Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nigel Bertram, Practice Professor of Architecture, Monash University

Investment in public housing is long overdue. But the current proposal to demolish all 44 of Melbourne’s social housing towers, relocate more than 10,000 residents and redevelop the sites is deeply flawed.

This blanket approach risks repeating the traumatic dislocation of vulnerable communities that happened when the towers were built more than 50 years ago. It also involves wasting money, energy and construction materials.

The state government says the old high-rises are being redeveloped to meet modern standards and house more people. But the decision to demolish and rebuild, rather than upgrade, has been challenged repeatedly.

I coauthored one of the most recent reports from concerned independent architects, urban designers and researchers. Together we argue retrofitting and upgrading existing housing stock, when combined with strategic new building, is technically feasible, cheaper and better for people and the planet.

At the same time, a class action lawsuit is awaiting a legal ruling on whether the government should be forced to release documents justifying demolition over retrofitting.

We know retaining and reusing existing structures saves energy and other resources, ultimately reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Across 44 buildings, this could also save around A$1.5 billion in construction costs.

Playing the numbers game

The federal government has set a national target to build 1.2 million homes by 2029. Victoria has a “bold” target to build 800,000 new homes over the next ten years. But how they go about meeting these targets matters too.

Melbourne’s housing commission towers are home to established communities, where connections between people have developed over a long period. This has immense social value.

The 44 towers also represent substantial embodied carbon. This is the carbon dioxide (CO₂) already emitted in extracting, manufacturing, transporting, installing and eventually disposing of existing concrete, bricks and other reusable materials.

Our analysis of one tower at Atherton Gardens estate revealed a potential saving of 16,000 tonnes of CO₂ through retrofitting. Multiplying this by 44 adds up to more than 700,000 tonnes – roughly equivalent to taking 150,000 cars off the road.

Taking tips from overseas

Overseas, similar postwar housing precincts have been updated and redeveloped in a more careful, considered way. Residents have even been able to stay in place while improvements are made. Such approaches incorporate a mix of renovation and retrofitting of existing buildings, combined with new infill and upgrades to public open spaces.

This approach integrates the precincts into the surrounding city and upgrades facilities to contemporary standards – without wholesale disruption and dislocation of the residents and their established communities.

It’s hard to know whether this work was considered during the decision-making process. The Victorian government and its housing agency Homes Victoria have so far refused to release the relevant reports or documents explaining their reasoning.

Such lack of transparency and consultation led to the launch of the class action. Residents at the Flemington and North Melbourne Estates have come together to argue their human rights were not considered when the decision to demolish their homes was made.

Two reports provide independent analysis

Filling the void, professional groups have undertaken two separate independent studies on a pro-bono basis. These reports analyse the different options based on the available information.

I helped compare three scenarios for a 20-storey tower at Atherton Gardens, Fitzroy. The research analysed two retrofit scenarios for the tower and compared these with a hypothetical equivalent new building.

We established the scope of building works required for each scenario. The team then measured capital cost, embodied carbon and carbon during operation for each case.

We found considerable savings can be made in capital costs (25–30%), embodied carbon (34–36%) and construction time (15–20%) through retrofitting, compared with constructing an equivalent new building.

When multiplied over 44 towers, these savings amount to about A$1.5 billion in raw construction value alone. This is without considering the additional costs of relocating existing residents, providing alternative accommodation during construction, or the social and health and wellbeing costs associated with long-term dislocation of communities.

A separate more detailed report on the Flemington Estate was released in October by charitable not-for-profit design and research practice OFFICE. Both reports independently arrived at very similar solutions for ways to address structural, fire and servicing upgrades.

Breaking down the barriers

Several reasons have been circulated as to why these high-rise towers are unsuitable for retrofitting. The two reports go through each in turn.

The towers are constructed from precast concrete slabs and internal walls are load-bearing. This makes refurbishment difficult, because the majority of walls cannot be moved. The buildings were also designed when the requirement to resist earthquakes was minimal.

A range of other technical hurdles, such as improving acoustic, thermal and fire separation and repairing degraded concrete, would also complicate upgrades. But none of these issues is insurmountable.

Both reports include strategies to address these issues, costed into the estimates. For example, the cost of strengthening to meet earthquake codes has been estimated as $1.73 million in Flemington and $3.85 million for Atherton Gardens. That’s around 3.7% of the total $105 million estimated construction cost for a single Atherton Gardens tower.

Exploring alternatives

The fact a building does not meet current regulatory standards is not in itself a reason for demolition. More than 80% of the city’s buildings would fail to meet these standards, including everything built in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our building codes recognise the value of existing structures and have provisions for renovation scenarios.

Retention and reuse of existing building fabric can achieve results surpassing current legislative standards while minimising waste, retaining the value of existing embodied carbon, and retaining the fabric, character and social memory of the city in the process.

Retrofitting can also avoid the mass displacement of existing residents, who would otherwise need to be accommodated during the construction phase. For instance, construction can allow refurbishment on a floor-by-floor basis, minimising relocation time for residents.

With the right design, skilled consultants, and genuine care for residents, it’s possible to overcome the barriers typically faced when reusing existing building stock.

I am grateful to Simon Robinson of OFFICE for his contributions to this article.

Read more:
Why knock down all public housing towers when retrofit can sometimes be better?

Nigel Bertram has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. Demolition should be the last resort for Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers – retrofit and upgrade instead – https://theconversation.com/demolition-should-be-the-last-resort-for-melbournes-44-public-housing-towers-retrofit-and-upgrade-instead-246327

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Thieberger, Associate Professor in Linguistics and a Chief Investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The University of Melbourne

Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother?

Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.

And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.

In the field of linguistics, such recordings are beyond priceless – yet often out of reach, due to the degradation of old cassettes over time. With a new tool, we are able to repair those tapes, and in doing so can recover the stories, songs and memories they hold.

A digital humanities telescope

Our digital archive, PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) contains thousands of hours of audio – mainly from musicological or linguistic fieldwork. This audio represents some 1,360 languages, with a major focus on languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.

The PARADISEC research project was started in 2003 as a collaboration between the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and the Australian National University.

Like a humanities telescope, PARADISEC allows us to learn more about the language diversity around us, as we explained in a 2016 Conversation article.

Lubing the screech

While many of the tapes we get are in good condition and can be readily played and digitised, others need special care, and the removal of mould and dirt.

We work with colleagues at agencies such as the Solomon Islands National Museum, for whom we recently repaired a set of cassettes that were previously unplayable and just screeched. We’ll be taking those cassettes, now repaired and digitised, back to Honiara in February and expect to pick up more for further treatment.

Screeching happens when a tape is dried out and can’t move through the mechanism easily. The screeching covers the audio signal we want to capture.

In 2019, my colleague Sam King built (with the help of his colleague Doug Smith) a cassette-lubricating machine while working at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This machine – likely the first of its kind in Australia – allowed us to play many previously unplayable tapes.

Last year, Sam built two versions of an updated machine called the LM-3032 Tape Restorator for PARADISEC, improving on the previous model. Between hand building some parts, 3D printing others and writing code for the controllers, it took him more than a year.

Preserving culture and heritage

The LM-3032 Tape Restorator works by applying cyclomethicone (a silicone-based solvent used in cosmetics) to the length of a tape. This leaves behind an extremely thin film of lubrication that allows smoother playback, making digitisation possible. See more details here.

Tests have shown this process has no negative long-term effects on the tape. In fact, tapes treated with this method five years ago still play without issues.

This technological wizardry allows us to salvage precious analogue recordings before it’s too late. For many languages, these may be the only known recordings – stored on a single cassette, in a single location, and virtually inaccessible. Some of the primary research records digitised by PARADISEC have survived long periods of neglect in offices, garages and attics.

The audio below is from a tape that was kept at Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley for 40 years. It features beautiful singing in the local Walmajarri language, with guitar accompaniment. The first seven seconds are from the untreated tape, while the rest is from the treated version.

Our experience has shown community members truly value finding records in their own languages, and we’re committed to making this process easier for them.

Here’s one testimonial from E’ava Geita, Papua New Guinea’s current acting Solicitor General. In 2015, Geita was overjoyed to hear digitised records capturing PNG’s Koita language:

If only you witnessed and captured the reaction in me going through the recordings at home! It is quite an amazing experience! From feeling of awe to emotion to deep excitement! The feeling of knowing that your language has been documented or recorded in a structured way, kept safely somewhere in the world, hearing it spoken 50–60 years ago and by some people you haven’t seen but whose names you only hear in history is quite incredible. It is most heartwarming to know that it is possible to sustain the life of my language. Thank you once again for the opportunity to listen to the records.

Acknowlegement: I’d like to thank Sam King for the technical information provided in this article.

The Tape Restorator was funded by the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, and by a grant from the Australian Research Council (LE220100010)

– ref. How we’re recovering priceless audio and lost languages from old decaying tapes – https://theconversation.com/how-were-recovering-priceless-audio-and-lost-languages-from-old-decaying-tapes-248116

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Gilbert, Professor of Finance, Auckland University of Technology

New Zealand’s superannuation is no longer enough to live on for the country’s retirees. Research has found people need hundreds of thousands in savings to live a comfortable life after work.

But the KiwiSaver scheme, introduced in 2007 to encourage New Zealanders to build their retirement savings, continues to be a political football. Since its creation, there have been multiple tweaks to the scheme, threatening to undermine its core purpose: supporting New Zealanders in their retirement.

In late 2024, the government proposed changes that would make it easier for KiwiSaver managers to invest in private assets.

The government says these changes could unlock billions to fund essential infrastructure or to provide capital for businesses, outcomes that could benefit the country as a whole.

But the changes required to enable investing in private assets – such as reduced transparency around fees – are concerning and may not be worth the limited benefits it would bring to KiwiSaver members.

Expanding KiwiSaver

At the moment KiwiSaver managers predominantly invest in publicly traded assets, specifically stocks and bonds.

The changes would open up KiwiSaver investors to a wide range of opportunities such as infrastructure projects (for example, toll roads), unlisted companies (KiwiBank has already been suggested by one provider) and property investments, among others.

Increasing private asset exposure from the current 2-3% of funds under management to a level similar to Australian super funds (15%+) could unlock significant investment for infrastructure or business capital.

But while there is definite appeal in using more KiwiSaver money to build roads and other essential infrastructure, the benefits to investors may be more modest.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment argues private assets may increase fund returns and should reduce risk for investors by reducing fund exposure to stock and bond markets.

But to achieve these possible outcomes KiwiSaver members risk being locked into a fund provider or having their funds split across providers when they opt to move. There is also the concern that transparency around the fees being charged by managers could worsen.

Gumming up the works

The advantage of the current system of investing in publicly traded assets is that they are relatively cheap to trade, can be bought or sold quickly and their market value is constantly known.

Private assets are none of these things.

Fund managers are currently required to release your funds within ten days when you opt to switch manager. Large investments in private assets that can not be sold quickly, or even worse, may be distressed (where the value is currently significantly below what it was bought for), could create a liquidity issue for a fund if a lot of investors decide to switch.

To encourage managers to invest in private assets the proposed changes would allow your existing fund manager to hold onto a portion of your investment until private assets could be liquidated if they deemed it in your best interest.

Essentially, you may have to stay with a fund manager for an indeterminate period even if you want to change, presumably while still paying them fees on the funds they are looking after.

Hiding fees

The government’s changes also suggest allowing managers to change the way the fees they report is calculated.

To encourage managers to invest in private assets, the government has proposed allowing them to exclude the costs associated with private assets from their reported fees. Why? Because private asset investing is significantly more expensive.

Managers may need to build specialised teams to evaluate private asset investments. There are substantial costs (consultants, lawyers, experts etc) incurred when evaluating these investments in the same way that a home buyer faces costs such as builder and valuer reports.

Additionally, managers will need to hire valuers periodically to reevaluate the value of the assets, resulting in more costs.

Removing private asset costs from disclosures will make it harder for New Zealanders to compare the fees on different funds.

Multiple other problems

Several other problems also exist with the plan.

The KiwiSaver market is relatively fragmented with 21 providers, nearly half of which manage less than NZ$1 billion in assets. Many private asset investments would require tens of millions, which means funds run the risk of becoming heavily exposed to just a few large investments. Only a handful of funds currently have the size to effectively use private assets to reduce investor risk.

There is also the difficulty in valuing private assets. Valuers can provide a best guess, but it will depend largely on what the market is willing to pay at the time you come to sell.

What is also unclear is how the value of private assets will be reflected in the unit prices that impact the price at which you buy into or sell out of fund. This introduces yet more opacity to a system that is currently transparent.

KiwiSaver will increasingly become a critical aspect of New Zealanders’ retirement. Changes to it need to be carefully considered and evaluated to avoid undermining confidence in KiwiSaver and to ensure that they support the primary goal, ensuring financial security in retirement. It is not clear that this change meets that threshold.

