The icebreaker of many a barbeque conversation is something like “what do you do for a crust?”
“I teach chemistry at university,” is what we usually reply. Then silence. Our new friend will usually go on to say they either hated or did terribly in chemistry at school.
Chemistry, it must be admitted, has an image problem.
Chemistry’s image problem
By the age of six, many children already have negative feelings about the word “chemical”.
Ask the average person what a chemical is, and they’re likely to tell you it’s something bad. Products advertise themselves as “chemical-free” – an assertion that makes no scientific sense (since everything in the world is made of chemicals) but resonates with the consumer.
The media often doesn’t help chemistry’s image. Positive news stories about science are often about a breakthrough cure for some disease, years before it might eventually be approved for use in patients, or the latest nifty-looking thing we’ve noticed up in space.
However, everyone in the world owes much of their present standard of living to advances made by chemists. Without the Haber-Bosch process for creating fertiliser from nitrogen in the air, half the world’s population would not have enough to eat. All modern medicines, from aspirin to RNA vaccines, owe their discovery to chemistry.
The lithium batteries that enable so many portable electronic devices – yep, chemistry. We could go on.
And indeed we will.
The chemical fertiliser that lets modern agriculture grow enough food to feed the world? That’s chemistry. FotoDuets / Shutterstock
The materials that allow the manufacture of just about everything you see were developed by chemists. The isolation of metals from ore is chemistry. The synthesis of lightweight plastics, polymers and composites is chemistry. The purification of silicon, enabling the computer and internet revolution, not to mention solar panels, is chemistry. Energy-efficient lighting due to white LEDs owes its development to yet more chemistry.
Chemistry has itself been enabled by advances in other disciplines, notably physics. The discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century advanced our theoretical understanding of chemistry, and many chemical reactions and behaviours can now be predicted using sophisticated computer programs.
At the same time, chemists’ study of molecules and atoms provided crucial data to physicists looking for that deeper understanding.
Chemistry and the future
Chemists are also working on solutions for the future.
Take batteries. The lithium on which today’s rechargeable batteries run is a scarce element. It is difficult to isolate, and its extraction is not without environmental drawbacks. Many chemists are working on alternatives. The batteries of the future might be based on sodium, for example, or some other chemistry yet to be developed.
The next generation of solar cells needs new materials. These are being synthesised by chemists, and rapidly tested in devices. Chemists have discovered materials that can work with silicon to pull more usable energy from sunlight, and that can make solar cells extremely lightweight and flexible.
Chemists continue to work hand in hand with clinicians on solutions to treating diseases, from rare conditions to unfortunately common cancers. We are developing new antibiotics, and antimicrobial coatings for medical devices.
Chemists also study the natural world, and how we affect it. Climate change might have its roots in chemical reactions releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere, but stabilising the climate will also require chemists to invent new ways to capture and store CO₂, or convert it to something else.
The central science
Even leaving aside the countless crucial applications of chemistry, fundamental chemical research born from pure curiosity is of vital importance. This work leads to solutions for problems we don’t yet know we are going to have.
Chemistry is sometimes seen as an “old” science: one that’s taught in high school but doesn’t prepare students for jobs in the real world. At best, chemistry is often seen as something that will get you a job in a horribly polluting industry.
But not always. At a kid’s birthday party the other day, a couple of GPs asked one of us what we did. Instead of the usual response to the mention of chemistry, the reply came as a pleasant surprise: “You enable the whole field of medicine,” they said.
As we have seen, chemistry is a subject that is at the core of past and future advances in society. It is still the central science.
Timothy Schmidt receives funding from The Australian Research Council and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
Jason Dutton receives funding from The Australian Research Council.
Sexual harassment is often considered to be a person-to-person act, but new research shows Australians are also experiencing and perpetrating workplace harassment in large numbers through technology.
Our latest study shows one in seven Australian adults surveyed reported having engaged in workplace tech-based sexual harassment. One in eight reported having engaged in both tech-based and in-person sexual harassment at work.
The research, launched today by ANROWS, is the first national study to investigate the perpetration of workplace tech-based sexual harassment. We found hostile motivations underpinning the behaviour, including wanting to frighten and humiliate victims.
Tech-based workplace harassment is common
We conducted a national perpetration survey with 3,345 Australian adults (18-65 years) who had participated in paid or voluntary work in the last 15 years. We also interviewed 20 industry stakeholders, including employer representatives, technology providers, regulators and workplace and online safety experts; and ran focus groups with 28 young adults (18-39 years).
The most common types of tech-based sexual harassment at work reported were:
sending someone sexually suggestive or explicit comments via technologies (such as emails, SMS messages or social media)
repeatedly inviting someone to go out on dates via technology
making sexually explicit phone calls.
When engaging in these behaviours, perpetrators used their work email (31%), personal phone or mobile (29%), personal email (26%), and work phone or mobile (25%). The majority of perpetrators said that their behaviour was a “one-off” incident (60%).
However, one in three acknowledged that they had engaged in tech-based sexual harassment towards a colleague on more than one occasion.
The findings align with other research on workplace harassment. According to 2022 figures from the Australian Human Rights Commission, one in three Australians have experienced workplace sexual harassment in the past five years. The same study found women (41%) are more likely to report experiencing workplace sexual harassment than men (26%).
