awareness still remains low.

Compared to 2023, general interest and knowledge about space have increased a little, and Australians are supportive of space in general. But less than a quarter of Australians have a clear sense of Australia’s future direction around space.

This was despite Australians appreciating the importance of space, with only 19% saying that space has little impact on their lives.

How does space contribute to our lives?

Space technologies are integral to everyday life. Thanks to data and communications services from satellites, you can use a navigation app to find the nearest coffee shop and then pay for that coffee with your phone.

Satellites contribute to weather forecasts and help monitor disasters such as floods and bushfires. From agriculture to defence, many industries rely on space tech.

However, few Australians associate everyday transactions, such as navigation or banking, with space. When we asked respondents to rate how much their life would be disrupted if we suddenly lost space capability for a day, they estimated there would be some disruption, but few thought it would be major or severe.

Commercial space is important for our economy

Commercial space is at the forefront of the conference this week. The Australian government recently announced a series of measures to boost Australia’s cooperation with Europe and the United States, which would in turn grow Australia’s space industry.

The public seems to support such measures. A majority (53%) see the commercial space sector as important for the economy while only 11% do not.

Leading opportunities include jobs (57%), access to sovereign space capability (42%) and the nation being more competitive as a destination for investment and high-skilled labour (42%).

Sovereign space capability is a nation’s independent ability to access, control and use space-based technology without relying on foreign entities.

Australians want to see their government working together with their partners, but they also expect Australia to pull its own weight and contribute to building its own space capabilities. Almost half of Australians (48%) think that Australia can “achieve its sovereign goals in space”, while only 16% disagree and roughly a third (35%) are neutral.

However, the public feels these efforts shouldn’t come at a cost to the environment. Two-thirds of Australians (67%) think it’s important for Australia to invest in sustainable space practices which ensure that the environments of Earth and space are protected.

Where exactly are we going?

Much of the expert conversation around Australian space activities at this week’s conference is about where the country should go next, what its priorities should be in space, and the importance of growing the sector.

However, the results of our survey suggest that bringing the average Australian along might be more difficult than all that excitement suggests.

Relatively few Australians have a sense of the country’s trajectory in space. Australians also tend to not know the breadth of space’s impact on their lives. They’re aware that “space” means “satellites and rockets”. But they’re less aware of how space influences banking, farming and transport.

All this means that while there is a great deal of momentum, how Australia talks about the space sector must change.

That space is “exciting” is not enough. There must be real links made between this vital sector and the everyday lives of Australians. Bringing everyone along for the journey, in a way that means something to each individual, will enable Australia to travel to the stars.

Tristan Moss receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with Australasian Centre for Space Governance, which co-funded the survey with the Space Industry Association of Australia. The survey was also co-funded by UNSW Canberra.

Kathryn Robison works for the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. She is affiliated with the Australasian Centre for Space Governance, which co-funded the survey with the Space Industry Association of Australia.

– ref. Australians want to spend more on space – but we don’t really know where we’re going – https://theconversation.com/australians-want-to-spend-more-on-space-but-we-dont-really-know-where-were-going-266246