Aaron Gilbert 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. KiwiSaver shakeup: private asset investment has risks that could outweigh the rewards – https://theconversation.com/kiwisaver-shakeup-private-asset-investment-has-risks-that-could-outweigh-the-rewards-247684

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

Anthony Albanese has outlined his pitch to improve his and his government’s standing among men, as he insists he can hold onto majority government at the election to be held in April or May.

In a wide-ranging interview on The Conversation’s Politics podcast, canvassing both his plans and current issues, the Prime Minister addresses the gender voter gap the polls have been showing, which is worrying Labor strategists.

On a two-party basis, a December Essential poll had the Coalition on 51% among men, and Labor on 44%, with 4% undecided. Among women, Labor was on 49% and the Coalition on 46%, with 5% undecided.

In a Resolve poll on preferred prime minister, Peter Dutton polled 40% among men, and Albanese 34%. Among women, Albanese was on 36% and Dutton on 31%.

Albanese tells the podcast: “One of the things that we will be really campaigning very hard on is the impact on blue collar workers of the Coalition promises to get rid of same job, same pay [law], the definition of casual in employment [and] their plan to essentially go back to wages going backwards, not forwards.”

Targeting younger voters

As Labor crafts its election policy, Albanese also flags he is looking to do more for young people.

Asked who he feels is being “left behind” in Australia at the moment, he points to the issue of “intergenerational equity”.

“I think that young people feel like they’ve got the rough end of the pineapple compared with previous generations,” he says. This is “something I’m really conscious of”.

Outlining what the government has done or announced already on student debt, housing supply, schools, the universities accord and free TAFE, he suggests there will be further policies targeted towards younger voters.

The likeliest election dates

Albanese confirms he has not locked in an election date. “We make decisions when we finalise them and I’ll consult,” he says.

“But I’ve always said […] one of the problems with three year terms is that they are too short.”

The speculation is the election will be either April 12, or one of the first three Saturdays in May, with May 17 the last practical date.

April 12 would mean scrapping the scheduled March 25 budget. “We certainly are working to hand down a budget in March,” Albanese says. “The ERC [Expenditure Review Committee] will be meeting this week, as it met last week.”

Asked whether he is confident he could still deliver his program if the election resulted in a minority Labor government, Albanese says: “I’m confident that we can achieve an ongoing majority government at this election. I think there are seats that we currently hold that we have good prospects in.”

He names two Victorian Liberal seats he had just visited – Menzies and Deakin – among those he believes Labor can win from the Coalition. (After the redistribution, Menzies is notionally a Labor seat by a tiny margin.)

Watching for a rate cut and trade wars

Asked when Australia might come out of the present per capital recession, Albanese says things are “heading in a positive direction”, but does not nominate a time.

He sounds confident about interest rates falling soon:

All of the economic commentators are saying that that is the most likely prediction of markets. It’s not up to me as prime minister to tell the independent Reserve Bank what to do, but I’m certain that we have created the conditions through, as well as our responsible economic management, producing two budget surpluses – the massive turnaround that we have seen, compared with what the Morrison 2022 budget handed down by the Coalition […] was predicting.

Prompted about the Reserve Bank’s next meeting on February 18, he says “I’m certainly conscious of that date”.

With United States President Donald Trump slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China while foreshadowing wider tariffs, Albanese recalls his phone conversation after Trump was elected, in which he reminded the incoming president that America has a trade surplus with Australia. Australia would “put our arguments forward very clearly” if it faced the threat of tariffs, Albanese says.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead to this fortnight’s parliamentary sitting, Albanese confirmed to The Conversation that he will not proceed with the Nature Positive legislation. It had been strongly opposed by the Western Australian government, which has its election on March 8.

But he hopes the Senate will pass the legislation for political donation and spending caps, indicating the government is willing to compromise to get the bill through.

Looking to a second term, Albanese highlights in particular the opportunities presented by the energy transition.

“We are positioned better than anywhere else in the world to benefit, in my view, from this transition that’s occurring.”

He contrasts Dutton’s energy plan, which he describes as a “myopic vision” to make Australia smaller.

“I want Australia to be more successful, to be enlarged in our optimism and our vision. And I want to lead a government that does that.”

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. Albanese will pitch to blue collar men with heavy warnings on Dutton’s workplace policies – https://theconversation.com/albanese-will-pitch-to-blue-collar-men-with-heavy-warnings-on-duttons-workplace-policies-248851

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Turton, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography, CQUniversity Australia

Record-breaking floods across north Queensland have now turned deadly, with one woman drowning while being rescued on Sunday morning. And the floodwaters are still rising, with rain set to continue.

Over the 48 hours to Sunday, there were reports of up to 1 metre of rainfall in parts of northeast Queensland. The torrential rain continues, particularly in the Herbert Coast region and north to around Tully.

Residents of Ingham and nearby towns, about 100km from Townsville, are witnessing flooding from the nearby Herbert River. This morning, it was at 15 metres and rising. With more heavy rain forecast for the next 24 hours, the Herbert River is likely to break the 1967 record of 15.2 metres later today.

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli – who grew up on his family’s sugar cane farm in Ingham – has said the floods will be a “once in a century” event for the town. To make matters worse, authorities say the town has lost power and an extended outage is likely.

The atmospheric factors behind these floods are very similar to recent floods in the region – and climate change is no doubt playing a role.

Where are the floods hitting?

For many people in Townsville – the largest city in Northern Australia – the unfolding emergency will bring back memories of the devastating February 2019 floods, which caused A$1.24 billion in damage. Residents have been asked to evacuate from several low-lying suburbs which were inundated in 2019.

It is too early to say if this flood event will be worse. Fortunately, water levels in the city’s Ross River Dam are much lower than 2019. Townsville Airport has recorded 545mm of rain over the past 48 hours, with many northwest suburbs recording much higher levels. The township of Rollingstone – 60km northwest of Townsville – recorded a whopping 702mm over the 24 hours to 9am Sunday.

Further north in the Cairns to Daintree region, residents are watching with concern, with many still raw after the record-breaking floods of December 2023.

What’s behind these floods?

The ongoing 2025 extreme rainfall event, the 2019 Townsville floods and the 2023 Cairns and Daintree floods are remarkably similar in many ways.

What triggered each of these floods was prolonged heavy rain falling on the southeast flank of a stationary tropical low weather system. Normally, tropical lows bring wind and rain, but move through quite quickly. But in recent years, we have seen a tendency for these systems to stall, sitting in place over or near land and dumping huge volumes of rain.

Last week, the Bureau of Meteorology warned that five tropical lows were forming around northern Australia. Most tropical cyclones form from tropical lows embedded in the region’s monsoon trough, a large low pressure band which forms over summer and draws in warm, moist air from the adjacent tropical seas.

But significant rain events like this one don’t necessarily require a tropical cyclone. Slow-moving deep monsoon lows over land can also deliver huge amounts of rain and widespread flooding.

These atmospheric conditions allow intense rain bands to form between converging winds: warm, moist winds from the northeast and southeast winds originating from the Coral Sea. As the winds collide, they push the moist air up into the cooler parts of the atmosphere where it condenses and falls as torrential rain.

More extreme rainfall and higher frequencies of flooded rivers and flash floods around the world have a clear link to climate change and ongoing global heating.

The main drivers behind these events include warming of the atmosphere. For every 1°C of warming, the atmosphere holds 7% more water vapour. Recent research suggests this figure could be even higher for short duration rainfall.

Hotter oceans hold more energy, meaning they can also amplify the global water cycle when atmospheric conditions are suitable.

This year’s latest ever monsoon

This year, sea surface temperatures in the northwest Coral Sea are 1-2°C above average. Ocean temperatures have risen because of a lack of cloud cover and rain last month. In northwestern Australia, this has given rise to an intensifying marine heatwave.

This ocean heat is likely to be driven by the Australian monsoon’s latest ever arrival. The monsoon brings heavy rains to northern Australia, triggering the wet season. When it arrives, sea surface temperatures generally drop due to a combination of high cloud cover and the cooling effect of rainwater.

After a slow start, the North Australian monsoon season is now in full swing.

The Bureau of Meteorology is monitoring an active monsoon trough for any low pressure systems, which may develop into tropical cyclones over the next week or so. If any cyclone does form, it will gain energy from warmer than usual sea surface temperatures.

What’s next for north Queensland?

The flood emergency in north Queensland is far from over. All global circulation models predict heavy rain to continue in the region, extending up towards Cape York and the Gulf Country as an active monsoon surge moves in from Indonesia.

As river catchments get saturated, more and more water will run off and engorge rivers. Forecasts are for rain to continue well into tonight and the next few days. We are likely to see more flooding in more places this week.

For the latest updates, check the Bureau of Meteorology’s Queensland flood warnings, ABC Emergency or local ABC radio stations.

Steve Turton has received funding from the Australian Government.

– ref. What’s driving north Queensland’s record-breaking, deadly floods? – https://theconversation.com/whats-driving-north-queenslands-record-breaking-deadly-floods-248847

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

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has dumped – for the second time – the government’s controversial “Nature Positive” legislation, which had run into strong opposition from the Western Australian Labor government.

Albanese, speaking on The Conversation’s Politics podcast ahead of a fortnight parliamentary sitting starting next week, said there was not enough support for the legislation, which had been on the draft list of bills for next week, circulated by the government.

This is the second time the Prime Minister has pulled back from the legislation. Late last year he also said it did not have enough support, despite Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek believing she had a deal with the Greens and crossbench for its passage.

The legislation would set up a federal Environment Protection Agency, which has riled miners who claim it would add to bureaucracy and delay approvals.

In recent days WA premier Roger Cook, who was instrumental in heading off the legislation last year, has been lobbying the federal government again. WA faces an election on March 8.

In an interview on Saturday, Albanese told The Conversation: “I can’t see that it has a path to success. So at this stage, I can say that we won’t be proceeding with it this term. There simply isn’t a [Senate] majority, as there wasn’t last year.

“The Greens Party on one hand have changed their views”, making another demand during the week, he said. While the Liberals – who began the review of the present Environment Protection Act – “have chosen an obstructionist path,” he said.

Albanese said the government would continue to discuss the issue with stakeholders in the next term of parliament.

“Does the environment and protection act need revision from where it was last century? Quite clearly it does. Everyone says that that’s the case. It’s a matter of working to, in a practical way, a commonsense reform that delivers something that supports industry.

“I want to see faster approvals. We in fact have speeded up approvals substantially.

“But we also want proper sustainability as well.”

Albanese also flagged the government might cut back its legislation to reform rules covering electoral donations and spending in order to get a deal to pass it.

Special Minister of State Don Farrell and the Liberals had been on the brink of a deal in the final week of parliament last year, but negotiations imploded at the eleventh hour.

Albanese told The Conversation he hoped the legislation could still be passed. “I spoke with [Farrell] today, he is consulting with people across the parliament.

“What I would say is that we are looking to get reform through. Now whether that is a bigger, broader reform or whether it needs to be narrowed down, we’ll wait and see.

“But we’re very serious about the reform which would lower the donation declarations, that would put a cap on donations, a cap on expenditure, that would lead to more transparency as well. It’s an important part of supporting our democracy.

“We see overseas and we’ve seen people like Clive Palmer here spend over $100 million on a campaign. That’s a distortion of democracy – if one person can spend that much money to try to influence an election and we don’t find out all of that information till much later on.”

The reforms would not start operating until the next term of parliament.

Albanese said he thought the reform would have “overwhelming support” with the public “and I hope that it receives overwhelming support in the Senate as well”.

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: Albanese dumps Nature Positive legislation and considers shrinking the electoral reform bill – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-albanese-dumps-nature-positive-legislation-and-considers-shrinking-the-electoral-reform-bill-248848

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt Fitzpatrick, Professor in International History, Flinders University

With only a few weeks until Germany’s election, Elon Musk has unambiguously thrown his support behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In a video address to a party rally last week, he appeared to urge Germans to “move on” from any “past guilt” related to the Holocaust.

It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.

Troublingly, the AfD is now firmly entrenched as Germany’s second-most popular political party, behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like all parties in German elections, however, it cannot win an outright majority. It is also unlikely to be invited to join any ruling coalition that emerges from the February 23 election.

But the AfD’s anti-migrant, anti-government sloganeering has already seriously distorted Germany’s public debate and democratic culture, leaving many to ask whether it even needs to win elections to see its policies implemented.

This was evident following a dramatic week in Germany’s Bundestag.

First, in a radical break with Germany’s political norms, opposition leader Friedrich Merz deliberately drew on the votes of the AfD on Wednesday to ram a radical anti-asylum seeker motion through the parliament.

It was the first time in the history of the Bundestag that a parliamentary majority was reached with the help of the far right. Merz’s action was widely condemned as a “taboo-breaking” step towards legitimising the AfD.

Merz tried to take this a step further with a far-reaching bill to tighten immigration controls on Friday. Although the bill narrowly failed, all of the AfD voted with Merz. Twelve members of his own CDU party refused to back him.