To date, workplace sexual harassment has centred primarily around in-person or face-to-face forms of unwelcome and/or threatening sexual conduct. But as our reliance on technology in workplaces has increased, so too have tech-based forms of workplace sexual harassment. That is, sexual harassment that is perpetrated using mobile, online and other digital technologies in a workplace context.
What is workplace tech-based sexual harassment?
Workplace tech-based sexual harassment can include a wide range of behaviours within and beyond the physical location of the workplace. It can take place during or after working hours.
It can include:
unwelcome sexual advances, comments and jokes
sexual requests
relational pursuit (including monitoring or stalking behaviours)
sexually explicit and abusive communications
threats of physical violence such as rape
the non-consensual taking, sharing or threat to share nude or sexual images (also known as image-based abuse).
Harassment can be instigated by co-workers, contractors, suppliers, customers, clients, and members of the community. It can include, for example, sharing sexually suggestive or explicit comments or images about a public or high-profile figure, such as a journalist or politician, due to their work.
Clear gendered patterns emerged in the study. These included that men (24%) were significantly more likely than women (7%) to report engaging in tech-based sexual harassment at work. Men (10%) were more likely than women (3%) to report engaging in both tech-based and in-person workplace sexual harassment. It also most commonly occurred when the gender composition of the workplace was male-dominated (45%) or had roughly equal numbers of men and women (38%), as opposed to the workplace composition being female-dominated (16%).
There were also gendered differences in perceptions of how the behaviour would be viewed and experienced by the victim. Overall, men were significantly more likely than women to minimise a victim’s perceptions of the act, for example, by thinking the person would be flattered or okay with it. Men were also more likely to hold negative feelings towards the victim, such as wanting to humiliate or frighten them.
One of the key findings to emerge from the study was the high rates of hostile motivations underpinning the behaviour. More than one in four of those who had engaged in tech-based sexual harassment at work said they did so to: “frighten” (30%), “humiliate” (30%), “express their anger towards” (30%), “hurt the feelings of” (30%) or “annoy” (31%) the victim.
The high level of hostile motivations challenges some of the common myths around sexually harassing behaviour. For example, it is often thought that someone engages in sexual harassment because they want to have a sexual or personal relationship with the person. Instead, our findings highlight how these behaviours form part of a pattern of sexual violence designed to humiliate, degrade and cause harm to the victim.
We also found similar patterns in the indicators of perpetration. Those respondents with a high endorsement of sexist and gender-discriminatory attitudes, such as “women often flirt with men just to be hurtful” and “in the workplace, men generally make more capable bosses than women”, were over 15 times more likely to report perpetrating tech-based sexual harassment at work than those with low endorsement of these attitudes.
Similarly, respondents with a high endorsement of sexual harassment myths, such as believing “women enjoy being hit on at work” or that “stopping sexual harassment at work is as simple as telling your colleague you’re not interested”, were almost five times more likely to report engaging in tech-based sexual harassment at work than those with low endorsement of these myths.
This suggests that there are cultural and social norm challenges to be addressed by governments and workplaces in preventing sexual harassment of this kind.
Of further concern, less than half (39%) of those who disclosed engaging in tech-based sexual harassment at work said that a formal report or complaint had been made against them for their behaviour. This finding suggests there is a significant problem with workplace cultures and highlights potential gaps in appropriate internal and external responses.
Where to from here?
Employers, technology providers, and government policy and legislation must take a combination of actions to address tech-based sexual harassment at work. These include
clarity in workplace policies
greater awareness of the changing nature of workplace sexual harassment (including the use of technologies)
improved reporting options for victims and bystanders in the workplace
proportional and consistent responses to those who use tech-based sexual harassment at work
proactive steps to improve workplace cultures that promote equality and respect.
There are a range of challenges, particularly given how significantly workplace communication has changed in recent years. At the same time, industry (employer, technology platforms and government) responses have yet to keep pace.
However, new laws introduced in 2022 require employers to take proactive steps to eliminate sexual harassment. In addition, the Australian Human Rights Commission has new powers to investigate and enforce compliance.
These changes may provide the opportunity for new actions and responses to address and prevent tech-based sexual harassment in the workplace.
Asher Flynn receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Criminology Research Council and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety.
Anastasia Powell receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS). Anastasia is also a director of Our Watch (Australia’s national organisation for the prevention of violence against women), and a member of the National Women’s Safety Alliance (NWSA).
Lisa J. Wheildon receives funding from the Criminology Research Council and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety.
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are taking drugs like Ozempic to lose weight. But what do we actually know about them? This month, The Conversation’s experts explore their rise, impact and potential consequences.
You’ve no doubt heard of Ozempic but have you heard of Wegovy? They’re both brand names of the drug semaglutide, which is currently in short supply worldwide.
Ozempic is a lower dose of semaglutide, and is approved and used to treat diabetes in Australia. Wegovovy is approved to treat obesity but is not yet available in Australia. Shortages of both drugs are expected to last throughout 2024.
Both drugs are expensive. But Ozempic is listed on Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS), so people with diabetes can get a three-week supply for A$31.60 ($7.70 for concession card holders) rather than the full price ($133.80).
Wegovy isn’t listed on the PBS to treat obesity, meaning when it becomes available, users will need to pay the full price. But should the government subsidise it?
Wegovy’s manufacturer will need to make the case for it to be added to the PBS to an independent advisory committee. The company will need to show Wegovy is a safe, clinically effective and cost-effective treatment for obesity compared to existing alternatives.
