Seven people have now died from melioidosis in flood-ravaged north Queensland this year.
Dozens of cases have been reported in the state in recent weeks, which experts have described as unprecedented.
So what is melioidosis, and why are we seeing a spike in cases now?
How do people get infected?
Melioidosis is caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei, a bug which normally lives harmlessly in soil and freshwater. But it can be dangerous when it infects humans or animals.
B. pseudomallei – sometimes called the “mud bug” – enters the body through cuts or scratches. It can also be breathed in and enter the lungs via small airborne water droplets, or by drinking affected water.
Symptoms usually develop within one to four weeks after a person has been infected. The disease can cause either local infections, such as chronic skin ulcers, or, more commonly, a lung infection which can lead to pneumonia.
Symptoms of the infection include fever, headache, trouble breathing, chest and muscle pain, confusion and seizures. In rare cases the disease can enter the bloodstream and cause septicaemia.
Treatment involves receiving intravenous antibiotics in hospital for several weeks followed by up to six months of oral antibiotics.
How common is it?
Diagnosis is usually conducted using a specialist bacterial culture. This is where a sample isolated from the patient is grown in a petri dish to identify the bacteria, which can take several days.
Globally, around 165,000 cases of melioidosis are reported annually, and 89,000 deaths. The majority of cases occur in southeast Asia, particularly Thailand.
Because similar symptoms can be caused by so many other diseases, melioidosis is commonly misidentified, meaning reported case numbers are probably far lower than the actual number of infections.
Also, cases often occur in remote communities and resource-poor settings, which can mean they’re less likely to be diagnosed.
In the Northern Territory, around 17 people per 100,000 are infected annually, which would be equivalent to about 42 cases. However, this data is several years old.
In Australia, melioidosis is often treated before fatalities occur. The mortality rate has been estimated at less than 10%.
More people die from the disease in lower-resource countries with poorer diagnostic capabilities and hospital facilities. In Thailand the mortality rate is estimated to be around 40%.
Who is at risk?
Anyone can get melioidosis, but certain people are at higher risk. This includes people with diabetes, liver and kidney disease, cancer, or other conditions which might compromise the patient’s immune system.
In Australia, the disease is also significantly more common in First Nations people than among non-Indigenous Australians.
In the current outbreak in Queensland, at least three of the victims so far have been elderly.
What’s causing the current outbreak?
Recent cases in north Queensland have been identified mainly around Townsville and Cairns.
Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service has recorded at least 41 cases since January 1, while more than 20 cases have been reported in Townsville in February.
B. pseudomallei lives in soil and mud, and comes to the surface during periods of high rainfall. So recent heavy rain and flooding in north Queensland has likely increased the risk of melioidosis.
In the Northern Territory, 28 cases have been reported since the start of the rainy season last October. However this is lower than recent seasons.
How can you protect yourself?
If you’re in an affected region, you can protect yourself by limiting exposure to mud and water, and using appropriate personal protective equipment such as gloves and boots if spending time in muddy areas. Cover any open wounds and wear a respirator if you’re working closely with water.
Monitor for symptoms and see a doctor if you feel unwell.
Particularly seeing as increasing extreme weather events due to climate change may make melioidosis more common, hopefully we’ll see an increase in research into and awareness of this disease in the years ahead.
Thomas Jeffries 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.
In recent days, the Chinese Navy conducted two live-fire military exercises in waters near Australia and New Zealand, sparking concern in both countries.
The Albanese government lodged a diplomatic protest with Beijing. China responded by saying it was “deeply surprised and strongly dissatisfied” by Australia’s response.
What exactly happened?
The presence of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (or PLA Navy) ships was well known. Australia’s Department of Defence put out a media release on February 13 indicating it was “aware” of the three ships operating to the northeast of Australia.
Over the next week, the ships gradually made their way along Australia’s east coast through its exclusive economic zone in the Tasman Sea, which extends 200 nautical miles (370km) from a country’s coastline.
On February 21, the PLA Navy gave short notice of its intent to conduct a possible live-fire exercise in the high seas between Australia and New Zealand. The next day, the ships conducted a second live-fire exercise. A live fire exercise can take many forms, such as using live rounds against stationary sea targets or the testing of new weapons systems.“
Once Australia and New Zealand received China’s notification of its exercises, a maritime and air exclusion zone was created in the vicinity of the Chinese ships, and trans-Tasman commercial flights were diverted.
Both exercises took place in “international waters”, which means no country has sovereignty over them. Neither Canberra nor Wellington contested China’s right to conduct these exercises, as the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea places no constraints on high-seas military operations.
The United States, for example, has conducted such high-seas weapons tests in the past, causing Qantas flights across the Pacific to be occasionally diverted.
If they were legal, why were Australia and NZ upset?
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles was critical of the short notice China gave both countries of its intention to use live rounds of ammunition.
Typically, Marles said, standard protocol is to provide between 12 to 24 hours notice of such exercises. This allows enough time to warn other ships in the area and for airlines to divert their flights.
However, because the exercises took place in the high seas, the protocol is more ambiguous. This became the key point of differentiation with China. Beijing could argue its warships are under no legal obligation to tell anyone what they are doing on the high seas. As Defence Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said,
China’s actions are in full compliance with international law and international practices, and will not affect aviation flight safety.
This is also the first instance of China conducting Tasman Sea military exercises. As such, it poses a challenge for how Australia and New Zealand should respond to future Chinese conduct.
The PLA Navy has been sailing more frequently around the Australian coast and has observed Australian military exercises conducted with defence partners, such as Exercise Talisman Sabre in 2023.
Why did China conduct the exercises here?
This is an important question since China could have just as easily conducted these exercises closer to its own shores.
Part of the answer lies in China having the capacity and capability to project its military force far beyond its own shores.
These types of activities are also important intelligence gathering exercises. Each Chinese Navy visit will give it more experience in waters where it does not frequently sail, while also gauging how Australia and New Zealand respond.
Given the increasing cooperation between China and some Pacific Island nations, such as the Cook Islands and Solomon Islands, we should expect the Chinese Navy will become a more frequent visitor to the region.
What can Australia and NZ do about it?
As Australia and New Zealand are strong supporters of the rules-based international order on which the law of the sea is based, there is very little they can legally do to obstruct China. Nevertheless, three options are available.
First, enhanced air and naval surveillance of China’s activities in these waters is legally permissible. Constantly shadowing the PLA Navy in the South Pacific, though, would be a drain on stretched defence resources.
Both countries would also need to ensure their navies are not in the line of fire to avoid an accident that could spiral into a major conflict.
Second, Australia and New Zealand could work though bodies such as the International Maritime Organization and International Civil Aviation Organization to settle on agreed practices on how much advance notification is required for high seas live-fire tests.
Finally, both countries could push for negotiations on a regional “naval code of conduct”. Similar codes have been agreed upon by both China and the US in the past. Incidents like this could prove to be a catalyst for more.
The South Pacific will increasingly be a strategically contested maritime space. Australia and New Zealand frequently deploy their navies for humanitarian operations in neighbouring Pacific states and engage in exercises with their military partners. The US Navy is also becoming more active in the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea to counter China, as are the navies of other nations, such as the United Kingdom, France and Japan.
With the potential for these various navies to be operating at the same time in the region, negotiating some basic “rules of the sea” would be a prudent and a helpful confidence-building measure to avoid a potential conflagration.
Donald Rothwell receives funding from Australian Research Council.
Financial challenges at the Whyalla steelworks in South Australia have reignited debate about the nation’s steel industry and its future.
Australians should have access to quality steel at competitive prices. The domestic steel production industry employs tens of thousands of people.
The state and federal governments have stepped in, however, announcing a A$1.9 billion support package for Whyalla, together with a new $1 billion green iron investment fund. Half of the new fund will be allocated to Whyalla to support its transition to green steel production. That’s a large amount of money for a privately owned business.
So, are the new packages going to be money well spent? To answer that question, let’s examine the priorities.
A national priority
Steel is an industry in which securing sovereign production capability is crucial. Sovereign capability means ensuring an industry can survive external shocks such as interruptions to shipping routes or disputes with other countries in the supply chain.
Steel is a vital input for defence industries such as ship and submarine building. What could be said of a country’s autonomy – or its sovereign capability – if it relies on others for the steel needed for its defence?
Whyalla is one of the two largest steelworks in Australia, the other being BlueScope’s Port Kembla plant. At least at first glance, the green iron investment fund seems to deal with the sovereign capability criterion well enough. Whyalla appears an ideal candidate.
However, the public subsidy is large. The subsidised plant’s ability to operate in an economically competitive manner needs to be examined. Further, while the Whyalla plant began its life as a supplier to an adjacent shipbuilding operation, its share of the current domestic defence industry steel market is unclear.
Environmentally friendly steel?
Production of steel using iron ore and coking coal is a greenhouse gas emissions intensive process. It can result in as many as 2.5 tonnes of greenhouse gas per tonne of steel.
The plan for Whyalla has long been to replace its coal-fired blast furnace with an electric arc furnace. This could, in turn, be supplied with low-emission sources of energy and consume scrap steel. While there is no globally agreed definition, this kind of approach would likely qualify as green steel.
Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG, the owner of the plant, had originally wanted this furnace to be operating by 2025, potentially using solar among its energy supply. The plan would have cut its emissions dramatically. The timeline later slipped to 2027.
The longer term plan for Whyalla appears based around production of green hydrogen to replace coking coal. As the world charges toward net zero emissions by 2050, the belief is that Australia can capture a good part of the green metals market.
The challenge is that green hydrogen is expensive and not widely used around the world. It’s hard to find signs that the global steel market is willing to pay a premium in the absence of sectoral emissions pricing. The strategy could therefore be seen as a bet on the future. If the bet went wrong, who would absorb the losses? It would, most likely, be the taxpayer.
The United States leads the way in low-emissions steel production. Firms there use electric arc furnaces to recycle scrap steel with energy from low-emission sources. This technology is proven and operates at industrial scale. It has a fraction of the emissions intensity but relies on the availability of scrap steel.
Can we add value?
Australia is a major world supplier of two key materials crucial for most steel making. These are iron ore and coking coal.
The countries to which we sell those raw materials then do the processing and manufacture, capturing profit that is arguably lost to the Australian economy. Whyalla is already an example of domestic value-adding. It uses iron ore from mines in the adjacent area, and domestic coking coal.
For Australia, however, this is going to be tricky. Australia is effectively signalling to its international customers that, one day, it hopes to compete with them in the global steel markets. In other words, this creates an incentive for the country’s customers to look for alternatives to buy iron ore.
Whether Australia increases steel production ahead of its customers finding new sources of iron ore elsewhere in the world is a risky race with an uncertain result.
Focus on government spending
So, back to the question: is the new funding going to be money well spent? Perhaps the most solid justification among the priorities examined, is sovereign capability.
The government probably needs to provide more information on how the new fund differs through from Future Made in Australia or the National Reconstruction Fund. Is this old funding with a new name? The nation is entering federal election season. Focus on government spending efficiency is likely to increase.
Daniel Rossetto is the owner of Climate Mundial Limited, a private company that does consulting work but is currently inactive. He does ad hoc private consulting through various consulting platforms. He is also the owner and host of a new private and independent YouTube channel called Climate Mundial’s Energy and Climate Weekly. He is on the editorial board of the Discover Sustainability journal published by Springer Nature.
A Nighttime Travesty is a bold new piece of theatre that depicts many illusions and truth interspersed with history.
What would happen if the world was to end? A plane has left Earth because Earth is dying. The journey is an escape for survival, but they are taking Earth-created social inequalities with them.
While hurtling into space, two hostesses talk about not feeling at home on Earth anymore. We can no longer advance as a human race and are forced to relocate.
The future of humankind does not appear optimistic – it is in the hands of the pilot.
Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard, co-creators of the work and the lead performers, bring brilliance to their artistic flair, playing multiple characters.
They are the two hostesses: one a young Aboriginal woman who has been impregnated by the pilot, and the other a robot. The pilot is played by Bell-Wykes, and Sheppard is a strange victim with a wit.
A Nighttime Travesty intertwines Indigenous futurism and vaudeville. Gregory Lorenzutti/Malthouse Theatre
Directed by Stephen Nicolazzo, A Nighttime Travesty is thought-provoking and complex theatre that addresses Aboriginal history and oppression using media representations of Aussie male humour.
Earth is dying. The journey is an escape for survival, but they are taking Earth-created social inequalities with them. There is no new world waiting for them to start over. They will have to do that themselves.
They ponder what is ahead of them as they travel to a new life somewhere in space.
The thread throughout the production is held together by a black and white history while the actors sing, dance, give birth and turn into murderers.
Indigenous futurism is a cultural practice of imagining the future, while acknowledging past and present. Including cultural practices and ways of knowing with social and political commentary within a scientific framework can create an aura of illusion and truth.
Aboriginal storytelling has long moved in and out of the past into the present in various artistic mediums as a form of expression and teaching. Indigenous futurism can be found in literature, film, visual arts, video games, poetry, music, fashion and theatre.
The philosophies of Indigenous ways of knowing and oral histories are important tools for storytelling.
The actors play dual gender neutral roles. The women depict the Australian male: the sexual power and masculinity in the workplace intermixed with artificial intelligence and technology. They are joined on stage by performers Zach Blampied and Peter Wykes, and musicians Matt Pana and Small Sound.
A Nighttime Travesty is particularly dense with sexualised humour and underlying pokes of fun made at the Aussie male expense.
The dark side of the humour from an Indigenous woman’s perspective steers the twists and turns which move with such quick motion that the audience is left waiting for conclusions to the messages.
Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard bring brilliance to their artistic flair. Gregory Lorenzutti/Malthouse Theatre
Aboriginal history
Much of this play is a reflection upon humanity and the life lessons learned or not learned from history. It is also a social and political commentary from young viewers of Australian humour on television and experiences of Australian society values.
Throughout the play there is lots of symbolism reflecting Australia. The sexual humour is structured around Australian icons of media, and BBQ aprons with male and female printed torsos. The actors morph into the sexuality of the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women.
It seems the co-creators researched the long-running Saturday night national television show Hey Hey It’s Saturday to finally offer a First Nations commentary.
On that show, men roasted each other, their guests and the audience – and presented a gem every now and then that would save their credibility.
Here, a dark hooded man sits on a bench titled “Hey Hey it’s Judgement Day” and a puppet on a stick named Dicky Lee is involved in sexual acts. This is presented as humorous, yet the audience is left feeling slightly embarrassed at Dicky’s involvement.
The play riffs off the long-running variety show Hey Hey, It’s Saturday. Gregory Lorenzutti/Malthouse Theatre
Religion, sex and babies born out of wedlock are harsh realities of life. Religion and God is pondered for the new world – but God is a man, and is blamed for the problems of the world.
Can they start over in a modern world, and what will their faith be? The Aboriginal hostess is concerned that, on a new planet, her Elders will be meaningless and, as the only Aboriginal on the plane, her culture and her race will die out. But wait – her baby will be the new beginning.
A Nighttime Travesty from A Daylight Connection played at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. Season closed.
Julie Andrews does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gavin Charles Young, Departmental Visitor, Materials Physics, Research School of Physics, Australian National University
3D printouts of the _Palaeospondylus australis_ holotype, enlarged x20. Carole Burrow
Queensland is renowned for its fossils of Australia’s largest back-boned animals – dinosaurs, of course, like the Jurassic Rhoetosaurus, the Cretaceous Wintonotitan, and other large sauropods.
It’s a highly enigmatic tiny “fish” from a remote location close to the Northern Territory border. It lived in the shallow margins of a marine environment about 400 million years ago.
A scattering of its skeletal elements was preserved in a small limestone outcrop at the southern end of the Toomba Range, on the edge of the Simpson Desert.
Palaeospondylus, a fossil enigma
Our paper describes a new species of the genus Palaeospondylus, only the second known. Remarkably, for the last 135 years, Palaeospondylus has been represented by a single species that lived in northern Scotland, on the other side of the world from our discovery.
Unlike nearly all fossil fish of that age, Palaeospondylus was “naked”, lacking external dermal bones and scales. But it did have a mineralised internal skeleton.
It is the oldest example from the fossil record to show a segmented vertebral column (a sort of backbone), hence its name – Greek for “ancient vertebra”.
Palaeospondylus gunni specimen from Achanarras Quarry, northern Scotland. Carole Burrow
The type species Palaeospondylus gunni is known from thousands of fairly complete specimens, almost all from a single flagstone quarry.
When first described in 1890, it attracted a flurry of competing interpretations in Europe and North America. Which group of animals did it belong to?
Since its discovery, it has been assigned to almost all major jawless and jawed vertebrate groups. All specimens were compressed, making the skeletal elements “melt” together. Imagination has always played a great role in trying to identify its parts.
Even after the advent of 3D scanning, three recent studies reached different conclusions. According to those, Palaeospondylus was related either to chondrichthyans (sharks), or tetrapods (the land vertebrates). Or maybe it was a stem jawed vertebrate – branching separately from the base of the evolutionary tree for all vertebrates with jaws.
The Queensland Palaeospondylus
The story of discovery of our new Queensland species, Palaeospondylus australis, began in 1977.
In the 1960s, geologist Reg Sprigg had predicted oil and gas beneath the northern Simpson Desert. The Bureau of Mineral Resources was conducting seismic surveys and microfossil sampling across the Georgina Basin, immediately to the north.
Microfossils are tiny fossils that can only be studied with a microscope, but are crucial to determining the age of the rock. Numerous sedimentary rock samples are collected, preferably limestones, because these can be dissolved in acid. The insoluble microfossils can then be identified and studied in the acid residues.
In 1977, I collected bits of limestone from an obscure gully in the Cravens Peak Beds, the sandstone forming the main ridge of the Toomba Range. Surprisingly, these produced a rich collection of Devonian fish microfossils. This was the first evidence that an arm of the sea had extended into central Australia during the Early Devonian (about 400 million years ago).
The 1977 Cravens Peak limestone samples before being processed in acid. Carole Burrow
In the 2000s, palaeontologist Carole Burrow at the Queensland Museum was investigating the internal structure of Devonian fish microfossils to assist in dating the rocks.
In the Cravens Peak samples, she noticed some distinctively shaped, tiny elements composed of an unusual honeycomb-like tissue. Carole hypothesised this could be a new species of Palaeospondylus, the only record from outside Scotland.
So, in 2006, we organised another field trip to this remote location.
The 2006 field trip participants (Tim Senden, Tim Holland, Carole Burrow, John Long, Gavin Young) looking south from the end of the Toomba Range, the last rock outcrop for around 500 km across the Simpson Desert. Bruce Burrow
Returning to the Queensland Museum after our field trip, Carole’s colleague from the Netherlands, palaeontologist Jan den Blaauwen, sent her new images showing similar honeycomb-like structure in the Scottish Palaeospondylus gunni.
Carole was acid-etching the newly collected samples so she could extract any microfossils. Luckily, she noticed a slightly larger specimen appearing on the rock surface (although still tiny, only about 3.6 millimetres long). It was highly interesting because it seemed bilaterally symmetrical.
Could this be a braincase (the bony capsule inside the skull that encloses the brain)? She immediately stopped acid etching before it disintegrated into crumbs.
Palaeospondylus australis holotype, QMF 52826, ventral braincase exposed on the limestone surface by acid etching (left), and trimmed for CT scanning (right). Carole Burrow, Gavin Young
The first uncrushed braincase
At the Australian National University, our sample was carefully trimmed before CT scanning, revealing the first uncrushed braincase of Palaeospondylus known to science.