Merz’s courting of the far right is widely seen as politically unnecessary, given his conservative CDU is already leading the national polls, making him the favourite to succeed the Social Democratic Party (SDP)‘s Olaf Scholz as chancellor.

This raises a couple crucial questions heading into the election. Is it insiders or outsiders that are playing the biggest role in bringing the far right into the mainstream? And just how big a role will the AfD play after the election?

The Musk effect

Musk’s embrace of the AfD should come as no surprise, given the integral part he played in Donald Trump’s election victory in the United States. In the German context, however, his behaviour and statements have taken on darker hues.

Germans know only too well what is at stake when democracy is eroded by those who abuse its freedoms to attack it. Had Musk’s now notorious Nazi salutes following Trump’s inauguration been performed in Berlin, for example, he might have faced up to three years in prison.

The catchphrase “never again” has underpinned German politics since the second world war. Yet, the response to Musk’s recent provocations was oddly muted in some sections of the German media.

The German tabloid Bild made embarrassing excuses for his Hitlerian salute, while others spoke vaguely of a “questionable gesture”.

With a few notable exceptions, it was left to activists to remind Germans of the severity of this gesture – projecting an image of Musk’s salute on a German Tesla plant, alongside the word “heil”.

Given the seriousness with which Germany patrols representations of its Nazi past, it was surprising just how few journalists were prepared to state without equivocation that “a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute”.

Merz’s embrace of the far right

Initially, there were some signs Germany’s main political leaders would decry Musk’s attempts to normalise far-right politics in the country.

When Musk called the AfD the “last spark of hope” in December, both Scholz and Merz quickly condemned his meddling.

Scholz has continued to label Musk’s blatant attempts to influence German politics as “unacceptable” and “disgusting”.

Merz claims to be keeping his distance from Musk. But it appears his strategy for winning the election is not far from what Musk is suggesting – mimicking AfD policies and collaborating with the party on anti-immigration votes.

In his most radical break with the centrism that characterised the CDU under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, Merz cracked the “firewall” against working with the far-right this week. Knowing just what it meant, he used the AfD’s support to pass the starkly worded nationalist border protection motion in the Bundestag.

The AfD publicly celebrated their good fortune, calling it a “historic day for Germany”.

Democratic party leaders, meanwhile, registered their shock and dismay. Merkel herself spoke out against Merz, saying it was “wrong” to “knowingly” work with the AfD.

Her intervention appears to have been critical to the immigration bill failing on Friday, with many of her former supporters in the CDU withholding their votes.

What AfD’s rise could mean

Given the two votes in the past week and Musk’s high-profile intervention, many in Germany now fear a CDU victory in the election could signal more collaboration with the AfD.

The Left Party has denounced Merz as an AfD puppet and demanded Musk be forbidden from entering Germany.

The Greens’ Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor, has said Merz’s nationalist coalition would “destroy Europe”. He has also warned Musk to keep his “hands off our democracy”, prompting Musk to label Habeck “a traitor to the German people”.

Musk is by no means the cause of the AfD’s popularity, but his embrace of the extremist party has given it a global profile and credibility in circles that might not have otherwise considered supporting it.

Musk has been a controversial figure in Germany ever since his Tesla “gigafactory” arrived in Brandenburg and was promptly accused of felling 500,000 trees and irreparably damaging precious groundwater reserves. Accusations of Tesla breaching German labour laws and even conducting surprise checks on sick workers have also not endeared him to progressive Germans.

As some commentators have suggested, it is probably not coincidental the AfD’s plans for the German economy would benefit Musk’s business interests. Economic self-interest alone seems insufficient, however, to explain why Musk has gravitated to the extreme right.

The same might be said of Merz. Electoral calculations alone cannot explain his risky courting of the far right. He has long been the frontrunner to win the next election. Cosying up to the AfD will only make it harder to form a coalition with either Scholz’s Social Democratic Party or the Greens.

If these two parties refuse to deal with Merz, the only other bloc large enough to deliver his party control of the government would be the AfD. Would he go so far?

Whether it is formally part of the next government or not, the AfD and its camp followers (such as Musk) could be set to have a much bigger influence on German politics. How this will change Germany in the long term remains to be seen.

Matt Fitzpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. The far-right is rising at a crucial time in Germany, boosted by Elon Musk – https://theconversation.com/the-far-right-is-rising-at-a-crucial-time-in-germany-boosted-by-elon-musk-247895

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Markus Wagner, Professor of Law and Director of the UOW Transnational Law and Policy Centre, University of Wollongong

It’s official. On February 1, US President Donald Trump will introduce a sweeping set of new 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico. China will also face new tariffs of 10%.

During the presidential campaign, Trump threatened tariffs against all three countries, claiming they weren’t doing enough to prevent an influx of “drugs, in particular fentanyl” into the US, while also accusing Canada and Mexico of not doing enough to stop “illegal aliens”.

There will be some nuance. On Friday, Trump said tariffs on oil and gas would come into effect later, on February 18, and that Canadian oil would likely face a lower tariff of 10%.

This may only be the first move against China. Trump has previously threatened the country with 60% tariffs, asserting this will bring jobs back to America.

But the US’ move against its neighbours will have an almost immediate impact on the three countries involved and the landscape of North American trade. It marks the beginning of what could be a radical reshaping of international trade and political governance around the world.

What Trump wants from Canada and Mexico

While border security and drug trade concerns are the official rationale for this move, Trump’s tariffs have broader motivations.

The first one is protectionist. In all his presidential campaigning, Trump portrayed himself as a champion of US workers. Back in October, he said tariff was “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”.

This reflects the ongoing scepticism toward international trade that Trump – and politicians more generally on both ends of the political spectrum in the US – have held for some time.

It’s a significant shift in the close trade links between these neighbours. The US, Mexico and Canada are parties to the successor of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Trump has not hidden his willingness to use tariffs as a weapon to pressure other countries to achieve unrelated geopolitical goals. This is the epitome of what a research project team I co-lead calls “Weaponised Trade”.

This was on full display in late January. When the president of Colombia prohibited US military airplanes carrying Colombian nationals deported from the US to land, Trump successfully used the threat of tariffs to force Colombia to reverse course.

Read more:
What are tariffs?

The economic stakes

The volume of trade between the US, Canada, and Mexico is enormous, encompassing a wide range of goods and services. Some of the biggest sectors are automotive manufacturing, energy, agriculture, and consumer goods.

In 2022, the value of all goods and services traded between the US and Canada came to about US$909 billion (A$1.46 trillion). Between the US and Mexico that same year, it came to more than US$855 billion (A$1.37 trillion).

One of the hardest hit industries will be the automotive industry, which depends on cross-border trade. A car assembled in Canada, Mexico or the US relies heavily on a supply of parts from throughout North America.

Tariffs will raise costs throughout this supply chain, which could lead to higher prices for consumers and make US-based manufacturers less competitive.

There could also be ripple effects for agriculture. The US exports billions of dollars in corn, soybeans, and meat to Canada and Mexico, while importing fresh produce such as avocados and tomatoes from Mexico.

Tariffs may provoke retaliatory measures, putting farmers and food suppliers in all three countries at risk.

Trump’s decision to delay and reduce tariffs on oil was somewhat predictable. US imports of Canadian oil have increased steadily over recent decades, meaning tariffs would immediately bite US consumers at the fuel pump.

We’ve been here before

This isn’t the first time the world has dealt with Trump’s tariff-heavy approach to trade policy. Looking back to his first term may provide some clues about what we might expect.

In 2018, the US levied duties on steel and aluminium. Both Canada and Mexico are both major exporters of steel to the US.

Canada and Mexico imposed retaliatory tariffs. Ultimately, all countries removed tariffs on steel and aluminium in the process of finalising the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Notably, though, many of Trump’s trade policies remained in place even after President Joe Biden took office.

This signalled a bipartisan scepticism of unfettered trade and a shift toward on-shoring or re-shoring in US policy circles.

The options for Canada and Mexico

This time, Canada and Mexico’s have again responded with threats of retaliatory tariffs.

But they’ve also made attempts to mollify Trump – such as Canada launching a “crackdown” on fentanyl trade.

Generally speaking, responses to these tariffs could range from measured diplomacy to aggressive retaliation. Canada and Mexico may target politically sensitive industries such as agriculture or gasoline, where Trump’s base could feel the pinch.

There are legal options, too. Canada and Mexico could pursue legal action through the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s dispute resolution mechanisms or the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Both venues provide pathways for challenging unfair trade practices. But these practices can be slow-moving, uncertain in their outcomes and are susceptible to being ignored.

A more long-term option for businesses in Canada and Mexico is to diversify their trade relationships to reduce reliance on the US market. However, the facts of geography, and the large base of consumers in the US mean that’s easier said than done.

The looming threat of a global trade war

Trump’s latest tariffs underscore a broader trend: the widening of the so-called “Overton window” to achieve unrelated geopolitical goals.

The Overton Window refers to the range of policy options politicians have because they are accepted among the general public.

Arguments for bringing critical industries back to the US, protecting domestic jobs, and reducing reliance on foreign supply chains gained traction after the ascent of China as a geopolitical and geoeconomic rival.

These arguments picked up steam during the COVID-19 pandemic and have increasingly been turned into actual policy.

The potential for a broader trade war looms large. Trump’s short-term goal may be to leverage tariffs as a tool to secure concessions from other jurisdictions.

Trump’s threats against Denmark – in his quest to obtain control over Greenland – are a prime example. The European Union (EU), a far more potent economic player, has pledged its support for Denmark.

A North American trade war – foreshadowed by the Canadian and Mexican governments – might then only be harbinger of things to come: significant economic harm, the erosion of trust among trading partners, and increased volatility in global markets.

Markus Wagner receives funding from the Department of Defence, Australia as a Chief Investigator on a project titled Weaponised Trade.

– ref. Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico amp up the risk of a broader trade war – https://theconversation.com/trumps-25-tariffs-on-canada-and-mexico-amp-up-the-risk-of-a-broader-trade-war-248667

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

On 27 December last year, astronomers using the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile discovered a small asteroid moving away from Earth. Follow up observations have revealed that the asteroid, 2024 YR4, is on a path that might lead to a collision with our planet on 22 December 2032.

In other words, the newly-discovered space rock poses a significant impact threat to our planet.

It sounds like something from a bad Hollywood movie. But in reality, there’s no need to panic – this is just another day living on a target in a celestial shooting gallery.

So what’s the story? What do we know about 2024 YR4? And what would happen if it did collide with Earth?

A target in the celestial shooting gallery

As Earth moves around the Sun, it is continually encountering dust and debris that dates back to the birth of the Solar system. The system is littered with such debris, and the meteors and fireballs seen every night are evidence of just how polluted our local neighbourhood is.

But most of the debris is far too small to cause problems to life on Earth. There is far more tiny debris out there than larger chunks – so impacts from objects that could imperil life on Earth’s surface are much less frequent.

The most famous impact came some 66 million years ago. A giant rock from space, at least 10 kilometres in diameter, crashed into Earth – causing a mass extinction that wiped out something like 75% of all species on Earth.

Impacts that large are, fortunately, very rare events. Current estimates suggest that objects like the one which killed the dinosaurs only hit Earth every 50 million years or so. Smaller impacts, though, are more common.

On 30 June 1908, there was a vast explosion in a sparsely populated part of Siberia. When explorers later reached the location of the explosion, they found an astonishing site: a forest levelled, with all the trees fallen in the same direction. As they moved around, the direction of the fallen trees changed – all pointing inwards towards the epicentre of the explosion.

In total, the Tunguska event levelled an area of almost 2,200 square kilometres – roughly equivalent to the area of greater Sydney. Fortunately, that forest was extremely remote. While plants and animals were killed in the blast zone, it is thought that, at most, only three people perished.

Estimates vary of how frequent such large collisions should be. Some argue that Earth should experience a similar impact, on average, once per century. Others suggest such collisions might only happen every 10,000 years or so. The truth is we don’t know – but that’s part of the fun of science.

More recently, a smaller impact created global excitement. On 15 February 2013, a small asteroid (likely about 18 metres in diameter) detonated near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

The explosion, about 30 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, generated a powerful shock-wave and extremely bright flash of light. Buildings were damaged, windows smashed, and almost 1,500 people were injured – although there were no fatalities.

It served as a reminder, however, that Earth will be hit again. It’s only a question of when.

Which brings us to our latest contender – asteroid 2024 YR4.

The 1-in-77 chance of collision to watch

2024 YR4 has been under close observation by astronomers for a little over a month. It was discovered just a few days after making a relatively close approach to our planet, and it is now receding into the dark depths of the Solar system. By April, it will be lost to even the world’s largest telescopes.

The observations carried out over the past month have allowed astronomers to extrapolate the asteroid’s motion forward over time, working out its orbit around the Sun. As a result, it has become clear that, on 22 December 2032, it will pass very close to our planet – and may even collide with us.

At present, our best models of the asteroid’s motion have an uncertainty of around 100,000 kilometres in its position at the time it would be closest to the Earth. At around 12,000 kilometres in diameter, our planet falls inside that region of uncertainty.

