With Jim Chalmers’s third budget on May 14, Australians will be looking for some more cost-of-living relief – beyond the tax cuts – although they have been warned extra measures will be modest.
As this week’s consumer price index showed, the battle with inflation has not yet been won. The government can’t afford to have an over-generous budget add to inflation and further delay a pre-election reduction in interest rates.
In this podcast, we’re joined by independent economist Chris Richardson to discuss the budget and Australia’s economic outlook.
Richardson say while the growth figure will be downgraded in the budget, not all is bad,
It will be downgraded, for the year just finishing, for the financial year just soon to start. It is tough times. To be fair, the Australian economy is growing. There hasn’t been a recession. There hasn’t been some of the problems that people expected.
On inflation, however, he says the new figures paint a much bleaker picture,
They are ugly. So, in the last three months, prices grew by 1%. Over the last year, they grew by a bit more than 3.5%. And yes, it’s falling. It’s not falling as fast as the Reserve Bank had predicted. There’d been hopes from some people that there might be an interest rate cut sooner rather than later.
But those numbers today, I tell you: absolutely, you are not getting a rate cut in Australia until the end of this calendar year at best.
Like many other economists, Richardson is critical of Anthony Albanese’s Future Made in Australia interventionist industry policy. He says while there’s some potential benefit, the government doesn’t seem to be focused on the right areas,
You look at something like solar panels, and throwing money at that is just spectacularly dumb. That is just a waste of money. It’s the equivalent of asking taxpayers to smoke $100 notes. And I do worry that bits of the new industry policy are a little bit more around having announcements in some key marginal seats in Queensland, for example, then they are around good policy.
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.
Among the many Australian who served during the second world war, there is a small group of people whose stories remain largely untold. These are the Muslim men and women who, while small in number, made significant contributions and sacrifices during the war effort.
Living in the time of the White Australia Policy, they were simultaneously wanted and rejected. Despite their sacrifices, many faced discrimination, and even deportation upon their return.
Our ongoing research is looking into the lives of Australian-Muslim servicemen and women during WWII. In doing so, we have come across incredible stories of sacrifice and hardship that reveal not all war veterans were treated equally, nor are they all remembered the same.
Australia’s Muslim Anzacs were a mix of Australian-born people and migrants. The Australian-born were the children and grandchildren of Afghan cameleers, Malay traders and Javanese labourers.
Several descendants of Afghan cameleers had Indigenous heritage, such as William “Billy” Bonsop of Mackay, who died in battle in New Guinea in 1943, and Akbar Namith Khan of Oodnadatta, who had active service in the Northern Territory.
Others were temporary immigrants who, with the outbreak of war, were unable to return home. When WWII began, many Albanian men were in Australia as part of the cultural practice of “kurbet”, where men would work abroad to earn money for their family.
One of these Albanians was Kurtali Raman of Mareeba, North Queensland – a place where many Albanians went to work on tobacco farms. Raman joined the 2/31 Battalion, and was among the first Australian soldiers to re-enter the village of Kokoda when it was taken back from the Japanese. He was killed in action at Papua on December 1 1942, at age 35.
Kurtali Raman was born in Albania in 1907. Australian Government Archives
Bravery, loss and betrayal
Another group of stranded workers were Indonesian and Malay indenturedpearl divers. One man whose service exemplifies both the sacrifice and injustice of war was Malaysian-born Abu Kassim bin Marah.
Abu Kassim bin Marah’s enlistment photo. Australian Government Archives
Abu Kassim arrived in Broome as a teenager in 1933 to work in the pearling industry. At the outbreak of war, he was living with his long-term partner, Patricia Djiween, and their two daughters, Faye and Georgina. Patricia was Indigenous and, despite the family they had made, Western Australia’s “Protector of Aborigines” at the time (the government official appointed to oversee the welfare of Aboriginal people) denied them permission to marry.
Following the Japanese bombing of Broome in February 1942, Broome’s pearl divers were evacuated to Fremantle. The Malays and Indonesians were classified as “allied aliens” which meant they could enlist, which Abu Kassim did.
He was first assigned to a labour battalion where his seafaring skills were put to use in water transport. However, while serving the country, the government removed his two daughters from their mother’s care and placed them in an orphanage.
In 1944, the Z Special Unit, based in Australia recruited Abu Kassim and several other divers after failing to successfully insert white Australian soldiers behind enemy lines. The divers were promised naturalisation and an end to their indenture as incentives to join.
Their fitness, language skills and local knowledge of Southeast Asia proved invaluable. Abu Kassim trained at the Fraser Island Commando School and his unit chose him as one of the first to be deployed overseas as part of Operation Semut. In April 1945, Abu Kassim parachuted into Japanese-held Sarawak in Borneo.
Having first contacted friendly Kelabit villagers, Abu Kassim and his companions moved up the Rejang River, convincing local Iban and Kayan people – who had a history of enmity with one another – to put aside their differences and support the Australians. He recruited many local people to join their guerrilla force against the Japanese.
Abu Kassim was part of the Semut II team at Long Akar, Borneo, which undertook missions behind Japanese lines. He is pictured here (second left) with other members of his team. Australian War Memorial
Abu Kassim then went ahead through the Japanese-held jungle to reach the coast, scouting enemy positions and gathering intelligence. He participated in guerrilla warfare against the Japanese, during which he was wounded in hand-to-hand combat.
He repatriated to Australia in December 1945. He was sick from his wounds and jungle illnesses, and soon discovered he had leukaemia. Upon his return, he applied for naturalisation but was rejected. As he was too sick to return to pearl diving, the government announced its intentions to deport him.
Abu Kassim was also unable to reunite with Patricia, since she was now married to a man named Snowy Dodson. But Abu Kassim gave his blessing for their union and for Dodson to look after his children. The two sisters would later be joined by two brothers, Patrick and MichaelPat and Mick Dodson went on to become prominent Aboriginal leaders, and a senator and barrister, respectively.
Abu Kassim‘s deportation orders were being processed when he died of leukaemia on March 3 1949. The veteran was buried in an unmarked grave in the Muslim section of Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth.
Only in 2021 was his grandson able to right some of the wrongs of his treatment and identify his grave so it could have a headstone.
Our documentary, Crescent Under the Southern Cross.
Lest we forget
Despite the promise of rewards for their service, many of the other divers were held to the indentured labour agreements they had with pearling bosses.
The Albanians fared better. For them, war service became a pathway to naturalisation. Many of these men, such as Laver Xhemali and Mustafa “James” Sheriff, successfully had families and became important members of their communities. Laver Xhemali died in 1991 at age 70. His grave plaque is the first Australian War Memorial grave to feature the Islamic crescent.
At the same time, many Australian-born Muslim servicemen returned to face the same discrimination they endured before the war, and their service faded into obscurity.
Dr Simon Wilmot received funding from Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
James Barry received funding from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs to complete part of this project.
There has been much analysis and praise of Justice Michael Lee’s recent judgement in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Channel Ten. Many people were openly relieved to read Lee’s “forensic” and “nuanced” application of law and good sense. Journalist Annabel Crabb wrote the judgement was a “lesson in shades of grey”.
What is not said, however, is that a significant factor in this case is that Lehrmann gave evidence. This is a major difference from the aborted criminal prosecution in 2022, in which Lehrmann relied on his right to silence at trial.
Lee’s decision in this defamation case is a clarion call. It compels us to think more creatively about approaches to prosecuting sex crimes, acknowledging a stark reality: in an “adversarial” legal system, a fair trial in these cases is rarely achieved by providing one of usually only two parties with a right to silence.
In essence, the right to silence is the right for an accused person not to incriminate themself through their own testimony. In Australia, it is mostly seen as a central part of the presumption of innocence for serious crimes. It is widely used.
At first glance, this seems fair enough. The prosecution should have to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt to avoid wrongful conviction. The right to silence can protect against abuses of process by the state against the individual.
Yet, like many sexual assault and child sexual abuse cases, this trial boiled down to an accusation and a denial: one person’s word against another. It was key to Channel Ten’s legal case, seeking to defend the claims it reported as true.
Given the nature of sex crimes, which mostly happen in private, there is often no hard evidence. There is no CCTV footage or “third party” witness. There is often no paper trail or easy basis for DNA testing where the accused is known or the case is about consent.
There are also reasons why victims of a sex crime might not have the perpetrator’s skin under their fingernails, for example, and why they don’t rush to a police station for immediate forensic testing. There can be a significant power imbalance between the people involved.
So, cases like Lehrmann’s come down to the credibility of the people involved and whatever can be gleaned from the broader circumstances.
Time for a rethink
What ultimately brought Lehrmann undone in this civil trial was that he chose to give evidence in defence of his reputation. He likely chose to testify because under New South Wales defamation law, the person alleging they’ve been defamed has the onus of proving the statements were, in fact, defamatory. For five days, the open court heard and felt the quality of his evidence and character.
This case was a rare chance to see what happens when everyone tells their story about an alleged rape. The decision is a basis from which legal reformers and academics should be seriously questioning the role of the right to silence in sex crime cases.
Despite ongoing reforms to improve things, victim-survivors of sex crimes still regularly face abuses of process in the current system.
This includes a culture of defence barristers using rape myths to destroy a victim’s credit as a witness. It also includes women being silenced by the law from talking about their experience and trauma.
Lee’s masterclass in sorting the evidentiary wheat from the chaff shows how judges with solid understandings of trauma and sexual assault are perhaps better suited than juries to navigate complex legal concepts such as “probative” and “prejudicial” evidence and witness “credit”, as they apply to sex cases.
An inquisitorial process may also work better, whereby judges can make reasonable inquiries of all parties throughout an investigation and trial, bound by rules of evidence, but active in getting to the truth of the matter. Such judges could balance the rights of both the accused and the alleged victim.
This kind of change is obviously big and structural but not unprecedented in Australia. Coronial hearings routinely exercise inquisitorial powers.
While we ultimately don’t know what the jury would have found in Lehrmann’s criminal case, the deeply flawed approach to sex crimes in Australia today means it’s time for a rethink.
Hopefully, Lee’s competent treatment of this complex case is not an aberration but the cultural moment when we start to think about what’s possible.
Kelly Saunders receives funding from the federal government for her PhD research via a stipend scholarship.
Around one in 20 people has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It’s one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in childhood and often continues into adulthood.
ADHD is diagnosed when people experience problems with inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that negatively impacts them at school or work, in social settings and at home.
Some people call the condition attention-deficit disorder, or ADD. So what’s the difference?
In short, what was previously called ADD is now known as ADHD. So how did we get here?
The first clinical description of children with inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity was in 1902. British paediatrician Professor George Still presented a series of lectures about his observations of 43 children who were defiant, aggressive, undisciplined and extremely emotional or passionate.
Since then, our understanding of the condition evolved and made its way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM. Clinicians use the DSM to diagnose mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions.
The first DSM, published in 1952, did not include a specific related child or adolescent category. But the second edition, published in 1968, included a section on behaviour disorders in young people. It referred to ADHD-type characteristics as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood or adolescence”. This described the excessive, involuntary movement of children with the disorder.
In the early 1980s, the third DSM added a condition it called “attention deficit disorder”, listing two types: attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADDH) and attention deficit disorder as the subtype without the hyperactivity.
However, seven years later, a revised DSM (DSM-III-R) replaced ADD (and its two sub-types) with ADHD and three sub-types we have today:
ADHD replaced ADD in the DSM-III-R in 1987 for a number of reasons.
First was the controversy and debate over the presence or absence of hyperactivity: the “H” in ADHD. When ADD was initially named, little research had been done to determine the similarities and differences between the two sub-types.
The next issue was around the term “attention-deficit” and whether these deficits were similar or different across both sub-types. Questions also arose about the extent of these differences: if these sub-types were so different, were they actually different conditions?
Meanwhile, a new focus on inattention (an “attention deficit”) recognised that children with inattentive behaviours may not necessarily be disruptive and challenging but are more likely to be forgetful and daydreamers.
People with inattentive behaviours may be more forgetful or daydreamers. fizkes/Shutterstock
Why do some people use the term ADD?
There was a surge of diagnoses in the 1980s. So it’s understandable that some people still hold onto the term ADD.
Some may identify as having ADD because out of habit, because this is what they were originally diagnosed with or because they don’t have hyperactivity/impulsivity traits.
Others who don’t have ADHD may use the term they came across in the 80s or 90s, not knowing the terminology has changed.
How is ADHD currently diagnosed?
The three sub-types of ADHD, outlined in the DSM-5 are:
predominantly inattentive. People with the inattentive sub-type have difficulty sustaining concentration, are easily distracted and forgetful, lose things frequently, and are unable to follow detailed instructions
predominantly hyperactive-impulsive. Those with this sub-type find it hard to be still, need to move constantly in structured situations, frequently interrupt others, talk non-stop and struggle with self control
combined. Those with the combined sub-type experience the characteristics of those who are inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive.
ADHD diagnoses continue to rise among children and adults. And while ADHD was commonly diagnosed in boys, more recently we have seen growing numbers of girls and women seeking diagnoses.
However, some international experts contest the expanded definition of ADHD, driven by clinical practice in the United States. They argue the challenges of unwanted behaviours and educational outcomes for young people with the condition are uniquely shaped by each country’s cultural, political and local factors.
Regardless of the name change to reflect what we know about the condition, ADHD continues to impact educational, social and life situations of many children, adolescents and adults.
Kathy Gibbs 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 West Papuan resistance OPM leader has condemned Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and US President Joe Biden, accusing their countries of “six decades of treachery” over Papuan independence.
The open letter was released today by OPM chairman Jeffrey P Bomanak on the eve of ANZAC Day 2024.
Praising the courage and determination of Papuans against the Japanese Imperial Forces in World War Two, Bomanak said: “There were no colonial borders in this war — we served Allied Pacific Theatre campaigns across the entire island of New Guinea.
“Our island! From Sorong to Samurai!”
Bomanak’s open letter, addressed to Prime Minister Albanese and President Biden, declared:
“If you cannot stand by those who stood by you, then your idea of ‘loyalty’ and ‘remembrance’ being something special is a myth, a fairy tale.
“There is nothing special in treachery. Six decades of treachery following the Republic of Indonesia’s invasion and fraudulent annexation, always knowing that we were being massacred, tortured, and raped. Our resources, your intention all along.
“When the Japanese Imperial Forces came to our island, you chose our homes to be your defensive line. We fed and nursed you. We formed the Papuan Infantry Brigade. We became your Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels.
“We even fought alongside you and shared the pain and suffering of hardship and loss.
“There were no colonial borders in this war — we served Allied Pacific Theatre campaigns across the entire island of New Guinea. Our island! From Sorong to Samurai!
OPM leader Jeffrey Bomanak . . . his open letter condemns Australia and the US leadership for preventing decolonisation of West Papua. Image: OPM
“Your war became our war. Your graves, our graves. The photos [in the open letter] are from the Australian War Memorial. The part of the legend always ringing true — my people — Papuans! – with your WWII defence forces.
“My message is to you, not ANZAC veterans. We salute the ANZACs. Your unprincipled greed divided our island. Exploitation, no matter what the cost.
“West Papua is filled with Indonesia’s barbarity and the blood and guts of 500,000 Papuans — men, women, and children. Torture, slaughter, and rape of my people in our ancestral homes led by your betrayal.
“In 1969, to help prevent our decolonisation, you placed two of our leaders on Manus Island instead of allowing them to reach the United Nations in New York — an act of shameless appeasement as a criminal accomplice to a mass-murderer (Suharto) that would have made Hideki Tojo proud.
“RAAF Hercules transported 600 TNI [Indonesian military] to slaughter us on Biak Island in 1998. Australian and US subsidies, weapons and munitions to RI, provide logistics for slaughter and bombing of our highland villages. Still happening!
“You were silent about the 1998 roll of film depicting victims of the Biak Island massacre, and you destroyed this roll of film in March 2014 after the revelations from the Biak Massacre Citizens Tribunal were aired on the ABC’s 7:30 Report. (Grateful for the integrity of Edmund McWilliams, Political Counselor at the US Embassy in Jakarta, for his testimony.)
“Every single act and action of your betrayal contravenes Commonwealth and US Criminal Codes and violates the UN Charter, the Genocide Act, and the Torture Convention. The price of this cowardly servitude to assassins, rapists, torturers, and war criminals — from war criminal Suharto to war criminal Prabowo [current President of Indonesia] — complicity and collusion in genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and wave after wave of ethnic cleansing.
“Friends, we will not forget you? You threw us into the gutter! As Australian and American leaders, your remembrance day is a commemoration of a tradition of loyalty and sacrifice that you have failed to honour.”
The OPM chairman and commander Bomanak concluded his open letter with the independence slogan “Papua Merdeka!” — Papua freedom.
Imagine having dinner at a restaurant. The menu offers plant-based meat alternatives made mostly from vegetables, mushrooms, legumes and wheat that mimic meat in taste, texture and smell. Despite being given that choice, you decide to order a traditional meat or vegetable dish. That’s a common decision.
The Australian plant-based meat industry has grown significantly in recent years and has been projected to become a A$3 billion industry by 2030. Yet most consumers still hesitate to order a plant-based meat dish in restaurants.
In our new study, we asked 647 Australians why they don’t order plant-based meat dishes when dining out.
It turns out not everyone shares the same reasons. We found six types of diner who avoided these dishes.
The 6 types of diner
Type 1: environmentally conscious, plant-based meat eater
The environmentally conscious plant-based meat eater doesn’t have any issues with meat alternatives. In fact, they enjoy experimenting with plant-based meat products at home. They have their favourite brands but also dislike certain products.
To avoid eating a product they don’t like, they prefer ordering traditional vegetable dishes when dining out. They are more concerned about protecting the planet than their own health.