In the meantime, we asked five experts: when supplies resume, should governments subsidise drugs like Ozempic for weight loss?
Four out of five said yes
Here are their detailed responses:
This is the last article in The Conversation’s Ozempic series. Read the other articles here.
Disclosure statements: Clare Collins is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Leadership Fellow and has received research grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), the Hunter Medical Research Institute, Diabetes Australia, Heart Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, nib foundation, Rijk Zwaan Australia, the Western Australian Department of Health, Meat and Livestock Australia, and Greater Charitable Foundation. She has consulted to SHINE Australia, Novo Nordisk (for weight management resources and an obesity advisory group), Quality Bakers, the Sax Institute, Dietitians Australia and the ABC. She was a team member conducting systematic reviews to inform the 2013 Australian Dietary Guidelines update, the Heart Foundation evidence reviews on meat and dietary patterns and current co-chair of the Guidelines Development Advisory Committee for Clinical Practice Guidelines for Treatment of Obesity; Emma Beckett has received funding for research or consulting from Mars Foods, Nutrition Research Australia, NHMRC, ARC, AMP Foundation, Kellogg and the University of Newcastle. She works for FOODiQ Global and is a fat woman. She is/has been a member of committees/working groups related to nutrition or food, including for the Australian Academy of Science, the NHMRC and the Nutrition Society of Australia; Jonathan Karnon 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; Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association and a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd (a medical device company) and a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design and testing; Priya Sumithran has received grant funding from external organisations, including the NHMRC and MRFF. She is in the leadership group of the Obesity Collective and co-authored manuscripts with a medical writer provided by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly.
April has been a bad month for the Australian environment. The Great Barrier Reef was hit, yet again, by intense coral bleaching. And Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek delayed most of her Nature Positive Plan reforms.
True, Plibersek did reject the controversial Toondah Harbour proposal, but only after a near decade-long grassroots campaign to save the wetland from an apartment and retail development deemed clearly unacceptable by her own department.
Rather than fall back into old patterns of developers versus conservationists, we have a rare chance to find a compromise. Labor’s embrace of “Nature Positive” – a promising new environmental restoration approach – opens up the possibility of a grand bargain, whereby developers and business get much faster approvals (or rejections) in exchange for ensuring nature as a whole is better off as a result of our activities.
Sustainable development was meant to save us
First, a quick recap. We were meant to have put the era of saving the environment one place at a time to bed a long time ago. Around 1990, governments worldwide took to the then-novel idea of sustainable development. We even had a special Australian variant, ecologically sustainable development, which our federal and state governments backed unanimously. This led to a national strategy and incorporation into well over 100 laws, including flagship laws like the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, passed in 1999.
The basic idea was, and is, sound: encourage development to improve our quality of life, while maintaining the ecological processes on which life depends.
But it’s not what ended up being legislated. The 1990’s laws did not require developers to make their projects sustainable. Typically, sustainable development was watered down into principles ministers only had to “consider”.
Meanwhile, our ecosystems have continued to go downhill. And in a 2020 review of the laws, Graeme Samuel pronounced the EPBC Act a failure.
Nature, positive?
When Labor was elected in 2022, it promised a new goal: “Nature Positive”.
This idea is no mere slogan. Nature positive is a serious policy idea. Think of it as the biodiversity counterpart to net zero emissions.
The goal is ambitious: stop the decline by 2030 and set about restoring what has been lost for a full recovery of nature by 2050. Rather than ticking boxes on whether principles had been considered, regulators would answer a much more basic question: will this development deliver a net positive outcome for nature?
Measuring progress is core to nature positive. We would take an environmental snapshot at the outset and track the gains and losses from there.
Like sustainable development before it, nature positive has been adopted with gusto by the Australian government, internationally and domestically.
In 2022, Plibersek committed to “stop the slide” and to “bake [the Nature Positive reforms] into law”.
Now, suddenly, we have lost momentum. The crucial part of the reforms – embedding nature positive in stronger environment laws – has been kicked down the road.
Plibersek has blamed complexity, extensive consultation and the need to get it right. Others see political concerns.
Could we strike a grand environmental bargain?
By pushing these laws back, Plibersek has effectively turned the already extended consultation process into an open-ended negotiation. Given consultation will keep running indefinitely, we’re now in the realm of regulatory co-design, previously only on offer to First Nations representatives for new cultural heritage protection laws.
Co-design implies proceeding by consensus. It would be politically embarrassing to run a consultation over years only to bring down the policy guillotine.
Consensus in turn raises the possibility of a grand environmental bargain, built around nature positive. Could this work? Might environment groups settle for a limited form of nature positive? Might business, in return for much faster approvals or rejections, support much stronger legal protection, especially for particularly vulnerable or important ecosystems?
Samuel certainly thinks so. At a recent Senate Inquiry, he recounted telling a meeting during his review:
If you each stick to your aspirations 100%, you’ll end up getting nothing. If you’re prepared to accept 80%-plus of your aspirations, you’ll get them, and that will be a quantum leap forward from the abysmal failure that we’ve had for two and a half decades
What might an 80% agreement look like?
If we are to turn decline into recovery, we need to ensure each natural system is intact. That is, it retains the minimum level of environmental stocks (such as animals, plants and insects) and flows (such as water, nutrients) needed to sustain ecological health.