Calculations suggest there is currently around a 1-in-77 chance that the asteroid will crash into our planet at that time. Of course, that means there is still a 76-in-77 chance it will miss us.

When will we know for sure?

With every new observation of 2024 YR4, astronomers’ knowledge of its orbit improves slightly – which is why the collision likelihoods you might see quoted online keep changing. We’ll be able to follow the asteroid as it recedes from Earth for another couple of months, by which time we’ll have a better idea of exactly where it will be on that fateful day in December 2032.

But it is unlikely we’ll be able to say for sure whether we’re in the clear at that point.

Fortunately, the asteroid will make another close approach to the Earth in December 2028 – passing around 8 million kilometres from our planet. Astronomers will be ready to perform a wide raft of observations that will help us to understand the size and shape of the asteroid, as well as giving an incredibly accurate overview of where it will be in 2032.

At the end of that encounter, we will know for sure whether there will be a collision in 2032. And if there is to be a collision that year, we’ll be able to predict where on Earth that collision will be – likely to a precision of a few tens of kilometres.

How big would the impact be?

At the moment, we don’t know the exact size of 2024 YR4. Even through Earth’s largest telescopes, it is just a single tiny speck in the sky. So we have to estimate its size based on its brightness. Depending on how reflective the asteroid is, current estimates place it as being somewhere between 40 and 100 metres across.

What does that mean for a potential impact? Well, it would depend on exactly what the asteroid is made of.

The most likely scenario is that the asteroid is a rocky pile of rubble. If that turns out to be the case, then the impact would be very similar to the Tunguska event in 1908.

The asteroid would detonate in the atmosphere, with a shockwave blasting Earth’s surface as a result. The Tunguska impact was a “city killer” type event, levelling forest across a city-sized patch of land.

A less likely possibility is that the asteroid is made of metal. Based on its orbit around the Sun, this seems unlikely – but we can’t rule it out.

In that case, the asteroid would make it through the atmosphere intact, and crash into Earth’s surface. If it hit on the land, it would carve out a new impact crater, probably more than a kilometre across and a couple of hundred metres deep – something similar to Meteor Crater in Arizona.

Again, this would be quite spectacular for the region around the impact – but that would be about it.

Living in a remarkable time

This all sounds like doom and gloom. After all, we know that the Earth will be hit again – either by 2024 YR4 or something else. But there’s a real positive to take out of all this.

There has been life on Earth for more than 3 billion years. In all that time, impacts have come along and caused destruction and devastation many times.

But there has never been a species, to our knowledge, that understood the risk, could detect potential threats in advance, and even do something about the threat. Until now.

In just the past few years, we have discovered 11 asteroids before they hit our planet. In each case, we have predicted where they would hit, and watched the results.

We have also, in recent years, demonstrated a growing capacity to deflect potentially threatening asteroids. NASA’s DART mission (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was an astounding success.

For the first time in more than 3 billion years of life on Earth, we can do something about the risk posed by rocks from space. So don’t panic! But instead, sit back and watch the show.

Jonti Horner 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. Astronomers have spied an asteroid that may be heading for Earth. Here’s what we know so far – https://theconversation.com/astronomers-have-spied-an-asteroid-that-may-be-heading-for-earth-heres-what-we-know-so-far-248753

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

One of United States President Donald Trump’s more startling claims since taking office for his second term – and there have been many – is his insistence that the US will take control of Greenland.

Both prior to taking office and since, Trump has spoken about a desire for the US to acquire Greenland, an autonomous territory that is part of Denmark. This revives a proposal he floated in 2019, and is now being advanced with serious intent.

Trump’s interest in Greenland is framed around US security. The island is strategically located in the GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) Gap. The gap gained prominence during the Cold War as an area where Soviet nuclear submarines could operate in the Atlantic Ocean proximate to the US and its NATO partners. Denmark’s limited naval capacity meant these Soviet submarine incursions were uncontested.

Washington has always appreciated the strategic significance of Greenland. It was used during the second world war as a US military staging point due to its relative safety from the European theatre of war and its capacity as a stopover for aircraft to refuel.

Later, during the Cold War, the Thule US Airbase was constructed on its northwest coast, later becoming the Pituffik Space Base.

Trump is particularly concerned about Russian and Chinese ships operating offshore near Greenland in the Arctic Ocean, and with ensuring US access to rare earth minerals on the island.

All of these are legitimate US security and strategic interests. It is often forgotten that the US is an Arctic nation by virtue of Alaska, and Greenland is adjacent to North America.

However, Greenland is not terra nullius ripe for American colonisation. It is recognised as Danish territory. Any dispute over a Danish claim to the island was resolved by an international court in 1933, and since that time Denmark has overseen Greenlandic affairs without challenge. Any suggestion Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland is contested has no foundation.

While Denmark has been a colonial power, there has been an active process underway to grant the 57,000 Greenlanders increased autonomy from Copenhagen. Home rule has been granted, a legislature has been created, and a road map exists for self-determination that may eventually see the emergence of an independent Greenland.

Seeking to honour the responsibility Copenhagen feels for ushering Greenlanders through this process, Denmark has made clear that Greenland is not for sale.

The most breathtaking aspect of Trump’s Greenland territorial ambitions has been the refusal to rule out the US using economic or military means to acquire it.

This ignores the fact that Greenland is part of Denmark (a NATO member) and that indigenous Greenlanders possess a right of self-determination. Moreover, any use of US military force to take Greenland would be in violation of both the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty on which NATO is founded and the 1945 United Nations Charter.

Respect for territorial integrity was one of foundations on which the UN Charter was built. The intention of the UN’s founders during the San Francisco Conference was to ensure military force could not be used to acquire territory through an act of aggression resulting in the annexation of territory.

Article 2 of the charter reflects this core principle. Its violation has repeatedly been seen as an egregious breach of international law. Iraq’s 1990 invasion and annexation of Kuwait and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine are examples of the international community uniting to condemn blatant uses of military force for territorial gain.

Other than Denmark, its Scandinavian neighbours and some NATO members, Trump’s Greenland territorial ambitions have been met with diplomatic silence. What is taking place behind closed doors and in the foreign ministries of US allies and partners can only be imagined.

For Australia, this raises fundamental issues regarding the US alliance. Would Australia be prepared to stand beside the US if it used its economic and military might to acquire Greenland?

Australia has a bipartisan position of both supporting the American alliance and the “rules-based” international order on which the UN is based. AUKUS is founded on these assumptions. Any US economic or military aggression over Greenland may force Australia into making a choice between America or the rule of law.

Donald Rothwell receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Trump says he wants to take Greenland. International law says otherwise – https://theconversation.com/trump-says-he-wants-to-take-greenland-international-law-says-otherwise-248682

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Mitchell, Lecturer in Criminology, Deakin University

Young people’s access to gender-affirming medical care has been making headlines this week.

Today, federal Health Minister Mark Butler announced a review into health care for trans and gender-diverse children and adolescents. The National Health and Medical Research council will conduct the review.

Yesterday, The Australian published an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calling for a federal inquiry, and a nationwide pause on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors.

This followed Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls earlier this week announcing an immediate pause on access to puberty blockers and hormone therapies for new patients under 18 in the state’s public health system, pending a review.

In the United States, President Donald Trump signed an executive order this week directing federal agencies to restrict access to gender-affirming care for anyone under 19.

This recent wave of political attention might imply gender-affirming care for young people is risky, controversial, perhaps even new.

But Australian courts have already extensively tested questions about its legitimacy, the conditions under which it can be provided, and the scope and limits of parental powers to authorise it.

What are puberty blockers?

Puberty blockers suppress the release of oestrogen and testosterone, which are primarily responsible for the physical changes associated with puberty. They are generally safe and used in paediatric medicine for various conditions, including precocious (early) puberty, hormone disorders and some hormone-sensitive cancers.

International and domestic standards of care state that puberty blockers are reversible, non-harmful, and can prevent young people from experiencing the distress of undergoing a puberty that does not align with their gender identity. They also give young people time to develop the maturity needed to make informed decisions about more permanent medical interventions further down the line.

Puberty blockers are one type of gender-affirming care. This care includes medical, psychological and social interventions to support transgender, gender-diverse and, in some cases, intersex people.

Young people in Australia need a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria to receive this care. Gender dysphoria is defined as the psychological distress that can arise when a person’s gender identity does not align with their sex assigned at birth. This diagnosis is only granted after an exhaustive and often onerous medical assessment.

After a diagnosis, treatment may involve hormones such as oestrogen or testosterone and/or puberty-blocking medications.

Hormone therapies involving oestrogen and testosterone are only prescribed in Australia once a young person has been deemed capable of giving informed consent, usually around the age of 16. For puberty blockers, parents can consent at a younger age.

Can a child legally access puberty blockers?

Gender-affirming care has been the subject of extensive debate in the Family Court of Australia (now the Federal Circuit and Family Court).

Between 2004 and 2017, every minor who wanted to access gender-affirming care had to apply for a judge to approve it. However, medical professionals, human rights organisations and some judges condemned this process.

In research for my forthcoming book, I found the Family Court has heard at least 99 cases about a young person’s gender-affirming care since 2004. Across these cases, the court examined the potential risks of gender-affirming treatment and considered whether parents should have the authority to consent on their child’s behalf.

When determining whether parents can consent to a particular medical procedure for their child, the court must consider whether the treatment is “therapeutic” and whether there is a significant risk of a wrong decision being made.

However, in a landmark 2017 case, the court ruled that judicial oversight was not required because gender-affirming treatments meet the standards of normal medical care.

It reasoned that because these therapies address an internationally recognised medical condition, are supported by leading professional medical organisations, and are backed by robust clinical research, there is no justification for treating them differently from any other standard medical intervention. These principals still stand today.

What if parents disagree?

Sometimes parents disagree with decisions about gender-affirming care made by their child, or each other.

As with all forms of health care, under Australian law, parents and legal guardians are responsible for making medical decisions on behalf of their children. That responsibility usually shifts once those children reach a sufficient age and level of maturity to make their own decisions.

However, in another landmark case in 2020, the court ruled gender-affirming treatments cannot be given to minors without consent from both parents, even if the child is capable of providing their own consent. This means that if there is any disagreement among parents and the young person about either their capacity to consent or the legitimacy of the treatment, only a judge can authorise it.

In such instances, the court must assess whether the proposed treatment is in the child’s best interests and make a determination accordingly. Again, these principals apply today.

Have the courts ever denied care?

Across the at least 99 cases the court has heard about gender-affirming care since 2004, 17 have involved a parent opposing the treatment and one has involved neither parent supporting it.

Regardless of parental support, in every case, the court has been responsible for determining whether gender-affirming treatment was in the child’s best interests. These decisions were based on medical evidence, expert testimony, and the specific circumstances of the young person involved.

In all cases bar one, the court has found overwhelming evidence to support gender-affirming care, and approved it.

Supporting transgender young people

The history of Australia’s legal debates about gender-affirming care show it has already been the subject of intense legal and medical scrutiny.

Gender-affirming care is already difficult for young people to access, with many lacking the parental support required or facing other barriers to care.

Gender-affirming care is potentially life-saving, or at the very least life-affirming. It almost invariably leads to better social and emotional outcomes. Further restricting access is not the “protection” its opponents claim.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. For LGBTQIA+ peer support and resources, you can also contact Switchboard, QLife (call 1800 184 527), Queerspace, Transcend Australia (support for trans, gender-diverse, and non-binary young people and their families) or Minus18 (resources and community support for LGBTQIA+ young people).

Matthew Mitchell has a contract with Bristol University Press for a forthcoming book on the legal regulation of gender-affirming hormones for transgender young people in Australia.

– ref. Can a child legally take puberty blockers? What if their parents disagree? – https://theconversation.com/can-a-child-legally-take-puberty-blockers-what-if-their-parents-disagree-248651

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chrystal Zhang, Associate Professor, Aerospace Engineering & Aviation, RMIT University

On Wednesday night US time, a passenger jet and US Army helicopter collided at a low altitude near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and crashed into the the Potomac River.

A total of 60 passengers – including US and Russian champion figure skaters – and four crew were on board the American Airlines flight AA5342 from Wichita, Kansas. Three military personnel were in the chopper, which was conducting a routine training flight. Authorities say no one on board either aircraft survived.

This crash comes just over a month after a passenger jet crashed in South Korea – possibly as a result of a bird strike – killing all but two of the 181 people on board. The two incidents have focused attention on aviation safety around the world.

In the case of the most recent tragedy in the US, technology exists that is designed to help pilots avoid midair collisions with other aircraft. It is known as the Traffic Collision Avoidance System – or TCAS.

So how does it work? And why might it have failed to prevent disaster in this case?

What is a TCAS?

A TCAS is an aircraft safety system that monitors the airspace around a plane for other aircraft equipped with transponders. These are devices that listen for and respond to incoming electronic signals.