It’s now the holotype – defining type specimen – for our new species. And we have about 400 other elements with the same honeycomb structure which belong to it, too.
The unique uncrushed preservation of this braincase, revealed by CT scanning and 3D printing techniques, provides the first details of brain structure in this tiny animal from 400 million years ago.
These include the shape of the cranial cavity and inner ear canals, the position of the pituitary gland and optic nerve openings, and details of the carotid arteries and jugular veins for blood supply to the brain.
3D scan image, the first view of the upper braincase surface of Palaeospondylus, showing the large opening into the cranial cavity. Jing Lu/Insitute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing
More questions remain
It is noteworthy that our curiosity-driven research into ancient brain morphology can be traced back to economically driven geological surveys of nearly 50 years ago, conducted to support exploration for oil and gas across central Australia.
As with any research result, there are now new questions to be investigated. The honeycomb tissue seems unique to Palaeospondylus, but could be a precursor to calcified cartilage of some other groups, including modern sharks.
Alternatively, it could be an early evolutionary stage for the spongy tissue (endochondral bone) filling the inside of most bones in modern land vertebrates, including humans.
The unique holotype of our new species clearly shows that previous interpretations of the crushed Scottish material included many structures that were not part of the braincase.
We’ve also now demonstrated that a recent study in the leading science journal Nature, which proposed that Palaeospondylus was closely related to our tetrapod ancestors, relied on many erroneous interpretations of braincase structure.
Of one thing we can be sure – Palaeospondylus was not a stem tetrapod.
Acknowledgements: Carole Burrow from Queensland Museum contributed greatly to this article.
Gavin Charles Young has received funding from the Australian Research Council.
The appearance of three Chinese naval vessels firing live rounds in the Tasman Sea has caused understandable alarm in New Zealand and Australia. But this has more to do with the geopolitical context than the actual event.
In fact, the Chinese navy is allowed to conduct exercises in the Tasman and has wide freedoms on the high seas in general. So far, China appears to be acting in accordance with both the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea.
While New Zealand would have preferred more notice of the Chinese navy’s intentions, there was no obligation to provide this.
Nor is what is occurring in the Tasman similar to the more aggressive sabre-rattling the Chinese military has displayed around the South China Sea, most recently involving both the Australian and Philippine navies.
For China, of course, Taiwan and parts of the South China Sea are highly disputed territory. The Tasman Sea is not. But what is disputed is China’s role and influence in the Pacific – and this, rather than a minor naval exercise, is what is causing headaches in Canberra and Wellington.
The Cook Islands factor
The surprise agreement signed by the Cook Islands and China under a fortnight ago, aimed at “deepening blue economy cooperation”, is the immediate context for that concern.
The deal avoids controversial areas such as security and policing. But it moves Chinese influence into infrastructure support for wharves, shipbuilding and repair, and ocean transportation.
For its part, China has asserted that its relationship with the Cook Islands “is not directed against any third party and should not be subject to or disrupted by any third party”.
In other words, China has told New Zealand to butt out of a major development in the historically close diplomatic and political relationship with its Pacific neighbour.
A Chinese own goal?
All of this is happening within a rapidly shifting geopolitical sphere. US President Donald Trump is unilaterally attempting to upend the old US-led world order, and other major powers such as Russia and China are adapting.
New Zealand’s relations with China were already difficult. The Security Intelligence Service and Government Communications Security Bureau have both identified state-sponsored Chinese interference in domestic affairs, breaches of the parliamentary network and other malicious cyber activity.
The question now is whether China has scored an own goal with its recent actions. Because while it might prefer New Zealand to operate a more independent foreign policy – balancing its relations with east and west – the opposite may now be more likely.
In times of international stress and uncertainty, New Zealand has always tended to move towards deepening relationships with traditional allies.
Whether it is the fear of Russian invasion in the 19th century, or Japanese invasion in the 20th century – and whether or not those threats are real or imagined – New Zealand reverts to form.
It has been this way for nearly 150 years and is likely to occur again. New Zealand is already grappling with how to respond to the Trump administration’s redrawn global system and will be looking for ways to deepen the friendship.
At the same time, the government now seems committed to joining a new arms race and increasing defence spending as a proportion of GDP. And the supposed benefits of joining the second tier of the AUKUS security pact may now become that much easier to sell politically.
Alexander Gillespie 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.
For people relying on rental properties to keep a roof over their heads, there are few things more scary than the possibility of being evicted from their home.
The paucity of official statistics makes it difficult to know exactly how common evictions are. In 2019–20, 13.8% of private renters moved due to their lease being terminated or not renewed.
Besides a report or two, we know little about what happens when households face the possibility of being evicted, or are actually evicted.
Our research examines these consequences. Through in-depth interviews with 53 private tenants in New South Wales and Queensland, we found these experiences negatively shaped people’s lives well into the future. Here are four themes we identified.
1. Poor mental health
The ease with which landlords can terminate a tenant’s occupation evoked persistent anxiety for most of the interviewees (the interviews were conducted prior to the scrapping of no-grounds eviction in NSW, though such evictions are still allowed in other states and territories).
This was especially so for low-income tenants.
When interviewed, Susan* had recently been evicted from her apartment in Sydney. She was reliant on the Disability Support Pension for her income and lived in constant fear of being evicted and rendered homeless. She felt that having a disability and being from a non-English-speaking background made her precarity worse:
if you are somebody who comes from a non-English-speaking background, or you have a disability, or have no ability to enforce [the legislation], it’s on the tenant to take up the laws and to do something about it. And if you don’t have any of those abilities, you’re just going to be on your way to homelessness very, very soon […]
Grace lived by herself in Sydney. She had been given a no-grounds termination and was convinced it was linked to her landlord’s realisation that he could raise her rent considerably once she moved out. Her mental health was seriously affected by the eviction:
It was just like out of nowhere […] so that was horrific […] I’m still trying to settle into this new place with that trauma of being uprooted all of a sudden […] I think it’s probably going to affect me for a while and particularly in terms of just the power that real estates and landlords have to be able to do that.
2. Financial hardship
For many of the low-income tenants, the financial implications of being evicted were severe.
Sarah, her husband and their three children had been renting in Sydney since 2013. She estimated that since 2014, they had had to move at least six times. Most of the moves were not voluntary. She found the financial implications of evictions extremely distressing:
It’s the finances of it that’s the hardest […] when you get asked to move, you need to have a bond ready to go at the next place before you receive your bond back, which is a killer […]
She outlined all the expenses that came up each time she moved from one rental to another: professional cleaners, removalists and maintenance deducted from the bond.
After her rented accommodation was condemned, Brenda, a single mum of two children, had 48 hours to move from her rental property in regional Queensland. The move consumed her savings:
I had $200 after paying all my bills to move. So once I moved that was it. So I struggled the following week for everything. For food, […] getting my son to school, my daughter. It was just horrible.
3. Reluctance to complain
The knowledge that, at some point, the rent could be increased to an untenable level or they could be asked to vacate evoked silent compliance. This created a reluctance to complain or request basic maintenance.
Alice was convinced she was evicted after complaining about the poor condition of the rental property she, her son and grandson had been renting for eight years in regional NSW. Her grandson’s bedroom was unusable due to excessive mould.
However, her low income and the threat of eviction meant she held off complaining for an extended period:
[…] it’s just disgusting that they [landlords] can get away with this shit while charging top dollar, and […] that’s why I didn’t complain because I said to everybody, “as soon as I complain he’ll kick us out.” […] If I hadn’t complained, we’d still be there […]
Sarah described how, despite feeling harassed and stressed by her landlord’s unannounced and constant intrusions, she felt the family had to accept the situation and not protest:
I was petrified of being kicked out if we fought back and so […] we let him onto the property 16 times in 10 months and said nothing.
When they couldn’t take it any longer and complained, they were given notice, the landlord claiming he needed to do maintenance that required the property to be vacant.
4. Ending up in a worse home
A common consequence of eviction is having to move to unsuitable, lower-quality accommodation.
Jan and her partner were older renters and reliant on government benefits for their income. The flow-on effects of being evicted from their accommodation in Queensland, where they had been living for ten years, were devastating. Her partner attempted suicide, her relationship with him ended, and she was forced to live in a tent on a piece of land her mother had bought several years prior:
our rental accommodation was sold out from under us to developers and we had to be out with nowhere to go. We looked around for somewhere else to rent and there was absolutely nowhere we could afford at all.
It’s clear that eviction, or the threat thereof, can have devastating affects on people’s lives.
Although there has been some movement around improving the lot of private renters, such as legislation abolishing no-grounds eviction in some jurisdictions, and rent increases being allowed only once a year, a lot more needs to be done to ensure tenants have acceptable security of tenure.
*All names in this article have been changed to protect participants’ privacy.
Alan Morris receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Joelle Moore receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Thi Thanh Mai Giang receives funding from The Australian Research Council.
Yiran Li receives funding from funding from the Australian Research Council.
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls’ first two days in New Caledonia have been marred by several clashes with local pro-France, anti-independence movements, who feared he would side with their pro-independence opponents.
However, he remained confident that all stakeholders would eventually come and sit together at the table for negotiations.
Valls arrived in the French Pacific territory on Saturday with a necessary resumption of crucial political talks regarding New Caledonia’s political future high on his agenda, nine months after the deadly May 2024 civil unrest.
His visit comes as tensions have risen in the past few days against a backdrop of verbal escalations and rhetoric, the pro-France camp opposing independence stressing that three referendums had resulted in three rejections of independence in 2018, 2020, and 2021.
But the third referendum in December 2021 was boycotted by a large part of the pro-independence, mainly Kanak community, and they have since disputed the validity of its result (even though it was deemed valid in court rulings).
On Saturday, the first day of his visit to the Greater Nouméa city of Mont-Dore, during a ceremony paying homage to a French gendarme who was killed at the height of the riots last year, Valls and one of the main pro-France leaders, French MP Nicolas Metzdorf, had a heated and public argument.
‘First Nation’ controversy Metzdorf, who was flanked by Sonia Backès, another major pro-France local leader, said Valls had “insulted” the pro-France camp because he had mentioned the indigenous Kanak people as being the “first people” in New Caledonia — equivalent to the notion of “First Nation” people.
Hours before, Valls had just met New Caledonia’s Custom Senate (a traditional gathering of Kanak chiefs) and told them that “nothing can happen in New Caledonia without a profound respect towards [for] the Melanesian people, the Kanak people, and the first people”.
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls (second from left) meets pro-France supporters as he arrives in New Caledonia on Saturday as French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc looks on. Image: NC la 1ère
Metzdorf told Valls in an exchange that was filmed on the road and later aired on public broadcaster NC la 1ère: “When you say there are first people, you don’t respect us! Your statements are insulting.”
“If there are first peoples, it means there are second peoples and that some are more important than others.”
To which Valls replied: “When you are toying with these kinds of concepts, you are making a mistake.”
🗣 Manuel Valls en Nouvelle-Calédonie : échange tendu entre le ministre des Outre-mer et des personnalités non-indépendantistes
👉 Nicolas Metzdorf et Sonia Backès lui reprochent certaines prises de position depuis la reprise des discussions
Every word counts The 1998 Nouméa Accord’s preamble is largely devoted to the recognition of New Caledonia’s indigenous community (autochtone/indigenous).
On several occasions, Valls faced large groups of pro-France supporters with French tricolour flags and banners (some in the Spanish language, a reference to Valls’s Spanish double heritage), asking him to “respect their democratic (referendum) choice”.
Some were also chanting slogans in Spanish (“No pasaran”), or with a Spanish accent.
“I’m asking for just one thing: for respect towards citizens and those representing the government,” an irate Valls told the crowd.
Questions have since been raised from local organisations and members of the general public as to why and how an estimated 500 pro-France supporters had been allowed to gather while the French High Commissioner still maintains a ban on all public gatherings and demonstrations in Nouméa and its greater area.
“We voted three times no. No means no,” some supporters told the visiting minister, asking him not to “let them down”.
“You shouldn’t believe what you’ve been told. Why wouldn’t you remain French?”, Valls told protesters.
“I think the minister must state very clearly that he respects those three referendums and then we’ll find a solution on that basis,” said Backès.
However, both Metzdorf and Backès reaffirmed that they would take part in “negotiations” scheduled to take place this week.
“We are ready to make compromises”, said Backès.
Valls carried on schedule Minister Valls travelled to Northern parts and outer islands of New Caledonia to pay homage to the victims during previous insurrections in New Caledonia, including French gendarmes and Kanak militants who died on Ouvéa Island (Loyalty group) in the cave massacre in 1988.
During those trips, he also repeatedly advocated for rebuilding New Caledonia and for every stakeholder to “reconcile memories” and sit at the negotiation table “without hatred”.
Valls believes ‘everyone will be at the table’ In an interview with local public broadcaster NC la 1ère yesterday, the French minister said he was confident “everyone will be at the table”.
The first plenary meeting is to be held this afternoon.
It will be devoted to agreeing on a “method”.
“I believe everyone will be there,” he said.
“All groups, political, economic, social, all New Caledonians, I’m convinced, are a majority who wish to keep a strong link within France,” he said.
He also reiterated that following New Caledonia’s Matignon (1988) and Nouméa (1998) peace accords, the French Pacific territory’s envisaged future was to follow a path to “full sovereignty”.
“The Nouméa Accord is the foundation. Undeniably, there have been three referendums. And then there was May 13.
“There is a before and and after [the riots]. My responsibility is to find a way. We have the opportunity of these negotiations, let’s be careful of the words we use,” he said, asking every stakeholder for “restraint”.
“I’ve also seen some pro-independence leaders say that [their] people’s sacrifice and death were necessary to access independence. And this, also, is not on.”
Valls also said the highly sensitive issue of “unfreezing” New Caledonia’s special voters’ roll for local elections (a reform attempt that triggered the May 2024 riots) was “possible”, but it will be part of a wider, comprehensive agreement on the French Pacific entity’s political future.
A mix of ‘fear and hatred’ Apart from the planned political negotiations, Valls also intends to devote significant time to New Caledonia’s dire economic situation, in post-riot circumstances that have not only caused 14 dead, but also several hundred job losses and total damage estimated at some 2.2 billion euros (NZ$4 billion).
A first, much-expected economic announcement also came yesterday: Valls said the State-funded unemployment benefits (which were supposed to cease in the coming days) woud now be extended until June 30.
For the hundreds of businesses which were destroyed last year, he said a return to confidence was essential and a prerequisite to any political deal . . . And vice-versa.
“If there’s no political agreement, there won’t be any economic investment.
“This may cause the return of fresh unrest, a form of civil war. I have heard those words coming back, just like I’ve heard the words racism, hatred . . . I can feel hope and at the same time a fear of violence.
“I feel all the ferments of a confrontation,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Most children have now returned from their summer holidays and are perhaps considering what sports to play this year.
For some, this means sampling a wide range of sports, but others might continue to focus on the same one they’ve been addicted to since they were able to walk and run.
But when it comes to possible sporting success, is it best to concentrate on one or give many a go?
Early specialisation
As the name suggests, early specialisation is typically defined as participation in one task or activity, with the aim to improve subsequent performances.
The rationale for its purported benefit can be traced to the theory of deliberate practice – or what some readers may have colloquially encountered as the “10,000-hour rule”.
Broadly, this theory proposes the attainment of excellence is proportionate to the number of accumulated hours invested into deliberate skill rehearsal.
So, the earlier someone specialises via deliberate practice, the more likely they’ll expedite the acquisition of expertise – or so the theory suggests.
While first explored in the musical domain, there are some examples of athletes who specialised early in a sport who went on to highly successful careers.
These include Simone Biles (who started gymnastics at the age of six), Tiger Woods (who hit a golf ball on the Mike Douglas TV show at the age of two) and Serena Williams (who was profiled hitting tennis balls on CNN at the age of nine).
There are also a host of athletes who specialised early and achieved outstanding success as a junior but never reached sporting success as an adult for myriad reasons.
Doesn’t practice make perfect?
Everyone would have encountered the saying “practice makes perfect”.
But does it really?
Of course, practice is an integral component of acquiring, developing and sharpening any skill. But perhaps we should be a little cautious.
Let us explain by first asking a few key questions that we encourage readers to ask themselves as the article unfolds: how much practice is needed to be perfect? What type of practice is needed to be perfect? And can “perfect” practice actually help us develop skills that are transferable between sports?
In other words, if practice makes perfect, should we not be advocating for sporting specialisation as early in life as possible?
It may seem logical, but is this belief – held by many parents, youth sport coaches, and perhaps children themselves – actually supported by evidence?
A 2022 systematic review suggested most elite, professional and Olympic level athletes engaged in multisport activities during their youth.
That is, they did not specialise in their chosen sport but actually diversified their sporting experiences up to the age of about 12, with some level of specialisation occurring from the age of 13 onward.
That was not all they found.
Youth sport specialisation was actually linked with increased risks of injury in athletes at the highest levels of competition when compared to those who engaged in multisport activities.
A similar review noted there was no evidence to support specialisation prior to puberty in the attainment of sporting excellence later in life.
What sport specialisation did increase, however, were risks of injury, psychological stress and sporting drop out.
This model is broken into three general stages of participation: the sampling years (between the ages of 6-12), the specialising years (13-15), and the investment years (16 and beyond).
As the name of each stage suggests, they are defined by unique types of participation.
For example, the sampling years are characterised by the acquisition of functional motor skills (such as running, throwing and jumping), developed through a wide variety of experiences.
The specialising years feature a progressive increase in focus on the deliberate practice of one or two sports, while the investment years are characterised by more deliberately increasing the volume of practice around one sport. In Australia, this may be the stage where seasonal sports become year-long through the establishment of pre-season training.
Since its inception nearly two decades ago, there has been a growing amount of research supporting these suggestions.
Food for thought
So what does this all mean for parents, youth coaches and children?
We suggest not to rush the process even if your child dreams of an elite sporting career: children under the age of 16 should engage in a wide variety of sporting experiences.
This is not only fun, but the research shows us diversity is likely to reduce the risk of overuse injuries and increase the likelihood of sporting excellence later in life, should that be their ambition.
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.
A White House fact sheet about Donald Trump’s recently announced “Fair and Reciprocal Plan” on trade described it as “the art of the international deal” – a reference to Trump’s 1987 business book, The Art of the Deal.
It was a classic piece of self-marketing from the president, but whether his latest tariff proposal will really turn out to be artful is very much open to question.
In fact, the United States’ long history of “reciprocity” in tariffs and trade suggests ordinary Americans could be in for a bumpy ride.
In essence, Trump is reviving a strategy used in the US more than a century ago to protect developing domestic industries. This time, according to the president, reciprocal tariffs aim “to correct longstanding imbalances in international trade and ensure fairness across the board”.
The plan targets trade relationships with other countries where the US does not receive reciprocal treatment. And it echoes the policies of the 25th US president, William McKinley, who presided over an aggressive reciprocal tariff regime in the late 19th century.
McKinley was president from 1897 until he was assassinated in 1901. And while Trump greatly admires his business acumen, McKinley’s economic legacy also reads like a cautionary tale.
Not a simple equation
From the current US perspective, “reciprocity” refers to symmetrical tariffs. Trump’s plan targets unequal rates, such as the European Union’s 10% tariff on US cars, compared with the 2.5% US tariff on European automobiles.