If flows of water into wetlands drop below a certain threshold, they’re not wetlands any more. AustralianCamera/Shutterstock
Such thresholds for ecological health are everywhere. For example, keeping the platypus off the endangered list would involve maintaining its population close to current levels and working out how much of its riverbank habitat should be conserved.
For policymakers, this suggests environmental laws should define minimum viability thresholds. Some thresholds would be absolute; others would be crossable in one location provided equivalent restoration was done in another.
Environmental groups could take satisfaction that thresholds would be maintained in most cases. Ecosystems would function, rivers would flow. But governments would still override thresholds for important economic and social reasons, say to approve a critical minerals project.
What’s in it for corporate Australia? Business would gain upfront certainty about what can be approved and quicker approvals for projects. Environmental litigation would fall. But development options would be narrowed and offsets would become more expensive.
The government would achieve a key goal: major environmental reform. But it would have to say no more often, and be transparent about crossing environmental thresholds.
It would have to finance the science and planning needed. And it would need to boost investment in environmental restoration, to compensate for using override powers and for the cumulative impact of smaller-scale activities.
A grand bargain along these lines would not deliver nature positive in full. We’d still be losing nature due to climate change. But it might go close enough to offer hope of long-term recovery.
Is such a deal feasible? It depends on how players read the incentives for compromise. For example, business will not want to be locked out of prospective development areas, but will also be worried about the possibility of a minority Labor government dependent on the Greens next year.
Nature positive in Australia is down – but opportunity remains.
Peter Burnett is a member of the Biodiversity Council, an independent expert group founded by 11 Australian universities to promote evidence-based solutions to Australia’s biodiversity crisis. This article does not necessarily reflect the Council’s views.
Australian university students are beginning to set up encampments on campus, in solidarity with college protesters in the United States. Protesters are calling for the divestment of funding from weapons manufactures and Israeli universities. But these protests are just the latest in a decades-long history of political action on Australian campuses.
We have been researching the legacy of protest and activism on campuses in the 1960s and ‘70s as part of a broader study on the building of Australia’s modern universities in the post-WWII decades.
Australian universities have long been sites of protest. These have encompassed issues directly impacting students and their learning, such as assessments and curriculum, to broader concerns resonating with international politics and social movements. And while Australian students engaged with international political issues, one specific feature of the postwar countercultural protest movement revolved around the perceived shortcomings of the new university campuses being built.
Today’s students join this legacy of activists who helped shape higher education and the Australian cultural landscape.
News of international student protests in 1968 spread rapidly to Australia. Dramatic scenes of 20,000 students marching in Paris against capitalism and American imperialism and violent escalations at Berkeley in California on civil rights, free speech and the Vietnam war were watched intently.
Local activism in the early 1970s was equally transformative. Young Australians were engaged in debates around seismic social issues such as Vietnam, the weaponising of world conflicts, anti-capitalism, feminism, gender and race rights.
The Australian tertiary sector was experiencing rapid change. Just seven universities teaching 30,000 students in the late 1940s increased to more than 200,000 students by the early 1970s.
This expansion strained establishment aspirations of higher education as an elite preserve. Surges in student numbers and new campus building only helped to fuel dissatisfaction with perceived outmoded teaching, governance and pastoral care.
Bleak new campuses were characterised by some students as claustrophobic and impersonal. These concerns intersected with growing animosity towards functionalist “concrete architecture”, carrying associations of alienation and the destruction of what came before. This concern was shared by US, UK, French and Canadian students on new universities were experiencing similar expansion.
In the face of more prevalent campus surveillance – alongside outdated gender segregation, curfews in colleges and prosaic matters like free car parking – new buildings and spaces were co-opted in unintended and uncontrolled ways. Students barricaded themselves into offices and disrupted lectures. Blank building facades and empty paved areas became backdrops for impromptu happenings, banners and protest artworks. Campus perimeters defined marching routes out into the neighbouring communities.
Campuses gained notoriety in the popular press as settings for transgressive social behaviours and a “breeding ground” for social protest movements, including the pivotal Aquarius Festival staged at Australian National University in 1971.
Protests across the country
The location of Australian universities had an impact on the nature and intensity of their social action.
At the older, more traditional sandstone campuses, protests were often enacted away from the campus and filtered into the surrounding urban areas.
In Brisbane in 1967, more than 4,000 rallying students and staff left the St Lucia campus and headed to the city to demonstrate against draconian laws curtailing public gatherings without a permit. This ended with an estimated 120 arrests.
From 1968 onwards, students in Sydney and Melbourne marched into city centres. These actions peaked with the Vietnam Moratorium rallies in Melbourne involving an estimated 70,000 people.
New postwar Australian campuses on the urban fringes were host to many actions. Monash University became known as Australia’s equivalent flashpoint to the modernist Nanterre campus in Paris.
Monash’s Forum, adjacent to the new slab blocks of the student union and administration buildings, was one of the more notorious and inhospitable open spaces. It was the site of mass sit-ins, temporary stages, lampooning of academic leadership and the odd Kombi van on the lawns.
La Trobe University was a potent site for action on its raw campus, created out of ex-agricultural and industrial areas in Melbourne’s north.
Today, it features extensive gardens and inspired landscape reserves. Before this masterplan matured, the reality of life was very different. The first 480 students commenced on campus with just the library administration and one residential college completed in 1967.
Spaces such as the university’s central Agora and the colleges saw ongoing protests and rallies, fuelled by reportedly heavy-handed policing.