The system – also sometimes referred to as an ACAS (Airborne Collision Avoidance System) – operates independently of an external air traffic control system. Its purpose is to alert pilots immediately to nearby aircraft and potential midair collisions.

Since the technology was developed in 1974, it has undergone a number of advances.

The first generation technology, known as TCAS I, monitors what’s around an aircraft. It provides information on the bearing and altitude of any nearby aircraft. If there is a risk of collision, it generates what’s known as a “Traffic Advisory” – or TA. When a TA is issued, the pilot is notified of the threat, but must themselves determine the best evasive action to take.

The second generation technology, known as TCAS II, goes a step further: it provides a pilot with specific instructions on how to avoid a collision with a nearby aircraft or conflict with traffic, either by descending, climbing, turning or adjusting their speed.

These newer systems are also able to communicate with each other. This ensures the advice given to each aircraft is coordinated.

Any aircraft used for commercial purposes must be equipped with a TCAS in accordance with international regulations under what’s known as the Chicago Convention. There are specific provisions under the convention for noncommercial aircraft.

Military helicopters are not subject to the provisions of the Chicago Convention (although they are subject to domestic laws and regulations). And there are reports the military helicopter did not have a TCAS system on board.

Limitations of TCAS at low altitudes

Regardless of whether the military helicopter involved in the crash was fitted with a TCAS, the technology still has limitations. In particular, it is inhibited at altitudes below roughly 300 metres.

The last recorded altitude of American Airlines flight AA5342 was roughly 90 metres. The last recorded altitude of the US military helicopter that collided with the plane was roughly 60 metres.

It is not an accident that a TCAS is inhibited at low altitudes. In fact, this is part of the design of the technology.

This is primarily because the system relies on radio altimeter data, which measures altitude and becomes less accurate near the ground. This could potentially result in unreliable collision-avoidance instructions.

Another issue is that an aircraft at such a low altitude cannot descend any further to avoid a collision.

The site of several near misses

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is one of the busiest airports in the United States. Commercial, military and private aircraft share very limited airspace and corridors.

It has been the site of several near misses in recent years.

For example, in April 2024, a commercial plane pilot coming into land had to take evasive action to avoid a helicopter that was roughly 100 metres beneath it. In an incident report, the pilot said:

We never received a warning of the traffic from (air traffic control) so we were unaware it was there.

Many people, including Democratic US senator Tim Kaine, pointed to this near miss as evidence of why a plan to allow more flights into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport should not proceed. Despite this, the plan was approved the following month.

All of this will undoubtedly be examined as part of the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board into this disaster.

Chrystal 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. Planes have high-tech systems to stop midair crashes. So what went wrong in Washington? – https://theconversation.com/planes-have-high-tech-systems-to-stop-midair-crashes-so-what-went-wrong-in-washington-248744

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phil Edwards, Senior Research Scientist, Australia Telescope National Facility Science, CSIRO

In February 1995, a small research organisation known as the SETI Institute launched what was then the most comprehensive search for an answer to a centuries-old question: are we alone in the universe?

This Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the first astronomical observations conducted for the search, named Project Phoenix. These observations were done at the Parkes Observatory on Wiradjuri country in the central west of New South Wales, Australia – home to one of the world’s largest radio telescopes.

But Project Phoenix was lucky to get off the ground.

Three years earlier, NASA had commenced an ambitious decade-long, US$100 million Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). However, in 1993, the United States Congress cut all funding for the program because of the growing US budget deficit. Plus, SETI sceptics in Congress derided the program as a far-fetched search for “little green men”.

Fortunately, the SETI Institute secured enough private donations to revive the project – and Project Phoenix rose from the ashes.

Listening for radio signals

If there is life elsewhere, it is natural to assume it evolved over many million years on a planet orbiting a long-lived star similar to our Sun. So SETI searches usually target the nearest Sun-like stars, listening for radio signals that are either being deliberately beamed our way, or are techno-signatures radiating from another planet.

Techno-signatures are confined to a narrow range of frequencies and produced by the technologies an advanced civilisation like ours might use.

Astronomers use radio waves as they can penetrate the clouds of gas and dust in our galaxy. They can also travel over large distances without excessive power requirements.

Murriyang, CSIRO’s 64 metre radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory, has been in operation since 1961.
It has made a wealth of astronomical discoveries and played a pivotal role in tracking space missions – especially the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

As the largest single-dish radio telescope in the southern hemisphere, it is also the natural facility to use for SETI targets in the southern skies.

While Project Phoenix planned to use several large telescopes around the world, these facilities were undergoing major upgrades. So it was at Parkes that the observing program started.

On February 2 1995, Murriyang pointed towards a carefully chosen star 49 light-years from Earth in the constellation of, naturally, Phoenix. This was the first observation conducted as part of the project.

A logistical and technological success

Project Phoenix was led by Jill Tarter, a renowned SETI researcher who spent many long nights at Parkes overseeing observations during the 16 weeks dedicated to the search. (Jodie Foster’s character in the 1998 movie Contact was largely based on Jill.)

The Project Phoenix team brought a trailer full of computers with state-of-the-art touch screen technology to process the data.

Bogong moths caused some early interruptions to the processing. These large, nocturnal moths were attracted to light from computer screens, flying into them with enough force to change settings.

Over 16 weeks, the Project Phoenix team observed 209 stars using Murriyang at frequencies between 1,200 and 3,000 mega-hertz. They searched for both continuous and pulsing signals to maximise the chance of finding genuine signals of alien life.

Radio telescopes are able to detect the faint radio emissions from distant celestial objects. But they are also sensitive to radio waves produced in modern society (our own techno-signatures) by mobile phones, Bluetooth connections, aircraft radar and GPS satellites.

These kinds of local interference can mimic the kinds of signal SETI searches are looking for. So distinguishing between the two is crucial.

To do this, Project Phoenix decided to use a second radio telescope some distance away for an independent check of any signals detected. CSIRO provided access to its 22 metre Mopra radio telescope, about 200 kilometres north of Parkes, to follow up signal candidates in real time.

Over the 16 weeks, the team detected a total of 148,949 signals at Parkes – roughly 80% of which could be easily dismissed as local signals. The team checked a little over 18,000 signals at both Parkes and Mopra. Only 39 passed all tests and looked like strong SETI candidates. But on closer inspection the team identified them as coming from satellites.

AS Jill Tarter summarised in an article in 1997:

Although no evidence for an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal was found, no mysterious or unexplained signals were left behind and the Australian deployment was a logistical and technological success.

The next generation of radio telescopes

When Project Phoenix ended in 2004, project manager Peter Backus concluded “we live in a quiet neighbourhood”.

But efforts are continuing to search for alien life with greater sensitivity, over a wider frequency range, and for more targets.

Breakthough Listen, another privately funded project, commenced in 2015, again making use of the Parkes telescope among others.

Breakthrough Listen aims to examine one million of the closest stars and 100 closest galaxies.

One unexpected signal detected at Parkes in 2019 as part of this project was examined in painstaking detail before it was concluded that it too was a locally generated signal.

The next generation of radio telescopes will provide a leap in sensitivity compared to facilities today – benefitting from greater collecting area, improved resolution and superior processing capabilities.

Examples of these next generation radio telescopes include the SKA-Low telescope, under construction in Western Australia, and the SKA-Mid telescope, being built in South Africa. They will be used to answer a wide variety of astronomical questions – including whether there is life beyond Earth.

As SETI pioneer Frank Drake once noted:

the most fascinating, interesting thing you could find in the universe is not another kind of star or galaxy … but another kind of life.

Project Phoenix used Murriyang, the CSIRO Parkes radio-telescope, under contract for the work described in this article. I work for CSIRO, but joined in 2006 after this project had been completed.

– ref. One of the largest searches for alien life started 30 years ago. Its legacy lives on today – https://theconversation.com/one-of-the-largest-searches-for-alien-life-started-30-years-ago-its-legacy-lives-on-today-247097

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shelley J. Walker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Justice Health, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

January 25 marked five years since the first COVID case was recorded in Australia.

Many of us have tried to move on quickly from the pandemic, putting lockdowns and restrictions far behind us.

But for some Australians, this hasn’t been possible. Among the pandemic’s lingering impacts is the burden of outstanding fines, issued for breaking COVID restrictions.

These often hit disadvantaged groups the hardest, who were more likely to be fined and less able to pay. Five years down the track, marginalised communities are still feeling the impact of these penalties.

Our new research involved surveys and in-depth interviews with people who used drugs during the pandemic. They reported feeling targeted by police and even harassed while trying to access drug treatments – and years later, many still have fines they’re unable to pay.

Thousands of unpaid fines

During the pandemic, police issued millions of dollars’ worth of fines to people who broke restrictions. More than 50,000 fines were issued in Victoria and around 62,000 in New South Wales .

Fines ranged from A$200 for not wearing a face mask to nearly $5,000 for breaking rules about gatherings.

Fines were a public health measure aimed at stopping the virus spreading.

But for some people already struggling with financial and social problems, including those who use drugs, it compounded their difficulties.

Studies have found some groups were fined much more often than others, including people from Sudanese and South Sudanese backgrounds, Aboriginal people and children experiencing disadvantage.

While they were intended as public health measures, the fines reveal deeper patterns about targeted policing.

Following calls by community legal services and human rights groups and updated legal advice, the NSW government withdrew all outstanding COVID fines at the end of 2024.

This is not the case in Victoria. In June 2023, around 30,000 fines were outstanding in Victoria, and to our knowledge the situation hasn’t changed since then.

Feeling targeted

We know that people who use drugs already face increased police scrutiny in general, due to the criminalisation of drug use.

We conduct two long-term studies with people who use drugs in Victoria, which involves participating in an annual survey.

During the pandemic we asked additional questions about people’s interactions with police. Between March 2020 and May 2022, 1,130 participants responded to our survey.

Our new research found one in ten reported being stopped by police.

A third of these received at least one COVID-related fine – mostly for breaking curfews, failing to wear a face mask or breaching travel restrictions – a rate we calculated as nearly three times higher than the general population.

However, this is a crude estimate, as accurate data on the numbers of fines in the general population is not publicly available.

Of those who received fines, most were unemployed, more than a quarter were in unstable housing or homeless, and more than half had been to prison.

We also did in-depth interviews with 76 participants. Many told us they felt the pandemic gave police an “excuse” to target them, leading to serious and lasting effects on their lives.

Fined while accessing services

Interactions with police were described as fraught with discrimination and harassment. Participants reported being stopped, searched and fined while trying to go about their daily lives. This may be partly because their circumstances meant they were more likely to be using public spaces – and therefore were more visible to police.

Daniel, aged 41, was fined $1,652 for breaching COVID rules he told us he didn’t understand. He said:

it was so obvious they were looking for drugs – it felt like they were doing everything they could to find a reason to fine us.

For people who use drugs, accessing harm-reduction services and drug treatment programs (such as methadone to replace opioids) is vital to their health. Some participants told us they were fined while doing so, despite carrying medical exemptions.

Natasha, aged 39, was homeless. She said she was fined while travelling to a needle and syringe program, despite being within the permitted travel zone.

Police issued her a fine for leaving the home for non-essential purposes. Natasha found the situation absurd, asking “how can you be (fined for being) outside if you sleep outside?”

Ryan, aged 45, was fined $1,800 while collecting methadone. He described the encounter as “humiliating” and unnecessary, saying police appeared more interested in finding drugs than enforcing public health measures.

The financial and emotional toll

In our study, the financial burden of COVID fines was devastating.

Most could not afford to pay fines or lacked the confidence to navigate appeals processes to contest them, leading to further entanglement with the criminal legal system.

For example, Sally, who received multiple fines while collecting her methadone during the pandemic, said:

at the end of the day, they’re government authority and I’m a nobody – the chances of me winning would be slim to none.

As a result, unpaid fines for some reportedly led to court orders, some were arrested, and a few even reported serving prison time.

The emotional toll was equally severe, with feelings of being targeted and harassed by police further eroding their trust in public institutions.

The Conversation contacted Victoria Police about our study, noting participants thought police were using the pandemic as an excuse to target them.

In response, a police spokesperson said: “At the time officers were performing duties on behalf of the Chief Health Officer’s direction.”

The burden can be lifted

Public health responses should be designed to protect people, not punish them. As we move forward, it is crucial to address the lasting impacts of COVID fines.

All Australian governments should follow the lead of NSW and waive all remaining fines to alleviate the financial and emotional burden on vulnerable populations.

*Names have been changed.

Shelley Walker is the recipient of an ARC Discovery Early Career Award (project number DE240101056) funded by the Australian Government. The study presented in this article was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council NHMRC (#2003255). The SuperMIX and VMAX studies are funded by the NHMRC; #545891, #1126090, #1148170)

Paul Dietze receives funding from the NHMRC and government and non-government organisations for the conduct of research into the impacts of alcohol and other drug use.