Type 2: health-conscious, plant-based meat supporter
Type 2 is similar to type 1, except type 2 diners care about being fit and healthy. They prefer to “just eat the vegetables they use to make the fake meat”, as one study participant told us, because they think meat alternatives contain too much sodium, soy, fat, sugar and genetically modified ingredients.
Type 3: curious plant-based meat avoider
The curious plant-based meat avoider typically orders a meat dish and occasionally a vegetable option. They sit on the fence when it comes to plant-based meat.
While they are curious to try it, they aren’t familiar with it and don’t want to risk disappointment. As a type 3 diner told us:
If I were offered a sample, I would be more inclined to try it but […] the risk of it being disappointing doesn’t justify the cost.
Type 4: sceptical plant-based meat avoider
Like the curious plant-based meat avoider, type 4 diners order more meat than vegetable dishes. They believe meat alternatives are unhealthy because “reading the back of plant-based meat packages will typically reveal a plethora of chemicals”. They don’t trust the technology used to create plant-based meat.
They also do not support the idea of mimicking meat with plants and giving these products names similar to animal meat such as burger or steak.
Type 5: indifferent meat lover
The indifferent meat lover doesn’t have any issues with plant-based meat. Yet they wouldn’t consider ordering a plant-based meat dish. Eating meat is an integral part of their restaurant experience and they “wouldn’t know how you’d mimic meat sliding off a bone”.
Although most of their family and friends also order meat dishes, they have no problem with restaurants offering meat alternatives if they are clearly labelled and don’t limit meat options. They believe eating meat is natural, summed up by one who said:
There is a nutritional requirement for animal meat inherent in humans.
Type 6: critical meat lover
The critical meat lover dislikes everything about plant-based meat. They don’t understand why anyone would replace meat with a plant-based alternative, nor why it is important.
Several times I have eaten this garbage […] and thoroughly regretted it.
Why does this matter?
As David Attenborough says: “We must change our diet. The planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters.”
Occasionally ordering a plant-based meal instead of a meat dish can greatly reduce the environmental footprint of the global food system. Animal agriculture accounts for 56% of food-related greenhouse gas emissions but produces only 18% of calories and 37% of protein.
Plant-based alternatives to chicken, pork and beef emit, on average, 43%, 63% and 93% less greenhouse gas emissions.
This means a family of four ordering plant-based meat burgers instead of beef patties saves carbon emissions equal to driving from Brisbane to the Gold Coast.
5 ways restaurants can promote plant-based meat dishes
Restaurants are the perfect tasting ground to introduce diners (especially curious and sceptical plant-based meat avoiders) to meat alternatives. Here are five simple things restaurants can do to promote plant-based meat dishes:
hand out free samples to reduce the fear of disappointment
serve plant-based meat by default to break meat-ordering habits, as a Brisbane pub has done
describe plant-based meat with indulgent words and avoid using unappealing language, such as the word vegan
provide health information to overcome the belief that meat alternatives are unhealthier than meat, which is often not true
integrate plant-based meat dishes into the full menu rather than listing them in a separate vegetarian section.
David Fechner received funding from ProVeg International to conduct this study (Project number July2022-0000001199).
Bettina Grün received funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) to conduct this study (Project DOI:10.55776/I4367).
Sara Dolnicar receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
An Australian-born judge in Kiribati could well face deportation later this week after a tribunal ruling that he should be removed from his post.
The tribunal’s report has just been tabled in the Kiribati Parliament and is due to be debated by MPs this week — the last week of the current parliamentary session ahead of the general election.
The Kiribati judiciary has been in turmoil for nearly four years now, with key judges removed and huge backlogs in the system.
Historically Kiribati had relied on expatriate judges for its senior courts but the man drawing the government’s ire here is David Lambourne, who, while Australian, has lived in Kiribati for many years, and is married to the current opposition leader, Tessie Lambourne.
What does the case centre on? There were a number of issues the government raised but the tribunal focused on one in particular and dismissed three others.
It said Lambourne had been remiss in failing to deliver a written decision on a civil court case in 2020.
This delay was at least partly due to covid-19 with Lambourne, in Australia for a judicial conference, unable to get back into Kiribati, which had shut its borders.
When he did get back, he faced myriad accusations, was stood down, and attempts were made to deport him, but a ruling heard by the then chief justice, New Zealand judge Bill Hastings, exonerated him.
An appeal by the government to the Court of Appeal also found in Lambourne’s favour, but the Kiribati government then removed all of those judges.
It should be noted that all of those judges were current or former members of the New Zealand judiciary and are held in high regard.
Where did this tribunal come from? It was set up by the government in May 2022, but it suspended its work two months later after Lambourne had challenged its existence.
It was staffed by a lay magistrate, a legal practitioner, a former public servant and a retired teacher.
It started work again in 2023 but this was again suspended when the High Court issued an interim injunction.
Then last month the government reconfigured the tribunal and it very quickly produced the report which politicians are shortly to discuss.
What conclusions did the tribunal reach? Its recommendation is that Parliament should consider removing Lambourne from his role as a Puisne Judge of the Kiribati High Court.
It said he had persistently disregarded the prompt delivery of written judgements, neglected to take thorough measures to prevent any misunderstanding about the fundamental role of a judicial officer, and, by behaving in a manner that created the perception of bias.
Another allegation claimed Lambourne bullied a 57-year-old staffer in the judiciary, by yelling at him. The tribunal said this was unacceptable.
What can Lambourne expect? Kiribati President Taneti Maamau’s party dominates the Parliament and it will be wanting to eliminate this issue completely ahead of the elections, due in a few months.
So the Parliament could well vote later this week to deport him and for that to happen immediately.
Lambourne would have recourse to appeal the findings of the tribunal but doing that from outside of the country would be an issue.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Swiss Elders for Climate Protection – KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz – had challenged the Swiss government’s emissions reductions strategy as “wholly inadequate”. The court largely agreed. The decision has made waves in Europe. Might its ripples reach New Zealand’s shores?
Youth perspectives have resonance in climate cases, given the long-term implications of climate change and impacts of future emissions reductions policies. Cases such as the one taken by KlimaSeniorinnen take a different tack, pointing to the vulnerability of older people.
One applicant had been hospitalised after collapsing during a heatwave. She died during the court proceedings. Others had respiratory or cardiovascular problems exacerbated by rising temperatures. Their evidence aligns with New Zealand research on higher risks from climate change for older people.
President of the European Court of Human Rights Siofra O’Leary leads the hearing involving the Swiss case against government climate action. Getty Images
Emissions policy on trial
The Swiss women argued, first in the Swiss domestic courts and then in the European Court of Human Rights, that their government’s failure to implement adequate emissions reductions meant it had breached various human rights obligations, including the rights to life, and private and family life, under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
In a 260-page ruling, the court agreed that the right to private life had been breached. But it said it didn’t need to reach a conclusion on the right to life claim. Having declared Switzerland in breach of its ECHR obligations, the court left it to the government to comply with the convention.
Like New Zealand, Switzerland has made international commitments to emissions reductions under the Paris Climate Agreement. However, the Swiss government struggled to pass legislation reflecting the accepted target reductions.
A national referendum in 2021 rejected a proposed CO₂ Act intended to translate the country’s Paris commitments into domestic law. It was not until June 2023 that a second referendum affirmed a replacement Climate Act. But by the time the European Court of Human Rights issued its decision, the Swiss Climate Act had not yet come into force.
The independent Climate Action Tracker has called Switzerland’s strategy “insufficient”. So it was unsurprising the court declared it in breach of its human rights obligations. The decision has obvious ramifications for the Swiss Confederation and other Council of Europe members. But could it also have implications closer to home?
The Swiss parliament in Bern struggled to implement agreed emissions targets. Getty Images
Implications for NZ courts
New Zealand is not bound by decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. But New Zealand courts regularly consider cases from overseas when determining claims.
Local activists, lawyers and judges will be poring over the judgement, which addresses a number of contested issues in existing and potential future cases in this jurisdiction.
First, New Zealand has ratified other international human rights instruments, including the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). New Zealand is also a party to the ICCPR’s Optional Protocol. This opens it up to compliance rulings by the UN Human Rights Committee, as occurred in the 2020 Teitoita v New Zealand climate-related case.
The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act imposes human rights obligations on public authorities. In a related claim to his climate case against Fonterra and others, Māori elder Mike Smith has sued the New Zealand government, claiming (among other things) that its inadequate emissions reductions framework breaches the rights to life and to practise culture under the Bill of Rights.
The case is currently at the Court of Appeal. If it goes to the Supreme Court or UN Human Rights Committee, the European Court of Human Rights decision in the KlimaSeniorinnen case could well feature prominently.
But KlimaSeniorinnen‘s relevance is not limited to human rights claims. An important aspect of the European judgement was a meticulous analysis of the factual and scientific context for the women’s claim.
The court comprehensively assessed the latest climate science, endorsing the need for “deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions”. That part of the decision offers something of a model for New Zealand courts in all sorts of climate cases.
The case also addresses a perennial question in climate cases in New Zealand and elsewhere: what is the proper role and function of the courts in assessing government responses to climate change?
Arguments about judicial competence to review policy-laden regulatory responses were (and will be) central to these ongoing cases, including Lawyers for Climate Action v Climate Change Commission, now awaiting a decision by the New Zealand Court of Appeal.
In the KlimaSeniorinnen case, the European Court of Human Rights readily acknowledged limits to judicial involvement in climate policy. But it ruled “the Court’s competence in the context of climate change litigation cannot, as a matter of principle, be excluded”.
We can expect its thoughtful approach on this issue to be carefully considered in New Zealand cases.
The Swiss case was decided under a particular legal, constitutional and institutional setting, in many respects different to New Zealand’s. But there is much in the decision that could inform New Zealand judicial responses to common issues which – like greenhouse emissions themselves – know no national borders.
Vernon Rive 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.
Have you ever felt sick at work? Perhaps you had food poisoning or the flu. Your belly hurt, or you felt tired, making it hard to concentrate and be productive.
How likely would you be to tell your boss you were unwell and had to go home?
While employees would probably tell their boss about a stomach upset, many who menstruate and feel unwell as a consequence every month, are unlikely to talk about their difficult periods.
Especially at work. This was confirmed in our recent study of 247 students and workers who have periods. We found only 6.7% would be honest with their employer about why they had to leave work or stay at home.
Additionally, 87% of those surveyed – 96% identified as women – felt their period often interfered with their work or study.
One respondent told us, “I would sometimes just say I wasn’t well and needed to work from home to be near a bathroom. I would let people assume it was gastro.” Another said, “I do not feel comfortable giving this as a reason to miss work as it feels like an excuse despite living in chronic pain.”
The topic of menstruation is unquestionably still on the taboo list. And it is also clearly affecting the workplace.
The good news is we are starting to see initiatives aimed at making workplaces more inclusive for people who menstruate.
Earlier this month, Victorian government employees dealing with menstrual pain, menopausal symptoms and IVF treatments were given an extra five days sick leave as part of their Enterprise Bargaining Agreement negotiations.
But the Victorian Women’s Trust led the way in Australia being the first company to introduce a Menstrual and Menopause Wellbeing Policy”.
Other organisations including the Aintree Group, Fisher and Paykel Healthcare, the Cura Day Hospitals Group and sports business Core Climbing are also getting on board.
The list of employers may grow if campaigns such as the Electrical Trades Union’s ‘Nowhere to Go’ and The Retail and Fast Food Workers Union’s ‘We’re Bloody Essential’ are effective, as they are lobbying for more companies to consider the menstrual needs of their employees.
Having access to free period products seems to be paying off as our research found 84.6% of employees said it makes them feel their workplace cares about them and reduces the likelihood they will leave work due to their period.
One respondent explained, “Periods can be hard. I once bled through my clothes at work and had to leave. It was so stressful and humiliating. Free period products could just change someone’s day.”
This is encouraging, but also suggests accessible products alone won’t lift the taboo and support a menstrual-inclusive workplace. More needs to be done.
How to create a menstrual-inclusive workplace
1) Recognise the impact of periods
Our study identified people who menstruate regularly experience physical symptoms such as abdominal pain (94%), backache (82%), and headaches (82%) before or during their period. They also describe emotional symptoms such as anxiety, fatigue, depression and irritability.
One respondent said: “My cramps are so painful they make me feel physically sick – as though I will throw up. So I don’t like being out of the house because I can’t stand up straight.”
And another: “My period increases my general level of anxiety in class, at work, and in all other situations. It can cause me to be acutely anxious during my classes and work, and I struggle to concentrate.”
To avoid feelings of humiliation, shame and discrimination, people with their period often mask and hide symptoms. When this happens, employees report being less engaged and productive.
By empathising with menstruators who are impacted in a wide variety of ways, organisations can support and empower them to look after their general and menstrual well-being.
2) Become an inclusive leader
Inclusive leaders treat menstrual health as a justice and human rights issue that is collectively important for individuals and the organisation. These leaders recognise people with their period should be supported, so they talk to them about cultural and practical ways the workplace can make them feel safe and allow them to manage their period with dignity.
This might mean providing free period products or offering menstruators flexible breaks and work hours when having their periods. Inclusive leaders recognise some people may need paid menstrual leave.
3) Normalise discussions about menstruation
Inclusive leaders go further than practical strategies, they create a period-positive environment by challenging stigma and discrimination. They normalise conversations about menstruation, and ensure people who menstruate feel heard, supported and respected. They offer education and training to dismantle the menstrual taboo in workplaces, and replace it with a culture that embraces menstrual wellbeing.
Ultimately, to make our workplaces equitable and inclusive, we must be willing to talk about menstruation openly and honestly and learn about the impact it has on employees. Only then will workers feel able to talk about what supports their health needs.
Ruth Knight 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.
Everyone has a favourite band, or a favourite composer, or a favourite song. There is some music which speaks to you, deeply; and other music which might be the current big hit, but you can only hear nails on a chalkboard.
Every time a major artist releases their new album, the critics are there to tell you exactly how the artist got it right – or how they got it wrong. And the fans are there to tell the critic how they got it right or wrong, in turn.
So if we all have our own opinions on music, is it ever possible to judge it objectively? Or are we all subject to our subjective disagreements forever?
We asked five music experts to let us know what they thought. Here’s what they had to say.
Sam Whiting receives funding from Creative Australia and the Australasian Performing Right Association.
Catherine Strong receives funding from the ARC and the VMDO.
Charlotte Markowitsch, Laura Glitsos, and Timothy McKenry 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.
When New Zealanders commemorate Anzac Day on April 25, it’s not only to honour the soldiers who lost their lives in World War I and subsequent conflicts, but also to mark a defining event for national identity.
The battle of Gallipoli against the Ottoman Empire, the story goes, was where the young nation passed its first test of courage and determination.
The question of why New Zealand soldiers ended up on Turkish beaches in April 1915 is typically not part of these commemorations. Rather, our collective memories begin with the moment of the early morning landing.
Consider, for example, the timing of the Anzac Day dawn service, or the Museum of New Zealand-Te Papa Tongarewa’s exhibition, Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, which plunges visitors straight into the action.
This selective retelling of history is necessary for the “coming of age” narrative to work. It helps conceal that Britain was pursuing its own colonial ambitions against the Ottomans, and that New Zealand took part in World War I as “a member of the British club”, as historian Ian McGibbon puts it, loyally devoted to the imperial cause.
Against the background of the recent horrors and escalating tensions in the Middle East, however, it seems more important than ever to make these silences speak in our commemorations of Gallipoli.
Where collective memory begins: dawn service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum cenotaph. Getty Images
Britain’s colonial interests
While the causes of World War I are complex and multifaceted, historians have extensively documented that Britain had long seen parts of the decaying Ottoman Empire as prey for colonial expansion. Already, in the late 1800s, Britain had taken control of Cyprus and Egypt.
Turkey’s Middle Eastern possessions were of interest to the government in London because they provided not only a land route to the colony in India, but also rich oil reserves.
Hence, when the Ottoman Empire signed an alliance with Germany – mainly to guard against Russian territorial aspirations – and somewhat reluctantly entered World War I, the British did not lament this as a diplomatic defeat.
“The decrepit Ottoman Empire was more useful to them as a victim than as a dependent ally,” as the late historian Michael Howard explained.
The day after Britain declared war on the Ottomans on November 5 1914, British troops attacked Basra (in today’s southern Iraq) to secure nearby oil facilities.
In the following months, the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia won a number of easy victories, which fuelled the belief the Turkish military was weak. This in turn led Britain to devise a plan to launch a direct strike on Constantinople, the Ottoman capital.
First, however, they had to clear the Gallipoli peninsula of enemy defences. And who better suited to this task than the first convoy of Anzac troops, just a short distance away in Egypt after passing through the Suez Canal?
Australian, British, New Zealand and Indian cameliers in Palestine during World War I.
Palestine: a complex tangle of pledges
As is well known, war planners in London had underestimated the enemy’s military strength. The battle of Gallipoli ended in a Turkish victory over Britain and its allies. Nevertheless, fortunes eventually turned against the Ottoman Empire.
Although a whole century has gone by, British diplomatic efforts and secret agreements that were meant to accelerate the collapse of the Ottoman Empire still shape the Middle East today.
Most significantly, it is the violent conflict over Palestine that can be traced back to colonial power dealings during World War I. The crux of the problem is that Britain affirmed three irreconcilable wartime commitments in relation to Palestine.
First, in the hope of initiating an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, the British made promises to Sharif Husayn, the emir of Mecca, about the creation of an independent Arab kingdom.
Second, in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the Ottomans’ Arab lands into British and French spheres of interest, Palestine was designated for international administration.
Third, in the Balfour Declaration
of November 1917, the British government pledged support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine – a move motivated by a mixture of realpolitik and Biblical romanticism.
In the end, it was the third commitment that turned out to be the most enduring.