A series of sit-ins occupied administration offices in July 1971. Students barricaded the entrances to deliver their deputation to the university council. They rallied against internal governance, the conditions in the new colleges (including the standard of food), alongside shared external issues amid competing political ideologies.
At the University of New England in New South Wales, protests coalesced over challenges to segregation in campus colleges. There was a growing gulf of social and religious attitudes between university authorities and the new student body.
At Flinders University in South Australia, the central Registry Building was occupied in an epic month-long siege in 1974, sparked in part by a divisive Vice Chancellor accused of “working for the interests of US domination of Australia”.
Other complaints focused on exam assessments and out-of-touch academics. One resident of the new Flinders’ University Hall building wrote:
The Hall was designed on the basis that it should be as functional and inexpensive as possible. The result reminds one more of a prison than a college; long corridors with little cells on either side, grey brick walls wherever you go.
These and many other episodes of resistance, protest and activism on Australian campuses rapidly deescalated by the mid-1970s.
However, these events produced a new generation of voices that demanded a response, not only politically, economically and culturally, but also physically in terms of tempering the stark reality of many new campuses.
Today, in the face of increasing financial pressures on students, renewed political, social and environmental tensions and escalating international conflicts, we are witnessing campuses again as potent settings for physical actions.
Details released by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet under the Official Information Act reveal New Zealand officials have been considering involvement in AUKUS from the outset.
On the same day the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and United States was announced on September 16 2021 (New Zealand time), New Zealand officials gathered in Wellington for the first of two joint-agency meetings to discuss “Tier 2 AUKUS” – since restyled in official parlance as “pillar two”.
At the time, New Zealand’s non-involvement was put down to the pact’s central purpose of supplying nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, and New Zealand’s prohibition of nuclear-powered vessels in its territorial waters.
Then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said: “We weren’t approached, nor would I expect us to be.”
It wasn’t until March 2023 that possible “non-nuclear” involvement in technology sharing was publicly discussed in New Zealand, during a visit by US National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, Kurt Campbell.
However, the newly released information – provided following an Official Information Act request – shows “Tier 2 AUKUS” meetings took place at Defence House in Wellington on September 16 and 23, 2021.
A month later, on October 22, New Zealand government ministers were advised
there are likely to be significant opportunities [for] future cooperation with AUKUS […] beyond the submarines, particularly in the cyber and artificial intelligence areas.
Lack of detail and transparency
The existence of these previously undisclosed meetings and their “tier 2” agenda suggest AUKUS was always intended to expand.
They also raise significant questions about whether associate members might be subordinated within the pact, and whether accommodating associates is intended to add a multilateral legitimacy that enhances both the pact’s authority and credibility.
The notion of a “tiered” system runs counter to recent rhetoric around AUKUS. “Pillar two” has been presented as a standalone technology-sharing arrangement, carefully delineated from pillar one’s nuclear-powered submarine deal.
This also highlights the lack of specific detail around the proposed benefits of pillar two involvement. As it stands, we know remarkably little about the “advanced capabilities” being developed through AUKUS, due to the secrecy surrounding the pact from the beginning.
Initially conceived as enhancing “joint capabilities and interoperability” between the three AUKUS members, what became pillar two has since been presented as an industrial programme focused on emerging technologies and job creation.
Now, it appears the technology is being used to draw in prospective members with promises of opportunities for their aerospace and research sectors.
Australian critics have argued AUKUS is not a jobs programme, but a strategic initiative that could lock members into exclusive US trade controls, jeopardise research independence, and prevent international research and development collaboration.
These concerns recently led former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr to describe pillar two as “cobbled together” and no more than “fragrant, methane-wrapped bullshit”.
Pillar two technologies are also designed to be interoperable with US forces. So far, there are no assurances that intelligence or data from AUKUS partners would not be used by autonomous weapons systems or nuclear command, control and communications infrastructure.
Indeed, the US has made “integrated deterrence” a core objective of its defence policy, including how it works with “allies and partners”.
Pillar one of AUKUS sets a precedent whereby Australia will be the first non-nuclear weapons state to receive highly-enriched, weapons-grade fissile material and nuclear-powered submarines.
Pillar two technologies, including AI, are already contributing to the modernisation of US and UK nuclear weapons command and delivery systems.
Broader AUKUS interoperability will see foreign nuclear-capable bombers and submarines “rotated” indefinitely through Australia.
Opponents of AUKUS argue this violates the spirit and the letter of the Treaty of Rarotonga, which establishes a nuclear-free zone in the South Pacific and bans the use, possession, storage and – crucially – stationing of nuclear weapons.
No limited involvement
AUKUS has clear implications for New Zealand’s non-nuclear security and close defence relationship with Australia. But to date, New Zealand has not sought to challenge Australian assurances around non-proliferation and compliance with the Treaty of Rarotonga.
Strikingly, it appears New Zealand officials – not AUKUS members – designated pillar two as “non-nuclear”, while formulating public messaging about potential involvement in March 2023.
New Zealand has taken a leading role in nuclear disarmament, through domestic nuclear-free legislation and support for international treaties. Framing pillar two as technically “non-nuclear” could compromise such advocacy in future.
Prospective partners under pillar two must recognise there can be no genuinely limited involvement in AUKUS. Participation tacitly supports Australian acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, the maintenance of US primacy in the Pacific region, and potentially dangerous confrontation with China.
It also puts New Zealand offside with other key partners.