While this looks like a clear lack of reciprocity, it’s not that simple. The US also applies a 25% tariff on EU utility vehicles (pickup trucks).
This is significant because of the popularity of pickups in the US – a 2024 survey found 47% of Americans owned one. Until last year, the Ford F150 had been the bestselling “car” in the US for 42 years in a row.
This is just one example of how differences in tariffs can be more complex than they appear at first glance.
A history of reciprocal tariffs
This cycle of higher and lower tariffs has gone on for well over a century. From 1861 to 1930, the US Congress maintained control over trade tariffs, with levels as high as 50% to protect developing industries.
But in 1934, Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, giving President Franklin D. Roosevelt authority to negotiate reciprocal tariff reductions with individual nations to stimulate global trade during the Great Depression.
These tariff reductions continued after World War II with the development of the World Trade Organization and US tariff levels declining to 5%. Economist Douglas Irwin refers to this period as the “reciprocity period” of nations lowering barriers to international trade.
The last time “reciprocity” was used to refer to the opposite process of raising tariffs was in 1890, under the Tariff Act, often just called the McKinley Tariff. It is this era Trump harked back to in his inaugural address:
President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent – he was a natural businessman.
Before he became president, McKinley was head of the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee. He proposed an average increase in tariffs on all imports, rising from 38% to 49.5% to “secure reciprocal trade”.
At the time, the US was running large surpluses from tariff revenues, which was threatening economic growth. This sounds counterintuitive these days, but surpluses were a problem because the US dollar was backed by gold at a fixed price (the gold standard).
Because the amount of money in circulation – and state spending – were limited to the amount of gold held by the government, surplus funds had to be kept in the Treasury reserves. This reduced the money supply and led to lower growth, less investment and tighter credit.
Republicans thought higher tariffs would reduce imported goods and therefore tariff revenues. Instead, income from the higher tariffs more than compensated for import reductions, and the surpluses increased.
Consumer prices rose, farm prices dropped, and the resulting voter backlash saw the Republicans lose control of Congress at the 1890 midterm elections. There was a financial panic in 1893, followed by a recession that lasted until 1896.
The book was a satire of political corruption and unscrupulous businessmen who benefited from political favours. The title reflects the reality of the era – superficially prosperous but not truly golden.
A thin veneer of technological progress, innovation and wealth concealed widespread corruption, scandals and income inequality.
But aside from the obvious historical parallels, it is overly optimistic to expect a plan from 1890 to succeed in a complex global trade environment that relies on interdependent supply chains to function.
McKinley’s flawed strategy sought protection for a few industries, but also aimed to reduce revenue for a government running large surpluses. However, Trump’s new tariffs are meant to raise revenue to pay off the US$36.5 trillion national debt, as well as to enforce reciprocal trade terms.
Trump began his second term with a declaration that “the golden age of America begins right now”. As in 1890, however, the risk remains that a handful of wealthy industrialists will benefit from increased protection, while ordinary citizens will pay higher prices.
Less the “art of the deal”, then, than a possible dealbreaker. In which case, Trump may yet be remembered less for a new golden age than for a Gilded Age 2.0.
Garritt C. Van Dyk received funding from the Getty Research Institute in 2024 .
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
A national Resolve poll for Nine newspapers, conducted February 18–23 from a sample of 1,506, gave the Coalition a 55–45 lead by headline respondent preferences, a three-point gain for the Coalition since January. By 2022 election preference flows, the Coalition led by 52–48, a one-point gain for them.
Primary votes were 39% Coalition (up one), 25% Labor (down two), 13% Greens (steady), 9% One Nation (up two), 9% independents (down one) and 4% others (down two). Labor’s primary vote is their lowest in any poll this term.
Anthony Albanese’s net approval was steady at -22, with 56% giving him a poor rating and just 34% a good one. Peter Dutton’s net approval was down one to +5. Dutton led Albanese by 39–35 as preferred PM (39–34 in January).
By 37–26, voters thought the Coalition was the best choice for them and their household over Labor. By 34–18, they thought Dutton better able to deal with Donald Trump than Albanese. By 43–22, they thought Albanese weaker than Dutton.
The Liberals led Labor by 41–24 on economic management (42–23 in January). The Liberals led on keeping the cost of living low by 37–25, down a little from 37–22 in January.
In both the Resolve and Freshwater polls that were taken after the Reserve Bank cut interest rates, the Coalition has increased its lead. Here is the graph that shows the dramatic widening in the Resolve poll in the Coalition’s favour.
Dutton’s ratings have been much better than Albanese’s in Resolve, and this is now flowing through to voting intentions. To put Labor back on track, Albanese needs to improve his ratings and Dutton’s need to fall. In this respect, the Freshwater poll below was much better for Labor.
Resolve’s respondent preference flows are probably a pro-Coalition outlier, but the general trend in the polls has been bleak for Labor.
Freshwater poll: Coalition leads by 52–48
A national Freshwater poll, conducted February 20–23 from a sample of 1,038, gave the Coalition a 52–48 lead by respondent preferences, a one-point gain for the Coalition since January. Primary votes were 41% Coalition (up one), 31% Labor (down one), 13% Greens (steady) and 15% for all Others.
Albanese’s net approval improved seven points to -11, while Dutton’s dropped four points to -8. Albanese led Dutton as preferred PM by 45–43 (a 43–43 tie in January).
On issues, 70% rated cost of living a top three issue, followed by 39% for housing, 27% for both crime and economic management, 26% for health and just 17% for the environment. The Coalition held double-digit leads over Labor on cost of living, crime and economic management.
Essential poll: Labor gains for a tie
A national Essential poll, conducted February 12–16 from a sample of 1,146, had a 48–48 tie by respondent preferences including undecided (49–47 to the Coalition in early February). The Coalition had led in the last four Essential polls by one to two points.
Primary votes were 35% Coalition (down one), 30% Labor (steady), 12% Greens (steady), 9% One Nation (up one), 1% UAP (steady), 9% for all Others (steady) and 4% undecided (steady). By 2022 preference flows, Labor would lead by about 51–49, a 0.5-point gain for Labor.
Albanese’s net approval dropped five points to -5 since January, with 48% disapproving and 43% approving, but the January poll had an 11-point jump in his net approval from December. Dutton’s net approval was down three points to -4, his worst net approval in Essential since February 2024.
Asked about the direction of the country, wrong track led by 51–31, a blowout from 46–38 in January. Wrong track led by the same 51–31 margin in December, and it has consistently had sizeable leads since June 2023.
On taxes and government services, 26% thought they should be reduced, 11% increased and 63% maintained. By 40–31, respondents opposed the Coalition’s plan to reduce the number of public service workers.
Asked whether they were aware of various Labor achievements, 77% were aware of the $300 energy bill rebate for all households, 66% were aware of TAFE and HECS debt cuts and 61% were aware of increased renewable energy targets. However, only 46% were aware of consecutive budget surpluses.
Morgan poll and Palmer’s new party
A national Morgan poll, conducted February 10–16 from a sample of 1,666, gave the Coalition a 51.5–48.5 lead by headline respondent preferences, unchanged from the February 3–9 poll.
Primary votes were 39.5% Coalition (down one), 28% Labor (down one), 12.5% Greens (up 1.5), 5.5% One Nation (up 1.5), 10% independents (up 0.5) and 4.5% others (down 1.5). By 2022 election flows, the Coalition led by 51–49, a 0.5-point gain for Labor.
A DemosAU poll of Queensland that asked for federal voting intentions, conducted February 10–14 from a sample of 1,004, gave the Liberal National Party a 53–47 lead, representing a 1% swing to Labor since the 2022 federal election result in Queensland.
Primary votes were 39% LNP, 31% Labor, 12% Greens, 10% One Nation and 8% for all Others. DemosAU is using the One Nation preference flow at the 2024 Queensland state election for its federal polls; this was better for the LNP than at the 2022 federal election.
State voting intentions were 54–46 to the LNP, unchanged since the 2024 election. Primary votes were 40% LNP, 30% Labor, 12% Greens, 10% One Nation and 8% for all Others.
Economic data: wage growth and jobs
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that in the December 2024 quarter, wages grew 0.7%, down from 0.9% in the September quarter. This was the slowest quarterly wage growth since March 2022. For the year to December, wages grew 3.2%, down from 4.1% in the year to June 2024.
In the December quarter, inflation was up 0.2% and up 2.4% for the year to December. So wage growth exceeded inflation by 0.5% in the December quarter and 0.8% for the year, but it had exceeded inflation by 0.7% in the September quarter.
The ABS said 44,000 jobs were added in January, but the unemployment rate rose 0.1% from December to 4.1% owing to a 0.2% increase in the participation rate. The employment population ratio (the percentage of eligible Australians that are employed) rose 0.1% to 65.6%, a record high.
German election
I am covering Sunday’s German federal election for The Poll Bludger. The election was held seven months early owing to a breakdown in the governing coalition of centre-left SPD, Greens and pro-business FDP.
Exit polls and pre-election polls have the conservative CDU/CSU leading, with the far-right AfD in second place and the SPD lagging in third. The final outcome should be known by this afternoon AEDT.
Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Scam Factories is a special multimedia and podcast series by The Conversation that explores the inner workings of Southeast Asia’s brutal scam compounds.
The Conversation’s digital storytelling and podcast teams collaborated with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne; Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; and Mark Bo, an independent researcher.
The researchers have spent the past few years interviewing nearly 100 survivors of these compounds and documenting the rise of the industry in Southeast Asia for a forthcoming book.
Scam Factories will unfold across three multimedia articles and three podcast episodes this week. We’ll update this page as more is published.
Part 1
Our first article explores how people are lured into the industry and what life is like inside the compounds, where scammers are forced to work long hours and are often subjected to violence.
And in our first podcast episode, No skills required, our researchers travel to a village in Cambodia called Chrey Thom to see what these compounds look like. And we hear from two survivors, a Ugandan man we’re calling George and a Malaysian woman we’re calling Lee, about how they were recruited into compounds in Laos and Myanmar.
The Conversation contacted all the companies mentioned in this series for a comment, except Jinshui, which we couldn’t contact. We did not receive a response from any of them.
Credits
The podcast series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Photos by Roun Ry, KDA, Halima Athumani and Ivan Franceschini.
Justin Bergman at The Conversation in Australia edited the articles in the series and Matt Garrow worked on the graphical elements of the stories. Series oversight and editing help from Ashlynne McGhee.
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024.NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems
NASA will soon launch a new telescope which it says will create the “most colourful” map of the cosmos ever made.
The SPHEREx telescope is relatively small but will provide a humongous amount of knowledge in its short two-year mission.
It is an infrared telescope designed to take spectroscopic images – ones that measure individual wavelengths of light from a source. By doing this it will be able to tell us about the formation of the universe, the growth of all galaxies across cosmic history, and the location of water and life-forming molecules in our own galaxy.
In short, the mission – which is scheduled for launch on February 27, all things going well – will help us understand how the universe came to be, and why life exists inside it.
A massive leap forward
Everything in the universe, including you and the objects around you, emits light in many different colours. Our eyes split all that light into three bands – the brilliant greens of trees, blues of the sky and reds of a sunset – to synthesise a specific image.
But SPHEREx – short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer – will divide light from everything in the sky into 96 bands. This is a massive leap forward. It will cover the entire sky and offer new insights into the chemistry and physics of objects in the universe.
The mission will complement the work being done by other infrared telescopes in space, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope.
Both of these telescopes are designed to make high-resolution measurements of the faintest objects in the universe, which means they only study a tiny part of the sky at any given time. For example, the sky is more than 15 million times larger than what the James Webb Space Telescope can observe at once.
In its entire mission the James Webb Space Telescope could not map out the whole sky the way SPHEREx will do in only a few months.
SPHEREx will take will take spectroscopic images of 1 billion galaxies, 100 million stars, and 10,000 asteroids. It will answer questions that require a view of the entire sky, which are missed out by the biggest telescopes that chase the highest resolution.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use these filters to capture spectroscopic images of the cosmos. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Measuring inflation
The first aim of SPHEREx is to measure what astronomers call cosmic inflation. This refers to the rapid expansion of the universe immediately after the Big Bang.
The physical processes that drove cosmic inflation remain poorly understood. Revealing more information about inflation is possibly the most important research area of cosmology.
Inflation happened everywhere in the universe. To study it astronomers need to map the entire sky. SPHEREx is ideal for studying this huge mystery that is fundamental to our cosmos.
SPHEREx will use the spectroscopic images to measure the 3D positions of about a billion galaxies across cosmic history. Astronomers will then create a picture of the cosmos not just in position but in time.
This, plus a lot of statistics and mathematics, will let the SPHEREx team test different theories of inflation.
The SHEREx mission will complement the work of the James Webb Space Telescope, which captured this composite image of stars, gas and dust in a small region within the vast Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light-years away from Earth. NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
Pinpointing the location of life-bearing molecules
In the coldest parts of our galaxy, the molecules that create life (such as water, carbon dioxide and methanol) are trapped in icy particles. Those icy biogenic molecules have to travel from the cold gas in the galaxy onto planets so life can come to be.
Despite years of study, this process remains a huge mystery.
To answer this fundamental question about human existence, we need to know where all those molecules are.
What SPHEREx will provide is a complete census of the icy biogenic molecules in our surrounding galaxy. Icy biogenic molecules have distinct features in the infrared spectrum, where SPHEREx operates.
By mapping the entire sky, SPHEREx will pinpoint where these molecules are, not only in our galaxy but also in nearby systems.
Located some 13,700 light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation Centaurus of the Milky Way, RCW 49 is a dark and dusty stellar nursery that houses more than 2,200 stars. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wisconsin
Once we know where they all are, we can determine the necessary conditions to form biogenic molecules in space. In turn, this can tell us about a crucial step in how life came to be.
Currently 200 spectra have been taken on biogenic molecules in space. We expect the James Webb Space Telescope will obtain a few thousand such measurements.
SPHEREx will generate 8 million new spectroscopic images of life-bearing molecules. This will revolutionise our understanding.
Mapping the whole sky enables astronomers to identify promising regions for life and gather large-scale data to separate meaningful patterns from anomalies, making this mission a transformative step in the search for life beyond Earth.
Deanne Fisher receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Child vaccination is one of the most cost-effective health interventions. It accounts for 40% of the global reduction in infant deaths since 1974 and has led to big health gains in Australia over the past two decades.
Australia has been a vaccination success story. Ten years after we begun mass vaccination against polio in 1956, it was virtually eliminated. Our child vaccination rates have been among the best in the world.
But after peaking in 2020, child vaccination in Australia is falling. Governments need to implement a comprehensive strategy to boost vaccine uptake, or risk exposing more children to potentially preventable infectious diseases.
Child vaccination has been a triumph
Thirty years ago, Australia’s childhood vaccination rates were dismal. Then, in 1997, governments introduced the National Immunisation Program to vaccinate children against diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, and measles.
Measures to increase coverage included financial incentives for parents and doctors, a public awareness campaign, and collecting and sharing local data to encourage the least-vaccinated regions to catch up with the rest of the country.
What followed was a public health triumph. In 1995, only 52% of one-year-olds were fully immunised. By 2020, Australia had reached 95% coverage for one-year-olds and five-year-olds. At this level, it’s difficult even for highly infectious diseases, such as measles, to spread in the community, protecting both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Gaps between regions and communities closed too. In 1999, the Northern Territory’s vaccination rate for one-year-olds was the lowest in the country, lagging the national average by six percentage points. By 2020, that gap had virtually disappeared.
The difference between vaccination rates for First Nations children and other children also narrowed considerably.
It made children healthier. The years of healthy life lost due to vaccine-preventable diseases for children aged four and younger fell by nearly 40% in the decade to 2015.
But that success is at risk. Since 2020, the share of children who are fully vaccinated has fallen every year. For every child vaccine on the National Immunisation Schedule, protection was lower in 2024 than in 2020.
Gaps between parts of Australia are opening back up. Vaccination rates in the highest-coverage parts of Australia are largely stable, but they are falling quickly in areas with lower vaccination.
In 2018, there were only ten communities where more than 10% of one-year-old children were not fully vaccinated. Last year, that number ballooned to 50 communities. That leaves more areas vulnerable to disease and outbreaks.
While Noosa, the Gold Coast Hinterland and Richmond Valley (near Byron Bay) have persistently had some of the country’s lowest vaccination rates, areas such as Manjimup in Western Australia and Tasmania’s South East Coast have recorded big declines since 2018.
Missing out on vaccination isn’t just a problem for children.
One preprint study (which is yet to be peer-reviewed) suggests vaccination during pregnancy may also be declining.
Far too many older Australians are missing out on recommended vaccinations for flu, COVID, pneumococcal and shingles. Vaccination rates in aged care homes for flu and COVID are worryingly low.
What’s going wrong?
Australia isn’t alone. Since the pandemic, child vaccination rates have fallen in many high-income countries, including New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Alarmingly, some regions in Australia have lower measles vaccination than that Texas county.
The timing of trends here and overseas suggests things shifted, or at least accelerated, during the pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy, fuelled by misinformation about COVID vaccines, is a growing threat.
This year, vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr was appointed to run the US health system, and Louisiana’s top health official has reportedly cancelled the promotion of mass vaccination.
In Australia, a recent survey found 6% of parents didn’t think vaccines were safe, and 5% believed they don’t work.
Those concerns are far more common among parents with children who are partially vaccinated or unvaccinated. Among the 2% of parents whose children are unvaccinated, almost half believe vaccines are not safe for their child, and four in ten believe vaccines didn’t work.
Other consequences of the pandemic were a spike in the cost of living, and a health system struggling to meet demand. More than one in ten parents said cost and difficulty getting an appointment were barriers to vaccinating their children.
There’s no single cause of sliding vaccination rates, so there’s no one solution. The best way to reverse these worrying trends is to work on all the key barriers at once – from a lack of awareness, to inconvenience, to lack of trust.
What governments should do
Governments should step up public health campaigns that counter misinformation, boost awareness of immunisation and its benefits, and communicate effectively to low-vaccination groups. The new Australian Centre for Disease Control should lead the charge.
Primary health networks, the regional bodies responsible for improving primary care, should share data on vaccination rates with GPs and pharmacies. These networks should also help make services more accessible to communities who are missing out, such as migrant groups and disadvantaged families.
State and local governments should do the same, sharing data and providing support to make maternal child health services and school-based vaccination programs accessible for all families.
Governments can communicate better about the benefits of vaccination. Yuri A/Shutterstock
Governments should also be more ambitious about tackling the growing vaccine divides between different parts of the country. The relevant performance measure in the national vaccination agreement is weak. States must only increase five-year-old vaccination rates in four of the ten areas where it is lowest. That only covers a small fraction of low-vaccination areas, and only the final stage of child vaccination.
Australia needs to set tougher goals, and back them with funding.
Governments should fund tailored interventions in areas with the lowest rates of vaccination. Proven initiatives include training trusted community members as “community champions” to promote vaccinations, and pop-up clinics or home visits for free vaccinations.
At this time of year, childcare centres and schools are back in full swing. But every year, each new intake has less protection than the previous cohort. Governments are developing a new national vaccination strategy and must seize the opportunity to turn that trend around. If it commits to a bold national plan, Australia can get back to setting records for child vaccination.
Grattan Institute has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.
Wendy Hu 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. Grattan Institute has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.
Widespread coral bleaching at Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia’s coast has deeply alarmed scientists and conservationists.