Lord Balfour inspecting troops at York Cathedral during World War I. Getty Images
How should we remember Gallipoli?
Amid this complex history, we must not forget the thousands of New Zealand soldiers who died in World War I – men who had either volunteered, expecting a quick and heroic war, or served as draftees.
However, we need to have a public discussion about whether it is still appropriate for our commemorations to skip over the question of why these men fought in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Facing up to this question not only makes us aware of our responsibilities towards the Middle East problem, but it can also serve as a lesson for the future – not to blindly follow great powers into their military adventures.
Olli Hellmann 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.
No, it arrested, prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned and deported the Israeli agents, plus made them pay a big sum of damages. And it refused to restore normal diplomatic relations with Israel until Israel apologised to NZ. Which Israel did.
Today’s government needs to treat Israel the same way it treats other aggressors, like Russia, with the likes of sanctions.
And the government needs to designate Zionism as an inherently racist, terrorist ideology.
Everyone knows that the Gaza War would stop in five minutes if the US stopped arming Israel to the teeth and allowing it to commit genocide with impunity.
Israel is the mass murderer; the US is the enabler of mass murder.
New Zealand is part of the US Empire. The most useful thing we could do is to sever our ties to that empire, something we bravely started in the 1980s with the nuclear-free policy. Also, do these things:
Develop a genuinely independent foreign policy;
Get out of US wars, like the one in the Red Sea and Yemen;
Get out of the Five Eyes spy alliance;
Close the Waihopai spy base and the GCSB, the NZ agency which runs it;
Kick out Rocket Lab, NZ’s newest American military base;
Stop the process of getting entangled with NATO; and
Stay out of AUKUS, which is simply building an alliance to fight a war with China.
I never thought I’d find myself on the same side of an issue as Don Brash and Richard Prebble but even they have strongly opposed AUKUS.
Zionism is the enemy of the Palestinian people.
US imperialism is the enemy of the Palestinian people and the New Zealand people.
Murray Horton is secretary/organiser of the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) and gave this speech last Saturday to a Palestinian solidarity rally at the Bridge of Remembrance, Christchurch.
NEWSMAKERS:By Vijay Narayan, news director of FijiVillage
Blessed to be part of the University of Fiji (UniFiji) faculty to continue to teach and mentor those who want to join our noble profession, and to stand for truth and justice for the people of the country.
I was privileged to lecture a few units a week for some time and also wrote the Broadcast Journalism module for the Fiji National University when the Media and Journalism Programme started back in 2005.
Excited to do more to build our media industry for now and for many years to come. As I enter the 27th year with Communications Fiji Limited, I look forward to many great things happening in our business which is always evolving based on audience, content and technology.
It starts with the people and ends with the people.
Three weeks from now, some of us will be presented with a mountain of budget papers, and just about all of us will get to hear about them on radio, TV or news websites on budget night.
The quickest way to find out what the budget is really doing will be to listen to the treasurer’s speech, or to peruse online the aptly-named “glossy” – a document that last year was titled “Stronger foundations for a better future”.
But they will tell you exactly what the government wants you to hear, exactly as it wants you to hear it.
If you are looking instead for the truth – what the government is actually trying to achieve and what it is holding itself and its officials to, I would suggest something else, tucked away on about page 87 of the main budget document.
It is required by the Charter of Budget Honesty Act introduced in 1998 by Peter Costello, the treasurer under Prime Minister John Howard.
On taking office in 1996, Costello set up a National Commission of Audit to examine the finances he had inherited from the Hawke and Keating governments, presumably with an eye to discovering they had been mismanaged.
But the members of the commission weren’t much interested in that. Instead, they decided to deal with something more fundamental.
Budget as you wish, but explain your strategy
Governments were perfectly entitled to manage money in whatever way they wanted, and they were perfectly entitled to spend more money than they raised (which they usually do, it’s called a budget deficit).
What the commission wanted was for governments to make clear what they were doing, and to spell out the strategy behind it.
Only part of it was about being upfront with the public. The commission also wanted governments to be upfront with themselves – to actually develop frameworks for what they were doing, rather than doing whatever they felt like.
The commission recommended a Charter of Budget Honesty, which among other things requires officials to prepare independent assessments of the finances before each election, requires budget updates six months after each budget, and requires tax expenditures (tax breaks) to be accounted for like other expenditures.
The fiscal strategy can be thought of as an exam question set by the student who is being examined – something along the lines of “this is what you say you want your budget to achieve, please set out the means by which you plan to achieve it”.
It turns out to have been exceptionally effective in getting governments to organise their thoughts, make budgets at least try to achieve something, and let the rest of us know what they are trying to achieve.
Every few years, treasurers change the strategy, as is their right. Treasurer Jim Chalmers says he’ll change it again this budget, to de-emphasise the fight against inflation and to more greatly emphasise the need to support economic growth.
His statement will tell us what’s behind his actions in a way the glossy words in his brochure and speech might not.
The strategy that has signposted 26 years
Previous statements have signposted all the important turns in what the budget is trying to do.
The first, in 1998, committed Costello and Howard to achieving a budget surplus on average over the economic cycle and whenever “growth prospects remain sound”.
Making that commitment more difficult was another “not to introduce new taxes or raise existing taxes over the term of this parliament”.
Two years later, after the government had won an election promising a new goods and services tax, that commitment was changed to “no increase in the overall tax burden from its 1996-97 level”, a condition met by calling the GST a state tax.
Hockey and Morrison wound back spending
The Labor budgets from 2008 loosened the tax target to the average share of GDP below the reference year, which they changed to the higher-tax year of 2007-08.
The first Coalition budget under Treasurer Joe Hockey in 2014 changed the target from tax to spending, pledging to bring down the ratio of payments to GDP, and pledging a surplus of 1% of GDP by 2023-24.
Any new spending would be more than offset by cuts elsewhere, and if the budget did receive a burst of unexpected revenue it would be “banked” rather than spent.
In 2018 Treasurer Scott Morrison reintroduced tax as a target, that he spelled out precisely. Tax was not to increase beyond 23.9% of GDP.
During COVID, Frydenberg spent big
In 2020, in the face of a COVID-induced recession and soaring unemployment, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg pushed the old strategy to one side.
They would spend big now to keep the economy afloat so they wouldn’t have to spend more bailing it out later, and they wouldn’t return to their old concern about the deficit until the unemployment rate was “comfortably below 6%”.
So well did they succeed that in 2021 Frydenberg made the momentous decision to keep going, abandoning the promise to return to worrying about the deficit when unemployment fell below 6%.
Along with high iron ore prices, that one change of strategy has probably helped deliver Chalmers two consecutive budget surpluses – the one he announced last year for 2022-23, and the one he is set to announce this year for 2023-24. More of us have been in jobs paying tax, and fewer have been out of jobs on benefits.
It’s a powerful demonstration of the real-world difference budget decisions can make, and the way in which the fiscal strategy tells the story.
Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.
As the climate warms and Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets melt, the resulting rise in sea level has the potential to displace hundreds of millions of people around the world by the end of this century.
A key uncertainty in how much and how fast the seas will rise lies in whether currently “stable” parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet can become “unstable”.
One such region is West Antarctica’s Siple Coast, where rivers of ice flow off the continent and drain into the ocean.
This ice flow is slowed down by the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating mass of ice nearly the size of Spain, which holds back the land-based ice. Compared to other ice shelves in West Antarctica, the Ross Ice Shelf has little melting at its base because the ocean below it is very cold.
Although this region has been stable during the past few decades, recent research suggest this was not always the case. Radiocarbon dating of sediments from beneath the ice sheet tells us that it retreated hundreds of kilometres some 7,000 years ago, and then advanced again to its present position within the last 2,000 years.
Figuring out why this happened can help us better predict how the ice sheet will change in the future. In our new research, we test two main hypotheses.
Scientists have considered two possible explanations for this past ice sheet retreat and advance. The first is related to Earth’s crust below the ice sheet.
As an ice sheet shrinks, the change in ice mass causes the Earth’s crust to slowly uplift in response. At the same time, and counterintuitively, the sea level drops near the ice because of a weakening of the gravitational attraction between the ice sheet and the ocean water.
As the ice sheet thinned and retreated since the last ice age, crustal uplift and the fall in sea level in the region may have re-grounded floating ice, causing ice sheet advance.
Earth’s crust uplifts and sea level drops near the ice sheet as it loses mass. AGU, CC BY-SA
The other hypothesis is that the ice sheet behaviour may be due to changes in the ocean. When the surface of the ocean freezes, forming sea ice, it expels salt into the water layers below. This cold briny water is heavier and mixes deep into the ocean, including under the Ross Ice Shelf. This blocks warm ocean currents from melting the ice.
Top: Cold dense shelf water blocks warm circumpolar deep water from melting the ice. Bottom: Warm circumpolar deep water flows under the ice shelf, causing ice melting and retreat. AGU, CC BY-SA
Seafloor sediments and ice cores tell us that this deep mixing was weaker in the past when the ice sheet was retreating. This means that warm ocean currents may have flowed underneath the ice shelf and melted the ice. Mixing increased when the ice sheet was advancing.
We test these two ideas with computer model simulations of ice sheet flow and Earth’s crustal and sea surface responses to changes in the ice sheet with varying ocean temperature.
Because the rate of crustal uplift depends on the viscosity (stickiness) of the underlying mantle, we ran simulations within ranges estimated for West Antarctica. A stickier mantle means slower crustal uplift as the ice sheet thins.
The simulations that best matched geological records had a stickier mantle and a warmer ocean as the ice sheet retreated. In these simulations, the ice sheet retreats more quickly as the ocean warms.
When the ocean cools, the simulated ice sheet readvances to its present-day position. This means that changes in ocean temperature best explain the past ice sheet behaviour, but the rate of crustal uplift also affects how sensitive the ice sheet is to the ocean.
Changes in ocean temperature best explain the retreat of West Antarctica’s ice sheet in the past. Veronika Meduna, CC BY-SA
What this means for climate policy today
Much attention has been paid to recent studies that show glacial melting may be irreversible in some parts of West Antarctica, such as the Amundsen Sea embayment.
In the context of such studies, policy debates hinge on whether we should focus on adapting to rising seas rather than cutting greenhouse gas emissions. If the ice sheet is already melting, are we too late for mitigation?
Our study suggests it is premature to give up on mitigation.
Global climate models run under high-emissions scenarios show less sea ice formation and deep ocean mixing. This could lead to the same cold-to-warm ocean switch that caused extensive ice sheet retreat thousands of years ago.
For West Antarctica’s Siple Coast, it is better if we prevent this ocean warming from occurring in the first place, which is still possible if we choose a low-emissions future.
Dan Lowry receives funding from the Antarctic Science Platform supported by the New Zealand Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment.
Holly Kyeore Han receives funding from NASA Postdoc Program.
Do Australian courts have the right to decide what foreign citizens, located overseas, view online on a foreign-owned platform?
Anyone inclined to answer “yes” to this question should perhaps also ask themselves whether they are equally happy for courts in China, Russia and Iran to determine what Australians can see and post online in Australia.
This is the problem with global “take-down orders”, an issue we now must confront in light of the Australian eSafety commissioner demanding that social media platform X (formerly Twitter) remove videos of a violent stabbing at a church in Sydney.
X agreed to prevent access to the content in Australia. However, at an urgent federal court hearing late Monday, the commissioner demanded a full removal, with an interim measure of blocking the posts globally.
There can be no doubt that a global take-down order can be justified in some instances. For example, child abuse materials and so-called revenge porn are clear examples of content that should be removed with global effect.
But it is far too simplistic to seek to justify a global take-down order just by saying that any platform operating in Australia must comply with Australian law, as shadow Foreign Minister Simon Birmingham said in a Sky News interview this morning.
After all, international law imposes limitations on what demands Australian law can place on foreigners acting outside Australia.
It is also too simplistic to just focus on efficiency, as was done in the context of so-called geo-blocking – the use of geo-location technologies to block users from a specific location. Attempts to block online piracy sites, for example, have famously been ineffective.
Of course, a court order requiring X to take down certain content globally is more effective than a court order requiring X to geo-block such content so that users in Australia cannot access it.
Even if X removed the content on a global basis, those Australians who are hell-bent on viewing the footage in question would be able to find it somewhere else online. In other words, there is no realistic way to fully ensure the content cannot be accessed at all.
Ordering X to use geo-location technologies to block Australians from viewing the content would be sufficient to prevent the general Australian public from coming into contact with the video. Doing so would also show respect for the fact that different countries have different laws.
An unusually poor ‘test case’ for free speech
Elon Musk, the American billionaire owner of X, has chosen to approach the matter as a fight for free speech in the face of “censorship”. Such a move would no doubt gain support among the conspiracy theorists and online trolls in his audience. But for the broader Australian public, this must appear like an odd occasion to fight for free speech.
There can sometimes be real tension between free speech and the suppression of violent imagery. For example, some news reporting from military conflicts may be deemed too graphic by some, while others view it as a necessary tool to illustrate the level of violence being committed.
Here, there are no such complex considerations. There is simply no arguable value in keeping the videos online. Consequently, while removing the content can be described as censorship, it is hard to understand why anyone would object to this censorship.
After all, not even the staunchest free speech advocates would be able to credibly object to all censorship. (For example, consider the publication of child abuse materials or Musk’s credit card details.)
The path forward
In the end, we must recognise the internet is a shared resource. All countries, including Australia, should be very careful in how they apply their laws where it can have a “spill-over” effect impacting people in other countries.
Global take-down orders are justifiable in some situations, but cannot be the default position for all content that violates some law somewhere in the world. If we had to comply with all content laws worldwide, the internet would no longer be as valuable as it is today.
We must also start being more proactive in how we regulate the internet. Rushed reactive lawmaking rarely leads to good long-term outcomes. This is a field in which we need international cooperation – this will take time.
Finally, the platforms must act maturely. While other platforms responded to the eSafety commissioner by swiftly blocking the content, X decided to fight for the “right” to display violent extremism in action.
The fact Musk views this as a suitable battleground for free speech shows that we have a long way to go in finding solutions to the regulation of the internet.
Dan Jerker B. Svantesson 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 Giovanni E Ferreira, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, Institute of Musculoskeletal Health, University of Sydney
Last week in a post on X, owner of the platform Elon Musk recommended people look into disc replacement if they’re experiencing severe neck or back pain.
According to a biography of the billionaire, he’s had chronic back and neck pain since he tried to “judo throw” a 350-pound sumo wrestler in 2013 at a Japanese-themed party for his 42nd birthday, and blew out a disc at the base of his neck.
In comments following the post, Musk said the surgery was a “gamechanger” and reduced his pain significantly.
Musk’s original post has so far had more than 50 million views and generated controversy. So what is disc replacement surgery and what does the evidence tells us about its benefits and harms?
What’s involved in a disc replacement?
Disc replacement is a type of surgery in which one or more spinal discs (a cushion between the spine bones, also known as vertebrae) are removed and replaced with an artificial disc to retain movement between the vertebrae. Artificial discs are made of metal or a combination of metal and plastic.
Disc replacement may be performed for a number of reasons, including slipped discs in the neck, as appears to be the case for Musk.
Disc replacement is major surgery. It requires general anaesthesia and the operation usually takes 2–4 hours. Most people stay in hospital for 2–7 days. After surgery patients can walk but need to avoid things like strenuous exercise and driving for 3–6 weeks. People may be required to wear a neck collar (following neck surgery) or a back brace (following back surgery) for about 6 weeks.
Costs vary depending on whether you have surgery in the public or private health system, if you have private health insurance, and your level of coverage if you do. In Australia, even if you have health insurance, a disc replacement surgery may leave you more than A$12,000 out of pocket.
Disc replacement surgery is not performed as much as other spinal surgeries (for example, spinal fusion) but its use is increasing.
In New South Wales for example, rates of privately-funded disc replacement increased six-fold from 6.2 per million people in 2010–11 to 38.4 per million in 2019–20.
What are the benefits and harms?
People considering surgery will typically weigh that option against not having surgery. But there has been very little research comparing disc replacement surgery with non-surgical treatments.
Clinical trials are the best way to determine if a treatment is effective. You first want to show that a new treatment is better than doing nothing before you start comparisons with other treatments. For surgical procedures, the next step might be to compare the procedure to non-surgical alternatives.
Unfortunately, these crucial first research steps have largely been skipped for disc replacement surgery for both neck and back pain. As a result, there’s a great deal of uncertainty about the treatment.
There are no clinical trials we know of investigating whether disc replacement is effective for neck pain compared to nothing or compared to non-surgical treatments.
For low back pain, the only clinical trial that has been conducted to our knowledge comparing disc replacement to a non-surgical alternative found disc replacement surgery was slightly more effective than an intensive rehabilitation program after two years and eight years.
Complications are not uncommon, and can include disclocation of the artificial disc, fracture (break) of the artificial disc, and infection.
In the clinical trial mentioned above, 26 of the 77 surgical patients had a complication within two years of follow up, including one person who underwent revision surgery that damaged an artery leading to a leg needing to be amputated. Revision surgery means a re-do to the primary surgery if something needs fixing.
Are there effective alternatives?
The first thing to consider is whether you need surgery. Seeking a second opinion may help you feel more informed about your options.
Many surgeons see disc replacement as an alternative to spinal fusion, and this choice is often presented to patients. Indeed, the research evidence used to support disc replacement mainly comes from studies that compare disc replacement to spinal fusion. These studies show people with neck pain may recover and return to work faster after disc replacement compared to spinal fusion and that people with back pain may get slightly better pain relief with disc replacement than with spinal fusion.
However, spinal fusion is similarly not well supported by evidence comparing it to non-surgical alternatives and, like disc replacement, it’s also expensive and associated with considerable risks of harm.