Few Pacific nations see AUKUS as addressing the principal security threat of climate change, or accept it as having a “non-nuclear” component. ASEAN states view it as establishing an unhelpfully adversarial relationship with China.
AUKUS aims to expand a tiered, de facto alliance through integrated, nuclear-enabling technologies. For New Zealand, this raises serious questions about whether there is any meaningful distinction between pillar one and pillar two.
Marco de Jong is affiliated with Te Kuaka, an independent group promoting a progressive foreign policy for Aotearoa.
Emma Shortis is Senior Researcher in International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
The rate of women killed by their partners in Australia grew by 28% from 2021–22 to 2022–23, according to new statistics released today by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC).
There were 34 women killed in intimate partner incidents in the financial year 2022–23, which is the equivalent of 0.32 per 100,000 people. The year before, the rate was 0.25 such homicides per 100,000.
Historically, the rate of women killed by their partners has been on the decline since the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has decreased by 66% over the past 34 years, according to the AIC.
However, the uptick in the homicide rate last year – coupled with the sharp rise in women killed in the first four months of 2024 – are cause for mounting concern for all Australians.
Historically low overall homicide rate
The AIC released two reports on statistics emerging from its National Homicide Monitoring Program, a database that has been in operation since July 1989.
The institute reports 232 overall homicide incidents were recorded by Australian state and territory police between July 1 2022 and June 30 2023, which resulted in 247 homicide victims.
The Australian homicide rate (0.87 deaths per year per 100,000 population) remains historically low. There has been a 52% reduction in homicide incidents since 1989‒90, indicative of a long-term downward trend in unlawful killings.
The report reveals police, prosecutors and courts are doing a good job, with 90% of cases being resolved through the justice system. That is, only 10% of homicide incidents in 2022‒23 were not “cleared,” meaning cases where an offender has yet to be identified, a suspect has not yet been charged, or a person is declared missing and police believe it’s linked to foul play.
A closer look at the figures
There are important features of the latest data that require further examination.
First, there is a significant gender disparity: in 2022-23, 87% of homicide offenders were male, while 69% of homicide victims were male. Predominantly, men are killing men.
And while men were most likely to be killed by a friend, acquaintance or some other person who was not a family member, women were more likely to be killed by a former or current partner (49% of all victims).
There is also a massive First Nations disparity in terms of victims and offenders.
Forty-nine of the homicide victims in Australia identified as First Nations (35 men and 14 women) – that is, 20% of victims.
The homicide victimisation rate of Indigenous men was more than seven times higher than non-Indigenous men at 7.65 per 100,000 people, compared to just 1.04 per 100,000. The disparity does not change with gender. The homicide rate was 3.07 per 100,000 for Indigenous women, compared with 0.45 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous women.
Of the 260 homicide offenders in 2022–23, 28% identified as First Nations.
These statistics merit repeating. First Nations people (3.8% of the population) comprised 20% of victims and 28% of perpetrators in homicide cases. That is an unacceptable state of affairs, which should be causing policymakers enormous concern.
Also noteworthy was that the recent rise in the homicide rate is mirrored in the domestic and family violence data found in police reports.
The number of people reporting sexual assaults has continued to increase over the past five years. According to the 2024 report of the Productivity Commission, the rate of victimisation in sexual crimes in 2022 was 124 per 100,000 population. In 2016, the rate was 95 per 100,000.
Why statistics require the right interpretation
From a criminologist’s perspective, there are a few things to bear in mind when considering these statistics.
The first is that interpretations of official crime data always require caution. There are various reasons for this:
much (if not most) crime is not reported to police or discovered by police
there are biases in the criminal justice system (especially when it comes to police discretion)
definitions of crime and counting rules and methods will differ according to jurisdiction
the data are usually generalised across state and territory jurisdictions, rather than presented as pertaining to specific cities, towns and regions.
Moreover, long-term trends are often ignored in the rush to analyse short-term crime rate fluctuations.
Having said that, homicide figures are usually the most accurate when tracking crime trends, given the obvious nature of the crime. So, making policy based on these data should be easier, one would think.
But this is not always the case. We need to bear in mind the impact of the institutional responses we are likely to offer when interpreting the data.
For example, how do we reduce or eliminate the seemingly unrelenting number of murders perpetrated by men against their intimate partners? How do we reduce or eliminate the massive disparity of violence affecting some Indigenous communities? One might think the best response is to arrest more people and lock more people up for longer.
Such an approach should, however, be a last resort. We need to recognise that every dollar spent in criminal justice services is a dollar that’s not spent on women’s shelters, education programs for young men on the importance of respect for women, and programs to improve the living standards and educational and employment opportunities for those who identify as First Nations. That’s where our dollars ought to be spent.
A decade ago, the American criminologist Elliott Currie talked about the importance of allocating resources designed to bring about what he referred to as “transformative intervention.” This involves:
helping people to move beyond the individualistic, often exploitative, often uncaring cultural orientations […] and to begin to relate differently to themselves, to those around them, and to the larger community (and the planet): to nurture alternative ways of looking at the world and their place in it that […] will be less violent, less predatory and less exploitative.
Such a transformation is something we need to take into account here in Australia as a matter of priority.
Rick Sarre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As Australia’s rapid renewable energy rollout continues, so too does debate over land use. Nationals Leader David Littleproud, for example, claimed regional areas had reached “saturation point” and cannot cope with more wind and solar farms and transmission lines.