Photos captured by divers, published by The Guardian last week, show severe bleaching at several sites along the reef, which runs for 260 kilometres off the state’s northwest.
A severe marine heatwave in the Indian Ocean off WA has caused the coral bleaching. In some places, surface temperatures up to 4°C warmerthan usual have been recorded.
Hotter temperatures aren’t only happening at the ocean’s surface – data indicates they also extend several hundred metres deep. Warm, deeper water can shut down the ocean’s natural cooling process, putting corals at even greater risk of bleaching.
Counting the cost
The full extent of damage to Ningaloo won’t be known until scientists conduct field surveys in coming months.
So far, bleaching has been documented at several sites, including Turquoise Bay, Coral Bay, Tantabiddi, and Bundegi (Exmouth Gulf).
Other sites such as Scott Reef, Ashmore Reef, the Rowley Shoals and Rottnest Island are also at risk.
Damage wrought by the heatwave extends beyond coral. More than 30,000 fish have died since the September onset.
The below images show the heatwave’s progression. Temperatures from February last year are included for comparison.
The white circle shows the location of Ningaloo. Cooler temperatures are in blue and purple. Warmer temperatures are in yellow and orange.
The images show the heatwave reached Ningaloo in December last year and moved south in January. Temperatures fell slightly in February due to strong southerly winds. From March, temperatures are forecast to increase again.
A complex warming picture
According to recent data and modelled forecasts, hotter ocean temperatures off northern WA run several hundred metres deep.
During La Nina, trade winds strengthen and push warm water westward. This intensifies two important ocean currents.
The first is the Indonesian Throughflow – which carries warm Pacific waters through the Indonesian seas and into the eastern Indian Ocean. The second is the Leeuwin Current, which picks up this warm water and takes it further south towards Perth.
This has led to a build-up of hotter water along the WA coastline.
La Nina is also affecting WA’s reefs in other ways.
The process relies on “stratification” – that is, layers of seawater that differ in temperature, salinity and density (or weight). Warmer, less dense water collects at the surface and colder, denser water falls to deeper levels.
La Nina conditions can suppress, or even shut down, this cooling effect in two ways.
All this means the water pumped to the surface isn’t much cooler than temperatures at the surface.
For many reefs along the coast of WA, the suppression of this tidal cooling is probably contributing to worsening conditions, and more coral bleaching.
Most bleaching forecasts rely on sea surface temperatures. This means scientists may be underestimating the vulnerability of deeper reefs.
What’s in store for Ningaloo and surrounds?
Looking ahead, the situation at Ningaloo and surrounding reefs remains critical.
But unfortunately, temperatures are rising again and the marine heatwave is expected to continue until April, as the below image shows.
Sea surface temperature anomaly forecast for March to May. Ningaloo denoted with black ‘X’. Bureau of Meteorology
Climate change is making marine heatwaves more intense and frequent. It means reefs often don’t have time to recover between destructive bleaching events.
All this is compounded by the general trend towards warmer oceans as the planet heats up.
Drastic action on climate change is needed now. If this alarming pattern continues, the world’s reefs risk being lost entirely.
Nicole L. Jones receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Western Australian government.
Kelly Boden-Hawes 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.
It’s exactly three years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
During that time, Ukrainians have lived through one of the world’s largest and most brutal humanitarian crises. Yet their resilience remains high.
The United Nations estimates that 64% of micro, small and medium enterprises had to either suspend or close their operations in Ukraine at some stage after the war began.
But the vast majority of these have since opened back up.
Over the past year, our international team of researchers from both Australia and Ukraine sought to find out what might drive such extraordinary resilience. The answer, according to Ukrainian business leaders, is their people.
Running a business in a war
Ukrainians are currently living through their third winter of this war. Some of Russia’s latest attacks have targeted the gas infrastructure and other energy facilities crucial for keeping people alive.
These daily attacks have made previously safe cities no longer safe, leaving residents without water, heat and electricity in bitterly cold conditions.
According to the UNHCR’s 2025 Global Appeal, Russia’s targeting of homes, hospitals and communities has resulted in civilian deaths, mass displacements, restricted access to humanitarian aid, and severely disrupted essential services.
For businesses, the war has impacted virtually every aspect of commercial activity. Beyond the immediate threat of coming under direct attack, firms have had to deal with everything from disrupted supply chains through to frequent power outages.
As one interviewee put it:
Many of us are afraid our main businesses may go bankrupt. We are constantly facing periods with no electricity which stops businesses and cuts us off from the world. We live with constant air raid alarms, moving in and out of underground shelters. We have a significant shortage of personnel because so many have gone to fight on the front lines or left the country.
The UN estimates that utilisation of production capacity for Ukraine’s micro, small and medium enterprises dropped from 72.4% before the war to 45.7% in 2023.
Women have been stepping into historically male dominated professions such as mining, truck driving and welding to fill the gap left by men who’ve joined the fight. But there is still a significant labour shortage.
A diverse range of sectors have continued to operate in Ukraine since the war began, despite labour shortages and other issues. Oleksandr Filatov/Shutterstock
Over the past year, our international team of researchers from both Australia and Ukraine surveyed business leaders from 85 different small and medium-sized businesses across 19 different industries in Ukraine.
These spanned engineering, transportation, aviation and mining through to agriculture, tourism, IT, healthcare, entertainment and finance.
We asked which resources were – and still are – key to the survival of their organisations.
Finance and access to funding came in at number two, followed by production and energy, new customers & markets, equipment technology & information and policy & regulations.
The most important resource
The most important resource, highlighted by 82% of the business leaders we surveyed, was their people.
When operating within an environment of severe crisis and disruption, the pressure can be enormous. But the Ukrainian executives we interviewed figured out a way to unite and lead their teams into the future.
As one reflected:
When team members are motivated, they are more likely to be optimistic and resilient when facing difficulties. Motivated employees are more productive than demotivated ones. This is important when people need to accomplish more with fewer resources.
Forcing positive adaptation
For many organisations in our research, operating within a crisis had pushed them to implement valuable human resource practices other businesses often struggle with.
Some had transitioned to a “flatter” organisational structure, speeding up decision making by giving employees more autonomy. Others invested in team training which focused on empowering employees to share their thoughts on how to best move forward.
Our processes and planning horizons have changed completely. We’ve had to become more agile and flexible in our approach to leadership, often reducing planning cycles and adapting to new realities much faster than before.
A focus on wellbeing was another common theme. Some organisations hosted more meetings to allow their employees to share stories – not only about work but also about their personal fears and victories.
Some also encouraged their employees to complete volunteer work together during work hours.
There was an emphasis across interviews on the fact all employees need additional rest and recovery time, and encouraging them to take time off whenever needed.
Making sacrifices
Many of the new support mechanisms had financial consequences for the organisations.
One business cancelled the salaries of its top management team one month after the war started. Another hired a full-time psychologist to provide counselling in both formal and informal sessions.
Some continued to pay the salaries of their serving members:
All our mobilized employees who are serving in the military have been receiving their salaries for the past three years. We also ensure they are equipped with everything they need, stay in constant contact with them, and support their families.
Knowing their business was supporting the war effort had a positive impact on employee motivation:
The only difference in employee motivation is the understanding that our company actively supports the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Thus, every employee in the company understands that through their work, they are involved in this support.
In the end, it is the connections between people these leaders saw as the key to their organisational resilience.
No matter how hard things get, how much grief and suffering we endure, we know for certain that tomorrow the sun will rise. And even if it’s not for us, it will be for our children. This is what gives us the strength to continue living, creating, and preserving Ukraine — for us and for future generations.
The authors would like to acknowledge their academic partners and coauthors from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, Yaryna Boychuk, Valeria Kozlova, Sophia Opatska, and Olena Trevoho, and thank all the Ukrainian business leaders who participated in this research.
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.
Reality TV – love it or hate it, there’s no denying it’s addictive. From explosive arguments to over-the-top love triangles, it can be hard to look away. But is all this drama just for fun, or might it do more harm – to watchers and participants – than we realise?
We asked five experts, and most of them said it might, especially when it comes to promoting negative body image and leaving contestants emotionally scarred.
But one expert argued reality TV is a valuable form of entertainment overall, which reflects modern culture and sparks important conversations.
Peter Dutton has launched a game of one-upmanship after Anthony Albanese at the weekend unveiled Labor’s $8.5 billion health policy that promises near universal bulk billing for GP visits by 2030.
Dutton wants to neutralise health as an election battleground. So he immediately pledged to match the Albanese policy. He’s included another $500 million, from an already announced Coalition policy for mental health, so he can get to the bigger number of $9 billion.
What’s more, the Opposition leader said the government should legislate the health plan before the election. There are two issues with that call.
On the present parliamentary sitting timetable, legislation could in theory be passed in budget week, which is set to start March 25. But, as everyone who’s paying attention knows, the current speculation is there probably won’t be a budget, with many players and observers anticipating Albanese will soon announce an April election.
Secondly, however, legislation is not needed. The changes can be made by regulation.
The Coalition decision to take over the Labor health policy holus bolus may be tactically smart – time will tell. Fixing up bulk billing will be popular; the opposition knows it would be on risky ground getting into an argument about it, even on detail.
But just adopting such a big Labor policy, within hours of seeing it, without further thought or strutiny, raises questions about the Coalition’s policy rigour.
Doesn’t it have a few ideas of its own? Labor’s policy, while welcomed, has already come under some criticisms. For instance, there are suggestions it might be harder to address the bulk billing issue in certain areas than in others, so maybe the claims for the policy are too sweeping. And some experts would prefer greater attention on more fundamental reforms to Medicare.
In strict policy terms, as distinct from political expediency, the Coalition’s approach just seems lazy. Shadow health minister Anne Ruston is said to have been out and about with stakeholders – did she come to exactly the same policy conclusions as Labor? Presumably, given the policy’s expense, a Coalition government would not be able to spend more on other health initiatives, which restricts its scope to do further or different things.
On the fiscal side, Dutton is looking for general spending cuts but says there will be no cuts in health. “The Coalition always manages the economy more effectively and that’s why we can afford to invest in health and education,” he said on Sunday.
Can we believe in this “no cuts” line? The government points back to Tony Abbott’s time when similar promises were made and the reality didn’t match the rhetoric. Dutton was health minister then and the government tried to introduce a Medicare co-payment. That attempt fizzled in face of opposition, but some voters might think that a Coalition that puts on Labor’s clothes so readily might shed some of them when in office, pleading the weather was hotter than it expected. That’s especially possible when it is a policy that stretches out several years, as this one does.
Certainly Labor has already been homing in on Dutton’s record from more than a decade ago.
None of this alters the fact that something needs to be done to boost bulk billing, which has now fallen to about 78% of GP visits. The govenrment’s disputes the opposition’s figure that it reached 88% under the Coalition but indisputably, it has certainly tumbled from where it once was.
The question now is, who will people trust more to fix it up?
Dr Chalmers goes to Washington
Meanwhile, the government is still battling on all fronts to make its case heard in Washington for an exemption from the US tariffs on aluminium and steel.
In a flying trip at the start of this week Treasurer Jim Chalmers will be the first Australian minister to visit there since President Trump announced the tariffs.
The treasurer will have discussions with the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whom he met (courtesy of ambassador Kevin Rudd) before the presidential election. So the talks will have the advantage of familiarity.
Chalmers on Sunday played down the prospect of any finality on tariffs coming out of his visit, which will also take in a conference of superannuation fund investors looking to put money into American businesses. The conference is being held at the Australian embassy.
If Australia eventually gets a favourable result on tariffs in the near term, the treasurer will be able to claim at least a tick for his efforts.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne
Labor yesterday foreshadowed a major Medicare change to address the falling rate of bulk billing, with an A$8.5 billion election announcement. The government said it would increase incentive payments for GPs to bulk bill all patients, from November 1 2025.
Today the Coalition said it would match Labor’s Medicare investment dollar-for-dollar.
Medicare was designed as a universal scheme to eliminate financial barriers to access to health care. The contemporary slogan is that you only need your Medicare card, not your bank card, to see your doctor.
But fewer than half of Australians are always bulk billed when the see a doctor. So how did we get into this situation? And what could these changes mean for access to care?
Until changes introduced by then Health Minister Tony Abbott in 2003, Medicare was the same for everyone.
But in response to declining rates of GP bulk billing at the time, the then Coalition government backed away from Medicare’s universality and introduced targeted bulk billing incentives for pensioners and health-care card-holders, children, people in rural and remote Australia and, in a political fix to appease then Tasmanian independent Senator Brian Harradine, all Tasmanians.
Fast-forward to 2014 and then Health Minister Peter Dutton introduced legislation as part of the budget for a compulsory copayment for GP consultations – a proposal that did not survive six months and failed in the Senate. A smaller optional payment also failed to get approval.
But the idea of getting Australians to pay out of pocket to see a GP survived. It was introduced by stealth by freezing GP rebates, rather than adjusting them to inflation. This slowly forced GPs to introduce patient co-payments as their costs increased and their rebates didn’t.
By the time Labor was elected, bulk billing was said to be in freefall.
Labor’s first response was to restore the indexation of rebates, so they increase increase in line with inflation in November of each year.
It then tripled the bulk billing incentive. This meant GPs received a greater rebate when they didn’t charge patients an out-of-pocket fee.
But the new incentive was not enough to cover the gap between rebate and fees in metropolitan areas.
What proportion of Australians are now bulk billed?
Only about 48% of people have the security of “always” being bulk billed when they see a GP. A further 24% are “usually” bulk billed.
Bulk billing rates are highest in poorer areas – South West Sydney has an “always” rate of 81%, almost quadruple the rate in the ACT (23%), which has Australia’s lowest “always” rate.
The always bulk billed rate – excluding special COVID items which required bulk billing – has dropped from about 64% in 2021–22.
The rate of bulk billing as a percentage of all visits to the GP, rather than people, is much higher. Around 78% of all attendances (aka visits) in the second half of 2024 were bulk billed. The higher rate is because more frequent users, such as older Australians, are bulk billed at a higher rate than younger people.
What does the new bulk billing package include?
The initiative announced yesterday includes three positive changes.
First, it again increases the bulk billing incentive.
It also introduces an additional bonus for general practices which achieve 100% billing.
The new combined Medicare rebate in metropolitan areas for a standard bulk billed visit to the GP is A$69.56 when both changes are applied. This is $27 above the current rebate of $42.85 (without any bulk billing incentive).
The current average out-of-pocket payment when a service is not bulk billed is $46. So there will still be a gap, but the difference between bulk billing and not is now significantly smaller.
*Totals include item Medicare rebate, Bulk Billing Incentive item rebate, and 12.5% Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program payment. Government Press Release
The government expects a major uplift – to 90% of visits bulk billed – as a result.
State government payroll taxes, also encourage bulk billing, by not requiring GPs to pay payroll tax on consultations that are bulk billed. This will provide a further incentive to increase the bulk billing rate.
The second positive change is that the new initiatives are for everyone. This ends the two-tiered incentive the Coalition introduced in 2003 and restores Medicare as a truly universal scheme.
Australia will now rejoin all other high-income countries (other than the United States) in having health funding underpinned by universality.
Third is the introduction of a 12.5% “practice payment” bonus for practices that bulk bill all patients.
This starts the necessary transition from a reliance on fee-for-service payments as the main payment type for general practice.
A “practice payment” is more holistic and better suited to a world where more people have multiple chronic disease which require care for the whole person, rather than episodic care. It signals payments need to be redesigned for that new reality.
Over time, this could fund and encourage multi-disciplinary teams of GPs, nurses and allied health professionals such as psychologists and physiotherapists – rather than patients always seeing a GP.
The downsides
The main risk practices face in contemplating these changes is the fear of how long this new scheme will last. A previous Coalition government showed it was prepared to use a rebate freeze to achieve its policy of a shift away from Medicare as a universal scheme.
The best way of reducing that risk would be to build in indexation of the rebate, and the incentive, into legislation.
The Royal Australian College of GPs says not everyone will be bulk billed because rebates are still too low to cover the cost of care.
This is true, as the gap between the prevailing metro bulk billed fee and the new rebate plus incentive will be about $20. But the aim is to increase bulk billing to 90% not 100% – and that is probably achievable.
Bottom line
The new arrangements will likely reverse the decline in the rates of bulk billing. The government can reasonably expect a bulk billing rate of around 90% of visits in the future.
For consumers facing cost-of-living pressures, it will be a very welcome change. There will be more 100%-bulk-billing practices and patients will no longer face a lottery based on a doctor’s or receptionist’s mood or whim about whether they will be bulk billed.
Yesterday’s announcement and the Coalition’s backing is a watershed, benefiting patients and general practices.
Labor is playing to its strengths and it will hope to reverse its current polling trends with this announcement.
The Coalition obviously hopes to negate the impact of a popular announcement by matching it. What will weigh in voters’ minds, though, is whether today’s Coalition announcement will be delivered after the election. The Coalition has a long history – dating back to Malcolm Fraser – of promising one thing about health policy before an election and reversing it after the vote, and this will probably fuel a “Mediscare” campaign by Labor.
Stephen Duckett 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.
Peter Dutton has launched a game of one-upmanship after Anthony Albanese at the weekend unveiled Labor’s $8.5 billion health policy that promises near universal bulk billing for GP visits by 2030.
Dutton wants to neutralise health as an election battleground. So he immediately pledged to match the Albanese policy. He’s included another $500 million, from an already announced as Coalition policy for mental health, so he can get to the bigger number of $9 billion.
What’s more, the Opposition leader said the government should legislate the health plan before the election.
On the present parliamentary sitting timetable, legislation could in theory be passed in budget week, which is set to start March 25. But, as everyone who’s paying attention knows, the current speculation is there probably won’t be a budget, with many players and observers anticipating Albanese will soon announce an April election.
The Coalition decision to take over the Labor health policy holus bolus may be tactically smart – time will tell. Fixing up bulk billing will be popular; the opposition knows it would be on risky ground getting into an argument about it, even on detail.
But just adopting such a big Labor policy, within hours of seeing it, without further thought or strutiny, raises questions about the Coalition’s policy rigour.
Doesn’t it have a few ideas of its own? Labor’s policy, while welcomed, has already come under some criticisms. For instance, there are suggestions it might be harder to address the bulk billing issue in certain areas than in others, so maybe the claims for the policy are too sweeping. And some experts would prefer greater attention on more fundamental reforms to Medicare.
In strict policy terms, as distinct from political expediency, the Coalition’s approach just seems lazy. Shadow health minister Anne Ruston is said to have been out and about with stakeholders – did she come to exactly the same policy conclusions as Labor? Presumably, given the policy’s expense a Coalition government would not be able to spend more on other health initiatives, which restricts its scope to do further or different things.
On the fiscal side, Dutton is looking for general spending cuts but says there will be no cuts in health. “The Coalition always manages the economy more effectively and that’s why we can afford to invest in health and education,” he said on Sunday.
Can we believe in this “no cuts” line? The government points back to Tony Abbott’s time when similar promises were made and the reality didn’t match the rhetoric. Dutton was health minister then and the government tried to introduce a Medicare co-payment. That attempt fizzed, but some voters might think that a Coalition that puts on Labor’s clothes so readily might shed some of them when in office, pleading the weather was hotter than it expected. That’s especially possible when it is a policy that stretches out several years, as this one does.
Certainly Labor has already been homing in on Dutton’s record from more than a decade ago.