Fortunately for patients, there are new, non-surgical treatments for neck and back pain that evidence is showing are effective – and are far cheaper than surgery. These include treatments that address both physical and psychological factors that contribute to a person’s pain, such as cognitive functional therapy.
While Musk reported a good immediate outcome with disc replacement surgery, given the evidence – or lack thereof – we advise caution when considering this surgery. And if you’re presented with the choice between disc replacement and spinal fusion, you might want to consider a third alternative: not having surgery at all.
Giovanni E Ferreira receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).
Christine Lin receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and Medical Research Future Fund.
Christopher Maher receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and Medical Research Future Fund.
Ian Harris has received grant funding from numerous research organisations.
Joshua Zadro receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey caught the headlines yesterday, courtesy of a blistering speech condemning the latest GST carve-up. New South Wales, he claimed, would be A$11.9 billion worse off over the next four years, leaving both the state’s coveted AAA credit rating and budget surplus in tatters.
The lost dollars, Mookhey said, could have funded 19,000 healthcare workers, 19,000 teachers or 16,000 police officers.
This is certainly a lot of revenue to lose in one hit. But it is not immediately clear where the state treasurer got this number from.
The new GST carve-up will see NSW receive $310 million less next year compared to this year.
But since 2021-22, Australia’s GST has been allocated under a new equalisation arrangement. We’re currently in the transition period, meaning each year states are compensated with “no worse off” payments to ensure they don’t receive less cumulative GST than they would have under the old system.
If NSW’s “no worse off” top-up payments are taken into account, the difference is only $188 million.
Mookhey could argue that the annual movement in GST payments is not the point. The issue is how much GST was factored into his budget last May. That was $1.2 billion more than what will now be received in 2024-25 under the updated distribution.
Yes, that’s a lot of money to lose, but multiplied out over four years, it’s still well short of $11.9 billion.
Short-changed on population
So, where exactly did that bigger number come from?
NSW’s beef with the GST carve-up is most likely that it receives much less than it would get if those revenues were distributed according to population share, instead of according to service delivery needs between states and territories.
Next year, for example, with 31.2% of the population, NSW will only receive 27.1% of GST revenues. In dollar terms, the difference is equivalent to about $3.6 billion, which multiplied out over four years, would come to $14.4 billion.
This is the only figure that comes anywhere near the amount suggested by the treasurer. But it’s misleading. Distributing GST by population alone ignores different service delivery needs between states.
NSW certainly copped a big drop in its assessed need relative to the average of all other jurisdictions in the latest GST update. But if history is any guide, its relative position is likely to go in the opposite direction sometime over the next four years.
The point here is we are talking about a future situation that may never arise – hardly a solid basis for a political fight.
But what’s really fair?
The treasurer’s speech gives the impression the latest GST carve-up is the source of the problem. In reality, Mookhey has taken aim at the way we try to even up the financial capacity of the states and territories. The current system of distribution allows us to ensure each Australian citizen, no matter where they live, is able to receive similar levels of government services without paying more than the average person.
For the foreseeable future, there will always be a significant gap between an ideal equal per capita distribution and what a wealthy state like NSW actually gets from the GST. That’s not because of the latest carve-up, it’s just the way it is.
The $11.9 billion GST “budget bomb” is the kind of fiction our political system could well do without. Money has not been lost, nor have jobs. They have simply been redistributed from NSW to South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory. Because of service needs, these jurisdictions receive a bigger share of GST funds than their share of the national population.
What about the NSW budget’s bottom line? In the NSW Treasury’s December budget update, Mookhey estimated that next year he would deliver an operating surplus of $475 million, down from the $844 million estimated last May. Most of the slippage occurred in 2023 after the budget was brought down.
While GST revenues will be down compared to what was budgeted in 2024-25, revenues in total are well above budget, by $490 million. The problem is not revenues, but expenses, which have blown out by close to $1 billion, mainly due to the impact of rising interest rates on outstanding debt.
Any budget problems the state now faces are not only because of lower-than-expected GST revenue, but at least equally because of NSW Treasury’s failure to control expenses.
Is NSW’s credit rating on the line? Not really. One of the three big credit rating agencies has already downgraded it with little, if any, impact on the state’s borrowing costs.
Were the other two agencies to follow suit, it likely wouldn’t make a difference. As Mookhey himself recently pointed out, rating agency assessments are becoming less important than was once the case.
So why the uproar? It is all just part of an annual parade of treasurers – usually from NSW and Victoria – fronting the media and calling for a bigger slice of the national GST pie. It may also be an attempt by Mookhey to soften up the public for a credit rating downgrade, one that is ironically unlikely to matter.
David Hayward does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has arrived at Kokoda Station, Northern province, at the start of his state visit to Papua New Guinea.
Both Albanese and Prime Minister James Marape will meet with the locals and the Northern Provincial government before they begin their walk along the historic 96km Kokoda Trail.
Both men were “excited” with Marape saying “he was there to lend a hand to his brother PM”.
Meanwhile, the heroism of Australian soldier Private Bruce Steel Kingsbury is being remembered in advance of ANZAC Day.
Knowing his platoon would not last long with the continuous attack by the Japanese and suffering severe losses during World War Two, Private Kingsbury made the heroic decision to move against the continuous firing and attacked the enemy which cost his life on 29 August 1942.
The battle took place at Isurava, Kokoda. Where Private Kingsbury fell is a memorial which is known as “Kingsbury Rock” beside the Isurava Memorial which Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will visit for the ANZAC Dawn service.
Private Kingsbury’s sacrifice earned him a Victoria Cross. He is buried at the Bomana War Cemetery outside Port Moresby and is one of 625 Australians who were killed in action along the Kokoda track, another 1055 were wounded.
Battle for PNG The battle to protect Papua and New Guinea, as it was known back then, took about 9000 lives and the remnants of war still remain in the jungles of PNG with more men still missing in action.
Private Bruce Kingsbury . . . a memorial known as “Kingsbury Rock” stands where he fell in battle against the Japanese in 1942. Image: PNG Post-Courier
Prime ministers Marape and Albanese will walk a section of the Kokoda track to honour the shared history and enduring bond between the two nations.
“The visit of Prime Minister Albanese underscores the close relationships between our countries,” said Prime Minister Marape.
“I’ll be joining him for a walk along the Kokoda Trail.”
Albanese is set to be the first sitting prime minister to walk part of the famous 96km track.
Kevin Rudd walked the Kokoda Track in 2006 while he was opposition leader while former prime minister Scott Morrison also hiked the track in 2009 during his time as a backbench MP.
Miriam Zarrigais a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, Professor, School of Politics Economics & Society, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of Canberra
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An important principle was invoked by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week in defence of the government’s Future Made in Australia industry policy announcement.
“There is a role for government sometimes in just providing […] support to get over the hump”, Albanese said, for otherwise sustainable companies facing rough patches in the quest to diversify Australia’s manufacturing base.
If it’s a good idea for companies, why not for responsible and otherwise financially-viable Australians at risk of losing their homes in a cost-of-living crisis?
HomeKeeper is modelled on the pandemic-era JobKeeper program, but applies key lessons from flaws in JobKeeper’s design.
Crucially, it’s not a handout. Nor is it a contingent loan, the shortcomings of which Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) debts have made painfully clear.
Rather, it’s government help through a small equity stake with positive returns for taxpayers when HomeKeeper help is no longer needed.
Mortgage-stressed owner-occupiers could get some breathing space to recapitalise, with government making their mortgage payments direct to the home-owner’s bank up to a modest (say $25,000 overall) ceiling.
In exchange, the government would own a small equity stake in the property, equal to the value of the mortgage aid as a proportion of the property’s market value at the time. Government would get its proportionate share back at market value later, when ownership of the property next turned over – or sooner if the homeowner chose.
Good for the homeowner. Good for taxpayers. Good in the way it stops already way-too-long rental queues and homelessness from worsening.
HomeKeeper would be of most help to lower income families who often don’t have a “Bank of Mum and Dad” to help them “over the hump”, as Albanese puts it, during temporary difficulties.
With a relatively low ceiling on the overall assistance, it would make a real difference to families of modest means but be of no real help, and therefore of little interest, to McMansion owners needing large scale assistance to avoid forced sales.
Crossbenchers see the benefits. Independent MP for Goldstein, Zoe Daniel, canvassed HomeKeeper in parliament in December noting, “the assistance would go straight from the government to the bank, ensuring it didn’t add to consumption and inflation”.
Given expectations that house prices will generally continue to rise for the foreseeable future, the taxpayer would typically benefit to that extent from the repayment; that is, reflecting the size of the government’s equity stake acquired via temporary mortgage payment support.
Pocock wants the government’s Help To Buy mechanism amended to enable low- and middle-income earners “facing mortgage repossession and possible homelessness to remain in home ownership” via a HomeKeeper-style program.
Establishing HomeKeeper is more important than ever because the monetary policy script isn’t following the arc politicians and policymakers planned.
Internationally and nationally, inflation is easing, but more slowly and fitfully than hoped.
Predictions that cuts would come sooner rather than later have been dashed more than once when reported United States economic data was stronger than expected, or when markets were affected by upticks in international conflict.
Throughout, Australia has been expected to begin cutting rates last among the world’s industrialised economies, since it was last to begin ramping rates up and the economy kept pumping along strongly.
Tightening the budget screws, the Albanese government is counting on multiple rate cuts in the run up to the next federal election, due to be called by next April, to put voters in a better mood.
At 31%, Labor’s support risks sliding into the 20s according to RedBridge Group pollster Kos Samaras.
Albanese’s net approval rating is barely ahead of Peter Dutton’s. Both are negative, suggesting a “pox on both your houses” sentiment among voters.
Relying on interest rate relief to arrive isn’t enough
Fiscal policy is doing its bit to help turn the tide on interest rates. Sustained effort by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Senator Katy Gallagher has turned around the dire budget balance and debt mountain inherited from the Morrison government.
What’s more, even without further rate increases by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) this year, the average mortgage rate is set to rise anyway according to research by the RBA’s Domestic Markets Department’s Benjamin Ung.
Little wonder then that mortgage stress is extensive and worsening. Nearly a third (31.4%) of mortgaged owner-occupiers are “at risk” of mortgage stress according to the latest Roy Morgan survey. Nearly one in five (19.7%) are “extremely at risk”.
Many mortgaged owner-occupiers are at and beyond the end of their tether as more and more of them face voluntary self-initiated house sales or, worse, forced sales by their banks.
Monetary policy pinch points don’t need to, and shouldn’t, throw financially responsible and otherwise viable mortgage-stressed owner-occupiers onto the rental queue or into homelessness.
Monetary policy in Australia should be reformed by supplementary humane, modest and economically effective policy to stave off collateral damage in the housing market during the worst part of the cycle.
Next month’s budget is an opportunity for the government to move beyond its “I feel your pain” rhetoric to a HomeKeeper-style policy for this particular group of temporarily squeezed Australians.
It will be too late for those who have already lost their homes.
But it could prove decisive at the margin to save a lot of others currently weighing up whether tents or cars are their best bet for shelter as the banks move in on their homes. These Australians don’t deserve to be incidental victims in government’s pursuit of the worthy goal of low inflation.
HomeKeeper isn’t meant to be a total solution to our hydra-headed housing woes. Rather, it’s a way to keep key elements of it from getting worse.
It can save real people whose foothold in society is temporarily, and often unexpectedly, precarious from tipping into a social security system that can’t cope with the challenges it already has.
Losing that foothold happens quickly. Regaining it takes a long time, if ever. The longer it takes, the more damaging to individuals and families, and the more costly it is to governments.
Albanese is right – sometimes there’s a role for government in providing help to get over that hump.
Chris Wallace is a professor in the University of Canberra’s School of Politics Economics & Society, Faculty of Business Government & Law. She has received funding from the Australian Research Council.
Security forces reinforcements were sent from France ahead of two rival marches in the capital Nouméa today, at the same time and only two streets away one from the other.
One march, called by Union Calédonienne party (a component of the pro-independence FLNKS umbrella) and its CCAT (field action group), was protesting against planned changes to the French Constitution to “unfreeze” New Caledonia’s electoral roll by allowing any citizen who has resided in New Caledonia for at least 10 years to cast their vote at local elections — for the three Provincial assemblies and the Congress.
The other march was called by pro-France parties Rassemblement and Les Loyalistes who support the change and intend to make their voices heard by French MPs.
The constitutional bill was endorsed by the French Senate on April 2.
However, as part of the required process before it is fully endorsed, the constitutional bill must follow the same process before France’s lower House, the National Assembly.
Debates are scheduled on May 13.
Then both the Senate and the National Assembly will be gathered sometime in June to give the final approval.
Making voices heard Today, both marches also want to make their voices heard in an attempt to impress MPs before the Constitutional Bill goes further.
The pro-France march is scheduled to end at Rue de la Moselle in downtown Nouméa, two streets away from the other pro-independence march, which is planned to stop on the Place des Cocotiers (“Coconut square”).
The pro-independence rally in the heart of Nouméa today. Image: @knky987
At least 20,000 participants were estimated to take part.
Security forces reinforcements have been sent from France, with two additional squads (140) of gendarmes, French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said yesterday.
While acknowledging the “right to demonstrate as a fundamental right”, Le Franc said it a statement it could only be exercised with “respect for public order and freedom of movement”.
“No outbreak will be tolerated” and if this was not to be the case, then “the reaction will be steadfast and those responsible will be arrested,” he warned.
Le Franc also strongly condemned recent “blockades and violence” and called for everyone’s “calm and responsibility” for a “Pacific dialogue in New Caledonia”.
CCAT spokesman Christian Téin, Arnaud Chollet-Leakava (MOI), Dominique Fochi (UC) and Sylvain Boiguivie (Dus) during a press conference on Thursday at the Union Calédonienne headquarters. Image: LNC
Tight security to avoid a clash New Caledonia’s Southern Province vice-president and member of the pro-France party Les Loyalistes, Philippe Blaise, told Radio Rythme Bleu he had been working with security forces to ensure the two opposing marches would not come close at any stage.
“It will not be a long march, because we are aware that there will be families and old people,” he said.
“But we are not disclosing the itinerary because we don’t want to give bad ideas to people who would like to come close to our march with banners and whatnot.
“There won’t be any speech either. But there will be an important security setup,” he reassured.
Earlier this week, security forces intervened to lift roadblocks set up by pro-independence militants near Nouméa, in the village of Saint-Louis, a historical pro-independence stronghold.
The clash involved about 50 security forces against militants.
Tear gas, and stones Teargas and stones were exchanged and firearm shots were also heard.
On March 28, the two opposing sides also held two marches in downtown Nouméa, with tens of thousands of participants.
No incident was reported.
The UC-revived CCAT (Field Actions Coordination Cell, cellule de coordination des actions de terrain), which is again organising today’s pro-independence march to oppose the French Constitutional change, earlier this month threatened to boycott this year’s planned provincial elections.
CCAT head Christian Tein said they were demanding that the French Constitutional amendment be withdrawn altogether, and that a “dialogue mission” be sent from Paris.
“We want to remind (France) we will be there, we’ll bother them until the end, peacefully”, he said.
“Those MPs have decided to kill the Kanak (Indigenous) people . . . this is a programmed extermination so that Kanaks become like (Australia’s) Aborigines,” he told local media.
“Anyone can cause unrest, but to stop it is another story . . . now we are on a slippery slope,” he added.
War of words, images over MPs Pro-France leader Sonia Backès, during a the March 28 demonstration, had also alluded to “causing unrest” from their side and its ability to “make noise” to ensure their voices are heard back in the French Parliament.
“The unrest, it will come from us if someone tries to step on us,” she lashed out at that rally.
“We have to make noise, because unfortunately, the key is the image,” she said.
“But this little message with the ballot box and Eloi Machoro’s picture, this is provocation.
“I am receiving death threats every day; my children too,” she told Radio Rythme Bleu.
The CCAT movement is placing a hatchet on a ballot box, recalling the Eloi Machoro protest. Image: 1ère TV screenshot APR
Hatchet and ballot box – the ghosts of 1984 During the CCAT’s press conference earlier this month, a ballot box with a hatchet embedded was on show, recalling the famous protest by pro-independence leader Eloi Machoro, who smashed a ballot box with a hatchet to signify the Kanak boycott of the elections on 18 November 1984.
The iconic act was one of the sparks that later plunged New Caledonia in a quasi civil war until the Matignon Accords in 1988. Both pro-France leader Jacques Lafleur and Lanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou shook hands to put an end to a stormy period since described as “the events”.
On 12 January 1985, Machoro was shot by French special forces.
The territorial elections day in New Caledonia on 18 November 1984 when Eloi Machoro smashed a ballot box in the small township of Canala. Image: RNZ/File
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Who makes the words? Why are trees called trees and why are shoes called shoes and who makes the names? – Elliot, age 5, Eltham, Victoria
Good question Elliot!
Let’s start with the first part of the question: who makes words?
Well, there’s no official person or group that’s responsible for making words. New words are invented by all of us getting creative. Mostly, it’s a matter of reusing words, or parts of words, and transforming them into new products. Language is the ultimate recycler!
One is to add things called “suffixes”, which are letters we add to the ends of words to change their meaning slightly. By adding a “-y” to “tree” and “shoe”, we can make “treey” (to describe something with lots of trees) and “shoey” (to describe people drinking from a shoe, an odd but old tradition). There are also things called “prefixes”. These are letters that go at the front of a word. For example, the word “subtree” describes a kind of shrub, and “overshoes” are something worn over ordinary shoes.
It’s also possible to combine whole words to make new ones. We can even put “tree” and “shoe” together to create “shoe-tree”, which is a block of wood we put into shoes to keep their shape. These types of words are called “compound words” — they are often written as two words (“apple tree”), but sometimes one (“shoelace”). English has never sorted out the rules here.