So how much land is needed to fully decarbonise energy in Australia? When we switch completely to solar and wind, do we have the space for all the panels, turbines and power lines?
I’ve done the sums. All we need is 1,200 square kilometres. That’s not much. The area devoted to agriculture is about 3,500 times larger at 4.2 million square kilometres. The area of land that would be taken away from agriculture works out at about 45 square metres per person – about the size of a large living room.
We can ditch fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse emissions with negligible impact on agriculture. And in many cases, farmers can be paid for hosting renewable energy infrastructure while continuing to run sheep and cows or grow crops.
Decarbonising Australia’s economy will require electrifying many technologies that currently derive their power from burning fossil fuels. Then we need to ensure the electricity grid runs entirely on renewables.
When we electrify transport, heating and industry, annual electricity consumption per capita doubles. But we will need even more electricity to decarbonise aviation and shipping. So it’s reasonable to assume electricity consumption must triple if we are to complete decarbonisation, to 30MWh per person per year.
This would logically be achieved in three stages, starting with the easiest to achieve:
Stage 1: Solar and wind displace coal and gas from the electricity system. The federal government target of 82% renewable electricity by 2030 puts us firmly on track to decarbonise electricity. This trend is already well underway as shown by the graph below.
Stage 2: Clean electricity is used to electrify transport (electric vehicles), heating (electric heat pumps) and industrial heat (electric furnaces). This off-the-shelf technology could largely replace petrol and gas within a decade with negligible impact on the cost of running vehicles and heating homes.
Stage 3: The chemical industry is decarbonised. Clean electricity is used to make ammonia, iron, steel, plastics, cement, and synthetic aviation and shipping fuel.
Most solar power in Australia today comes from rooftop solar panels. These panels don’t require any extra land. But the area of rooftop is limited. In coming years, ground-mounted solar farms will become ever more important.
We’ll also need more wind farms. Each wind farm contains dozens of turbines and spans dozens of square kilometres. But only a small fraction of the land is lost to farming.
And it’s best to spread the solar farms and wind farms throughout the settled areas of Australia, to reduce the effect of local cloud and wind lulls.
Most solar and wind farms are located on sheep and cattle farms inland from the Great Dividing Range. Here there is plenty of sun and wind, and it’s not too far away to transmit electricity to the cities via high-voltage power lines.
Similarly, because solar panels are spaced apart, the area spanned by a solar farm is often two to three times the actual area of the panels themselves.
The panels are typically spaced to avoid losses from shading. As an added bonus, it means rain and sunlight can fall between them, allowing grass to grow and livestock to graze and shelter.
About 10,000km of new transmission lines will also be required for the energy transition. This sounds like a lot but amounts to just 37 centimetres per person.
Again, the area of land that would be taken away from agriculture for wind turbine towers and access roads is relatively small.
A further small area of land will be dedicated to new storage such as pumped hydro power and batteries.
The total area spanned by the solar farms, wind farms and all the other infrastructure is about 22,000 square km (mostly the land between the turbines in windfarms). But agriculture could continue largely as normal on most of this land.
By my calculations, the total area taken away from agriculture to power a 100% renewable energy (zero fossil fuel) economy is about 45 square metres per person. Considering Australia’s total population of 27 million people, that means the total land area required is 1,200 square km. The area currently devoted to agriculture is about 3,500 times larger than this.
Solar and wind farm developers do not have the same rights. They must agree on lease fees with landowners before gaining access to land. These fees are typically tens of thousands of dollars per year per turbine.
In the case of transmission lines, hosts in Victoria are paid A$200,000 per kilometre over eight years.
The transition to renewable energy has attracted opposition from some residents living near proposed infrastructure. But this can be overcome.
Successful solar and wind farm companies gain community acceptance through genuine transparency, particularly early in the project, to ensure no information vacuum is created and then filled with misinformation.
Paying neighbours as well as the renewable energy host farm, and establishing community funds, is also helpful.
Solar panels also provide shade for livestock. Clean Energy Council / University of Queensland
Plenty of land to share
The expansion of renewable energy infrastructure will be concentrated in Australia’s regional areas. But we can also expect new energy capacity from elsewhere, such as expanded rooftop solar and new offshore wind farms, which reduces the amount of land needed for the energy transition.
The location of good areas for solar and wind farms is shown in the Australian National University’s renewable energy heatmaps, which takes account of the solar and wind resources, proximity to transmission lines, and protected land. Farmers in areas coloured red can command higher prices for leasing land to solar and wind farm companies.
In short, Australia has far more than enough land to host the solar farms and wind farms required for the renewable energy revolution.
Arrest for witchcraft (1866) by John PettieNGV, CC BY-NC
In recent decades, governments the world over have increasingly taken action to address the dark history of witch-hunting. In western Europe, memorials to victims have been erected at sites in Bamberg (Germany), Vardø (Norway) and Zugarramurdi (Spain). Many states have also taken to issuing national apologies, with some even granting posthumous pardons.
The witchcraft exoneration movement isn’t simply about addressing past injustices. Violence directed at suspected witches persists across the world today and, alarmingly, seems to be intensifying.
The witchcraft trials memorial at Steilneset in Vardø, Finnmark, Norway. Wikimedia
The 2023 Annual Report of the United Nations Human Rights Council asserts that each year, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people are harmed in locations such as sub-Saharan Africa, India and Papua New Guinea because of belief in witchcraft.