None of this alters the fact that something needs to be done to boost bulk billing, which has now fallen to about 78% of GP visits. The govenrment’s disputes the opposition’s figure that it reached 88% under the Coalition but indisputably, it has certainly tumbled.
The question now is, who will people trust more to fix it up?
Dr Chalmers goes to Washington
Meanwhile, the government is still battling on all fronts to make its case heard in Washington for an exemption from the US tariffs on aluminium and steel.
In a flying trip at the start of this week Treasurer Jim Chalmers will be the first Australian minister to visit there since President Trump announced the tariffs.
The treasurer will have discussions with the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whom he met (courtesy of ambassador Kevin Rudd) before the presidential election. So the talks will have the advantage of familiarity.
Chalmers on Sunday played down the prospect of any finality on tariffs coming out of his visit, which will also take in a conference of superannuation fund investors looking to put money into American businesses. The conference is being held at the Australian embassy.
If Australia eventually gets a favourable result on tariffs in the near term, the treasurer will be able to claim at least a tick for his efforts.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A new narrative is being aggressively pushed by Israel and its apologists to justify resuming the Gaza genocide, conveniently just as an important deadline for ceasefire negotiations draws near.
The Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF) is now claiming that the Israeli children Kfir and Ariel Bibas “were both brutally murdered by terrorists while being held hostage in Gaza, no later than November 2023.”
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told the press on Friday that, “Contrary to Hamas’ lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood.
“The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys, they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”
Anyone who has been following the events in Gaza over the last year and a half will be unsurprised to learn that Israel provided no evidence to support these incendiary claims.
Benjamin Netanyahu released a video statement in his signature American English waving around an enlarged photograph of the children and talking about what savage monsters the Palestinians are.
“Hamas murdered them in cold blood,” Netanyahu says, while the camera zooms in on the adorable little redheads. “As the prime minister of Israel, I vow that I will not rest until the savages who executed our hostages are brought to justice. They do not deserve to walk this earth.
“Nothing will stop me. Nothing.”
Sabotaging ceasefire negotiations This happens just as Netanyahu has been working to sabotage ceasefire negotiations by adding new non-starter demands that were not in the original agreement, just as sources in Israeli media predicted he would do upon his return from Washington earlier this month.
The six-week-long first stage of the ceasefire deal with Hamas is set to expire at the beginning of March next weekend
This is obvious babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda, being released at the most convenient of times. After Israel has been caught lying about beheaded babies and mass rapes and so much more, only an idiot would take any of these claims on faith.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
“Today is a tragic day. It’s a day of boundless sorrow, of indescribable pain.
Four-year-old Ariel Bibas, his baby brother one-year-old Kfir and 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz were brutally murdered by Hamas savages. pic.twitter.com/7TMchvOZ9E
But it’s doing the job. Now everywhere you look you’ll see Israel supporters calling to end the ceasefire and reignite the Gaza holocaust to avenge these innocent children. I just saw an article from Tablet Magazine titled “Their Time Is Up,” subtitled “The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us exactly who our Palestinian neighbors are.
“Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action.”
Most likely cause of death All this despite the fact that we know the most likely cause of the children’s death was the fact that their own government was raining military explosives on places where hostages were being held during that time.
Hamas reported back in November 2023 that the Bibas children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike along with their mother. In December 2023 it was reported in the mainstream press that Hamas had offered to return their bodies to Israel but Israel had refused, telling the press that “Israel will not address propaganda-based reports coming from Hamas”.
You don’t need to trust Hamas or anyone else to deduce that a woman and two children being killed by Israeli airstrikes in an area where many women and children were being killed by Israeli airstrikes every day is a much more likely scenario than Palestinian resistance fighters spontaneously deciding to murder children with their bare hands instead of using them as negotiating leverage as planned.
As journalist Muhammad Shehada recently noted on Twitter, Israel already has an established track record of lying about Hamas killing hostages who were actually killed in Israeli airstrikes.
In December 2023, Israel informed the families of three hostages that they had been murdered by Hamas. The mother of one of the hostages kept digging and eventually discovered that they had died of asphyxiation when IDF troops “gassed” the tunnel they were hiding in.
Last September, the IDF admitted that they had killed the hostages in an airstrike and lied about it.
Three weeks ago Shehada correctly predicted in an article with Zeteo that Israel was preparing to use the Bibas deaths as an excuse to terminate the ceasefire, long before any of this started.
Shehada noticed the way pro-Israel narrative managers had been pushing the line that great vengeance must be exacted upon Gaza if it turns out the Bibas children have been harmed, despite Hamas having announced their deaths more than a year ago.
They knew those children were dead, so after the ceasefire was announced in late January they began circulating the narrative that discovery of their demise would be a valid reason to end it.
🚨BREAKING | Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children, ages 12 and 13, in the illegally occupied West Bank today. Both were reportedly shot in the back. https://t.co/6iqVf7Nasg
Israel forces shoot dead 2 Palestinian children Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children in the West Bank just yesterday — both of them shot in the back. You could be forgiven for not knowing that this happened, because the Western political/media class has been too focused on the deaths of two little white kids to pay attention to such trivialities.
Israel needs to keep “discovering” new Hamas atrocities from 2023 because otherwise it just looks like one-sided atrocities being committed by Israel this whole time. First it was beheaded babies, then later it was “We’ve discovered Hamas did mass rapes!”, and now it’s the Bibas kids.
They need to do this because the Hamas attack was the last time anything happened where Israel could frame itself as the victim, so they’ve been milking it and milking it and milking it for as long as possible while committing orders of magnitude worse abuse in Gaza.
It’s all designed to drum up outrage, and to draw sympathy toward Israel and away from the obvious victims who Israel has been abusing, displacing and mass murdering for a year and a half.
As calls to rain vengeance upon Gaza grow louder, remember this: the Bibas kids aren’t the reason, they’re the excuse. The excuse to advance pre-planned agendas against the Palestinians that have been in place since long before those children were born.
Prime Minister James Marape has issued a strong appeal to all young men and boys in Papua New Guinea — stop abusing girls, mothers, and sisters.
He made the plea yesterday before flying to Australia, emphasising the importance of respecting women and children in society.
Marape urged young men to take their issues to him instead of resorting to violence against women and children.
Marape also called for the nation to rise in consciousness to preserve the values and achievements of their fathers and mothers who fought for independence 50 years ago.
“We want to give a special recognition to the fathers and mothers of our country, a generation and people of our country to be proud to be here today,” he said.
He expressed his pain at seeing the continued cycle of abuse and disrespect towards women and children in the country.
Marape’s message was clear: violence and abuse towards women and children would not be tolerated, and the nation must come together to ensure the safety and well-being of all its citizens.
‘Don’t do it to our sisters’ “These are not two things that we want to take on. For every young boy out there, if you have an issue in society, I don’t mind you taking it upon me. But please don’t do it to the girls in the neighbourhood,” he said.
“Don’t do it to our sisters in the neighbourhood. Don’t do it to our mothers and aunties in the neighbourhood.
“In a time when our nation is facing a 50th anniversary, I call for our nation to rise in a consciousness to preserve what our fathers and mothers did 50 years ago.
“Lawlessness, disrespect for each other, especially women and children amongst us. This is something that I speak at great lengths and speak from the depth of my heart.
“It pains me to see girls, women, and children continue to face a vicious cycle of abuse and total abhorrence, abuse of children, rape,” he said.
“I just thought these are important activities coming up. I want to conclude by asking our country through the media.
“We are in another state of our 50th anniversary year.
‘Let us take responsibility’ “We have many challenges in our country. But all of us, we take responsibility of our country. As government, we are trying our absolute best.
“Citizens, public servants, private sector, all of us have responsibility to our country. Unless you have another country to go and live in, if property is your country in the first instance, I call out to all citizens, take responsibility in your corner of property.
“Privacy alone cannot be able to do everything that you expect it to do.
“I’m not omnipotent. I’m not omniscient. I’m not omnipresent.
“I’m but only one person coordinating at the top level. Call for every citizen of our country.
“As we face our 49th year and as we welcome our 50th of September 16,) we call this on every one of us.”
Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.
The Albanese government on Sunday will pledge $8.5 billion for Medicare, declaring this would enable all Australians to have access to bulk billing by 2030.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will announce the policy at a rally in Tasmania, where the Labor seat of Lyons and the Liberal seat of Bass are in play.
Under the plan, Labor would extend the bulk billing incentive to all Australians, and also create an extra incentive payment for practices that bulk billed all their patients.
The changes would mean an extra 18 million bulk billed GP visits annually, the government says. Nine out of ten GP visits would be bulk billed by 2030. On the government’s figures, this would increase the number of fully bulk billing practices to about 4,800, triple the present figure.
The government says its plan would produce patient savings of up to $859 million a year by 2030.
It says this is the single largest investment in Medicare since it was created more than 40 years ago.
The promised big health spend is designed both to focus the election campaign on an area of traditional strength for Labor, and to address the serious erosion of bulk billing rates in recent years. The rate is currently down to about 78%.
The health package also promises to boost the number of nurses and doctors in the system. Four hundred nursing scholarships would be provided. By 2028 2,000 new GP trainee places would be funded each year in federally-funded GP training programs. The number funded in 2025 is 1600.
The government has peviously tripled the bulk billing incentive for pensioners, concession card holders and families with children. From November 1, that would be widened to all Australians.
Also from November 1, in addition to the bulk billing incentive, practices that fully bulk billed would receive an extra 12.5% loading on their Medicare rebates.
“The combined investment means around 4,800 practices will be in a better financial position if they adopt full bulk billing,” Albanese and Health Minister Mark Butler said in a statement.
Albanese said the plan “will make Medicare even stronger, help with cost of living pressures and ensure every Australian receives the best health care that they deserve”.
Butler said people would be worse off if Peter Dutton became PM. “Peter Dutton tried to end bulk billing with a GP tax and then started a six-year freeze to Medicare rebates that froze GP incomes and stripped billions out of Medicare.”
Proposed New Bulk Billing Arrangments
The table below shows how total Medicare payments for common visits would increase from November 1, with the expansion of the bulk billing incentive to all Australians and the new incentive payment for practices that bulk billed every patient.
The bulk billing incentive is scaled according to how far a general practice is from a major city or metropolitan area, with larger Medicare payments as communities get more remote.
The total cost of the bulk billing initiatives over the forward estimates is nearly $7.9 billion.
The costs year-by -year are: 2025-26, nearly $1.2 billion; 2026-27, nearly $2 billion; 2027-28, $2.3 billion, and 2028-29, $2.4 billion.
The government said most of the cost of the Medicare package is accounted for the the December budget update and the rest would be in the next budget.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners this month called for the extension of bulk billing incentives to those under 35. It said this would boost the national rate to 85%.
The Greens have called for tripling the bulk billing incentive for everyone with a Medicare card.
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.
The BBC has removed its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from iPlayer after it was revealed that its teenage narrator is the son of a Hamas official.
The broadcaster stated that it was conducting “further due diligence” following mounting scrutiny.
The film, which aired on BBC Two last Monday, follows 13-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri as he describes life in Gaza.
However, it later emerged that his father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, serves as the Hamas Deputy Minister of Agriculture in Gaza.
In a statement yesterday, the BBC defended the documentary’s value but acknowledged concerns.
“There have been continuing questions raised about the programme, and in light of these, we are conducting further due diligence with the production company,” the statement said.
The revelation sparked a backlash from figures including Friday Night Dinner actress Tracy-Ann Oberman, literary agent Neil Blair, and former BBC One boss Danny Cohen, who called it “a shocking failure by the BBC and a major crisis for its reputation”.
On Thursday, the BBC admitted that it had not disclosed the family connection but insisted it followed compliance procedures. It has since added a disclaimer acknowledging Abdullah’s ties to Hamas.
UK’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said that she would discuss the issue with the BBC, particularly regarding its vetting process.
However, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians urged the broadcaster to “stand firm against attempts to prevent firsthand accounts of life in Gaza from reaching audiences”.
Others also defended the importance of the documentary made last year before the sheer scale of devastation by the Israeli military forces was exposed — and many months before the ceasefire came into force on January 19.
‘This documentary humanised Palestinian children’ Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), criticised the BBC’s decision.
“It’s very regrettable that this documentary has been pulled following pressure from anti-Palestinian activists who have largely shown no sympathy for persons in Gaza suffering from massive bombardment, starvation, and disease,” Middle East Eye quoted him as saying.
Doyle also praised the film’s impact, saying, “This documentary humanised Palestinian children in Gaza and gave valuable insights into life in this horrific war zone.”
Journalist Richard Sanders, who has produced multiple documentaries on Gaza, called the controversy a “huge test” for the BBC and condemned its response as a “cowardly decision”.
Earlier this week, 45 Jewish journalists and media figures, including former BBC governor Ruth Deech, urged the broadcaster to pull the film, calling Ayman Al-Yazouri a “terrorist leader”.
The controversy underscores wider tensions over media coverage of the Israel-Gaza war, with critics accusing the BBC of a vetting failure, while others argue the documentary sheds crucial light on Palestinian children’s suffering.
Another teenager who appears in the Gaza documentary . . . she has o global online following for her social media videos on cooking and life amid the genocide. Image: BBC screenshot APR
I am writing to you as a Palestinian and a survivor of genocide, who was born and raised in Gaza — a city of love and resilience.
I have read your statements about Gaza and frankly, I am confused.
You claim to be a “peacemaker”, but encourage Israel to continue its genocide, calling for “all hell” to break loose if your demands are not fulfilled.
Mr Trump, we have already been through hell. We lost 60,000 martyrs in it.
You claim credit for the ceasefire deal, and yet your government — one of its guarantors — refuses to pressure Israel into fulfilling all its obligations under it.
You call Gaza a “demolition site” but conveniently fail to name the criminal responsible — while simultaneously supplying it with more bombs, funding, and diplomatic cover.
You talk about Palestinians being “safe” and “happy”, yet you refer to us as if we are a burden to be offloaded onto Jordan, Egypt, or any country willing to take us.
You claim that we “only want to be in the Gaza Strip because [we] don’t know anything else”.
“Gaza is not [President Trump’s] business venture, and it is not for sale. Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.” Image: Instagram/#flyer_for_falastin/@tahiapretiti
You profoundly misunderstand us
Mr Trump, I think you profoundly misunderstand who we are and what Gaza is to us.
You may think of us as a mere obstacle to your vision of luxury resorts, but we are a people with deep roots, long history, and unalienable rights.
We are the rightful owners of our land.
Gaza is not your business venture, and it is not for sale.Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.
And no, it is not true that we want to stay here because we “know nothing else”.
Although the 17-year-long Israeli siege has made life incredibly difficult for us, some of us have still managed to travel — for education, medical treatment or work. But these people still return because Gaza is home.
He earned his master’s degree in the UK and later completed his PhD at Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Despite having the opportunity to stay abroad, he chose to return to Gaza, where he taught creative writing and literature at the Islamic University.
He also co-founded We Are Not Numbers, an initiative that paired young Palestinian writers with experienced authors to amplify their voices and resist occupation through storytelling. One of these voices is mine.
Last spring, I, too, had the opportunity to leave, but I decided against it. I could not leave my family, friends and Gaza amid a genocidal war. However, like many others, I plan to travel to complete my education and then return to help rebuild and support my people.
The Palestinian way This is the Palestinian way – we seek knowledge and opportunities, not to abandon our homeland, but to build and strengthen it.
Speaking of building — you talk about your plans to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. The thing is, Gaza was the Riviera of the Middle East. Our ancestors built it into a flourishing trade hub, port city and cultural centre. It was “magnificent” — to use your words — until Israel was created and it started destroying it.
And yet, after every brutal Israeli assault on Gaza, Palestinians would rebuild. Despite all the Israeli violence, restrictions and thievery, Palestinians still made sure Gaza was a safe place with a cosy rhythm of life, where its youth were doing their best to pursue decent livelihoods, where families were happy and together, and where homes thrived.
Israel has now tried to reduce all of Gaza to rubble and death so we are no longer able to live in it. You have picked up on the idea, effectively endorsing our ethnic cleansing under the veneer of humanitarianism.
No, Mr Trump, we will not be “happy” and “safe” elsewhere.
But I agree with you on something else you said: “You’ve got to learn from history”. Indeed, history teaches us that settler-colonialism in modern times is unsustainable. In this sense, your plans and Israel’s plans are doomed to fail.
We, the people of Gaza – like any Indigenous people – refuse to be uprooted. We refuse to be dispossessed. We refuse to be forced into exile so that our land can be handed to the highest bidder. We are not a problem to be solved; we are a people with the right to live in our homeland in freedom and dignity.
No amount of bombs, blockades, or tanks will make us forget that. We will not be relocated, resettled, or replaced.
Power and wealth will not decide the fate of Gaza. History is not written by thieves – it is written by those who resist, by the will of the people. No matter the pressure, our connection to this land will never be severed. Surrender and abandonment are not an option. We will honour our martyrs with resistance by nourishing this land with love, care and remembrance.
Wishing you all the best in your futile pursuits,
Hassan Abuqamar Gaza, Palestine
This open letter was first published by Al Jazeera.
One of the leading Middle East’s leading political and media analysts, Marwan Bishara, has accused President Donald Trump of applying a doctrine of ‘strategic coercion” and “economic blackmail” in his approach to the Gaza ceasefire.
Bishara, senior political analyst of the Doha-based Al Jazeera global television network, was responding to the news that Trump has apparently backed off his plan for expelling more than 2 million Palestinians from their Gaza homeland and to redevelop it as the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
He has now been describing it as a “recommendation” that would not be enforced.
“The idea that Trump starts with [about taking over Gaza] is mad. But there is a method to the madness,” Bishara said.
“The method to the madness, you can see it in the context of Trump’s doctrine, if you will – and that is strategic coercion and economic blackmail.
“In fact, he started his administration by inviting [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu to Washington, blessing him with all kinds of support . . . and blackmailing Egypt and Jordan into accepting two million refugees, or else — and then asking them to come up with something else.”
Bishara said he expected the Trump doctrine to be applied elsewhere in the world, such as with his efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
‘This kind of strategic coercion of Arab countries on behalf of the United States and Israel, and economic blackmail — I think we’re going to see it as part of the Trump doctrine throughout the world.
President Trump’s walkback on his “Riviera” plan for Gaza. Video: Al Jazeera
‘Surprised’ over opposition The US president had said in a radio interview with Fox News that he was “a little bit surprised” that Jordan and Egypt had voiced opposition to his plan to “take over” Gaza and displace Palestinians.
“I’ll tell you, the way to do it is my plan — I think that’s the plan that really works,” Trump said.
“But I’m not forcing it, I’m just going to sit back and recommend it.
“And then the US would own the site, there’d be no Hamas, and there’d be development and you’d start all over again with a clean plate.”
A former Egyptian deputy foreign affairs minister to the European Union, Gamal Bayoumi, said the “informal” meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of the leaders of several Arab countries to discuss an Egyptian counterproposal had led to the softening of Trump’s stance.
Speaking from Cairo, Bayoumi said Trump had appeared “inexperienced concerning international law” and the Middle East, saying the US president’s plan “has no logic . . . to ask the Palestinians to leave their own country.”
A thin crystal is bent elastically when pressed with a metal probe. UQ/QUT
We are all familiar with elastic materials – just think of a rubber band which can return to its original shape after being stretched.
Humans have used elastic materials for millennia. These days, they’re in everything from optical fibres to aeroplanes and buildings. But until now, scientists haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly how these materials return to their original shape. What happens at the level of their molecules?