A third process, and one that’s really popular these days, is “blending”. This is when we mix words together (sometimes they’re called “frankenwords”, itself a blend of “Frankenstein” and “word”). Here are two made-up blends based on “tree” and “shoe”. They don’t exist — yet (perhaps they’ll take off!).
Treerific (“tree” has been squished with “terrific” to convey something wonderful that is related to trees)
Shoenicorn (“shoe” has been squished with “unicorn” to mean an unicorn with magical shoes)
Words and parts of words can combine and recombine to create a never-ending number of new words. Out of blended “treerific”, I can build “treerifical”, “treerificalise”, “treerificalisation”, “treerificalisational” and so on. The number of words is endless. But of course we can’t invent too many of these because it’s difficult to keep track of all the “-als”, “-izes” and “-ations”!
English words are also flexible. For example, “trees” and “shoes” are objects (called “nouns”), but we can turn them into doing words (called “verbs”) too — “to tree” (plant with trees) and “to shoe” (put shoes on).
We can also build words from the first letters of other words. These are called “acronyms”. Each letter in the word “tree” could mean “tall rustling evergreen entity”. Of course, this isn’t true, it’s just an example. In fact, most acronyms are names (for example, your school might introduce something called “TREE”, short for Tactical Response Emergency Evacuation).
Finally, English is also a word pirate that steals words from other languages — more than 350 in fact. Words like “tree” and “shoe” weren’t stolen but thousands of others have been, like “forest” and “sandal” to give just two (about 700 years ago, we pinched “forest” from French and a little later “sandal” from Latin). This term for this is “borrowing” — curious, because English has no intention of ever giving these words back!
Okay, so what about the second part of the question: why are trees called trees and why are shoes called shoes? This is a trickier puzzle, because both are among the oldest words in the English language.
Here’s a very early example of “tree” from an ancient poem written more than a thousand years ago. In Modern English, the sentence is “I saw a wondrous tree” but as you can see, the English in this poem looks very different:
Iċ ġesāwe syllicre trēow
At this time, there were lots of words for trees and also for different types of shoes (including what we now know as “sock”, originally a kind of slipper). Many of these words didn’t survive, but “shoe” (originally “sco”) did, even though shoes look very different now than they did hundreds of years ago.
Both “tree” and “shoe” can be traced back to the parent language of English, called “Proto-Germanic”. This was spoken about 2,500 years ago, but unfortunately nothing survives of the language, or perhaps people weren’t into writing things down back then. Even so, we can do some detective work to recreate the ancient words they grew out of: “tree” comes from something like “trewo-” and “shoe” from “skōhw-”.
We can go even further back in time to the grandparent of English — a language called “Proto-Indo-European”. About 6,000 years ago, the word “tree” probably looked like “dōru-”.
For centuries, people have wondered how words like “tree” and “shoe” were invented. There are lots of ideas around, but we’ll never know for sure because people have been speaking for more than 30,000 years. That’s a very long time!
Only one thing is certain. Humans are the only animals that can create a never-ending number of new words. Remember what we could do earlier with just the two words “tree” and “shoe’!
Hello, Curious Kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
Kate Burridge 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
Roles of health professionals are still unfortunately often stuck in the past. That is, before the shift of education of nurses and other health professionals into universities in the 1980s. So many are still not working to their full scope of practice.
There has been some expansion of roles in recent years – including pharmacists prescribing (under limited circumstances) and administering a wider range of vaccinations.
But the recently released paper from an independent Commonwealth review on health workers’ “scope of practice” identifies the myriad of barriers preventing Australians from fully benefiting from health professionals’ skills.
These include workforce design (who does what, where and how roles interact), legislation and regulation (which often differs according to jurisdiction), and how health workers are funded and paid.
There is no simple quick fix for this type of reform. But we now have a sensible pathway to improve access to care, using all health professionals appropriately.
I recently had a COVID booster. To do this, I logged onto my general practice’s website, answered the question about what I wanted, booked an appointment with the practice nurse that afternoon, got jabbed, was bulk-billed, sat down for a while, and then went home. Nothing remarkable at all about that.
But that interaction required a host of facilitating factors. The Victorian government regulates whether nurses can provide vaccinations, and what additional training the nurse requires. The Commonwealth government has allowed the practice to be paid by Medicare for the nurse’s work. The venture capitalist practice owner has done the sums and decided allocating a room to a practice nurse is economically rational.
The future of primary care is one involving more use of the range of health professionals, in addition to GPs.
It would be good if my general practice also had a physiotherapist, who I could see if I had back pain without seeing the GP, but there is no Medicare rebate for this. This arrangement would need both health professionals to have access to my health record. There also needs to be trust and good communication between the two when the physio might think the GP needs to be alerted to any issues.
This vision is one of integrated primary care, with health professionals working in a team. The nurse should be able to do more than vaccination and checking vital signs. Do I really need to see the GP every time I need a prescription renewed for my regular medication? This is the nub of the “scope of practice” issue.
How about pharmacists?
An integrated future is not the only future on the table. Pharmacy owners especially have argued that pharmacists should be able to practise independently of GPs, prescribing a limited range of medications and dispensing them.
This will inevitably reduce continuity of care and potentially create risks if the GP is not aware of what other medications a patient is using.
But a greater role for pharmacists has benefits for patients. It is often easier and cheaper for the patient to see a pharmacist, especially as bulk billing rates fall, and this is one of the reasons why independent pharmacist prescribing is gaining traction.
Every five years or so the government negotiates an agreement with the Pharmacy Guild, the organisation of pharmacy owners, about how much pharmacies will be paid for dispensing medications and other services. These agreements are called “Community Pharmacy Agreements”. Paying pharmacists independent prescribing may be part of the next agreement, the details of which are currently being negotiated.
GPs don’t like competition from this new source, even though there will be plenty of work around for GPs into the foreseeable future. So their organisations highlight the risks of these changes, reopening centuries old turf wars dressed up as concerns about safety and risk.
Funding is at the heart of disputes about scope of practice. As with many policy debates, there is merit on both sides.
Clearly the government must increase its support for comprehensive general practice. Existing funding of fee-for-service medical benefits payments must be redesigned and supplemented by payments that allow practices to engage a range of other health professionals to create health-care teams.
This should be the principal direction of primary care reform, and the final report of the scope of practice review should make that clear. It must focus on the overall goal of better primary care, rather than simply the aspirations of individual health professionals, and working to a professional’s full scope of practice in a tram, not a professional silo.
In parallel, governments – state and federal – must ensure all health professionals are used to their best of their abilities. It is a waste to have highly educated professionals not using their skills fully. New funding arrangements should facilitate better access to care from all appropriately qualified health professionals.
In the case of prescribing, it is possible to reconcile the aspirations of pharmacists and the concerns of GPs. New arrangements could be that pharmacists can only renew medications if they have agreements with the GP and there is good communication between them. This may be easier in rural and suburban areas, where the pharmacists are better known to the GPs.
The second issues paper points to the complexity of achieving scope of practice reforms. However, it also sets out a sensible path to improve access to care using all health professionals appropriately.
Stephen Duckett was a member of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce and is a member of the Commonwealth Department of Health’s Expert Advisory Panel for the Review of General Practice Incentives
Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is carefully managed to always reflect a pro-Israel bias.
Forget the humanity of 120,000 dead and wounded Palestinians and countless others facing famine and disease sheltering in tents or what’s left of destroyed buildings, even internationally recognised terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” are discouraged, along with “slaughter”, “massacre” and “carnage”.
Though such language restrictions are claimed to be in the interests of “fairness”, an earlier investigation showed that between October 7 and November 14, The Times used the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.
By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.
This carefully managed use of words is deliberate and insidious and, as Jack Tame’s interview with Israel’s ambassador on last Sunday’s Q&A programme showed, even our most experienced media people are not immune to its effects.
From his introduction, “establishing” that the genocide taking place in Gaza had its genesis in the October 7 attack by Hamas, and not in the Nakba of 1948, Jack Tame and TVNZ facilitated an almost hour-long presentation of pro-Israel propaganda, justifying its atrocities.
For its appalling lack of balance, including Tame’s obsequious allowance and nodding agreement with the Israeli ambassador’s thoroughly discredited claims of Hamas atrocities; “beheadings” “necrophilia” and for describing Israelis’ as being “butchered” (five times he used the word) while Palestinians were merely “killed”, this was a new low in our media’s record of bias when it comes to the presentation of the facts about the Palestine/Israel conflict.
In the very week that we prepare to remember the horrific sacrifices made in previous wars and even as Israel‘s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians brings us closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, that TVNZ should have, pre-recorded and so had time to edit, such a disgraceful presentation is simply appalling — and heads should roll.
It may come as a surprise to hear 2023 was Australia’s biggest bushfire season in more than a decade. Fires burned across an area eight times as big as the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires that tore through 10 million hectares in southeast Australia.
My research shows the 2023 fires burned more than 84 million hectares of desert and savannah in northern Australia. This is larger than the whole of New South Wales, or more than three times the size of the United Kingdom. The scale of these fires is hard to comprehend.
The speed at which these fires spread was also incredible. In just a few weeks of September and October, more than 18 million hectares burned across the Barkly, Tanami and Great Sandy Deserts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
I presented this research into the 2023 fires at the International Fire Behaviour and Fuels Conference this month in Canberra. I described the scale of these fires, why they occurred, and how fires could be better managed to help protect remote but ecologically and culturally important regions of Australia.
2023 fire spread in North Australia animation, drawing on North Australia Fire Information from firenorth.org.au (Rohan Fisher)
Why did this happen?
Fire and rain are closely connected. Rain triggers grass growth. When it dries out, grass becomes fuel for fires.
For example, you can see the pattern of more fire following wet years repeating at periodic intervals over the past 20 years of fire in the Northern Territory.
In this way, La Niña is the major driver of these massive fires in the desert.
Although 2023 was a massive fire year, 2011 was even bigger. In the NT alone, more than 55 million hectares burned in 2011, compared with 43 million in 2023.
When fuel is dry and weather conditions are extreme, lightning strikes tend to start more fires across savannah and desert rangelands.
Lightning across Australia in late 2023 using data from Andrew Miskelly at Weather Zone (Rohan Fisher)
It has been variously suggested in the media and on social media that these fires are part of a “normal” cycle, a consequence of climate change, or largely the result of arson. Such simplifications fail to grasp the complexity and history of fire management in desert Country.
The main driver of these fires was the very large fuel loads. These wet growing seasons are part of the natural cycle. While climate change can make fire conditions more extreme, in this case it’s not the main cause. However, the scale of these fires was not “normal”. can we briefly say more on this last point?
Traces of this long history of traditional fire practice can be seen in aerial photos of desert Country from the 1940s. Research analysing these photos has shown extensive and complex “fuel mosaics” spread like patchwork quilts over vast parts of the WA deserts.
The term mosaic refers to having many patches of vegetation of different ages, some recently burnt with sparse cover, some long unburnt with old, large and connected spinnifex clumps and small trees.
This provides habitat for a broad range of animals, because different species prefer different amounts of ground cover. It also hinders the spread of fire because areas subject to more recent fire have insufficient fuel to carry new fires for many years.
Aerial image from the 1940s showing a complex mix of burns through spinifex in the Great Sandy Desert. National Library Australia, CC BY
Efforts have only just begun to bring good fire management back into these landscapes in a coordinated and large-scale way.
In 2022–23 Indigenous ranger groups conducted extensive burning operations. They travelled more than 58,000km by air and road, burning from cars, on foot and dropping incendiaries.
These burns were astoundingly effective. Even though large fires still ripped through these deserts in 2023, by mapping the fuel reduction fires and overlaying the spread of subsequent wildfires, we can see the 2023 fires were limited by previous burns.
For example, the fire spread animation below shows fires moving through a complex mosaic comprising fuel of different ages. One fire can be seen moving more than 600km from near the NT border almost to the coast south of Broome. The fire weaves around previous burns and cheekily finds small gaps of older, continuous fuel.
Animation showing fire spreading through the Great Sandy Desert in 2023 (North Australia and Rangelar)
So without these earlier smaller controlled burns, the out-of-control fires would have been larger.
In the Great Sandy Desert of WA, the complex mosaic of spinifex of different ages persisted after these fires. The Indigenous Desert Alliance puts this down to more controlled burning in the past couple of years than in the ten years prior.
The fires of greatest concern to government agencies were the Barkly fires that threatened the town of Tennant Creek. These fires were large and fast-moving, feeding off fuel in a vast area of unmanaged country east of the town.
Here, a lack of land management increased disaster risk. The fire only stopped when it encountered four-year-old burned areas from lightning strikes.
The summer of 2023–24 was very wet across the Barkly and Tanami regions in the NT. Bushfires NT chief fire control officer Tony Fuller has warned of another big fire year to come as we head into the northern dry season of 2024.
Desert fire management is still under-resourced and poorly understood.
Ultimately the only effective way to prevent these massive fires in very remote parts of Australia is through a long-term, well-funded strategy of using fire over our vast desert landscapes to control fuel, as was done during previous millennia.
Rohan Fisher 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.
With only four more seats in the 50-member Parliament yet to be officially declared, there is no outright winner in the Solomon Islands elections.
As of Monday, the two largest blocs in the winner’s circle, independents and the incumbent Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare’s Our Party, were tied with 12 MPs each.
It is a significant result, given at the last election in 2019 Our Party did not even exist going into the polls, but was created by Sogavare with the sole intention of pulling together the large number of independent MPs that emerged from the election that year.
RNZ Pacific investigations have identified the location of some of the lobbying camps in the capital.
The Honiara Hotel camp in Chinatown was set up by former prime minister Gordon Darcy Lilo’s Solomon Islands Party for Rural Advancement a week before polling even began.
Sogavare’s Our Party, the largest grouping in the last Parliament, has a well-documented affiliation to the Cowboy’s Grill in the eastern side of town.
Solomon Islanders queuing up to cast their ballots in Honiara last Wednesday. Image: RNZ Pacific/Koroi Hawkins
The former opposition leader Mathew Wale, who gambled in setting up the country’s first ever publicly announced pre-election coalition “CARE”, is understood to be holed up at the Heritage Park Hotel in the CBD.
Prediction impossible At this stage, it is next to impossible to predict the final form of the coalition government because MPs are not legally bound to political parties and can move freely between the different camps.
In Solomon Islands, there is a stark disparity in both pay and benefits between government, opposition and independent MPs, which ups the stakes significantly and has been fingered by political experts as one of the root causes of political instability in the country.
Meanwhile, losing candidates around the country are already preparing election petitions ahead of a 30-day window for submissions which opens once all the election results are in.
In 2019, more than half of the MPs had election petitions filed against them but the majority where dismissed due to a lack of sufficient evidence.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Are all single people insecure? When we think about people who have been single for a long time, we may assume it’s because single people have insecurities that make it difficult for them to find a partner or maintain a relationship.
But is this true? Or can long-term single people also be secure and thriving?
Our latest research published in the Journal of Personality suggests they can. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, not everybody tends to thrive in singlehood. Our study shows a crucial factor may be a person’s attachment style.
Singlehood is on the rise
Singlehood is on the rise around the world. In Canada, single status among young adults aged 25 to 29 has increased from 32% in 1981 to 61% in 2021. The number of people living solo has increased from 1.7 million people in 1981 to 4.4 million in 2021.
People may also remain single due to their attachment style. Attachment theory is a popular and well-researched model of how we form relationships with other people. An Amazon search for attachment theory returns thousands of titles. The hashtag #attachmenttheory has been viewed over 140 million times on TikTok alone.
What does attachment theory say about relationships?
Attachment theory suggests our relationships with others are shaped by our degree of “anxiety” and “avoidance”.
Attachment anxiety is a type of insecurity that leads people to feel anxious about relationships and worry about abandonment. Attachment avoidance leads people to feel uncomfortable with intimacy and closeness.
People who are lower in attachment anxiety and avoidance are considered “securely attached”, and are comfortable depending on others, and giving and receiving intimacy.
At the same time, evidence suggests many single people are choosing to remain single and living happy lives.
Single people represent a diverse group of secure and insecure people
In our latest research, our team of social and clinical psychologists examined single people’s attachment styles and how they related to their happiness and wellbeing.
We carried out two studies, one of 482 younger single people and the other of 400 older long-term singles. We found overall 78% were categorised as insecure, with the other 22% being secure.
Looking at our results more closely, we found four distinct subgroups of singles:
secure singles are relatively comfortable with intimacy and closeness in relationships (22%)
anxious singles question whether they are loved by others and worry about being rejected (37%)
avoidant singles are uncomfortable getting close to others and prioritise their independence (23% of younger singles and 11% of older long-term singles)
fearful singles have heightened anxiety about abandonment, but are simultaneously uncomfortable with intimacy and closeness (16% of younger singles and 28% of older long-term singles).
Insecure singles find singlehood challenging, but secure singles are thriving
Our findings also revealed these distinct subgroups of singles have distinct experiences and outcomes.
Secure singles are happy being single, have a greater number of non-romantic relationships, and better relationships with family and friends. They meet their sexual needs outside romantic relationships and feel happier with their life overall. Interestingly, this group maintains moderate interest in being in a romantic relationship in the future.
Anxious singles tend to be the most worried about being single, have lower self-esteem, feel less supported by close others and have some of the lowest levels of life satisfaction across all sub-groups.
Avoidant singles show the least interest in being in a romantic relationship and in many ways appear satisfied with singlehood. However, they also have fewer friends and close relationships, and are generally less satisfied with these relationships than secure singles. Avoidant singles also report less meaning in life and tend to be less happy compared to secure singles.