Lisa Maher 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. 5 years after COVID began, outstanding fines mean marginalised Australians are still paying the highest price – https://theconversation.com/5-years-after-covid-began-outstanding-fines-mean-marginalised-australians-are-still-paying-the-highest-price-247912

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naomi Milthorpe, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania

I’m at the park with my daughter, who is jumping in and out of puddles, splashing, shrieking at me (Mum! Look what I can do!), as I read frantically, taking one-handed notes on my phone (Mum! Look at this!). Part of me wishes I could enjoy with her this moment of pleasure in movement. The other, more insistent part is thinking about this essay: where to start, what to say, how to sum up the extraordinary legacy of the book I’m re-reading, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which this year marks 100 years since its first publication in 1925. How am I supposed to write about this book?

If you were to read a synopsis, it might seem like a book purely for an academic specialist (which, admittedly, I am). One day in London in June 1923, an ageing rich woman, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares to give a party. Across town, a shell-shocked Great War veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, loses his grip on sanity. Between them oscillate other characters: Clarissa’s former lover Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s husband Richard and daughter Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s tutor Doris Kilman, Septimus’s wife Rezia, and his doctors Holmes and Bradshaw.

Like that other modernist monument, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows ordinary people through ordinary activities on an ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are filtered through their individual consciousnesses, threaded together with language, images and memories.

The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is demonstrated by the number of online parodies it inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a verified meme.

A new seam

On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of the manuscript she was drafting – then called “The Hours” – that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could write whatever she wanted to write because she owned her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond home.

Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to be self-published in this way. Being a small-press publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that would have been impossible if she was working with a mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do my scales”.

I recently co-hosted a conference here in Hobart, which included a panel on contemporary Tasmanian experimental writing. The writers who spoke that day talked of the struggle to place work that pushed the boundaries of form and genre. A hundred years after Woolf’s efforts to unearth what she called a new “seam”, commercial imperatives continue to constrain writers and their work.

Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion.

It sold moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year. Her biographer Hermione Lee records that in 1926 income from writing allowed Woolf and her husband Leonard to install a hot water range and toilet at their country home.

Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its challenge to the novel form and representation of time. Clarissa remembers the jolt of desire she felt as an 18-year-old for her friend Sally Seton, who kisses her on the terrace of her house at Bourton:

the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

Clarissa, made “virginal” in middle age by illness and marital boredom, is surprised by this irrupting memory. She connects it to her sense of joy in life itself: “the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings […] collecting the whole of her at one point”.

Clarissa and Septimus Smith – though they never meet – are shadow versions of each other. Both have beaky noses, thin pale birdlike bodies, and histories of illness.

Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of the social system – what Woolf’s narrator ironises as the sister goddesses Conversion and Proportion.

“Worshipping proportion […] made England prosper”, because proportion forbids despair, illness, and emotional extremes. Conversion, the strong arm of Empire, “offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, the dissatisfied”. Conversion “loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will”. Together, they suck the life from those who cannot or will not comply with them.

For Septimus, who has witnessed the dreadful disproportion of the war, ordinary social life becomes a torturous pressure cooker, a “gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames”. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement emphasised this aspect of its experimentalism:

Watching Mrs Woolf’s experiment, certainly one of the hardest and very subtly planned, one reckons up its cost. To get the whole value of the present you must enhance it, perhaps, with the past.

Watching my daughter lark about is shadowed by the two surgeries she had in early childhood to correct her developmental hip dysplasia. I hear her screech with joy in the park, rocketing about freely; I hear her scream in pain in the hospital, encased in plaster from the midsection down. As Woolf knew, the past and the present are experienced within us simultaneously.

Doubled experience

“In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.”

Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now probably the most written-about 20th century English author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which criticised the educational, economic and social constraints that prevented women, in many instances, from writing anything at all.

Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. Feminist politics has progressed beyond Woolf, but she laid one of the foundation stones. In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot.

The same year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, she also published her important collection of essays, The Common Reader. The first piece in that book, on the medieval letters of the Paston family, describes the illumination cast by these ordinary, non-literary pieces of writing:

Like all collections of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the fortunes of individuals. The family will go on, whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes.

Mrs Dalloway encompasses this doubled experience of insignificance and blazing life. Woolf writes of the past emerging into the present day and the present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she called this her “tunnelling process, by which I tell the past in instalments, as I have need of it”.

In tunnelling through narrative, digging out caves behind her characters, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust – buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their significance, through repeated reference to the bells and clocks of London striking the hour.

This is why the opening line – and the novel as a whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop time. As she wrote of the Pastons’ letters: “There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.”

Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of different perspectives through a single shared moment in time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and moves through that individual’s memories.

Woolf wrote in her diary that “the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” Daiches diagrammed these relations in time and space as a series of connected trees, arguing that they illustrated the novel’s concern with “the importance of contact and at the same time the necessity of keeping the self inviolable, of the extremes of isolation and domination”.

A legacy of inspiration

Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued to inspire. For second-wave feminism, Woolf was a touchstone. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an unparalleled position in the history of 20th century letters, inspiring the recovery of other contemporaneous women writers connected with the Bloomsbury group.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or explicitly.

Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she throws a literary party.

Cunningham’s novel counterpoints, as Woolf did, the work of living with the work of art. The homemaker Laura Brown tries to bake a cake to equal a work of art, hoping “to be as satisfied and as filled with anticipation as a writer putting down the first sentence, a builder beginning to draw the plans.” Later, her delirious dying son Richard regrets what he views as the failure of his art to compete with simply living:

I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine trying to do that. What foolishness.

More recently, Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf (2023) and Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead (2024) have wrestled with Mrs Dalloway the character, and with Woolf’s legacy. Darling’s novel revives a new “Mrs” Dalloway, Winona, a wealthy Sydney suburban writer, wife and mother, who struggles to break through “to something more real” than the constraint of middle class domestication.

Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf explores a minor character from Mrs Dalloway, whom Woolf failed to make properly live: Daisy Simmons, Peter Walsh’s Anglo-Indian fiancee. In Woolf’s novel, Daisy exists entirely offstage. She is a romantic memory of Peter’s, “dark, adorably pretty”. Daisy, writes Cahill, is

trapped in the past, in a moment, a vignette, but not the kind that would enter a room, open a window, to a life inside, a life in the mind, as it does for Clarissa with a squeak of hinges on the very first page of Mrs Dalloway! Not a real girl, Daisy, too arch perhaps, the air not stirring for her, seeing as she has no present tense.

Cahill’s present-day narrator Mina, writing back to Woolf, sees Daisy as a fully fleshed character: a mixed-race woman living in Calcutta in the twilight of Empire, as the Indian independence movement grows in strength. In recovering Daisy’s rich personal and political history, narrated through letters to Peter, Cahill reclaims interiority for this marginalised character.

In her 1937 essay Craftsmanship, the BBC broadcast of which is the only surviving recording of her voice, Woolf wrote: “Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations.”

Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same event from different vantage points and through different filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee explained, for Woolf “the really important life was ‘within’”.

Peter remembers Clarissa’s theory of life, which is expounded on top of a bus going down Shaftesbury Avenue:

She felt herself everywhere; not here here here; […] but everywhere. […] so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places […] since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death.

Late in the book, Septimus’s suicide is reported to Clarissa at the party. “Oh,” she thinks, “in the middle of my party, here’s death”. And in the middle of her party, Clarissa feels not only the disaster of death – “her disaster, her disgrace […] and she forced to stand here in her evening dress” – but the deep pulsing joy of life. “Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long.”

In certain lights – to paraphrase Michael Cunningham – Mrs Dalloway might look like the book of one’s own life, a book that will locate you, parent you, arm you for life’s changes. As an undergraduate, I was mesmerised by Woolf’s language and her grasp on the inner life.

Though Clarissa Dalloway is 52, Woolf turned 43 the year her novel was published. I’m turning 43 this year, too. Woolf, ravaged by long periods of illness and partially toothless, thought of herself as elderly. I do not, though I am no longer young. But to re-read this novel at this age reminds me to relish these long hours and short years: to sniff flowers, feel the lift of the gusting wind, jump and splash with my children, read the patterns made by the clouds. To seize the day.

Naomi Milthorpe 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. Friday essay: Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100 – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-seize-the-day-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-at-100-246331

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lily van Eeden, Lecturer, RMIT University

Ecosystems and species across the natural world are in serious trouble. The vast majority of Australians want more government action, but it’s not being delivered.

Take, for example, the federal government commitment to end extinctions via its Nature Positive plan. Or consider its promise to overhaul Australia’s environmental legislation and create a new independent regulator. Progress on both has faltered.

The biodiversity crisis calls for systemic change in humanity’s relationship with nature. This requires bold policy action from governments. Our new research examined how everyday people can help achieve this.

We mined the insider knowledge of politicians, senior public servants and environmental advocates. The participants were Victoria-based, but their advice applies more broadly.

Here, we present a recipe for achieving real, lasting change for the natural world.

1. Be prepared for a long haul

Change can take a long time. Be willing and able to see out the process. As one government interviewee told us:

[Change] is not going to happen by one research paper, one meeting, one event, it’s gonna be a whole range of things over a sustained period of time.

Also, find support. Our interviewees told us the most successful campaigns often happen when like-minded individuals band together. This provides the social support needed to stay the course.

Remember, change is possible. As one government interviewee told us, this is especially true in marginal seats, where “constant ongoing campaigning at every level” can shift the dial.

There is very likely a community group advocating for nature near you. These groups sometimes link up with larger, better-funded environment groups, to access their resources and networks.

2. Know the system

Identify who you need to influence. The person holding the lever might not be a politician, but a public servant. Or public servants might rally for a cause internally, sometimes partnering with community groups.

So how do you find this key person? Build your networks. Start talking to people in your community and get to know your local elected representatives. Find out what they care about and pitch your message to appeal to their values and concerns.

One interviewee told us community groups would benefit from knowing more about how the system works:

What are the bits that can actually change? […] Community members can be a bit aggressive in trying to drive through their challenge without understanding why they’ve been ignored in the past, or feel that they’ve been ignored.

As another government interviewee told us:

People don’t see how much power they have if they just use their voice and use it in a constructive way.

3. Be strategic

Choose whether to work with the government, or challenge it publicly.

Environmental advocates can work alongside government to design solutions together. For example, a community group might work with their local council to design and implement management of a bush reserve. Big non-government environment groups often work in this way, relying on strong relationships with government insiders to achieve change.

The opposite strategy is an “outsider” approach, which, at the extreme end, might include physically disrupting industry. Think chaining yourself to a tree in a forest pegged for logging or ramming a ship into a commercial whaling vessel.

A less extreme outsider approach might be seeking to get your issue into the media to build public interest to get something on the political agenda.

Both approaches have their merits in the right context. As one staff member of an environment group told us:

We’re going to put on the suits […] and we’re not going to scale their buildings and release confidential information that they’ve given us to the media […] I don’t judge those that have that theory of change, because we need both, we need the really extreme advocacy to make us look mainstream and medium and reasonable.

4. Seize the moment

Identify when your advocacy might be most effective. It might be an upcoming election or budget, or when a policy is being reviewed.

Or it might be something less predictable, such as a bushfire, flood or other environmental disaster. In those cases, nature conservation issues are suddenly all over the media. It might be a chance for real change.

Effective advocates know how to identify, create, and be prepared for these windows. As one staff member at an environmental group told us:

Some organizations talk about making change. But that’s a harder exercise. Often it’s a sort of a
catching a wave of something else, or waiting for the opportunity.

The upcoming federal election is one such opportunity. The lead up is a good time to advocate for nature. Speak with your local politician and their competitors about the change you want to see.

If not us, who?

These are well-tested, effective actions you can use to achieve positive policy change for the environment. But remember, the system is dynamic. New methods and approaches will emerge as technologies, modes of communication and other factors evolve.

Governments, however, are a permanent fixture in the system. They stand to benefit politically by engaging with community and advocacy groups. So there is enormous potential for everyday people to genuinely make a difference.

Environmental crises can seem overwhelming, but we can – and must – try to make a difference. Because, as the old adage goes: if not us, who? And if not now, when?

The authors acknowledge Fern Hames and Kim Lowe for their contributions to this article.

Lily van Eeden receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Lily was previously employed by the Victorian government.

Liam Smith is a Councillor on the Biodiversity Council.

Sarah Bekessy receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Ian Potter Foundation and the European Commission. She is a Lead Councillor with The Biodiversity Council, a board member of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of the WWF Eminent Scientists Group and an advisor to ELM Responsible Investment, the Living Building Challenge and Wood for Good.

– ref. Make a noise or work with the system? New research reveals 4 ways to create real change for nature – https://theconversation.com/make-a-noise-or-work-with-the-system-new-research-reveals-4-ways-to-create-real-change-for-nature-248226

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annabel Ahuriri-Driscoll, Associate Professor, School of Health Sciences, University of Canterbury

Despite being used in both the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill, the term “democracy” is neither defined nor explained in either.

This rhetorical and ideological vagueness obscures a pivotal point: there is no such thing as a singular form of democracy.