Our findings will allow us to develop new ways of designing components for complicated aerospace and building materials or electronic devices.
The mystery of elasticity
A material is elastic if it can return to its original structure after being deformed. For example, a rubber band goes back to its original shape after it’s been stretched. However, it will snap if pulled too hard. This is known as a “non-elastic change” – it means the material can no longer return to its original shape.
The most useful elastic materials can undergo large changes in their structures and still return to their original shape. There are many engineering uses for this. As one example, bridges are designed to move elastically in high winds to prevent them from falling down.
All materials are at least a little bit elastic: they can restore themselves after very small changes in structure. If you shake a piece of paper, it will still lie flat. But if you fold it, the crease is permanent – a non-elastic behaviour that is essential for origami.
Prior to our research, there were two main approaches to understanding elasticity.
In the 17th century, Robert Hooke first described how elastic materials work. He discovered that the force needed to stretch an elastic material is proportional to the distance it is stretched, and described this mathematically.
However, knowing this doesn’t provide much insight for chemists and physicists like ourselves, who work to develop new materials with better elastic properties.
More recently, computers have been used to calculate the elastic properties of a material using its structure and the basic laws of physics. But while it’s nice for a computer to understand the problem, it doesn’t necessarily make it easier for humans to grasp. This is where our work on flexible crystals comes in.
How can a crystal be flexible?
Crystals, which are normally hard and brittle, are made up of a repeating pattern of atoms or molecules. Because the atoms or molecules are stacked neatly in place, it is hard to move them.
This is why diamond – a crystal of carbon atoms – is hard, while coal, also mostly made of carbon but not a crystal, is soft and crumbly.
In the flexible crystals we have developed, there are weak interactions between the molecules. These crystals are made of a combination of simple organic molecules and metal ions.
Interactions between them allow the crystals to be bent so much, they can be tied in a knot without the crystal breaking.
Our new approach allows humans to understand how the subtle interactions between molecules in crystals give rise to elasticity.
A flexible crystal in the shape of a thin strand is tied in a loose knot.
We first used X-ray diffraction, a technique for determining the positions of atoms and molecules in crystals, at the Australian Synchrotron. This allowed us to understand how the arrangement of molecules in our flexible crystal changes when it’s bent.
We then used a computer to model the interactions between pairs of molecules. Our results showed these interactions could be used to calculate elasticity just as accurately as theoretical models of the entire crystal.
So, what makes our crystal highly elastic? Our results show that none of the interactions between atoms are “happy” with the structure of the crystal when it is bent. Some would like it to move one way, others in the opposite direction. They have to compromise.
This means the molecules and atoms don’t strongly resist to changes, making the crystal highly elastic despite its molecular structure which is typical of a regular, inflexible crystal.
We could not have learned this with either of the traditional approaches for analysing elasticity.
A single crystal cantilever prepared with a steel ball approximately 55 times the mass of the crystal. The ball rises back higher than the neutral position against gravity when the force holding it is released. UQ/QUT
We were also able to calculate how much energy is stored within a crystal when it is bent, and found it was enough for the crystal to lift a mass 30 times its own weight one metre in the air. This is similar to shooting an arrow with a bow. When you draw the bow, you store elastic energy. Upon the release of the arrow, that elastic energy is transformed into kinetic energy – movement.
Our flexible crystals are not yet robust enough to be used in the construction of bridges or skyscrapers.
But the new understanding our study brings to elasticity could lead to new ways of preparing smart devices, wearable electronics, or even components for spacecraft.
Jack K. Clegg receives funding from the Australian Research Council
Ben Powell receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Queensland Government.
John McMurtrie receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Hydrogen was once sold as a universal climate fix — a clean, green wonder fuel for cars, homes, power grids and even global export. But reality has cooled that buzz.
This week, the South Australian government shelved plans for a A$593 million hydrogen power plant, in favour of injecting that money into the $2.4 billion Whyalla steelworks rescue package. Premier Peter Malinauskas said there was “no point in producing hydrogen” without a customer: the steelworks.
Meanwhile, the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project in Victoria, meant to ship hydrogen to Japan, has met with delays and overruns. Earlier this month, the new Queensland government chose to halt further investment in the Central Queensland Hydrogen Project, putting plans to export hydrogen in doubt.
These setbacks show hydrogen isn’t the ultimate solution to all our energy needs, especially if we want to export it. But they don’t spell doom. Instead, they nudge us toward where hydrogen really shines: in heavy industry, right where it’s made.
Heavy industry: where hydrogen makes sense
Heavy industries such as steel manufacturing and ammonia production are where hydrogen proves its worth. These sectors are significant contributors to climate change — steel accounts for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, ammonia a further 2%.
Most emissions from steelmaking come from burning coal in blast furnaces to convert ore into iron and carbon dioxide.
In a cleaner alternative, hydrogen (when produced using renewable energy) can be used to strip oxygen from the ore and make iron, with water as a byproduct. The result is green iron, ready to be turned into steel in an electric arc furnace – with a fraction of the emissions.
Ammonia is used to make fertiliser and industrial chemicals, and hydrogen is one of the main ingredients in its production. Hydrogen bonds with nitrogen from the air to form ammonia. No hydrogen, no ammonia — it’s that simple. Conventional ammonia plants get hydrogen from methane, producing CO₂ in the process. Green ammonia uses renewable energy to produce hydrogen by splitting water via electrolysis.
Our recent research crunched the numbers on producing these new green commodities. We found making green iron in Australia with hydrogen and shipping it to Europe for steel production could be 21% cheaper than exporting raw iron ore and hydrogen separately. Plus, it could cut emissions by up to 95% compared to traditional methods.
There are huge economic opportunities for Australia too. Instead of shipping low-value raw materials, Australia could export ready-to-use green iron or green steel, reshaping global supply chains while cutting costs and carbon. That’s the kind of rethink hydrogen enables.
Industry hubs: a practical fix
Transporting hydrogen long distances is costly and inefficient. The fix? Industry hubs that produce hydrogen right where it’s needed — next to steel mills, ammonia plants, desalination plants, water treatment plants or even aluminium smelters. Putting producers and consumers together slashes transport costs and unlocks efficiencies.
We’ve built tools to pinpoint places with the greatest potential to produce these new green commodities.
The Hydrogen Economic Fairways Tool maps where renewable energy, infrastructure and industrial sites align for cost-effective hydrogen production.
The Green Steel Economic Fairways Mapper zooms in on prime locations for green steel, spotlighting places such as Eyre Peninsula in SA and the Pilbara in Western Australia, among others (see below). These locations have abundant wind and solar resources alongside an existing industrial base.
The Green Steel Economic Fairways Mapper compares the levelised cost of steel, including production and transport to the port. a) Regional changes across Australia b) Example of how to optimise the system to minimise the levelised cost of producing 1 million tonnes per annum c) Breakdown of costs d) Hourly system performance, in terms of energy flows. Green Steel Economic Fairways Mapper, Geoscience Australia
Challenges remain
Green hydrogen promises to revolutionise heavy industries, but significant hurdles stand in the way of widespread domestic adoption. The biggest challenge comes from the unpredictable nature of renewable energy, which makes it hard to maintain the steady hydrogen supply industries need.
The costs remain steep, too. Splitting water into hydrogen using renewable electricity isn’t cheap, particularly when you need backup storage systems to keep production going during cloudy or windless periods.
Getting hydrogen where it needs to go poses another major challenge. As hydrogen is both bulky to transport and highly flammable, it requires special handling and infrastructure, driving up costs, especially for facilities far from production sites.
Many companies also hesitate to invest in hydrogen-compatible equipment, as retrofitting existing plants or building new ones requires substantial upfront costs without guaranteed returns.
The $2.4 billion rescue package for the Whyalla Steelworks (ABC News)
Meanwhile tax credits for green aluminium and alumina should help another heavy industry to navigate the energy transition using clean hydrogen.
These measures aim to unlock tens of billions in private investment, boost regional economies, and position Australia as a leader in clean energy manufacturing. This isn’t just about one-off projects. It’s laying the groundwork for hubs that link renewable energy and hydrogen production to industrial demand.
There’s more in the pipeline. The Hydrogen Headstart program pumps funds into hydrogen innovation, and the Future Made in Australia initiative backs clean industry with billions more. Add in policies like carbon pricing or low-interest loans, and the economics tilt even further toward green steel and ammonia. Government buying power — in the form of procurement targets for low-carbon materials — could seal the deal by guaranteeing demand.
These policies aren’t just wishful thinking — they’re practical steps that are already working elsewhere. Sweden’s HYBRIT project, which paired green steel with government-backed demand, has already led to construction starting on new industrial-scale green steel facilities. At the same time, the European Union’s hydrogen strategy leans on carbon pricing and subsidies to guide industries and suppliers through the energy transition, while Japan offers incentives for the use of green steel in their automotive industry.
Australia has the renewable energy and the industrial base to take advantage of these opportunities. With the right leadership, we can turn hydrogen’s stumbles into a global triumph for heavy industry.
Changlong receives funding from the South Australian Department for Energy and Mining to conduct the SA Green Iron Study, and from Geoscience Australia under the Exploring for the Future program to develop the Hydrogen and Green Steel Economic Fairways tool. Changlong is affiliated with Melbourne Climate Futures, University of Melbourne, and is a visiting fellow at Engineering Science, Oxford University, UK.
Stuart Walsh receives funding from Geoscience Australia supporting the development of the Bluecap software suite, which highlights opportunities for new renewable energy and critical mineral projects in Australia. Stuart received funding from the South Australian Department for Energy and Mining to conduct the SA Green Iron Study and from Geoscience Australia under the Exploring for the Future program to develop the Hydrogen and Green Steel Economic Fairways tool.
Imagine you have just finished a workout. Your legs are like jelly, your lungs are burning and you just want to collapse on the couch.
But instead, you pick yourself up and go for a brisk walk.
While this might seem counterintuitive, doing some light activity after an intense workout – known as “active recovery” – has been suggested to reduce soreness and speed up recovery after exercise.
But does it work or is it just another fitness myth?
What is active recovery?
Active recovery simply describes doing some low-intensity physical activity after a strenuous bout of exercise.
This is commonly achieved through low-intensity cardio, such as walking or cycling, but can also consist of low-intensity stretching, or even bodyweight exercises such as squats and lunges.
The key thing is making sure the intensity is light or moderate, without moving into the “vigorous” range.
As a general rule, if you can maintain a conversation while you’re exercising, you are working at a light-to-moderate intensity.
Some people consider doing an easy training session on their “rest days” as a form of active recovery. However, this has not really been researched. So we will be focusing on the more traditional form of active recovery in this article, where it is performed straight after exercise.
What does active recovery do?
Active recovery helps speed up the removal of waste products, such as lactate and hydrogen, after exercise. These waste products are moved from the muscles into the blood, before being broken down and used for energy, or simply excreted.
This is thought to be one of the ways it promotes recovery.
In some instances active recovery has been shown to reduce muscle soreness in the days following exercise. This may lead to a faster return to peak performance in some physical capabilities such as jump height.
This means active recovery can be used regularly after exercise without the risk of affecting the benefits of the main exercise session.
There’s evidence to the contrary too
Not all research on active recovery is positive.
Several studies indicate it’s no better than simply lying on the couch when it comes to reducing muscle soreness and improving performance after exercise.
In fact, there’s more research suggesting active recovery doesn’t have an effect than research showing it does have an effect.
While there could be several reasons for this, two stand out.
First, the way in which active recovery is applied in the research varies as lot. It’s likely there is a sweet spot in terms of how long active recovery should last to maximise its benefits (more on this later).
Second, it’s likely the benefits of active recovery are trivial to small. As such, they won’t always be considered “significant” in the scientific literature, despite offering potentially meaningful benefits at an individual level. In sport science, studies often have small sample sizes, which can make it hard to see small effects.
But there doesn’t seem to be any research suggesting active recovery is less effective than doing nothing, so at worst it certainly won’t cause any harm.
When is active recovery useful?
Active recovery appears useful if you need to perform multiple bouts of exercise within a short time frame. For example, if you were in a tournament and had 10–20 minutes between games, then a quick active recovery would be better than doing nothing.
Active recovery might also be a useful strategy if you have to perform exercise again within 24 hours after intense activity.
For example, if you are someone who plays sport and you need to play games on back-to-back days, doing some low-intensity active recovery after each game might help reduce soreness and improve performance on subsequent days.
Similarly, if you are training for an event like a marathon and you have a training session the day after a particularly long or intense run, then active recovery might get you better prepared for your next training session.
Conversely, if you have just completed a low-to-moderate intensity bout of exercise, it’s unlikely active recovery will offer the same benefits. And if you will get more than 24 hours of rest between exercise sessions, active recovery is unlikely to do much because this will probably be long enough for your body to recover naturally anyway.
The good news is you don’t have to do a lot of active recovery to see a benefit.
A systematic review looking at the effectiveness of active recovery across 26 studies found 6–10 minutes of exercise was the sweet spot when it came to enhancing recovery.
Interestingly, the intensity of exercise didn’t seem to matter. If it was within this time frame, it had a positive effect.
So it makes sense to make your active recovery easy (because why would you make it hard if you don’t have to?) by keeping it in the light-to-moderate intensity range.
However, don’t expect active recovery to be a complete game changer. The research would suggest the benefits are likely to be small at best.
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.
You may have noticed that changes in weight are sometimes accompanied by changes in your period.
But what does one really have to do with the other?
Maintaining a healthy weight is key to regular menstruation. Here’s why – and when to talk to your doctor.
The role of hormones
The menstrual cycle – including when you bleed and ovulate – is regulated by a balance of hormones, particularly oestrogen.
The ovaries are connected to the brain through a hormonal signalling system. This acts as a kind of “chain of command” of hormones controlling the menstrual cycle.
The brain produces a key hormone, called the gonadotropin-releasing hormone, in the hypothalamus. It stimulates the release of other hormones which tell the ovaries to produce oestrogen and release a mature egg (ovulation).
But the release of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone depends on oestrogen levels and how much energy is available to the body. Both of these are closely related to body weight.
Oestrogen is primarily produced in the ovaries, but fat cells also produce oestrogen. This is why weight – and more specifically body fat – can affect menstruation.
Fat cells produce oestrogen, a hormone with a key role in the menstrual cycle. Halfpoint/Shutterstock
Can being underweight affect my period?
The body prioritises conserving energy. When reserves are low it stops anything non-essential, such as reproduction.
This can happen when you are underweight, or suddenly lose weight. It can also happen to people who undertake intense exercise or have inadequate nutrition.
The stress sends the hypothalamus into survival mode. As a result, the body lowers its production of the hormones important to ovulation, including oestrogen, and stops menstruation.
Being chronically underweight means not having enough energy available to support reproduction, which can lead to menstrual irregularities including amenorrhea (no periods at all).
This results in very low oestrogen levels and can cause potentially serious health risks, including infertility and bone loss.
Missing periods is not always a cause for concern. But a chronic lack of energy availability can be, if not addressed. The two are linked, meaning understanding your period and being aware of any prolonged changes is important.
How about being overweight?
Higher body fat can elevate oestrogen levels.
When you’re overweight your body stores extra energy in fat cells, which produce oestrogen and other hormones and can cause inflammation in the body. So, if you have a lot of fat cells, your body produces an excess of these hormones. This can affect normal functioning of the uterus lining (endometrium).
Excess oestrogen and inflammation can interfere in the feedback system to the brain and stop ovulation. As a result, you may have irregular or missed periods.
It can also lead to pain (dysmenorrhea) and heavier bleeding (menorrhagia).
Being overweight can sometimes worsen premenstrual syndrome as well. One study found for every 1 kg increase in height (m²) in body mass index (BMI), the risk of premenstrual syndrome went up by 3%. Women with a BMI over 27.5 kg/m² had a much higher risk than those with a BMI under 20 kg/m².
Sometimes weight changes are linked to hormonal balances that indicate an underlying condition.
For example, people with polycystic ovary syndrome may gain weight or find it hard to lose weight because they have a hormonal imbalance, including higher levels of testosterone.
The syndrome is also associated with irregular periods and heavy bleeding. So, if you notice these symptoms, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor.
Similarly, weight changes and irregular periods in midlife might signal the start of perimenopause, the period before menopause (when your periods stop altogether).
Small changes in when your period comes or how long it lasts are usually harmless.
Similarly, slight fluctuations in weight won’t usually have a significant impact on your period – or the changes may be so subtle you don’t notice them.
But regular menstruation is an important marker of female health. Sometimes changes in flow, regularity or the pain you experience can indicate there’s something else going on.
If you notice changes and they don’t feel right to you, speak to a health care provider.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Senior Lecturer in Museum and Curatorial Studies / Research Fellow, University of Adelaide
Archaeologists in Egypt have made an exciting discovery: the tomb of Pharaoh Thutmose II, a ruler who has long been overshadowed by his famous wife and half-sister, Queen Hatshepsut.
The remarkable find is located in the Western Valley (a burial ground for queens rather than kings), near the complex of Deir el-Bahari, which houses the funerary temple of Hatshepsut. Both of us worked together as archaeologists at this spectacular site some 15 years ago.
Thutmose II’s tomb has been labelled the first, and biggest, discovery of a royal tomb since Tutankhamun’s tomb was found just over 100 years ago.
Despite being totally empty, it’s a crucial element in further understanding a transformative period in ancient Egyptian history.
Hatshepsut’s forgotten brother and husband
Thutmose II (also called Akheperenre) reigned in the first half of the 15th century BCE. This made him the fourth ruler of the 18th Egyptian Dynasty, which marked the beginning of the New Kingdom period.
Thutmose II likely ruled for a little over ten years, although some scholars believe his reign may have lasted only three years.
He was the son of a great pharaoh Thutmose I and his lesser wife, Mutnofret. He married his half-sister Queen Hatshepsut according to the royal custom, to solidify the rule and bloodline. Together they had a daughter named Nefrure.
Thutmose II’s mummy was discovered in 1881 but his original tomb was unknown until now. Wikimedia
Upon his death, his wife Hatshepsut became the sixth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty – and arguably one of the most famous and successful female rulers of all time.
Military activities
As the successor of Thutmose I, Thutmose II continued his father’s military policy in the southern regions of Egypt.
According to preserved inscriptions, he ordered the brutal suppression of a rebellion against Egyptian rule in the land of Kush (in present-day north Sudan). As a result, a significant number of prisoners were brought to Egypt – possibly as part of a campaign.
But Thutmose II’s military campaigns were minor in comparison to the grand conquests of his predecessors and successors. Most historians believe he was a weak ruler and that Hatshepsut had a major role in governing the country, even long before his death. However, others contest this.
Thutmose II’s short reign left modest traces of building activity in Karnak, one of the largest religious centres in ancient Egypt, located in present-day Luxor.
The structure, of which only fragments survive, features a unique decoration depicting Thutmose II, Hatshepsut as his royal wife before she became a ruler, and their daughter Nefrure. The origins of the monument are uncertain. It’s possible Thutmose II started it and Hatshepsut finished it.
The monument was reconstructed by French researchers and can now be admired at the Open Air Museum in Karnak.
Karnak is one of the most important religious centres in Ancient Egypt. Katarzyna Kapiec
Other monuments of Thutmose II were found in the southern regions of Egypt, such as in Elephantine, in the city of Aswan, and in northern Sudan (likely connected to his military campaigns).
The condemnation of Hatshepsut’s memory
Interestingly, the name of Thutmose II became strongly associated with many of Hatshepsut’s constructions due to the actions of Thutmose III.