Fearful singles reported more difficulties navigating close relationships than secure singles. For instance, they were less able to regulate their emotions, and were less satisfied with the quality of their close relationships relative to secure singles. They also reported some of the lowest levels of life satisfaction across all sub-groups.
It’s not all doom and gloom
These findings should be considered alongside several relevant points. First, although most singles in our samples were insecure (78%), a sizeable number were secure and thriving (22%).
Further, simply being in a romantic relationship is not a panacea. Being in an unhappy relationship is linked to poorer life outcomes than being single.
It is also important to remember that attachment orientations are not necessarily fixed. They are open to change in response to life events.
Our studies are some of the first to examine the diversity in attachment styles among single adults. Our findings highlight that many single people are secure and thriving, but also that more work can be done to help insecure single people feel more secure in order to foster happiness.
Christopher Pepping receives funding from the Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation, the Melbourne Primary Care Network, Beyond Blue, and the Sax Institute.
Geoff Macdonald receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Tim Cronin receives funding from the Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation, the Victorian Medical Research Accelerator Fund, and the Medical Research Future Fund.
Yuthika Girme receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Landscapes that have escaped fire for decades or centuries tend to harbour vital structures for wildlife, such as tree hollows and large logs. But these “long unburnt” habitats can be eliminated by a single blaze.
The pattern of fire most commonly experienced within an ecosystem is known as the fire regime. This includes aspects such as fire frequency, season, intensity, size and shape.
Fire regimes are changing across the globe, stoked by climate and land-use change. Recent megafires in Australia, Brazil, Canada and United States epitomise the dire consequences of shifting fire regimes for humanity and biodiversity alike.
We wanted to find out how Australian fire regimes are changing and what this means for biodiversity.
In our new research, we analysed the past four decades of fires across southern Australia. We found fires are becoming more frequent in many of the areas most crucial for protecting threatened wildlife. Long unburnt habitat is disappearing faster than ever.
However, evidence of how fire regimes are shifting within both threatened species’ ranges and protected areas is scarce, particularly at the national scale and over long periods.
To address this gap, we compiled maps of bushfires and prescribed burns in southern Australia from 1980 to 2021.
We studied how fire activity has changed across 415 Australian conservation reserves and state forests (‘reserves’ hereafter), a total of 21.5 million hectares. We also studied fire activity within the ranges of 129 fire-threatened species, spanning birds, mammals, reptiles, frogs and invertebrates.
We focused on New South Wales, the Australia Capital Territory, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia because these states and territories have the most complete fire records.
Large areas of long unburnt forest in New South Wales were burnt in the 2019-20 fire season. Tim Doherty
More fire putting wildlife at risk
We found areas of long unburnt vegetation (30 years or more without fire) are shrinking. Meanwhile, areas of recently burnt vegetation (5 years or less since the most recent fire) are growing. And fires are burning more frequently.
On average, the percentage of long unburnt vegetation within reserves declined from 61% to 36% over the four decades we studied. We estimate the total area of long unburnt vegetation decreased by about 52,000 square kilometres, from about 132,000 sq km in 1980 to about 80,000 sq km in 2021. That’s an area almost as large as Tasmania.
At the same time, the mean amount of recently burnt vegetation increased from 20% to 35%. Going from about 42,000 sq km to about 64,000 sq km in total, which is an increase of 22,000 square kilometres.
And the average number of times a reserve burnt within 20 years increased by almost a third.
While the extent of unburnt vegetation has been declining since 1980, increases in fire frequency and the extent of recently burnt vegetation were mainly driven by the record-breaking 2019–20 fire season.
Changes in the proportions of unburnt and recently burnt vegetation across 415 conservation reserves and state forests in southern Australia. Tim Doherty
Which areas have seen the biggest changes?
The strongest increases in fire frequency and losses of long unburnt habitat occurred within reserves at high elevation with lots of dry vegetation. This pattern was most prominent in southeastern Australia, including the Kosciuszko and Alpine national parks.
In these locations, dry years with low rainfall can make abundant vegetation more flammable. These conditions contribute to high fire risk across very large areas, as observed in the 2019–20 fire season.
Threatened species living at high elevations, such as the spotted tree frog, the mountain skink and the mountain pygmy possum, have experienced some of the biggest losses of long unburnt habitat and largest increases in fire frequency.
Multiple fires in the same region can be particularly problematic for some fire-threatened animals as they prevent the recovery of important habitats like logs, hollows and deep leaf-litter beds. Frequent fire can even turn a tall forest into shrubland.
Fire-threatened species Australia include (clockwise from top-left) the kyloring (western ground parrot), mountain skink, stuttering frog and mountain pygmy possum. Clockwise from top-left: Jennene Riggs, Jules Farquhar, Jules Farquhar, Zoos Victoria.
What does this mean for Australia’s wildlife?
Fire management must adapt to stabilise fire regimes across southern Australia and alleviate pressure on Australia’s wildlife.
Indigenous land management, including cultural burning, is one approach that holds promise in reducing the incidence of large fires while providing fire for those species that need it.
Strategic fire management within and around the ranges of fire-threatened species may also help prevent large bushfires burning extensive portions of species’ ranges within a single fire season.
We can also help wildlife become more resilient to shifting fire regimes by reducing other pressures such as invasive predators.
However, our efforts will be continually undermined if we persist in modifying our atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. This means conservation managers must also prepare for a future in which these trends continue, or hasten.
Our findings underscore the increased need for management strategies that conserve threatened species in an increasingly fiery future.
William Geary is affiliated with the Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.
Dale Nimmo receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions, and the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.
Julianna Santos and Kristina J Macdonald 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.
Why are we crossing ecological boundaries that affect Earth’s fundamental life-supporting capacity? Is it because we don’t have enough information about how ecosystems respond to change? Or are we unable, even unwilling, to use that information better?
We have a lot to learn still, but as we show in our research, using current ecological knowledge more effectively could deliver substantial environmental gains.
Our work focuses on improving links between research and ecosystem management to identify key trigger points for action in a framework that joins land, freshwater and sea ecosystems.
Specifically, we investigate solutions to environmental and societal problems that stem from the disparities between scientific research, policy and management responses to environmental issues.
We need managers and policy makers to consider ecological tipping points and how they can cascade though ecosystems from land into rivers and lakes and, ultimately, the ocean.
Gaps between social, political, ecological and management approaches between ecosystems contribute to difficulties in managing ecosystems. Author provided, CC BY-SA
This issue came into focus when New Zealand set up research collaborations known as national science challenges a decade ago to solve “wicked” social and ecological problems.
The challenges focused on environmental issues were deliberately created to concentrate on separate ecosystem and management domains (marine, freshwater and land). But all included research groups addressing ecological tipping points.
This was our inspirational spark. Our research highlights the consequences of managing land, freshwater and sea ecosystems in socially constructed bubbles. We focus on solutions where social and ecological connections are at the forefront of environmental management practices and decisions.
An example is the movement of pollutants such as microplastics from the land to the sea. Most of the microplastics found along coasts and in harbours are blown or washed off the land. While this pollution is a well recognised environmental threat to the marine environment, we have not yet focused on strategies to reduce the load.
Our work points to the ignored but critical issue that people’s impacts on land accumulate in the sea, but land management and consequent actions are not informed by these far-field effects.
This leads to lags in decision making which create undesirable environmental outcomes that are difficult to return from. But if we act on these connections, the environmental gains could be substantial.
Cyclones as a real-world example
As a result of massive soil erosion on the east coast of the North Island during Cyclone Bola in 1988, steep hillsides were retired from grazing and converted to pine plantations to help stabilise the land.
Fast forward three decades and a large proportion of the forest reached harvest at the same time. The exposed soil associated with clear felling was left draped in woody debris to protect it from rain.
However, Cyclone Gabrielle hit in February last year, with extreme rainfall washing both soil and woody debris into streams.
Cyclone Gabrielle washed tonnes of silt onto farms and orchards. Getty Images/STR/AFP
This destroyed habitats, transported vast amounts of silt and wrecked lowland farms, orchards and critical infrastructure. The debris also clogged harbours and coastal beaches, smothered seafloor habitats, destroyed fisheries and affected cultural and recreational values.
This real-world example demonstrates the severe consequences of lags in information flow and management responses. If land-use management decisions had considered the effects on other connected ecosystems and the potential for climate change to intensify those connections, the outcomes could have been different.
We could have implemented more diverse strategies in land use and put emphasis on restoring native forest and coastal wetlands.
Our vision is one where social and ecological connections across ecosystem domains are at the forefront of moving to a more sustainable future.
Living within planetary boundaries requires a paradigm shift in behaviours, including the way we link science and management to on-the-ground action. Crucially, we need to increase the speed at which new research is taken up and rapidly transition this into action that improves environmental outcomes at local scales.
This behavioural shift underpins the way to a more integrated, broad-scale ability to act and stay within planetary boundaries.
Our research shows we can, with trust and open minds, transcend the disciplinary silos to support new forms of research organisation. The challenge now is to extend holistic approaches into new practices.
This means identifying opportunities where connected research can alter behaviours across society, from individuals to global finance and governance. Central to this transition is recognising we are part of complex social and ecological systems and our actions have indirect effects and long-term consequences.
We need new research to provide this evidence. It will inevitably lead to new questions about fundamental ecological and integrated Earth processes.
We believe these holistic approaches will allow science to be more readily incorporated into decision making and ensure environmental perspectives are captured. This will lead to relevant, locally appropriate, integrated and robust environmental management actions.
Rebecca Gladstone-Gallagher receives funding from philanthropy, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), including from the National Science Challenges, the Marsden Fund and the Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships.
Conrad Pilditch receives funding from Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), including the National Science Challenge Sustainable Seas, Marsden Fund and regional councils. He is a member of the Sustainable Seas Challenge Leadership Team.
Simon Francis Thrush receives funding from MBIE, government agencies, international organisations and philanthropy. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Here’s something for the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia to ponder as it meets next month to set interest rates.
It has pushed up rates on 13 occasions since it began its attempt to restrain inflation in May 2022.
On each occasion, its rationale was that by making borrowing more expensive, it would take money out of the economy. Yet, at the same time, it has also been pushing money into the economy and potentially feeding inflation.
It helps to know a bit about the relationship between the Reserve Bank and the private banks that bank with it.
Banker to the banks
Each of the private banks has an exchange settlement account at the Reserve Bank. The banks use these accounts to make payments to one another.
Here’s why. Every day some of the customers of each bank want to transfer to money to the customers of other banks, usually to pay for services or goods.
To a large extent, the transactions cancel each other out, because, say, Westpac needs to transfer about as much to the ANZ as the ANZ needs to transfer to Westpac. But they don’t cancel out completely, meaning that at the end of each day Westpac might need to make a net payment to the ANZ.
It does this by transferring funds from its exchange settlement account at the Reserve Bank to the ANZ’s settlement account at the Reserve Bank.
If Westpac doesn’t have enough cash in its account, it will borrow from another bank that does, at a rate known as the overnight cash rate.
The overnight cash rate is the rate the Reserve Bank tries to influence when it adjusts interest rates.
How it adjusts the overnight cash rate is slightly more complicated. It sets two other rates.
The Reserve Bank pays interest to banks that have excess cash in their settlement accounts and it charges interest to banks that need to borrow cash from it to settle their payments.
It is by setting these two rates – either side of the overnight cash rate – that the Reserve Bank nudges the cash rate up or down.
Historically, the Reserve Bank ensured there was just enough cash in the exchange settlement system to meet the banks’ needs, neither too much nor too little. It called it a “scarce reserves” system.
From just enough cash to an abundance of cash
If there was too much cash in the system, the Reserve Bank sold financial instruments such as bonds to banks, requiring them to pay from their exchange settlement account. If there was too little, it bought financial instruments from them, paying cash into their account.
That’s until COVID. In 2020 it stopped buying bonds from banks, leaving cash to accumulate in their accounts in what it called an “abundant reserves” system. This was done to ensure the banking system had more than enough cash to deal with whatever was in store.
And because the Reserve Bank was also lending billions to the banks through its Term Funding Facility an awful lot of cash accumulated in these accounts.
Beginning in 2020, the amount of surplus cash in the system exploded, from very little in the years leading up to COVID to A$450 billion.
To start with, the Reserve Bank wasn’t required to pay much interest on these extra hundreds of billions because its cash rate target was close to zero. But as it lifted rates to get on top of inflation, it began to pay serious sums.
My calculations suggest that since the Reserve Bank began lifting rates in May 2022 it has paid out more than $25 billion in interest, in some months paying more than $1.3 billion.
To put that $25 billion in perspective, it is more than the $20 billion the government plans to spend on modernising the electricity network. An important difference is that for the billions paid out by the Reserve Bank, there’s no direct benefit to the public.
Each time the Reserve Bank has pushed up rates, it has had to pay out more in interest, which means it has been been pumping money into the economy potentially feeding inflation at the same time as it announced measures to restrain it.
Against this, in recent months the COVID-era Term Funding Facility has been winding down, as the three-year loans issued to banks expire. The last will expire in the middle of this year, winding back the surplus cash in exchange settlement accounts.
But my calculations suggest when this happens there is still likely to be $200 billion of surplus cash in the accounts and about $700 million paid to the banks in interest each month this year.
Excess cash is set to stay
It’d be open to the Reserve Bank to soak up the excess cash by selling the banks enough financial instruments to return to the system of scarce reserves.
It said ensuring the banks had just enough cash to transfer funds to each other had required a lot of effort on its part, forcing it to buy and sell financial assets daily, and sometimes more than daily.
And it said the banks seem to have adapted to having more than enough reserves, and the extra reserves made the system resilient to shocks.
It will move instead to a new system it will call “ample reserves”, selling enough bonds to limit excess reserves, but not too harshly.
This new system will mean that when it next pushes up rates (most likely not for a long time) it will again be working against itself to some extent, putting more money into the hands of the banks.
How much has the interest paid out by the Reserve Bank contributed to Australia’s inflation problem? I don’t know. But I think it’s time we consider the whole picture.
Matthew Crocker is a PhD student exploring the history of Australia’s monetary system and is a recipient of a Commonwealth Research Training Program scholarship.
Many Australians with disability feel on the edge of a precipice right now. Recommendations from the disability royal commission and the NDIS review were released late last year. Now a draft NDIS reform bill has been tabled. In this series, experts examine what new proposals could mean for people with disability.
Recent media coverage about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) frames the choices of people with disability as threatsto their safety or the safety of others. Such reports suggest participants who use unregistered providers could be putting themselves in harm’s way. Or that some participants – such as those with criminal backgrounds – pose unacceptable dangers to support providers.
But research shows choice and safety are not at odds when it comes to disability support. What does this mean for the recommendations from the review of the NDIS – especially given its push for evidence-based practice?
Part of the original thinking in developing an NDIS structured around principles of choice and control was recognising that not having those things puts people with disability in more vulnerable situations. Research indicates people with disability are more likely to be safe and free from abuse when they have choice over what services they receive and who provides them.
Previous research by oneof us (Sophie) also found some people feel safe as a result of having more choice.
When we interviewed people about why they use unregistered NDIS providers, most described feeling more secure when they were able to choose the right people for the job – those with the right attitudes and skills. One told us:
Safety for me means being able to work with people that I know have relevant qualifications and people that are embedded in my community.
This means being able to look beyond whichever providers happen to be NDIS registered and available in their area. Some people feel less safe with registered providers if they’ve had bad experiences with them before or they aren’t sure who the provider will send each week.
People we interviewed also talked about how they select their support worker team for themselves or their family members via interviews, trial shifts and reference checks. This builds a sense of whether the relationship will work or not.
Limited service options, particularly in regional, rural and remote areas, place people with disability in disempowering and risky positions. They may be dependent upon one provider for essential services.
Regulatory oversight is just one (albeit important) piece of the safeguarding puzzle. Choice – which promotes safety – is best supported when participants are informed, empowered, and have a range of people to go to for help, including when things go wrong.
Laura’s recent research found many in the disability sector, including people with disability, family members and advocates, view the NDIS commission’s complaints processes as inaccessible and difficult to navigate. One disability advocate pointed out:
You shouldn’t need an advocate to liaise with the body that has the responsibility of safeguarding your rights and protection.
Unfortunately, the NDIS review had relatively little to say about strengthening the complaints processes.
Since the introduction of the NDIS, there has been a rapid rise in gig economy-style employment. NDIS participants can use online platforms to employ sole-trader support workers rather than going through agencies. Some self-managing participants also choose to directly employ their support workers, effectively becoming small businesses in the process.
Gig economy work potentially involves risks for workers, as well as participants, because there isn’t any oversight or monitoring. That said, workers employed by disability service organisations also report low levels of confidence in organisational safety and reporting systems.
All of this points to the need for strategies to build and retain a high-quality, well-paid and safe workforce. This was noted in the NDIS review and the government’s draft National Strategy for the Care and Support Economy released last year.
Some NDIS participants employ and screen their own support workers, rather than using agencies. Shutterstock
What could support safety for everyone?
Rather than assuming choice and safety are in opposition to each other and further restricting choice, our researchsuggests the following priorities:
clear complaints pathways, with “no wrong door” referral models so people don’t miss the chance to lodge issues
accessible and responsive formats for submitting complaints
accessible and up-to-date information so people know their rights, can navigate the NDIS and choose providers
peer support with resources to promote these networks.
Both NDIS-specific and mainstream safeguarding institutions such as police, health authorities, consumer bodies and community services, need to build their capacity to listen and respond to people with disability.
Lastly, we need to foster “natural safeguards” – the relationships with family, friends and the community that keep everyone safe (not just people with disability).
Safety is about being connected and embedded within the community, where many people are looking out for you, checking in on you and noticing if you don’t show up to your usual activities. Supporting all people with disability to build and sustain these relationships should be a priority.