The ACT Party is behind both bills, and its leader David Seymour has also justified the Treaty Principles Bill – now before select committee – as upholding and protecting democracy. He asks, “are we a modern democracy where all citizens have equal rights?”.

But democracy takes various forms, and has done for millennia. Derived from the Ancient Greek “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power or rule), the word broadly means “rule by, or power of, the people”. And this can be realised in a number of ways.

The classical Greek form was direct democracy, also known as deliberative or participatory democracy. This involved male citizens participating equally and directly in political decisions.

In contrast, the ancient Roman form was indirect, representative democracy. Representatives elected by eligible citizens made decisions on their behalf. This was the basic model enacted in the 1852 New Zealand Constitution Act, as in most modern democracies.

Other models exist, too. But the point is that democracy is an evolving concept. It’s wrong to assert that any type of governance or decision-making other than our existing system of representative democracy (one person, one vote, underpinned by the rule of law) is undemocratic or anti-democratic.

Tyranny of the majority

Many of the political mechanisms the current government wishes to dismantle – such as Māori wards and consultation processes – were established because of the problems associated with representative democracy.

It is widely accepted that political representation should reflect the different characteristics of a community. But what has been called the “tyranny of the majority” can lead to minorities being constantly outvoted.

Unable to gain representation in proportion to their population, their interests are excluded. In short, it is entirely possible for democracy to be applied in ways that promote inequality rather than equality.

The common interpretation of equality as meaning “sameness” – everybody receiving the same resources and opportunities – underlies the insistence that laws and policies must be applied regardless of individual and group difference. Anything else is unfair or “special” treatment.

However, these assertions overlook the bias of our institutions towards members of the dominant or majority culture, and the unequal outcomes (in health and elsewhere) for Māori people that have resulted in marginalisation and disadvantage.

Correcting that imbalance is a political challenge. As others have argued, “protecting minority rights is an equal characteristic of genuine democracy”.

Tino rangatiratanga and democracy

The term “equity” refers to this recognition of the inequalities that exist between people. Where these inequalities are avoidable and unfair, resources and opportunities need to be allocated to reach an equal outcome.

Achieving health equity for Māori was a key purpose of Te Aka Whai Ora/the Māori Health Authority, prior to its disestablishment.

For Māori, the unfairness extends beyond unequal health and other socioeconomic outcomes. It involves the disregarded guarantees pledged by the Crown in te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.

These included Māori rights of self-determination, or tino rangatiratanga, which is the source of so much contemporary debate.

Tino rangatiratanga challenges the singular base of power assumed by the Crown, and a “one size fits all” system of representation. But despite claims to the contrary, others argue upholding tino rangatiratanga is entirely possible within the realms of democracy.

The idea of “rule of and by the people” may take many forms, as the work of Matike Mai, the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, tries to demonstrate.

In proposing constitutional change, Matike Mai describes a sphere of influence based on the Māori-Crown relationship where “conciliatory and consensual democracy” operates.

Difference and equity

It has been argued that te Tiriti is “of its time” and should therefore be subject to reinterpretation. And yet the same argument is rarely made about notions of democracy and equality that have been with us since 1852.

This is relevant to many communities which experience avoidable and unfair health and social inequalities, not only Māori.

In September last year, a Cabinet Office circular required public sector agencies to ensure “services are not arbitrarily allocated on the basis of ethnicity or any other aspect of identity”.

On the face of it, this is a call for fair and equal treatment based on need. But the language suggests difference is about how an individual chooses to identify, rather than how their identity and circumstances cause them to be treated differently in the first place.

As long as this is the case, those differences and their associated needs will always be underserved.

Annabel Ahuriri-Driscoll 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 Treaty Principles Bill’s promise of ‘equal rights’ ignores the blind spots of our democracy – https://theconversation.com/the-treaty-principles-bills-promise-of-equal-rights-ignores-the-blind-spots-of-our-democracy-248121

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natasa Gisev, Clinical pharmacist and Scientia Associate Professor at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

Changes are coming into effect from February 1 about how paracetamol is sold in Australia.

This mainly affects pack sizes of paracetamol sold outside pharmacies and how paracetamol is accessed in pharmacies.

The changes, announced by Australia’s drug regulator, are in line with moves internationally to reduce the harms of liver toxicity and the risk of overdose.

However, there are no new safety concerns when paracetamol is used as directed. And children’s products are not affected.

What is paracetamol?

Paracetamol is commonly sold under brand names such as Panadol, Dymadon and Panamax. It’s used to treat mild pain and fever for short periods or can be prescribed for chronic (long-term) pain.

Millions of packs of this cheap and accessible medicine are sold in Australia every year.

Small packs (up to 20 tablets) have been available from supermarkets and other retailers such as petrol stations. Larger packs (up to 100 tablets) are only available from pharmacies.

Paracetamol is relatively safe when used as directed. However, at higher-than-recommended doses, it can cause liver toxicity. In severe cases and when left untreated, this can be lethal.

Why are the rules changing?

In 2022, we wrote about how the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) was considering changes to paracetamol access because of an increase in people going to hospital with paracetamol poisoning.

An expert review it commissioned found there were about 40-50 deaths every year from paracetamol poisoning between 2007 and 2020. Between 2009-10 and 2016-17, hospital admissions for this increased (from 8,617 to 11,697), before reducing in 2019-20 (8,723). Most admissions were due to intentional self-poisonings, and about half of these were among people aged ten to 24.

After the report, the TGA consulted with the public to work out how to prevent paracetamol poisonings.

Options included reducing pack sizes, limiting how many packs could be bought at once, moving larger packs behind the pharmacy counter and restricting access by age.

Responses were mixed. Although responses supported the need to prevent poisonings, there were concerns about how changes might affect:

• people with chronic pain, especially those in regional areas, where it may be harder to access pharmacies and, therefore, larger packs

• people on limited incomes, if certain products were made prescription-only.

Although deaths from paracetamol poisoning are tragic and preventable, they are rare considering how much paracetamol Australians use. There is less than one death due to poisoning for every million packs sold.

Because of this, it was important the TGA addressed concerns about poisonings while making sure Australians still had easy access to this essential medicine.

So what’s changing?

The key changes being introduced relate to new rules about the pack sizes that can be sold outside pharmacies, and the location of products sold in pharmacies.

From February 1, packs sold in supermarkets and places other than pharmacies will reduce from a maximum 20 tablets to 16 tablets per pack. These changes bring Australia in line with other countries. These include the United Kingdom, which restricted supermarket packs to 16 tablets in 1998, and saw reductions in poisonings.

In all jurisdictions except Queensland and Western Australia, packs sold in pharmacies larger than 50 tablets will move behind the pharmacy counter and can only be sold under pharmacist supervision. In Queensland and WA, products containing more than 16 tablets will only be available from behind the pharmacy counter and sold under pharmacist supervision.

In all jurisdictions, any packs containing more than 50 tablets will need to be sold in blister packs, rather than bottles.

Several paracetamol products are not affected by these changes. These include children’s products, slow-release formulations (for example, “osteo” products), and products already behind the pharmacy counter or only available via prescription.

What else do I need to know?

These changes have been introduced to reduce the risk of poisonings from people exceeding recommended doses. The overall safety profile of paracetamol has not changed.

Paracetamol is still available from all current locations and there are no plans to make it prescription-only or remove it from supermarkets altogether. Many companies have already been updating their packaging to ensure there are no gaps in supply.

The reduction in pack sizes of paracetamol available in supermarkets means
a pack of 16 tablets will now last two days instead of two-and-a-half days if taken at the maximum dose (two tablets, four times a day). Anyone in pain that does not improve after short-term use should speak to their pharmacist or GP.

For people who use paracetamol regularly for chronic pain, it is more cost-effective to continue buying larger packs from pharmacies. As larger packs (50+ tablets) need to be kept out of sight, you will need to ask at the pharmacy counter. Pharmacists know that for many people it’s appropriate to use paracetamol daily for chronic pain.

Natasa Gisev receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Ria Hopkins receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

– ref. Paracetamol pack sizes and availability are changing. Here’s what you need to know – https://theconversation.com/paracetamol-pack-sizes-and-availability-are-changing-heres-what-you-need-to-know-242200

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Stokes, Associate Professor, Teaching Innovation Unit, University of South Australia

As January lingers on, families may find themselves struggling with what a friend of mine has labelled the “electronic nanny”.

Children have been out of their normal routines for weeks during the holidays. Some are still yet to go back to school. Meanwhile, parents are back at work and needing to juggle those commitments with bored kids.

We know balanced screen use is important for children’s healthy physical, mental and social development. Too much screen time has also been linked to overeating and disrupted sleep.

How can families encourage healthy screen use as we ease back into the routine of a new school year?

Parental monitoring recommended

While screen use guidelines provide time limits, there is now a broader move among experts towards “curation over duration”.

This means it matters what children are watching – not simply how long they are watching it for.

Is the content age-appropriate? Is it educational or inspiring? Has it been well-reviewed)?

This means parents should play an active role in what content kids are viewing or engaging with. An easy way to do so is to view with children, or at a minimum be present in the same room and alert to what they are watching.

When you are “interactive co-viewing”, you not only watch together, you also discuss the content. This helps children engage with what they are watching and then make connections off-screen.

For example, if you are interested in a sea creature you see on Octonauts, you could go and find a book about it in the local library. Or you could discuss a moral dilemma you see on SpongeBob SquarePants: should SpongeBob have quit his job after another chef was mean about his cooking?

For older children, you could discuss plot points in films or strategies in games.

Read more:
‘Screen time’ for kids is an outdated concept, so let’s ditch it and focus on quality instead

Positive screen use

There are also lots of ways to use screens that can build skills and encourage critical thinking and creativity. Some things to try include:

• producing a short film, or stop-motion animation, all the way from idea, to script, shooting and editing

• taking and editing photos to make a calendar

• exploring an area of interest, such as dinosaurs, the Titanic or ballet dancing, using sites such as ABC Education or PBS LearningMedia.

• investigating generative artificial intelligence (AI). For example, test the capabilities of ChatGPT by asking it a question your child knows the answer to, and evaluating the response together. Does it contain all the relevant information? Is it fair and balanced?

• exploring how easy it is to edit an image, and consider what this tells us about the potential for online misinformation.

Being physical

Research shows interactive screen use – such as playing games or using educational apps – is more beneficial for kids than just passively viewing content. It can can even support literacy, numeracy and academic persistence.

You can also use screens to encourage physical activity. For example, these holidays, my little ones have enjoyed “shaking their sillies out” with dance-along videos by Danny Go!. They have also done “yoga in space” with Cosmic Kids.

Older kids may enjoy the dance fitness program Zumba, boxing or sports competitions on the Nintendo Switch.

Or you could stage your own family dance party. The kids could create their own set using a free DJ app.

Read more:
Screen time doesn’t have to be sedentary: 3 ways it can get kids moving

Structure in time away from screens

It’s also important for kids to see parents doing things other than using phones and other screens when they have downtime. Parents play a powerful role modelling time away from screens.

Make sure your kids see you enjoy offline activities too, such as reading, playing sport and socialising. If you are struggling to do this as a family – and we all know it is is hard – think about revisiting some of the old standards. You could:

• go to the park, for a scoot or a walk

• spend time in nature at the beach or bushwalking

• set building challenges with Lego

• draw or do other art activities with your child

• play board games

• make a recipe together.

And remember, you are certainly not the only family telling your kids “this is the very last episode”. If today has been a struggle, take tomorrow to recharge and reconnect as a family. Screens are part of our lives today, and we are all striving to find balance.

Jennifer Stokes 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. Watch shows together, talk about them and have dance parties: how to rebalance screen use after the holidays – https://theconversation.com/watch-shows-together-talk-about-them-and-have-dance-parties-how-to-rebalance-screen-use-after-the-holidays-247996

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcus Carter, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney

Gaming is no longer a niche activity reserved for a select few – it’s a global pastime enjoyed by people of all ages, backgrounds and interests. In fact, studies show 81% of Australians engage in some form of gaming.

But for those who don’t consider themselves “gamers”, it can be hard to know where to start. The idea of picking up a complex, console-focused title might feel intimidating.

But fear not. Whether you’re looking for a game that’s mentally stimulating, addictive enough to help kill time, or simply something everyone can enjoy, there are plenty of options. Here are our top picks for beginners.

1. Real Bird Fake Bird

Since Wordle’s meteoric rise in 2022, we’ve seen a wave of daily browser games, including Tradle, Vulture’s Cinematrix and the New York Times’ Connections.

The Melbourne-based developers behind the critically acclaimed Scrabble-esque Gubbins have created the newest addition to this list: Real Bird Fake Bird.

The premise is simple. Each day you’re given a topic, and are supposed to guess whether seven different things are “real” or “fake” examples of that topic. For instance, Adele is a real example of a Grammy winner, but “sun condemnation” is a fake example of a yoga pose.