Regarded as one of the greatest warriors, military commanders and military strategists of all time, Thutmose III was the nephew and stepson of Hatshepsut, and co-ruled with her as a regent.
At the end of Thutmose III’s reign, some 20 years after Hatshepsut’s death, he carried out a large-scale campaign to remove or alter Hatshepsut’s names and images. Scholars call this “damnatio memoriae”, or condemnation of the memory.
An example of Hatshepsut’s ‘damnatio memoriae’ at Deir el-Bahari. Hatshepsut’s cartouches (left) were defaced, while Thutmose III’s (right) remained untouched. Wikimedia
This was likely due to concerns about securing the throne for his successor, Amenhotep II, by linking him to his male ancestors.
In many cases, Hatshepsut’s name was replaced with that of Thutmose II, making him the principal celebrant in temples built by Hatshepsut, such as in Deir el-Bahari.
View at the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari at the dawn. Katarzyna Kapiec
What does Thutmose II’s empty tomb tell us?
The newly discovered tomb reveals fresh details about the status of Thutmose II and his role in the sociopolitical structure of 15th century BCE Egypt – a period of territorial expansion, wealth and political intrigue. It also sheds light on the perception of his rule at the time.
Thutmose II has been painted as an ineffectual ruler. And the latest findings don’t contradict this.
Unlike his father Thutmose I, who expanded Egypt’s reign through military strength, or his stepson Thutmose III, who became one of the most famous Egyptian warrior-kings, his modest tomb suggests his legacy may not have been as widely celebrated as others in his dynasty.
The tomb’s location is also intriguing, as it is near the tombs of royal wives, including the cliff tomb of Hatshepsut, which was prepared for her when she was still a royal wife.
Thutmose II’s mummy was discovered in the so-called Royal Cache in Deir el-Bahari in 1881, alongside other royal mummies. Many royal mummies were relocated here for protection from flooding and during the uncertain times of the 21st Dynasty (circa 1077–950 BCE), some 400–500 years after Thutmose II’s original burial.
However, experts suspect Thutmose II’s tomb might have been emptied even earlier due to flooding from a waterfall above it.
The two of us speculate another tomb may have been built for him, and is still awaiting discovery.
An 1881 photograph of some of the coffins and mummies found in DB320, taken before the mummies were unwrapped. Wikimedia
Ultimately, Thutmose II’s reign remains shrouded in mystery due to the lack of available records. The search for his tomb – from Western Valley, through the Valley of the Kings, all the way to Deir el-Bahari – spanned centuries.
Despite its poorly preserved state, and its scarcity compared with Tutankhamun’s splendorous tomb, this discovery will expand our understanding of the overlooked figure of Thutmose II, and the role he played in setting up the reign of Hatshepsut – arguably the most successful of the four female pharaohs.
In fact, paving the way for the ascent of Hatshepsut may have been his greatest contribution.
Anna M. Kotarba-Morley receives funding from Australian Research Council and previously received funding from National Centre of Science in Poland.
Katarzyna Kapiec receives funding from National Science Centre in Poland
A month in, and it is clear even to conservatives that US President Donald Trump is attempting to fundamentally reshape the role of the American president.
Trump and his supporters sees the natural authority of the American president in broad terms, similar to those of the Russian president, or a king. Trump, in fact, has already likened himself to a king.
This desire to “Russify” the presidency is not an accident: Trump and many of his supporters admire the king-like power that Vladimir Putin exercises as Russian president.
Russia’s system of government is what I call a “crown-presidential” system, which makes the president a kind of elected king.
Two powers are central to this role.
First, like a king, the Russian “crown-president” does not rely on an elected legislature to make policy. Instead, Putin exercises policy-making authority unilaterally via decree.
Putin has used decrees to wage wars, privatise the economy and even to amend the constitution to lay claim to the parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia since 2014.
He has also used these decrees in a performative way, for example, by declaring pay raises for all Russian state employees without any ability to enforce it.
Over the last month, Trump has made similar use of decrees (what the White House now terms “presidential actions”).
He has issued scores of presidential decrees to unilaterally reshape vast swathes of American policy – far more than past presidents. Trump sees these orders as a way of both exercising and demonstrating his vast presidential power.
Control over the bureaucracy
Second, like a king, Putin does not allow the Russian legislature to use the law to organise the executive branch and create agencies independent of presidential control. Instead, he has unquestioned dominance over both the organisation and staffing of the executive branch. This has given him vast power to dominate politics by controlling information gathering and legal prosecutions.
A similar push is underway in the United States. Trump has appointed key loyalists to head the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Moreover, he is seeking to restructure the executive branch by abolishing some agencies altogether and vastly reducing the size of the workforce in others.
Can the courts stop Trump?
Trump’s attempt to Russify the American presidency undermines the American constitutional order.
Courts are the natural “first responders” in this kind of crisis. And many courts have blocked some of Trump’s early decrees.
This legal response is important. But it is not enough on it own.
First, the US Supreme Court might be more willing to accept this expansion of presidential power than lower courts. In a ruling last year, for example, the court granted the president immunity from criminal prosecution, showing itself to be sympathetic to broad understandings of executive power.
Second, presidential decrees can be easily withdrawn and modified. This can allow Trump and his legal team to recalibrate as his decrees are challenged and find the best test cases to take to the Supreme Court.
Third, parts of the conservative right have long argued for a far more powerful president. For instance, the idea of a “unitary executive” has been discussed in conservative circles for years. This essentially claims that the president should be able to direct and control the entire executive branch, from the bureaucracy to prosecutors to the FBI.
These arguments are already being made to justify Trump’s actions. As Elon Musk has said, “you could not ask for a stronger mandate from the public” to reform the executive branch. These arguments will be made to courts to justify Trump’s expansion of power.
Fourth, even if the Supreme Court does block some decrees, it is possible the White House will simply ignore these actions. We had an early glimpse of this when Trump posted that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”.
Vice President JD Vance has also said judges “aren’t allowed” to block the president’s “legitimate power”.
The importance of political mobilisation and messaging
Trump’s aggressive use of presidential power is not just a constitutional crisis, it is a political one. For those seeking to resist, this is too important to just be left to the courts; it must also involve America’s key political institutions.
The most obvious place to start is in Congress. Lawmakers must act decisively to assert the legal power granted to them in the constitution to check the power of the presidency. This would include active Congressional use of its budgeting power, as well as its oversight powers on the presidency.
This could happen now if a few Republicans were to take a principled position on important constitutional issues, though nearly all have so far preferred to fall in line. Democrats could retake both branches of Congress in the midterm elections in 2026, though, and assert this power.
The states can and should also act to resist this expansion of presidential power. This action could take many forms, including refusing to deploy their traditional police powers to enforce decrees they view to be unconstitutional or unlawful.
In mobilising to defend the constitution, these institutions could appeal to the American people with more than the narrow legal argument that Trump’s acts are unconstitutional. They could also make the broader political argument that turning the American president into a Russian-style, elected king will foster a form of inefficient, unresponsive and corrupt politics.
Or, in the words of The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, “it’s the corruption, stupid”.
Time is of the essence. Russia shows the more time a “crown-president” is able to operate, the more entrenched this system becomes. For those hoping to preserve American democracy, the time is now for not just legal, but political resistance.
William Partlett 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.
Thirty-four artworks created with artificial intelligence (AI) have gone up for sale at Christie’s in New York, in the famed auction house’s first collection dedicated to AI art.
Christie’s says the collection aims to explore “human agency in the age of AI within fine art”, prompting viewers to question the evolving role of the artist and of creativity.
Questions are not all the collection has prompted: there has also been a backlash. At the time of writing, more than 6,000 artists have signed an open letter calling on Christie’s to cancel the auction.
What’s in the collection?
Sougwen Chung’s Study 33 (2024) was created through a process that captured data from an EEG headset and a computer vision system tracking body movement and fed it to a painting robot called D.O.U.G._4. Sougwen Chung / Christie’s
The Augmented Intelligence collection, up for auction from February 20 to March 5, spans work from early AI art pioneers such as Harold Cohen through to contemporary innovators such as Refik Anadol, Vanessa Rosa and Sougwen Chung.
The showcased pieces vary widely in their use of AI. Some are physical objects, some are digital-only works – sold as non-fungible tokens or NFTs – and others are offered as both digital and physical components together.
Some have a performance aspect, such as Alexander Reben’s Untitled Robot Painting 2025 (to be titled by AI at the conclusion of the sale).
After generating an initial image tile, the work iteratively expands outwards, growing with each new bid in the auction. As the image evolves digitally, it is translated onto a physical canvas by an oil-painting robot. The price estimate for the work ranges from US$100 to US$1.7 million, and at the time of writing the bid sits at US$3,000.
Alexander Reben’s Untitled Robot Painting 2025 involves art generated by AI and painted by robot as bids come in. Alexander Reben / Christie’s
Claims of exploitation
The controversy surrounding this show is not surprising. Debates over the creation of AI art have simmered ever since the technology became widely available in 2022.
The open letter calling for the auction to be cancelled argues that many works in the exhibition use “AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license”.
Embedding Study 1 & 2 (from the xhairymutantx series) (2024) by Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst explores the concept of ‘Holly Herndon’ in generative AI models. Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst / Christie’s
The letter says:
These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.
[Christie’s] support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.
Copyright and cultural appropriation
Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations – ISS Dreams (2021) is a video work used an AI model trained on publicly available images taken from the International Space Station. Refik Anadol / Christie’s
There are several attempts by artists to bring legal proceedings against AI companies underway. As yet, the key question remains unresolved: by training AI models on existing artworks, do AI models infringe artists’ copyright, or is this a case of fair use?
Artists who are critical of AI are rightly concerned about losing their incomes, or their skills becoming irrelevant or outdated. They are also concerned about losing their creative community – their place in the creative ecosystem.
Last year, Indigenous artists withdrew from a Brisbane art prize, highlighting concerns about AI and cultural appropriation.
At the same time, many AI artists don’t use copyrighted material. Refik Anadol, for instance, has stated that his work in the Christie’s collection was made using publicly available datasets from NASA.
How the ‘work’ of art is changing
The Christie’s event occurs during a major shift in what it means to be an artist, and to be creative. Some participants in the show even question whether the label of “artist” is even necessary or required to make meaningful imagery and artefacts.
Many non-artists may wonder – if AI is used, where is the real “work” of art? The answer is that many forms of work will look different in the age of AI, and creative endeavours are no exception.
Creativity gave humans an evolutionary edge. What happens if society censors or undermines certain forms of creativity?
Pindar Van Arman’s Emerging Faces (2017) was created via two AI agents: one attempted to generate images of faces, while the other stopped the process as soon as it recognised the image as a face. Pindar Van Arman / Christie’s
Clinging to traditional ideas about how things are done ignores the bigger picture. When used thoughtfully, technology can stretch our creative potential.
And AI cannot make art without human artists. Creating with new technologies requires context, direction, meaning, and an aesthetic sense.
In the case of the Christie’s auction, artists are doing much more than typing in prompts. They iterate with data, refine models, and actively shape the end result.
This evolving relationship between humans and machines reframes the creative process, with AI becoming more like a “conversational partner”.
What now?
Calling for the Christie’s auction to be cancelled may be shortsighted. It oversimplifies a complex issue and sidesteps deeper questions about how we should think about authorship, what authenticity means, and the evolving relationship between artists and the tools they use.
Whether we embrace or resist AI art, the Christie’s auction pushes us to rethink artistic labour and the creative process.
At the same time, Christie’s may need to take more care to produce collections that are sensitive to contemporary issues. Artists have real concerns about loss of work and income. A “move fast and break things” approach feels ill-suited to the thoughtfulness associated with artistic production.
Harold Cohen’s Untitled (i23-3758) (1987) was produced with the groundbreaking AARON image-generating AI system. Harold Cohen / Christie’s
Beyond protest, more education and collaboration is required overall. Artists who do not adapt to new technologies and ways of creating may be left behind.
Equally important is ensuring AI does not diminish human agency or exploit creatives. Discussions around achieving sustainable and inclusive AI could follow other sectors focusing on equally sharing benefits and having rigorous ethical standards.
Examples might come from the open source community (and organisations such as the Open Source Initiative), where licensing and frameworks allow contributors to benefit from collective development. And in the tech realm, some software companies (such as IBM) do stand out for their rigorous approach to ethics.
Rather than cancelling the Christie’s auction, perhaps this is a moment for us to reimagine how we do creativity and adapt with AI.
But are artists – and audiences – prepared for a future where the nature of being an artist, and creativity itself, is radically different?
Jessica Herrington 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.
As French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls lands in New Caledonia tomorrow to pursue talks on its political future, the situation on the ground has again gained tension over the past few days.
The local political spectrum is deeply divided between the two main opposing camps, the pro-independence and those wanting New Caledonia to remain part of France.
The rift has already culminated in May 2024 with rioting resulting in 14 deaths, several hundreds injured, thousands of job losses due to the destruction, burning and looting of businesses, and a material cost of over 2 billion euros (NZ$3.7 billion).
Valls hosted talks in Paris with every party represented in New Caledonia’s Congress on February 4-9.
Those talks, held in “bilateral” mode, led to his decision to travel to Nouméa and attempt to bring everyone to the same negotiating table.
It is all about finding an agreement that would allow an exit from the Nouméa Accord and to draw a fresh roadmap for New Caledonia’s political future.
However, in the face of radically different and opposing views, the challenge is huge.
The two main blocs, even though they acknowledged the Paris talks may have been helpful, still hold very clear-cut and antagonistic positions.
Each camp seems to have their own interpretation of the 1998 Nouméa Accord, which has until now defined a roadmap for further autonomy and a gradual transfer of powers.
The main bloc within the pro-independence side, Union Calédonienne (UC), which since last year de facto controls the wider FLNKS (Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front), has been repeatedly placing as its target a new “Kanaky Agreement” to be signed by 24 September 2025 and, from that date, a five-year “transition period” to attain full independence from France.
Within the pro-independence camp, more moderate parties, such as PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party) and UPM (Progressist Union in Melanesia), have distanced themselves from a UC-dominated FLNKS, and are favourable to some kind of “independence in association with France”.
On the pro-France side, the two main components, the Les Loyalistes and the Rassemblement-LR, have shown a united front. One of their main arguments is based on the fact that in 2018, 2020 and 2021, three successive referenda on self-determination have resulted in three votes, each of those producing a majority rejecting independence.
However, the third and latest poll in December 2021 was boycotted by most of the pro-independence voters.
The pro-independence parties have since challenged the 2021 poll result, even though it has been ruled by the courts as valid.
Pro-France parties are also advocating for a change in the political system to give each of New Caledonia’s three provinces more powers, a move they described as an “internal federalism” but that critics have decried, saying this amounted to a kind of apartheid.
Talks required since 2022 The bipartisan talks became necessary after the three referendums were held.
The Nouméa Accord stipulated that in the event that three consecutive referendums rejected independence, then all political stakeholders should “meet and examine the situation”.
There have been earlier attempts to bring about those talks, but some components of the pro-independence movement, notably the UC, have consistently declined.
Under a previous government, French Minister for Home Affairs and Overseas territories Gérald Darmanin, after half a dozen inconclusive trips to New Caledonia, tried to push some of the most urgent parts of the political agreement through a constitutional reform process, especially on a change to New Caledonia’s list of eligible registered voters at local elections.
This was supposed to allow citizens who have resided in New Caledonia for at least ten uninterrupted years to finally cast their votes. Until now, the electoral roll has been “frozen” since 2009 — only those residing before 1998 had the right to vote.
Pro-independence parties protested, saying this was a way of “diluting” the indigenous Kanak votes.
The protest — in the name of “Kanak existential identity” — gained momentum and on 13 May 2024 erupted into riots.
Now the sensitive electoral roll issue is back on the agenda, only it will no longer be tackled separately, but will be part of a wider and comprehensive scope of talks regarding New Caledonia’s political future.
Heavy schedule for Valls On Thursday, Valls unveiled his programme for what is scheduled to be a six-day stay in New Caledonia from 22-26 February 2025.
During this time, he will spend a significant amount of time in the capital Nouméa, holding talks with political parties, economic stakeholders and representatives of the civil society and law and order agencies.
He will also travel to rural parts of New Caledonia.
In the capital, two solid days have been earmarked for “negotiations” at the Congress, with the aim of finding the best way to achieve a political agreement, if all parties agree to meet and talk.
On Tuesday, February 25, Valls also intends to pay homage and lay wreaths on independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and anti-independence leader Jacques Lafleur’s graves.
They were the leaders of FLNKS and (pro-France) RPCR, who eventually signed the Matignon Accords in 1998 and shook hands after half a decade of quasi civil war, during the previous civil unrest in the second half of the 1980s.
Valls was then a young member of French Prime Minister Michel Rocard (Socialist) who enabled the Matignon agreement.
On several occasions, over the past few days, Valls has stressed the grave situation New Caledonia has been facing since the riots, the “devastated” economy and the need to restore a bipartisan dialogue.
He told public broadcaster NC La Première that since the unrest started had France had provided financial support to sustain New Caledonia’s economy.
‘Fractures and deep wounds within New Caledonia’s society’ “But blood has been shed . . . there have been deaths, injuries, there are fractures and deep wounds within New Caledonia’s society,” Valls said.
“And to get out of this, dialogue is needed, to find a compromise . . . to prevent violence from coming back. I still believe those (opposing) positions are reconcilable, even though they’re quite far apart,” he said.
“I’m very much aware of the difficulties . . . but we have to find an agreement, a compromise.”
One clear indication that during his visit to New Caledonia the French minister will be walking on shaky ground came a few days ago.
When, speaking to French national daily Le Monde, he recalled the Nouméa Accord included a wide range of possible perspectives from “a shared sovereignty” to a “full sovereignty”, there was an immediate outcry from the pro-French parties, who steadfastly brandished the three recent referendums opposing independence and urging the minister to respect those “democratic” results.
“Respecting the Nouméa Accord means respecting the choice of New Caledonians”, said Les Loyalistes-Le Rassemblement-LR in a media release.
“Shared sovereignty is the current situation. It’s all in the Nouméa Accord, which itself is enshrined in the French Constitution”, Valls replied.
Over the past six months, several notions have emerged in terms of a political future for New Caledonia.
It all comes down to wording: from independence-association (Cook Islands style), to outright “independence” or “shared sovereignty” (as suggested by French Senate President Gérard Larcher during his visit in October 2024).
A former justice minister under Socialist President François Hollande, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, well-versed in New Caledonian affairs, suggested an innovative wording which, he believed, could bring about some form of consensus — the term “associated state”, could be slightly modified into “associated country” (“country” being one of the ways to describe New Caledonia, also described as a sui generis entity under French Law).
Urvoas said this would make the notion more palatable.
Pro-France meetings indoors On Wednesday evening, in an indoor multi-purpose hall in Nouméa, an estimated 2000 sympathisers of pro-France Rassemblement and Loyalists gathered to hear and support their leaders who had come to explain what was discussed in Paris and reiterate the pro-France bloc’s position.
“We told [Valls] the ‘bilaterals’ are over. Now we want plenary discussions or nothing,” pro-France Virginie Ruffenach told the crowd.
“We will tell him: Manuel, your full sovereignty is No Pasaran! (in Spanish ‘Will not pass’, a reference to Valls’s Spanish heritage),” said Nicolas Metzdorf, who is also one of the two New Caledonian MPs in the French National Assembly, speaking to supporters brandishing blue, white and red French flags.