NDIS participants and workers face distinct challenges but the voices and concerns of both groups need to be heard and addressed by service providers and government. Ultimately, a scheme where people with disability are empowered to make meaningful decisions between quality services, and workers are valued and supported in their roles, will promote safety for everyone.
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.
New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters is putting off recognition of Palestine as a state, despite opposition Labour’s formal request that he make the move.
Peters said diplomatic recognition of Palestine was a matter of “when not if”, but doing so now could impede progress towards a two-state solution — and the focus should be on aid for civilians.
Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson David Parker had written to Peters, calling for New Zealand to take “meaningful action” by recognising Palestine as a state.
He noted this did not mean a recognition of Hamas, “which is one political party in the Palestinian territories”.
“There can be no lasting peace without Palestinian statehood,” Parker wrote, pointing to 139 of the 193 member states of the United Nations having already recognised it.
“Recognition signals this. It doesn’t matter that the state is yet to be fully established, with agreed borders. Many states and much of the Western world recognised Israel well before it was established as a state. Similarly with Kosovo.”
Parker said New Zealand should do this by inviting the Palestinian Authority to send an ambassador to present their credentials to New Zealand, a role which could be performed by the Head of the General Delegation of Palestine based in Canberra Izzat Abdulhadi.
‘Immediate ceasefire’ needed Peters, however, said the “immediate and urgent need is for an immediate ceasefire and the provision of aid to help alleviate the desperate plight of an innocent civilian population”.
“The government supports the establishment of a Palestinian state and has done so for decades. We must see momentum towards this goal and it’s a matter of ‘when not if’ we see Palestinian statehood,” he wrote.
However, he said they could not afford to take focus away from the current crisis.
“Bluntly asserting statehood unilaterally at this point, however well intentioned, would do nothing to alleviate the current plight of the Palestinian people. Indeed, it might impede progress.
“We would need to be sure that any change in our current settings would contribute credibly to a serious diplomatic push to achieve a two-state solution. We do not believe we are currently at that point.
“We are realistic that achieving this will require serious negotiations, including over the territory and political authority of a future Palestinian state. Statehood is neither a prerequisite for renewed negotiations, nor is it a guarantee they will progress faster.
“It is important for any Palestinian state that it does not contain elements that threaten Israel’s security, and that the Palestinian Authority can govern effectively. That is why we have said an organisation like Hamas — which commits terrorism — cannot be part of future governance in Palestine.”
Case for recognition Parker had laid out his case for recognition, saying Israel had ignored two resolutions of the UN General Assembly backed by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations, including “its closest ally, the United States, which has repeatedly said the loss of civilian life in Gaza is an unacceptable price to pay for Israel’s pursuit of Hamas”.
“The international community, including New Zealand, should not stand by and watch Israel breach international law and ignore entreaties without taking meaningful action,” he wrote.
“The absence of progress for many years, and the current war, make the status quo ever more untenable.
“The occupying Israeli government forces cannot legitimately continue to deprive Palestinians of basic rights to govern themselves.
“We believe it is time now for New Zealand to reinforce our opposition to the war and our support for a lasting peace including Palestinian independence.”
Parker said Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s recent statements also contemplating recognition was coincidental, and Labour had already decided to make the proposal to Peters.
He accepted it was unlikely Peters would be able to give an immediate response, other than to say no.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Asia Pacific Report says that in the UN Security Council vote last week, only the US voted against Palestine becoming a full member of the United Nations by using its veto. But an overwhelming majority of 12 nations out of the 15 voted in favour of admission, including three of the permanent members (China, France and Russia). Only the fifth permanent member, UK, and Switzerland abstained.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has ordered social media platform “X” (formerly known as Twitter) to remove graphic videos of the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney last week from the site. The incident was captured on the church’s livestreamed mass service.
In response to this order, X’s owner, Elon Musk, has branded the commissioner the “Australian censorship commissar”.
X had agreed to part of the take-down. However, it did not agree with removing the material entirely, telling media publications “X believes that eSafety’s order was not within the scope of Australian law and we complied with the directive pending a legal challenge.”
So what are the laws around this, especially because the church incident was quickly labelled a terrorist act by authorities? What powers do governments have in this situation?
They absolutely should be able to quickly and effectively remove content that’s damaging and devastating to the social harmony and fabric of society, particularly images such as terrorist attacks.
Other Labor ministers described X as “a playground for criminals and cranks” or accused the company of thinking they’re above the law.
Of course such damning remarks directed towards a much-maligned website and its equally controversial owner are to be expected. What politicians can do about it is another matter.
What do federal laws say?
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman-Grant, has the power to require the take-down of material under the Online Safety Act. The power she exercised under part nine of that act was to issue a “removal notice”. The removal notice requires a social media platform to take down material that would be refused classification under the Classification Act.
The video was circulating online as the New South Wales Commissioner of Police, Karen Webb announced the attack was a terrorist incident and the alleged perpetrator would be charged with a terrorist offence.
While it’s these laws being applied in the case against X, there are other laws that can come into play.
Australia also has a voluntary code of practice relating to disinformation and misinformation. This is administered by the industry group DiGi. The signatories to this code include Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Redbubble, TikTok, and Twitch.
X had previously adopted the code. X’s failure to comply led to its signatory status being withdrawn by DiGi in November 2023.
The government released a draft of a proposed bill to combat misinformation and disinformation in June 2023. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill would give the Australian Communications and Media Authority power to enforce an industry code, or make one if the industry could not. It is a variation of this bill, reflecting the substantial range of views on the draft, that now has bipartisan support.
Would this new law make any difference in this case?
The immediate answer is no. The eSafety Commissioner already has extensive powers. She used only one of those powers in this case, but there are are alternative courses of action.
Perhaps the gruesome images in the Wakeley videos might remind some of the Christchurch massacre.
In that attack, Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone (now part of TPG), cut access to sites such as 4Chan, which were disseminating video of the attack. This was without any prompting from either the eSafety Commissioner or from law enforcement agencies.
Telcos blocked websites like 4Chan in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch massacre. Shutterstock
The eSafety Commissioner has the power to require telcos to block access. She would need to be satisfied the material depicts abhorrent violent conduct and be satisfied the availability of the material online is likely to cause significant harm to the Australian community.
This means the commissioner could give a blocking notice to telcos which would have to block X for as long as the abhorrent material is available on the X platform.
Separately, the telcos have an obligation to do their best “to prevent telecommunications networks and facilities from being used in, or in relation to, the commission of offences against the laws of the Commonwealth or of the States and Territories” under the Telecommunications Act. This requires there to be an offence.
There is a potential that sharing the video material could be seen as an act done in preparation for, or planning, terrorist acts, if the video was depicting an incident police had decided was an act of terror. This would be a breach of the terrorism prohibitions under the federal Criminal Code.
All this is to say while Musk may be unhappy with the eSafety Commissioner’s actions, it’s just the tip of the iceberg of the laws that could force his site to remove terrorist content.
Rob Nicholls receives funding from the Australian Research Council for the International Digital Policy Observatory.
In past bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, the southern region has sometimes been spared worst of the bleaching. Not this time. This year’s intense underwater heat has triggered the most severe heat stress ever seen on record. Only 3% of surveyed southern reefs have not bleached at all. It’s shaping up to be the most severe and widespread bleaching of the southern reef, while mass bleaching has hit other areas of the reef in the fifth mass bleaching event in eight years.
We’re shocked and saddened by images of stark white coral skeletons. But the damage done by heat underwater goes much further. A living coral reef is a complex ecosystem teeming with vastly more species than the corals. Not only that, but 95% of the habitat on the reef is not coral, but sediment and sand, hotspots of hidden biodiversity. So, what happens to this cornucopia of life when subjected to extreme temperature stress?
We are currently on One Tree Island on the southern reef. It’s home to a research station and has one of the highest levels of protection within the whole reef.
What have we found? So far, the signs are not good. When we dive underwater, we can taste the change as stressed and dying corals release chemicals into water. When we bring back samples, the smell is distinctly sulphurous and sour. We see not just bleached hard corals, but also bleached anemones and soft corals. There are few starfish or sea urchins, yet algae growing on dead coral is attracting more herbivorous fish.
Coral reefs are complex, interlocking systems built on relationships. Living organisms need other living organisms to survive, whether as food, homes, symbiotic partners, or as substrate to grow on.
Think of the famous relationship between anemonefish and their anemones. These fish chase away predators of their anemone hosts, and their poo gives the anemone nutrients. In turn, the anemone’s stinging cells keep the fish safe from predators.
We are working to uncover relationships between different parts of a reef ecosystem, such as corals, fishes, sea stars, worms and microbes. We want to know the effect of higher water temperatures on these relationships.
To unpick this complexity, we need a lot of data. We do real-time underwater surveys, photogrammetry to turn photos into 3D models of reefs and sediment collection and sorting. We also record temperatures, deploy underwater coral incubation chambers to study respiration, and analyse the environmental DNA and nutrients held in sediments.
We need many sources of data to gauge the health of reef ecosystems on One Tree Island. John Turnbull, CC BY-NC-ND
The taste of a sick reef
From our first day at One Tree, we could see what the heat had done. Bleached, fluorescing and dead corals were on every reef we surveyed in the lagoon. Newly dead corals were beginning to be colonised by wavy, dense algae, known as filamentous turfing algae.
Near each reef, we could see more biofilm than usual on top of the sediment sections, which appear like white sand seen from above. Touching the sediments gave a sticky feeling, indicating mucus sloughing off bleaching corals settles here.
So far, the fish communities seem relatively unaffected. The flow-on effects are likely to be delayed, however, with changes expected in coming months and years.
All the large anemones we saw had expelled their own symbiotic algae and bleached, which suggests some anemonefish may soon be losing their homes.
Damselfish and gobies, which usually hide in live coral heads, were now having to hide in dead, algae encrusted coral. Common parrotfish species were there in substantial numbers, suggesting they are benefiting from eating algae on the dead coral.
Sea stars, shell animals and sea urchins were scarce. This was as we feared, as these mobile macroinvertebrates are in widespread decline. If they go, the reef will lose the ecological services which these animals provide, as these organisms recycle nutrients and eat detritus, while some also hunt prey.
From the sky, the Barrier Reef presents as patches and lines of reef, interspersed with a great deal of sand. These sediment and sand communities are not barren. They’re hotspots for crustaceans and worms, feeding grounds for many fish, and the sites where a great deal of nutrient cycling takes place. They are very likely to be hit hard by the heat.
What future can the reef have?
When coral bleaches, it’s easy to tell. It looks very different. But when broader reef ecosystems dwindle, it’s harder. Much of the damage done this summer will take months or even years to manifest.
What will it look like? Research on other reefs is a guide. First, we would expect to see falling numbers of coral-eaters such as butterflyfish. We would then expect to see a drop in coral-dwellers such as the damselfish and gobies living in coral heads.
In 2023, these acropora corals were alive. This year, they’ve died, and algae has covered them. John Turnbull, CC BY-NC-ND
For herbivores, such as algae-eating fish, we would expect to see first a rise in numbers, as their populations expand to eat algae, and then the potential for a substantial fall as the overall health, diversity and structure of the reef declines.
The rippling damage done by bleaching isn’t always one-way. Some immediate damage can be reversed and even lead to recovery, but we won’t know this for some time.
Extreme underwater heatwaves are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity as we continue heating the planet. We are entering unknown territory for these incredibly diverse and highly valued ecosystems, with flow-on effects we are only starting to understand.
Acknowledgement: We could not have done this work without the support of One Tree Island Research Station managers Ruby Holmes and Heinrich Breuer
John Turnbull receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the University of Sydney. He is also a volunteer on the Reef Life Survey program.
Emma Johnston receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Graeme Clark and Steph Gardner 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.
The relationship between witchcraft and teenage girls has been the subject of many books, films and television shows.
Over time, the traditional image of witch as crone has been replaced and reclaimed by a glamourous symbol of rebellion and feminine empowerment, notions that are deeply appealing to teenagers.
During the grunge era of the 1990s, these ideas reached their peak with Buffy (a film in 1992, and on television from 1997–2001) and Charmed (1998–2006). In 1998, Australian musician and television personality Fiona Horne wrote her infamous book situating witchcraft as an alternative form of spirituality and knowledge.
Director Alice Darling and playwright Bridget Mackey situate The Exact Dimensions of Hell in this 1990s suburban Australia. It is a theatrical exploration that unflinchingly examines themes of teenage girls, desire and power.
The story revolves around 14-year-old The Girl (Matilda Gibbs), who begins seeking information in online chat groups about witchcraft and magic(k) rituals. We understand this girl is isolated, struggling to belong and perceives herself as hideous.
Conversely, she believes she is special and worthy, claiming she has always been able to perceive “the unseen”. She wants to learn witchcraft to destroy her enemies and obtain her desires – which largely include being able to dance front row in the Rock Eisteddfod and make boys notice her.
Through these chat groups, she encounters The Witch (Daniel Schlusser), a lonely, ageing and terminally ill occultist who has already written one book, and desperately wants to make his mark writing another before cancer prematurely ends his life.
The Witch convinces The Girl he can teach her how to practise witchcraft and bend the universe to her will.
Through online chat groups, The Girl encounters The Witch. Darren Gill/Mackey, Darling & Collaborators
Traditional ideas of witches suggest that a witch is usually a woman who makes a pact with the devil in exchange for powers to undertake evil acts. In this way, Schlusser’s The Witch is situated as wholly unreliable and deeply problematic, a corrupt and evil force.
What unfolds in this relationship between The Girl and The Witch is a predictable, uncomfortable and disturbing manipulation. The Girl’s desire to encounter and submit to the possibilities of the forbidden become entangled in The Witch’s capacity to propel and groom The Girl into being part of his own fantasies of infamy and control.
Taking place on a stripped back set with minimal props (visual design by Meg Wilson), the performance oscillates between realistic dialogue and sequences of abstracted and stylised choreography.
The performance makes great use of projected text. Darren Gill/Mackey, Darling & Collaborators
Rituals and invisible forces are represented through movement sequences and hanging fabric demarcating the space. The performance makes great use of projected text which visually depict the occult practice of sigils and uses the symbol of a triangle, understood in some witchcraft practices as representative of the feminine.
The projected text also reflects the exact dimensions of power playing out throughout the story.
Witchcraft and ‘hysteria’
Throughout, the intentions of The Girl are placed at the forefront of the story, and the audience are given a clear depiction of the chaos and contradiction of this character.
There are moments in the play when the force of The Girl’s desire for power over her own life are physically inhabited and realised, and she shakes palpably with the intensity of her beliefs and her desire. Unfortunately, this theatrical attempt to centre her perspective and empower The Girl does little to provide her with narrative agency.
The Girl is both wild and trapped, playful and serious, certain and unsure. Darren Gill/Mackey, Darling & Collaborators
As we watch the horror of an abusive situation unfold on stage between The Witch and The Girl, her vulnerability is emphasised – despite her gaining confidence in her own power.
The Exact Dimensions of Hell does not focus on the complexities of occult practices, but rather works to depict the fearlessness and vulnerability of adolescence. The Girl is a romanticised embodiment of the multiple realities and truths of this particular age; she is both wild and trapped, playful and serious, certain and unsure.
Historically, the depictions of witches in popular culture have intersected with social anxieties over young girls as they enter into womanhood. These young women have often been positioned as dangerous and “hysterical”.
The Exact Dimensions of Hell works to reinforce this idea of the dangerous and hysterical teenage girl, and so misses an opportunity to critique how this notion has been constructed in social discourse. The choice to theatrically fragment the depictions of the catalogue of abuse The Girl has suffered at the hands of men make her an unreliable narrator for the audience.
We have often seen how women have been depicted as unreliable with the truth in arenas of public judgement or the halls of justice. Attributing these ideas of the dangerous, unreliable and hysterical to young women can define how they are seen, and how they are believed in these and other contexts.
It is not too big a jump to imagine the persistent interest young women show in witchcraft practices is related to a desire to control what is around them – and in so doing protect themselves from the very real danger they face as teenage girls in a patriarchal society.
The Exact Dimensions of Hell is at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, until April 28.
Sarah Austin 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.
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards, Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)
Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards.
Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the government – works in the public interest, and doesn’t encourage corruption and lobbying that produces poor decisions.
A bright light needs to be shone on the whole process, in which three ministers will be able to greenlight projects such as mining or housing development without the usual resort to the Resource Management Act processes. As I wrote about in early March, the whole new Fast-Track process will inevitably encourage closer linkages between vested interests and politicians, risking cronyism in decision-making – see: The Government’s new fast-track invitation to corruption
Because the normal democratic processes will be bypassed for projects chosen by the three ministers, what will be sorely needed is scrutiny from outside. I’m therefore proposing to run a campaign of analysis and awareness about everything to do with the new Fast-Track process, but especially of the projects that are being lined up for inclusion in the Schedules being inserted into the Bill. So far there has been a dangerous lack of transparency about this process – especially about which businesses and organisations are being invited to submit projects. Overall, the ethos of this reform programme seems alarmingly secretive and anti-democratic.
The name that I’m proposing for this campaign is “Fast-Track Watch” (Hashtag: #FastTrackWatch), to be hosted by the Democracy Project, which I run at Victoria University of Wellington. The main vehicle and output for this investigation and scrutiny will be a series of columns I’ll send out on the Substack platform, which I will make available to all media for free publication. Together, I hope that this campaign will be something of a watchdog on the Fast-Track activities.
In order to analyse the various organisations and businesses involved, and particularly their linkages with each other and politicians, I’ll be using the research databases I am developing as part of my broader programme of work on vested interests at the University. I will try to identify potential conflicts of interest and dubious relationships involved.
But I will also need the help of others: I’m hoping to crowdsource information about the potential Fast-Track projects and processes. Therefore, hopefully whistleblowers and well-informed citizens will provide additional information. Please send me your tips, ideas, feedback, or offers of assistance.