Sounds simple, right? It’s harder than it seems. The lists often have devilish examples of fakes that seem real, and real things that seem fake, leaving you second-guessing.

And just like with Wordle, you can share your score with friends once you’ve made all seven guesses. It’s a great way to spend a minute of your day.

You can play Real Bird Fake Bird through any device that can access a browser.

2. Balatro

Then there’s a hypnotic re-imagining of the card game poker, Balatro, (playable everywhere).

Each round involves playing poker hands to hit a points target, but these hands can be upgraded and augmented by a deck of “jokers” that favour particular poker hands or combinations of cards. Hands swiftly ascend to scoring tens of thousands (if not millions) of points per hand, in a near-perfect gameplay loop that combines card-game logic with the immersive flow of games like Tetris.

Balatro, largely developed by a single, anonymous developer, was one of 2024’s biggest hits. It sold more than 3,500,000 copies, won best indie game and best mobile game at the Game Awards 2024, and even secured a surprise nomination for game of the year.

This is the gaming equivalent of an anonymous independent filmmaker getting a nod for Best Picture at the Oscars.

3. The Case/Rise of the Golden Idol

This recommendation is targeted at mystery lovers. If you, or someone you know, can’t get enough of films like Knives Out (2019) or mystery books like The Thursday Murder Club, then the Golden Idol series (2022 and 2024) may be the perfect fit.

Each level shows the moment of a crime and it’s up to the player to interact with the characters and environment to fill in the blanks on a file explaining what happened.

With simple controls and a retro art style recalling the classic LucasArts adventure games, much of the joy in the Golden Idol games comes from the devious logic puzzles the cases provide.

One case revolves around placing the locations of all the house guests at an estate party, while another involves interpreting an entire language made out of dance moves. Combine these puzzles with a delightful sense of humour and a slightly mystical meta-narrative and these games will keep your inner detective occupied for hours.

The original and sequel are both Netflix games, and are available through Netflix on mobile and tablet.

4. Mouthwashing

Heavily inspired by the films Alien (1979) and The Shining (1980) – and not for the faint-of-heart – Mouthwashing (2024) is perfect for horror fans who want to dip their toes into the gaming world.

The cargo spaceship Tulpar is deliberately crashed by its captain mid-voyage. Unable to call for help, its five crew members can do nothing but wait for rescue. They open the hold in search of food or medicine, but instead find millions of bottles of mouthwash. Lost in space with minimal supplies, the crew begin to turn on each other – and wonder why their beloved captain crashed the ship in the first place.

A haunting story of human fallibility, Mouthwashing tells its tale through “walking sim” gameplay: the player simply wanders around the wreck of the Tulpar, interacting with objects and characters, without any complicated controls.

With a compelling cast, gorgeously surreal art direction and a focus on dread and despair (rather than jump scares), Mouthwashing is a wonderful introduction to the renaissance happening in horror games right now.

The game is available for PC via Steam (A$19) and can be completed in 2-3 hours.

5. Wingspan

For those who have endless bird facts on hand, can identify a bird at a glance and look forward to the Aussie Bird Count each year, Wingspan is the perfect game.

The goal of this competitive, card-driven board game (which also has a videogame version) is to attract the best birds to various habitats by gathering food and laying eggs. Each player also has a randomly determined individual goal, which they can use to score extra points, making Wingspan very re-playable.

The best aspects of the game include the beautiful art and the delightful facts on each bird card. There is even an Oceania expansion, so you can gather and admire Australian birds, too!

Wingspan can be purchased online or at major board game retailers. You can play the videogame version with friends via Steam.

Although Wingspan was released in 2018, last year its publisher, Stonemaier Games, also released Wyrmspan – a spiritual successor which focuses on hatching dragons instead of birds. Wyrmspan is more complex than Wingspan, though, and offers a steeper learning curve for less-experienced board game players.

Acknowledgement: we would like to acknowledge the contributions of Mads Mackenzie to this article, director of the upcoming game Drăculești and co-director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival.

Marcus Carter is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (#220100076) on ‘The Monetisation of Children in the Digital Games Industry’. He has previously received funding from Meta, TikTok and Snapchat, and has consulted for Telstra. He is a current board member, and former president, of the Digital Games Research Association of Australia.

Taylor Hardwick is employed under funding by the Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship #220100076; DECRA #240101275). She is a board member of Freeplay, a Melbourne-based independent games festival.

Finn Dawson and Ryan Stanton 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. 5 games to play if you’re ‘not a gamer’ – or to introduce to the non-gamers in your life – https://theconversation.com/5-games-to-play-if-youre-not-a-gamer-or-to-introduce-to-the-non-gamers-in-your-life-244912

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Keiran Hardy, Associate Professor, Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University

Mike Burgess, head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, has issued a stark warning following the discovery of explosives in a caravan in northwest Sydney, alongside a note bearing the address of a Sydney synagogue.

We have seen a disturbing escalation in the targeting of Jewish interests, and a disturbing escalation in the severity and recklessness of the targeting.

In response to the recent spate of antisemitic incidents in Sydney – which include a childcare centre being set alight and graffitied – NSW Premier Chris Minns has also pledged to strengthen the state’s hate laws.

Changes to these laws would bring NSW in line with other states. However, they will have limited impact on a serious social problem. Both nationally and in the states, many existing laws can be used to prosecute people for these crimes, including incitement to violence on the basis of religion, race or ethnicity.

Responding quickly to the growing crisis around antisemitic attacks is understandable, but greater long-term investments must also be made to prevent extreme, hateful beliefs from developing in our communities in the first place.

What crimes are being committed?

Different laws can be triggered depending on the nature of a particular offence.

The firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue late last year was treated as an act of terrorism, while a joint counter-terrorism team is investigating the caravan explosives.

Other hateful acts can be charged as arson, property damage or serious vilification.

For conduct to be treated as terrorism, it must be done for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.

Extreme right-wing or neo-Nazi beliefs can certainly satisfy this. But whether an individual case will be treated as terrorism depends on whether there is enough evidence of an underlying ideological motive.

Serious vilification offences apply when someone incites others to cause harm on the basis of race, religion, sexuality or gender identity.

Both nationally and in the states, new offences also apply for displaying Nazi symbols. Neo-Nazis who were arrested after a march in Adelaide this month, for example, were charged with various offences, including failing to cease loitering and displaying a Nazi symbol.

Read more:
Legal in one state, a crime in another: laws banning hate symbols are a mixed bag

What is NSW considering changing?

The biggest change would be to section 93Z of the NSW Crimes Act.

Section 93Z is a serious vilification offence, but it applies only to the incitement of violence. Equivalent offences in other states are broader because they also include incitement to hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule.

In Queensland, this requires threats or inciting threats of physical harm. In Victoria, changes likely to pass in parliament soon would remove a similar harm requirement.

In NSW, vilification on broader grounds is still unlawful, but it falls under civil law. Complaints can be made to Anti-Discrimination NSW and this may lead to lawsuits and potential compensation – but not criminal prosecution.

It makes sense for NSW to match section 93Z to equivalent laws in other states. But this would go against the very recent recommendations of the NSW Law Reform Commission.

In its report last November, the commission concluded that strengthening laws is not always the best way to address underlying social issues. It said the low prosecution rate for section 93Z could be explained by police preferring other, more serious offences for these types of crimes.

Still, it appears Minns may go ahead with the reforms, saying an antisemitic attack “begins with hateful, racist language”.

If I can stop it at its source with changes to the law, that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Would these changes make a difference?

The proposed changes are quite technical and are unlikely to have a significant impact on the growing threat of antisemitism.

Widening section 93Z could generate some additional prosecutions for hate speech that falls below inciting violence. But in most cases, other, more serious offences are already available to prosecutors.

Ultimately, in addition to the ongoing investigations, there needs to be greater investment in efforts to understand extremism in Australian society. This includes developing clearer answers to these questions:

• why extreme, hateful beliefs are thriving in our communities
• who is most likely to develop these beliefs and act on them, and
• how extremist narratives can best be countered, in our communities and online.

Countering violent extremism programs are improving over time. These include interventions for at-risk youth and broader efforts to educate communities. But investments in these approaches have never kept pace with changes to the criminal law.

Antisemitism has no place in Australian society, and changing the law in NSW will send a quick message that the government is taking the problem seriously. But taking it seriously also means doing whatever else we can as a society to ensure no one experiences hate or violence for who they are or what they believe.

Keiran Hardy receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Project on conspiracy-fuelled extremism.

– ref. As antisemitic attacks reach ‘disturbing’ levels, is strengthening hate crime laws the answer? – https://theconversation.com/as-antisemitic-attacks-reach-disturbing-levels-is-strengthening-hate-crime-laws-the-answer-248549

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pi-Shen Seet, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Edith Cowan University

In an election pitch last week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced new incentive payments of $10,000 for eligible apprentices in residential construction.

The federal government has committed to an ambitious target of building 1.2 million new homes over the next five years through the National Housing Accord. That means it urgently needs to boost Australia’s construction workforce.

But a recent strategic review into incentives for Australian apprentices and trainees found cost-of-living pressures were a major barrier to apprenticeship entry and completion.

Only about half of apprentices currently finish their apprenticeships.

The new program has been touted as the federal government’s initial response. It will target 62,690 apprentices and cost $627 million.

But previous attempts to attract new apprentices with cash payments have had mixed results. A similar 2023 scheme to get more tradies into “green jobs” only attracted about 2,200 sign-ups in the first year.

There are also concerns the new scheme may have unintended consequences, such as diverting talent from important sectors of the new economy – including the previous “green jobs” scheme.

Read more:
There may not be enough skilled workers in Australia’s pipeline for a post-COVID-19 recovery

How will it work?

From July 1, eligible apprentices in the new Housing Construction Apprenticeship Program will receive five payments of $2,000 each: after six, 12, 24 and 36 months, and upon completion. The payments are staged to encourage apprentices to complete their training.

Cash payments won’t be the only new financial incentive. There’ll also be a boost to the Living Away From Home Allowance to help cover the costs of relocating, while an increase in the Disability Australian Apprentice Wage Support payment provides financial support to employers who hire apprentices with disability.

Read more:
Albanese to promise $10,000 for apprentices in housing construction

Will the scheme succeed?

The government’s previous attempts to address chronic labour shortages through cash incentives have had mixed results.

Introduced in 2023, the New Energy Apprenticeships Program also offers $10,000 in staged payments to apprentices in priority green roles, such as electric vehicle technicians.

Despite 2,200 apprentices joining in the first year, the program was deemed too restrictive by the industry. That was despite employers themselves receiving $15,000 per apprentice (which is also what is proposed for the construction scheme).

Read more:
Yes, we know there is a ‘skills shortage’. Here are 3 jobs summit ideas to start fixing it right away

As part of the strategic review, the Centre for International Economics was commissioned to conduct an international literature review. It found that financial incentives such as wage or training subsidies and incentives were only “somewhat relevant” to the Australian context, and there was mixed support, at best, for their effectiveness.

A major factor behind the mixed results may be the crowding-out effect in economic theory.

This suggests that increasing public spending (by giving financial incentives) could undermine the intended effect by reducing or even eliminating private-sector investment. And it does not address apprehension among employers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, about taking on more apprentices.

More than six months after the government expanded eligibility for clean energy work, the green energy sector continues to face significant skills shortages.

While these payments may help in the long run, their staggered nature over three years won’t provide immediate relief.

The plan will likely only contribute to the government’s home-building targets by 2029, if and when more Australians enrol and complete their apprenticeships in the construction sector.

Will this have effects outside the construction industry?

More strategically, by shifting the focus from “new economy” industries outlined in the Future Made in Australia policy, this scheme risks weakening efforts to transform Australia’s economy.

Read more:
Australia has a new National Skills Agreement. What does this mean for vocational education?

The cash incentive for apprentices in home-building comes at a time when there is intense global competition for skills in “new industries”.

However, despite the many state and federal government initiatives for fee-free TAFE courses since the COVID pandemic, recently released data indicates a continued trend of long-term decline in Vocational Education and Training (VET) enrolments.

Albanese was asked about the government’s commitment to technology and digital innovation, with increasing global competition in artificial intelligence.

He responded by discussing the government’s commitment to the “new economy”.

However, the construction sector has until now not been identified as an essential part of the new economy’s priority industries by the government.

Instead, expanding incentives to construction apprentices marks a shift away from the priorities on green energy and new industries, and towards more traditional trades.

The cash incentives could divert school leavers from considering apprenticeships in key future industries. That is something that schemes such as the new energy program were specifically designed to do in response to multiple skills and training reviews over the past two decades.

So, despite the lack of evidence that cash incentives work, and the fact they may cause unintended effects, the proposed incentive payments appear to be a pitch addressing cost-of-living/cost-of-building concerns for the upcoming election.

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. Will new $10,000 apprentice payments help solve job shortages in construction? Not anytime soon – https://theconversation.com/will-new-10-000-apprentice-payments-help-solve-job-shortages-in-construction-not-anytime-soon-248446