Metzdorf said he hoped that supporters would show up during the minister’s visit with the same flags “to remind him of three “no” votes in the three referenda.
A ban on all open-air public meetings is still in force in Nouméa and its greater area.
The two-flag driving licence declared illegal. Image: New Caledonia govt
Double flags banned on driving licences Adding to the current tensions, an announcement also came earlier this week regarding a court ruling on another highly sensitive issue — the flag.
The ruling came in an appeal case from the Paris Administrative Court.
It overturned a ruling made in 2023 by the former New Caledonian (pro-independence) territorial government to add the Kanak flag to the local driving licence, next to the French flag.
In its February 14 ruling, the Appeal Court stated that the Kanak flag could not be used on such official documents because “it is not the official flag” of New Caledonia.
The court once again referred to the Nouméa Accord, which said the Kanak flag, even though it was often used alongside the French flag, had not been formally endorsed as New Caledonia’s “identity symbol”.
The tribunal also urged the new government to make the necessary changes and to re-circulate the former one-flag version “without delay”.
Meanwhile, the government is bearing the cost of a fine of 100, 000 French Pacific francs (about US$875) a day, which currently totals over US$43,000 since January 1.
The “identity symbols”, as defined by the Nouméa Accord, also include a motto (the wording ‘Terre de Parole, Terre de Partage’ — Land of Words, Land of Sharing’ was chosen) and even a national anthem.
But despite several attempts since 1998, no agreement has yet been reached on a common flag.
This week, hours after the court ruling, an image is being circulated on social media declaring: “If this flags disturbs you, I’ll help you pack your suitcase” (“Si ce drapeau te dérange, je t’aide à faire tes valises”).
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s announcement this week that the island nation will open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem has been labelled “an act of aggression” by Palestine.
On Tuesday, the Fiji government revealed that Cabinet had decided to locate its consulate in Jerusalem, which remains at the centre of the Palestine-Israel decades-long conflict.
According to an overwhelming United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES‑10/19 on 21 December 2017 (128-9), Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as capital of Israel is “null and void”.
Previous UN Security Council resolutions demarcated Jerusalem as the capital of the future state of Palestine.
The Fijian government said in a statement: “Necessary risk assessments will be undertaken by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defence, in consultation with relevant agencies, prior to and during the establishment process.”
Fiji and Israel established diplomatic relations in 1970 and have partnerships in security and peacekeeping, agriculture, and climate change.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Rabuka said he “received a phone call from my friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressing his gratitude for Fiji’s decision to open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem.”
“Even though very brief, we reaffirmed our commitment to strengthening Fiji-Israel ties,” he said.
I commend the Republic of Fiji’s government for its historic decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. Thank you, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka @slrabuka, friend of Israel. Thank you Fiji! 🇮🇱🇫🇯 pic.twitter.com/IxCkjPnhQ6
‘Violating international law’ “With this decision, Fiji becomes the seventh country to violate international law and UN resolutions regarding the city’s legal and political status and the rights of the Palestinian people,” it said in a statement.
The seven countries include Papua New Guinea.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemns the decision of PM @slrabuka to relocate Fiji’s embassy to occupied #Jerusalem.
This move blatantly violates international law and UN resolutions, and places #Fiji on the wrong side of history. https://t.co/5x1bCECNXO
— Palestine Australia, Aotearoa NZ and Pacific (@PalestineAusNZ) February 19, 2025
“This decision is an act of aggression against the Palestinian people and their rights.
“It places Fiji on the wrong side of history, harms the chances of achieving peace based on the two-state solution, and represents unacceptable support for the occupation and its crimes.”
The statement added that Fiji’s move “blatantly defies UN resolutions at a time when the occupying power is escalating its attacks against Palestinians across all of the Palestinian Territory, attempting to displace them from their homeland.”
The ministry said that it would continue to take political, diplomatic, and legal action against countries that opened or moved their embassies to Jerusalem.
“It will work to hold them accountable for their unjustified actions against the Palestinian people and their rights.”
In September 2024, Fiji was one of seven Pacific Island nations that voted against a United Nations resolution to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – Co-Authored by Graeme Austin, Chair of Private Law, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, and Jane C Ginsburg, Morton L Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia University.
Not that long ago, the term “deepfake” wasn’t in most people’s vocabularies. Now, it is not only commonplace, but is also the focus of intense legal scrutiny around the world.
Known in legal documents as “digital replicas”, deepfakes are created by artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate the visual and vocal appearance of real people, living or dead.
Unregulated, they can do a lot of damage, including financial fraud (already a problem in New Zealand), political disinformation, fake news, and the creation and dissemination of AI-generated pornography and child sexual abuse material.
For professional performers and entertainers, the proliferation and increasing sophistication of deepfake technology could demolish their ability to control and derive income from their images and voices.
And deepfakes might soon take away jobs: why employ a professional actor when a digital replica will do?
One possible solution to this involves giving individuals the ability to enforce intellectual property (IP) rights to their own image and voice. The United States is currently debating such a move, and New Zealand lawmakers should be watching closely.
Owning your own likeness
Remedies already being discussed in New Zealand include extending prohibitions in the Harmful Digital Communications Act to cover digital replicas that do not depict a victim’s actual body.
Using (or amending) the Crimes Act, the Fair Trading Act and the Electoral Act would also be helpful.
At the same time, there will be political pressure to ensure regulation does not stymie investment in AI technologies – a concern raised in a 2024 cabinet paper.
Legislation introduced to the US Congress last year – the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Bill – proposes a new federal intellectual property right that individual victims can use against creators and disseminators of deepfakes.
Known informally as the “No Fakes Bill”, the legislation has bipartisan and industry support, including from leading entertainment worker unions. The US Copyright Office examined the current state of US law and concluded that enforceable rights were “urgently needed”.
From the New Zealand perspective, the No Fakes Bill contains both helpful ideas and possible pitfalls. As we discuss in a forthcoming paper, its innovations include expanding IP protections to “everyday” individuals – not just celebrities.
All individuals would have the right to seek damages and injunctions against unlicensed digital replicas, whether they’re in video games, pornographic videos, TikTok posts or remakes of movies and television shows.
But these protections may prove illusory because the threshold for protection is so high. The digital replica must be “readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual”, but it’s not clear how identifiable the individual victim of a deepfake needs to be.
Well known New Zealand actors such as Anna Paquin and Cliff Curtis would certainly qualify. But would a New Zealand version of the bill protect an everyday person, “readily identifiable” only to family, friends and workmates?
Can you license a digital replica?
Under the US bill, the new IP rights can be licensed. The bill does not ban deepfakes altogether, but gives individuals more control over the use of their likenesses. An actor could, for example, license an advertising company to make a digital replica to appear in a television commercial.
Licences must be in writing and signed, and the permitted uses must be specified. For living individuals, this can last only ten years.
So far, so good. But New Zealand policy analysts should look carefully at the scope of any licensing provisions. The proposed IP right is “licensable in whole or in part”. Depending on courts’ interpretation of “in whole”, individuals could unknowingly sign away all uses of their images and voice.
The No Fakes Bill is also silent on the reputational interests of individuals who license others to use their digital replicas.
Suppose a performing artist licensed their digital replica for use in AI-generated musical performances. They should not, for example, have to put up with being depicted singing a white supremacist anthem, or other unsanctioned uses that would impugn their dignity and standing.
Protectng parody and satire
On the other side of the ledger, the No Fakes Bill contains freedom of expression safeguards for good faith commentary, criticism, scholarship, satire and parody.
The bill also protects internet service providers (ISPs) from liability if they quickly remove “all instances” of infringing material once notified about it.
This is useful language that might be adopted in any New Zealand legislation. Also, the parody and satire defence would be an advance on New Zealand’s copyright law, which currently contains no equivalent exception.
But the US bill contains no measures empowering victims to require ISPs to block local subscribers’ access to online locations that peddle in deepfakes. Known as “site-blocking orders”, these injunctions are available in at least 50 countries, including Australia. But New Zealand and the US remain holdouts.
For individual victims of deepfakes circulating on foreign websites that are accessible in New Zealand, site-blocking orders could offer the only practical relief.
The No Fakes Bill is by no means a perfect or comprehensive solution to the deepfakes problem. Many different weapons will be needed in the legal and policy armoury – including obligations to disclose when digital replicas are used.
Even so, creating an IP right could be a useful addition to a suite of measures aimed at reducing the economic, reputational and emotional harms deepfakes can inflict.
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.
As we head towards a federal election, the Labor government recently announced a funding package worth A$573 million for women’s health.
The funding includes $100 million to support two national trials for pharmacies to provide the oral contraceptive pill and treatments for uncomplicated urinary tract infections over the counter.
The question of whether or not pharmacists should be able to provide the oral contraceptive pill without a prescription from a GP has long been a topic of debate.
We asked five experts for their thoughts. Should pharmacists be able to provide the pill over the counter without a script?
Four out of five said yes. Here are their detailed responses.
In the 2022 federal election, two demographics were key to the final outcome: women and young people.
With another election fast approaching, will they swing the result again?
To answer this question, I turned to the Australian Election Study (AES) data spanning the period from 1987 to 2022, to investigate how different demographics have voted over time.
I found that, generally, Australian women and young people tend to favour left-of-centre parties.
However, specific election issues can have a substantial impact, making the political context of each election crucial. So what can we expect this time around?
Young women are increasingly progressive. Young men – particularly Gen Z (born after 1994) – are leaning more conservative in many countries, including the United States, China, South Korea and Germany.
My analysis of the Australian data mirrors global trends, but with a twist.
Young Australian women are moving sharply to the left. But unlike in many other countries, young Australian men are also shifting left, just at a slower pace.
Australia’s leftward move across generations is reflected in both self-placement on a left-right ideological scale, and in the vote in federal elections.
In the 2022 Australian election, the Coalition received its lowest-ever share of the women’s vote at just 32%.
Only 24.3% of Millennials (21.9% of men and 25.7% of women) voted for the Coalition in 2022.
These are the lowest levels of support for either major party among younger people in the history of the survey.
Among Gen Z, a slightly higher proportion of 24.6% voted for the Coalition (34.0% of men and 19.8% of women).
What’s driving this?
In theory, women’s leftward shift is driven by several factors. These include higher education levels, greater participation in professional work, and exposure to feminist values. Despite Australia’s post-industrial, egalitarian image, persistent gendered inequalities and discrimination also play a role.
Meanwhile, young men’s move to the left can be attributed to progressive and egalitarian socialisation. Plus, unlike in other countries, Australia lacks Donald Trump-like figures who could mobilise anti-feminist or hardline conservative sentiments. This limits the expression of such views at an aggregate level.
This leftward shift is, in part, a generational effect – or at least a reflection of the times.
The generational angle is crucial, as the 2025 federal election will be the first in which Millennials and Gen Z together will outnumber Baby Boomers as the dominant voting bloc in Australia.
This shift should shape how political parties campaign, whom they target, and which issues take centre stage.
Policies are voter priorities
My analysis highlights another important angle. Over the study period, voting decisions have increasingly been driven by policy issues, with 48% of Australians citing them as the primary factor. This is followed by party affiliation (29%), party leaders (14%) and local candidates (9%).
In 2022, 54% of voters reported policy issues as the main factor influencing their choice.
Across election years, I identified the most prominent and recurrent election issues that voters identified as influential. I added these issues to my model to see how people who care about these issues lean (left-right) and whether men and women differ in their political leanings (progressive-conservative). I also considered other factors known to impact voting, including:
sociodemographic factors (education, marital status, social class, home ownership and rural/urban residency)
familial socialisation (what their parents’ political preferences were)
social network factors (whether they’re religious or a member of a union)
electoral context (what each respondent said were the most important voting issues)
Overall, women tend to be slightly more left-leaning on policy issues than men, and while this difference is statistically significant, it is small and the general trend holds across both sexes.
Compared with Boomers, each successive generation is more likely to vote for a left party. Gen Z is the most left-leaning (though their smaller sample size warrants some caution in interpretation).
So who votes for whom?
Unsurprisingly, people vote according to who they think will best address the policy areas they care about most.
Those prioritising interest rates, taxation or economic management favour right-wing parties. Voters most concerned with health, Medicare and climate change are more likely to vote for the left.
Education, class and social networks matter, too. Highly educated, working-class, non-religious and union-affiliated voters tend to support left parties. So, too, do those raised in left-leaning households.
While the size of these effects varies slightly between men and women, the overall direction remains the same.
How might this play out in 2025?
The thing about election issues is that they are highly time-sensitive. Take the GST: it was one of the defining issues of the 1998 election, yet was largely irrelevant after 2004.
In recent years, left-leaning issues — the environment, health and Medicare — were more likely to be front-of-mind when Australians all of ages headed to the polls. This gives Labor and the Greens an issue-owner advantage.
Cost of living (spanning day-to-day expenses, interest rates and housing affordability) has now become the defining issue of this election cycle. At first thought, among the two major parties, the Coalition is traditionally seen as a better economic manager.
However, my analysis from 2022 election data shows that, compared with the 2019 election, fewer people considered the Coalition the best manager of the economy among those who considered it the most important election issue.
Further, for the first time in the past five elections, a majority of the voters perceived Labor as more aligned with their own views on immigration, refugees and asylum seekers. These issues, historically seen as Coalition strongholds, are also likely to be key this time around.
For the Coalition, this is bad news. But for Labor, the challenge is twofold: retaining younger, progressive voters while addressing broader economic anxieties.
With growing voter volatility and a diminished sense of party loyalty, neither major party can rely on a stable base.
Australians are increasingly willing to shift allegiances, including to the increasing supply of independent alternatives. Both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will have to convince voters they have the best solutions for the key issues.
Intifar Chowdhury 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.
In the past 12 months, more than 1,300 people have died on Australia’s roads. In January alone, there were 114 road deaths in Australia – roughly 20% more than the average for that month over the previous five years.
Our new study projects these tragedies are set to continue over the next 25 years, despite a commitment by Australian governments to achieving zero deaths on the nation’s roads by 2050.
Published in the journal Injury, our study uses a modelling tool to forecast the number of road fatalities in 2030, 2040 and 2050. Importantly, it also identifies the people and regions at higher risks, which provides an opportunity for taking a more nuanced and targeted approach to road safety.
Clear trends
Improved vehicle safety technology, stricter traffic laws and public awareness campaigns have led to a significant drop in the number of road deaths over the past several decades in Australia. But tragically, the number of people dying on Australia’s roads is still high.
The data reveal some clear trends. For example, weekdays see fewer fatalities, likely due to routine commuting and lower-risk behaviours. On the other hand, weekends, particularly Saturdays, experience spikes linked to alcohol consumption and more social travel.
December emerges as the deadliest month. This is likely driven by holiday travel surges, with secondary peaks in March and October tied to school holidays and seasonal weather changes that affect road conditions.
Geographic disparities further complicate the picture. Urban centres in New South Wales and Victoria such as Sydney and Melbourne account for 35% to 40% of fatalities, in part because of dense traffic volumes, complex intersections and pedestrian-heavy zones.
In contrast, rural and remote areas, though less congested, have more severe road accidents because of inadequate road infrastructure and higher speed limits. For example, the Northern Territory, with vast stretches of high-speed highways, records the highest fatality rate, while the Australian Capital Territory, with its urban planning emphasis on safety, reports the lowest.
Speed zones of 51–80 km/h are particularly lethal for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. This underscores the crucial role of speed management in urban and rural areas alike.
Demographic risks also remain entrenched. For example, men constitute more than 70% of fatalities – in part because they are more likely to engage in risky behaviour such as speeding and drunk driving. Young drivers (17–25 years) and middle-aged adults (40–64 years) are also over-represented due to a combination of inexperience, overconfidence and high mileage.
In good news, child fatalities (0–16 years) have sharply declined. This reflects the success of targeted measures like child seat laws and school zone safety campaigns.
To forecast these trends over the next 25 years, our new study used a modelling tool called Prophet developed by tech company Meta.
We fed 35 years of road data – from 1989 to 2024 – into the model. This data came from Australia’s Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics. It incorporated variables such as road user type, age, gender, speed limits and geographic location.
To refine predictions, we also incorporated public holidays such as Christmas and Easter.
Prophet outperformed other models we tested, including SARIMA and ETS. It did a better job at modelling past changes in road safety. And it especially excelled at handling non-linear trends, multiple seasonal patterns (daily, weekly, yearly) and the effects of holiday periods.
An unmet target
The findings of the study are cause for some cautious optimism.
Overall, by 2050 fatalities are expected to decline. But Australia’s ambitious zero fatality target by the middle of the century will remain unmet.
The modelling indicates annual male fatalities will drop from 855 in 2030 to 798 in 2050, while female fatalities will plummet from 229 to 92.
There will also be a drop in the number of child fatalities – from 37 in 2030 to just two in 2050. But the model shows a troubling rise of the number of older drivers (over 65) dying on Australia’s roads – from 273 in 2030 to 301 in 2050. This reflects Australia’s ageing population, with more people expected to have both reduced mobility and reduced reflexes.
Motorcyclist fatalities buck the overall trend, rising from 229 in 2030 to 253 in 2050. This signals urgent needs for dedicated lanes and better rider education.
Regionally, Queensland and the Northern Territory lag due to rural road risks. Urban areas with speed limits lower than 80 km/h show steadier declines.
Motorcyclist fatalities are expected to rise from 229 in 2030 to 253 in 2050. FotoDax/Shutterstock
A shared priority
Based on these findings, our study provides several recommendations to mitigate the risk of death on Australia’s roads.
Speed management: enforce dynamic speed limits in high-risk zones such as school areas and holiday corridors, and expand 80 km/h zones on rural highways.
Targeted campaigns: launch gender-specific safety initiatives for men (for example, anti-speeding programs) and age-focused interventions, such as mandatory refresher courses for drivers over 65.
Infrastructure upgrades: invest in rural road safety such as median barriers and better signage, as well as dedicated cyclist pathways.
Technology integration: accelerate the adoption of autonomous vehicles to reduce crashes caused by human error and risky behaviours, and pilot artificial intelligence-driven traffic systems for real-time hazard detection.
Expand public transport: subsidise off-peak travel and rural transit networks to reduce how much people – particularly high-risk groups – depend on car travel.
Better enforcement: strengthen weekend and nighttime policing of roads and deploy more mobile speed cameras during peak holiday periods.
By following these recommendations, Australia can move closer to its vision of safer roads. Our findings underscore that sustained progress demands not only rigorous policy, but also community engagement.
Ali Soltani has received funding from the Flinders Foundation, the National Road Safety Action Grant (NRSAGP), and the Lifetime Support Authority Grant in 2024. He is also a FIAS (French Institute of Advanced Studies) Fellow, Le Studium, under the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission (2024–25). Additionally, he has affiliations with the Planning Institute of Australia, SA Branch, and has received multiple research and travel grants.
As we head towards a federal election, the Labor government recently announced a funding package worth A$573 million for women’s health.
The funding includes $100 million to support two national trials for pharmacies to provide the oral contraceptive pill and treatments for uncomplicated urinary tract infections over the counter.
The question of whether or not pharmacists should be able to provide the oral contraceptive pill without a prescription from a GP has long been a topic of debate.
We asked five experts for their thoughts. Should pharmacists be able to provide the pill over the counter without a script?
Four out of five said yes. Here are their detailed responses.