Likewise, if you’re a journalist or involved in media, please contact me if you want to collaborate in any way to help get material out to the public that helps keep scrutiny on the Fast-Track processes.
There will, of course, be many bona fide projects and proposals that deserve to be given resource consents or even fast-tracked by the government. This campaign isn’t against development per se, but merely being done to provide additional scrutiny and transparency, so that there is less chance of unscrupulous and damaging projects getting through the Fast-Track process simply because they’ve employed smart lobbyists, or have good connections with politicians and officials.
If you’re interested, please get in touch, in confidence. Contact me: bryce.edwards@vuw.ac.nz or just reply directly to this email. And please forward this “call” to other interested people, to grow #FastTrackWatch
Dr Bryce Edwards
Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington.
There are no silver bullets, magic tricks or secret hacks to solving complex public health problems. Taking on the global tobacco industry and reducing the devastating consequences of smoking has taken decades of incremental reforms.
Most of these reforms have focused on making smoking less attractive, to reduce the appeal of and demand for tobacco products. Countries that are serious about reducing tobacco use have all increased the price through high taxes, placed graphic health warnings on packs, adopted bans on all forms of tobacco advertising, and generally made smoking socially unacceptable through indoor smoking bans and emotive campaigns about the dangers of smoking.
Last week, the United Kingdom took an important step in shifting the dial on tobacco control, to not only focus on reducing the appeal and demand for products, but to totally rethink how tobacco products are supplied.
Under the new law, the legal age for cigarette sales (currently 18) will increase by a year each year from 2027. This means people born from 2009 will never be able to legally buy cigarettes in the UK. But what does this mean for Australia and the rest of the world?
A smoke-free generation
While some jurisdictions require tobacco retailers to have a license to sell cigarettes, and most countries put a minimum age on legal sales of all tobacco products, the UK looks set to be the first country in the world to phase out who can legally be sold tobacco products.
The focus of the UK law is not to criminalise smoking, but to end the sale of a highly addictive and uniquely dangerous product to future generations. Penalties for defying the law will include on-the-spot fines for retailers.
Aotearoa New Zealand was poised to be the first country to implement this same type of law in July 2024. However, when a change of government occurred in the 2023 election, the legislation was repealed as part of a coalition negotiation. The law was dropped alongside other public health measures that were set to reduce the number of tobacco retail outlets and a plan to reduce nicotine in cigarettes.
Undue tobacco industry interference and influence is viewed by public health experts as the primary factor in overturning these laws. Just as when Australia became the first country to implement tobacco plain packaging laws in 2012, the UK will need to be vigilant in pushing back against these same powerful commercial interests.
At the end of last year, a much-needed package of tobacco control reforms was passed in Australia. These include refreshing the now dated graphic health warnings on tobacco packages, requiring the tobacco industry to report its sales data and marketing activities, and revamping the tobacco advertising laws to capture new forms of digital marketing and vaping products.
These measures are all wholly welcome by the health sector and will be rolled out over the coming months.
While this suite of new reforms does not address the supply of tobacco products, the National Tobacco Strategy 2023–2030 has a goal to reduce daily smoking prevalence to 5% or less by 2030. Current daily smoking in Australia is at 10.6%, and provided we continue to innovate and adopt progressive policies we can reach this target. Of course, we should not be content to stop at 5%, but must embrace a goal of being a smoke-free country.
One of the key priority areas to reach this goal is to “strengthen regulation to reduce the supply, availability and accessibility of tobacco products”. Specifically, the National Tobacco Strategy will “consider the feasibility of raising the minimum age of purchase of tobacco products and monitor international developments on this matter”.
We’ve seen incremental reforms to tobacco control policies over several years. Milles Studio/Shutterstock
There is a clear government mandate to keep in step with international best-practice in tobacco control. This is the key reason the tobacco industry opposes innovative law reforms so strongly, even in relatively small countries like New Zealand.
When a public health measure is successfully adopted and proven effective in one nation, it has a habit of spreading quite quickly to others. As an example, plain packaging laws are now commonplace after surviving multiple tobacco industry legal challenges in Australia. So we may soon see similar age-restrictive laws introduced in Australia and other countries.
Australia is currently debating legislation that will place further restrictions on how vaping products are sold. In these proposed laws, we have an opportunity to protect young people from lifelong addiction.
If passed, these laws will also set a powerful precedent that harmful and addictive products should not be sold as consumer goods in the same shops that sell everyday household groceries like bread, fruit and milk.
When it comes to smoking, future generations will look back and shake their heads that we ever allowed a product that kills 20,500 Australians a year to be so casually available, anywhere and any time.
Becky Freeman is an Expert Advisor to the Cancer Council Tobacco Issues Committee and a member of the Cancer Institute Vaping Communications Advisory Panel. These are unpaid roles. She has received relevant competitive grants that include a focus on e-cigarettes/vaping from the NHMRC, MRFF, NSW Health, the Ian Potter Foundation, VicHealth, and Healthway WA; relevant research contracts from the Cancer Institute NSW and the Cancer Council NSW; relevant personal/consulting fees from the World Health Organization, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Department of Health, BMJ Tobacco Control, the Heart Foundation NSW, the US FDA, the NHMRC e-cigarette working committee, NSW Health, and Cancer Council NSW; and relevant travel expenses from the Oceania Tobacco Control Conference and the Australia Public Health Association preventive health conference.
We breathe oxygen and nitrogen gas in our atmosphere every day, but did you know that these gases also float through space, around and between galaxies?
Gas outflows from galaxies happen when supernovae – the explosive deaths of stars – eject a mixture of gas and heavy elements such as oxygen, sulphur and even nickel. In addition to “polluting” space with heavy elements, these outflows also play a key role in star formation within galaxies as a whole.
Observing outflows from galaxies is hard, because the gas is many times fainter than the light from the galaxy itself. As a result, we have observed outflows in only a handful of galaxies in the nearby universe.
This lack of data has significantly limited our understanding of their physical nature. It means that every time we do find a new outflow, we gain a wealth of new information.
Telescope image shows the galaxy NGC 4383 with gas flowing from its core at a staggering rate due to star formation. ESO/A. Watts et al., CC BY
Gas outflows regulate how stars form
Galaxies grow through star formation, a process regulated by the gas supply: the raw fuel for new stars. While new stars are constantly forming, the most massive stars are also ending their lives as supernovae: chemically enriched explosions that sweep up the surrounding gas and carry it out of the galaxy.
This forms an outflow, one of the main methods for removing gas from galaxies. This makes them a key regulator of star formation, and thus the growth of galaxies.
They’re also an effective method for distributing the elements necessary for forming planets like Earth.
The focus of our research was the spiral galaxy NGC 4383, a peculiar object forming many stars in its centre. We had an inkling that something more was going on, perhaps even the presence of an outflow.
Still, we needed more information to pinpoint how this galaxy was evolving. To this end, we observed NGC 4383 with one of the most sensitive ground-based instruments in the world: the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) mounted on the European Southern Observatory’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) on Cerro Paranal, a mountain in northern Chile.
A spectacular image
The data we got were more spectacular than we ever could have imagined.
We see clearly the presence of a massive outflow of gas extending 20,000 light-years from the galaxy’s centre. The total mass of gas contained in the outflow is equivalent to 50 million times the mass of our own Sun. That is a significant number of stars this galaxy won’t form any time soon.
MUSE takes more than just a picture of a galaxy. Each pixel in the image contains a spectrum of light, similar to how a rainbow shows us the spectrum of sunlight.
Each element in the universe has a unique spectral signature, and the locations of these signatures are shifted by how fast gas in a galaxy moves. As a result, we could also map the movement of gas and chemical elements in NGC 4383 in great detail.
The galaxy NGC 4383 in myriad colours or wavelengths of light. Different elements like hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur or nitrogen emit light at very specific wavelengths, highlighted here as the animation scans through different colours.
We found that there is no smooth escape for this gas, and the outflow contains turbulent shells and chimney-like structures resulting from the violent nature of the supernova explosions that are expelling it.
Our ability to trace the gas motions lets us clock the gas as escaping at the mind-blowing rate of over 200 kilometres per second.
We observed the chemical signatures of several heavy elements – among them, oxygen, sulphur and nitrogen – being carried by the outflowing gas to pollute the space around the galaxy. Now, if I’ve made you worried about space pollution, don’t fret. This is the good kind of pollution, as these heavy elements are the same ones that make up the world around us and are essential for life as we know it.
Our results are the first from a new project, called MAUVE, aimed at building a detailed understanding of star formation and the chemical evolution of galaxies. If these data are anything to go by, I’d say the biggest surprises are still to come.
A new group of drugs called nitazenes has been detected in Australia. They have been sold as heroin as well as other drugs like ketamine.
Concerns about the potential harms associated with these drugs, and users not knowing what they’re taking, have led to government health alerts and coroners recommendations for drug-checking.
Nitazenes are similar to the drug fentanyl, which has led to unprecedented deaths in North America. Fentanyl is the prescription opioid that caused Prince’s death in 2016. Some are similar to fentanyl in strength, while others can be up to 50 times stronger than fentanyl.
Australia has an opportunity to learn from the North American experience of severe harms related to a highly contaminated drug supply, prior to these drugs becoming common here.
What’s the difference between heroin, fentanyl and nitazenes?
Fentanyl and nitazenes are highly-potent “synthetic” opioids, meaning they’re made in a laboratory. This differs from morphine or heroin which come from the opium poppy.
Although fentanyl is a prescription opioid, most fentanyl in the US drug market is made illegally in labs. Illegally manufactured fentanyl has had catastrophic impacts in North America, accounting for most drug deaths in the US and Canada.
Fentanyl is estimated to be up to 50 times more potent than heroin with a fast onset of action, reducing the time available to respond to an overdose.
Illegally manufactured fentanyl has had catastrophic impacts in the US and Canada. Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
However, there are concerns this new class of drugs, the nitazenes, may be different. Nitazenes were developed and tested in the 1950s by pharmaceutical companies, but unlike fentanyl, did not proceed to therapeutic use due to their poor safety profile.
Nitazenes have caused increasing deaths in the United Kingdom and the US. Some of the first nitazenes identified included isotonitazene (2019) and metonitazene (2020). Several compounds have now been brought under international drug control.
Nitazenes vary in strength, with some being lower in potency than fentanyl, while most are similar to or stronger than fentanyl.
In contrast to fentanyl, where medical use has led to a good understanding of its effects, there is comparatively limited research on nitazenes. Limited ability to detect nitazenes has also hampered our knowledge and understanding of the extent of harms related to their use.
Globally, and in Australia, nitazenes have appeared in falsified pharmaceutical products (packaged to look like pharmaceutical pain medicines) and as contaminants in drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine, MDMA and ketamine.
A broad range of people could be affected by accidentally or intentionally taking nitazenes. This ranges from people who use drugs occasionally at music festivals, to people who regularly inject drugs.
This means a wide range of strategies will be needed to meet the needs of these different populations.
What can we do about them?
A range of proposed public health responses to the threat of fentanyl could be applied to nitazenes. Australia is yet to implement or fully upscale most of these harm reduction responses, but they would work for nitazenes. These include:
Other options include instant drug checking strips that can be used at home. An instant test strip for nitazenes has recently been made available overseas, but it may not identify all drugs of concern. Instant testing strips can be inaccurate, with false positives results related to the presence of other commonly used substances like MDMA, and they can be hard to read correctly. For these reasons, we don’t know how helpful they will be in Australia yet.
Supervised injecting rooms
Increasing access to supervised injecting facilities means that if someone injecting drugs inadvertently ingests a nitazene, medical care is immediately on hand. Antidotes such as naloxone can be quickly administered alongside other life-saving care.
Two such facilities operate in Melbourne and Sydney, so we would need many more locations to be established in different geographic areas to be effective if nitazenes become an issue in Australia.
Access to naloxone
Naloxone is a medicine that reverses the effects of opioids, and has been used in hospitals and by paramedics for decades to treat overdose. We have good evidence that trained laypeople can also administer naloxone to treat overdose successfully.
Increasing access to take-home naloxone, alongside opioid overdose education is critical.
People may inadvertently consume nitazenes contained in drugs sold as stimulants. This means having naloxone in a wide range of settings, including night clubs, festivals and music events, will be vital to respond quickly to unexpected overdoses.
As many drug-related deaths occur in people’s homes, education about the signs and symptoms of opioid overdose, and providing naloxone to people who use stimulants or other drugs is essential.
For people who regularly use or inject drugs, existing harm-reduction services are ideally placed to deliver messaging around nitazenes, including the heightened severity of overdose risk and current public health alerts about these substances.
Nitazenes present a unique threat in Australia. But drug checking, increasing supervised drug consumption facilities and expanding take-home naloxone with overdose education can help to reduce harm from these and other drugs in Australia.
Can the job of being a federal member of parliament be shared by two or more persons? Two prospective candidates for the inner-Melbourne federal seat of Higgins, Lucy Bradlow and Bronwen Bock, have announced that they will run as job-sharing independent candidates. They say they will “work week-on, week off, with a handover at the end of each week”. Is this legally and constitutionally valid?
Bradlow and Bock claim “there are no legal barriers to the inclusion of two candidates in either the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act or the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918”. They argue the Constitution permits parliament to change the number of members of parliament, and does not specify a particular number of members per seat.
They conclude that “the only possible barrier to two people running to represent the same electorate is that previous candidate nomination forms for the House of Representatives […] only allowed space for the entry of the name of one candidate” and the form should be “updated” to allow two or more names to be entered as “the candidate”.
What are the legal barriers?
It will take a lot more than “updating” an old form for Bradlow and Bock to be able to nominate validly as job-sharing candidates for Higgins.
Section 57 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act says:
One member of the House of Representatives shall be chosen for each Electoral Division.
Section 163 provides that “a person” is qualified to be elected as “a member” of the House of Representatives if certain criteria, such as age, citizenship and qualification as an elector, are met. There is no provision for more than one person to be elected as the “one member” for an electorate in the House of Representatives.
Nominations are required, by section 166, to be in the form set out in the schedule. This only provides for individual candidates to nominate for election as a member (not job-sharing candidates to be elected as a single member). A political party cannot nominate more than one candidate for an electoral division. Section 172 provides for the Electoral Commissioner to reject nominations that do not comply with section 166.
Section 284 deals with the outcome of elections. It says that once it has been ascertained that “a candidate” has been elected to a seat, the divisional returning officer shall publicly declare “the name of the candidate”. The electoral commissioner then certifies that name on the election writ, which is returned to the governor-general.
There would have to be major reforms to the Commonwealth Electoral Act (including to the form of the ballot paper) if it were proposed either that two candidates could run together to be “one member” for an electorate, or if two members could represent it on a job-sharing basis.
What are the constitutional barriers?
The Constitution does not determine whether electorates are single-member or multi-member. It left that up to parliament to decide under its electoral legislation. But there are restrictions on the number of members of parliament.
Section 24 of the Constitution ties the number of members of the House of Representatives to twice the size of the Senate. It also allocates the number of members in each state according to that state’s population as a proportion of the national population.
So if you had a system where you could have two job-sharing members in Higgins, that would mean you’d have to get rid of another member elsewhere in Victoria to stay within Victoria’s allocated number.
If every electorate could have two or more job-sharing members, it would be absolutely chaotic, as one wouldn’t know until each election how many members were elected and whether the number breached the Constitution.
For this reason, the only way to make it work would be to say there was only one “office” of member of parliament for an electorate, but that its duties could be shared by two or more people.
But that wouldn’t work either. This is because the Constitution treats members as persons, not offices. Before a person can sit or vote in the House of Representatives, section 42 of the Constitution requires the “member” to be sworn in. It doesn’t permit two people to be sworn in as a single member.
Section 37 of the Constitution refers to the resignation of “a member” (not one or more job-sharers) and section 33 refers to the election of “a new member” to fill a vacancy in the House of Representatives.
The provisions in the Constitution concerning the qualification and disqualification of members of parliament are also directed at individuals. The Constitution simply does not contemplate a “member” being comprised of two or more people who are subject to different qualifying or disqualifying circumstances.
While Bradlow and Bock have stated that if one of them resigns or becomes disqualified, that would mean that both of them would be – that’s just their view of what should happen. There is nothing in the Constitution or the legislation that addresses the issue, because both are predicated on there being a single member who is an individual person.
If each of the job-sharers, having been sworn in as members, turned up to vote in the house at the same time, each would be fully entitled to vote, giving their electorate double representation. It is not enough to say they have an arrangement between themselves to attend on separate weeks. This would not remove their legal entitlement as a member to attend or vote. Further, any contract that constrained a member from exercising his or her right to vote would be invalid, because it would be treated, under the law, as a contract for an “improper purpose”.
In 2015 in the United Kingdom, two Green party candidates sought to job-share. They took legal proceedings against the electoral officer who rejected their nomination. They argued references in statutes to a “candidate” and “member” in the singular should be interpreted as including the plural, and the law had to be interpreted in a manner consistent with the European Convention of Human Rights.
The High Court of England and Wales rejected their argument. Justice Wilkie pointed out that job-sharing by members of parliament would give rise to many difficult practical and conceptual problems, and these were not something a court was equipped to deal with or should determine through statutory interpretation. It was a matter for parliament to resolve, not the courts.
The same point should be made here in Australia. If job-sharing for members of parliament is desired, then at the very least this should be the subject of proper consideration and legislation by parliament to make the system workable.
But even then, it would be very difficult to make it consistent with the current constitutional provisions, so a referendum would be needed. This would also be the most democratic course, as the people could have their say about how they wanted to be represented.
Anne Twomey has received funding from the Australian Research Council and occasionally does consultancy work for governments, parliaments and inter-governmental bodies.