One 2020 UN report states at least 20,000 “witches” were killed across 60 countries between 2009 and 2019. The actual number is likely much higher as incidents are severely under-reported. These sobering statistics indicate a need for urgent government action.
The exoneration movement
State-issued exoneration for victims of witchcraft persecution isn’t a modern concept. The most notable example was in the aftermath of the Salem witch trials (1692–93), in which at least 25 people (mostly women) were executed, tortured to death, or left to die in jail.
In the decades that followed, the citizens of Salem submitted petitions demanding a reversal of convictions for those found “guilty” of witchcraft, and compensation for survivors. In 1711, Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley agreed to these demands.
More recently, many states have moved to recognise and make amends for their historical involvement in witch-hunting. On International Women’s Day 2022, Scotland’s former first minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a national apology to people accused of witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries.
This witchcraft scene (circa 1770-1799), attributed to Spanish painter Luis Paret y Alcázar, shows three nude figures in a darkened interior, with one holding a skeleton by the shoulders. Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA
However, as historian Jan Machielsen warns, the exoneration process can also be problematic. For instance, apologies or pardons may ignore the central role of communities in historical witch-hunts.
Most witchcraft accusations emerged from neighbourly disputes and involved active participation by both the community and authorities. Even when European states ceased persecution in the 18th century, community-level violence continued.
Nonetheless, advocates for witchcraft exoneration projects argue that state pardons are more important than ever, not least because they can help address ongoing witchcraft-related violence.
Why is modern witchcraft violence growing?
Modern witchcraft persecutions are driven largely by religious fundamentalism and are further exacerbated by factors such as civil conflict, poverty, and resource scarcity. Biblical passages such as Exodus 22:18 are clear on the matter: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”.
Pentecostal evangelising has effectively demonised many cultural traditions – superimposing a strict religious attitude towards magic onto societies that have long accommodated such beliefs. This is evident in the ongoing crusade led by Helen Ukpabio, founder of the notorious Nigerian church Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries.
Witchcraft-related violence has also been a growing concern in the United Kingdom, particularly within the African disapora. One of the most shocking cases was the 2010 death of 15-year-old Kristy Bamu in London.
Bamu was tortured by his older sister and her partner for days, as they believed he was a witch. On Christmas Day, Bamu was forced into a bath for an exorcism, where he drowned. In response to such horrific cases, London’s Metropolitan Police launched The Amber Project in 2021 to address increasing incidents of child abuse linked to belief in witchcraft and spirit possession.
Misogyny has also been a prevalent factor in historical witchcraft prosecutions and remains so today. According to the UN, “women who do not fulfil gender stereotypes, such as widows, childless or unmarried women, are at increased risk of accusations of witchcraft and systemic discrimination”.
Witchcraft accusations are often a means to exert control over the bodies of women and girls, while maintaining male-dominated power structures. Accusations also play a role in human trafficking by making it easier to drive victims out of their communities.
Belief in harmful magic and/or witchcraft exists across many societies. India has a long history of witch-hunting and continues to be plagued by this terrible injustice. One victim was Salo Devi, a 58-year-old woman from a small village in the state of Jharkhand. In 2023 she was beaten to death by her neighbours for allegedly bewitching a baby.
This wooden fertility doll ‘akwaba’ was made in Ghana prior to 1914. Such dolls were used as fertility charms since infertility raised suspicions of witchcraft. The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA
Violence isn’t just used as a punishment against accused witches, but is often part of the remedy. Attempts at counter-witchcraft or exorcisms have been a significant source of harm, particularly for children.
Cultural beliefs surrounding disabilities and misunderstood conditions such as albinism have also been used as justification for beatings, banishment, limb amputation, torture and murder.
So prevalent is such violence that in 2021 the UN Human Rights Council issued a historic special resolution calling for the “elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks”. This resolution urges member states not only to condemn these practices but also to take action to abolish them.
What can be done?
The UN and numerous non-government organisations are implementing programs to educate communities at risk of witchcraft-related violence. Leo Igwe, a Nigerian human rights activist and director of Advocacy for Alleged Witches, has played a central role in increasing public awareness of this violence. More voices like his are needed. At the same time, increased recognition is only the beginning.
The UN has issued numerous denouncements and a few states have introduced anti-witchcraft bills. Additional legal protections, multi-agency task forces and national apologies will help bring more attention to this pressing issue.
Above all, it’s necessary to address the beliefs and motivations that underpin witchcraft accusations. By doing so, we can reverse the alarming rate of witchcraft-related deaths recorded each year.
The Witch Hunt (circa 1882-88) by Henry Ossawa Tanner. Wikimedia
Brendan C. Walsh 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 US Department of Justice is being urged to condemn and cease its reliance on the “Insular Cases” — a series of US Supreme Court opinions on US territories, which have been labelled racist.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin called them “a stain on the history of our country and its highest court”.
The territories include the Northern Marianas, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa.
A letter signed by 43 members of Congress was sent to the Department of Justice this month.
The letter follows a filing by the Justice Department last month, in which it stated that “aspects of the Insular Cases’ reasoning and rhetoric, which invoke racist stereotypes, are indefensible and repugnant”.
But the court has yet to reject the doctrine wholly and expressly.
US House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee ranking member Raúl M. Grijalva said the Justice Department had made strides in the right direction by criticising “aspects” of the Insular Cases.
‘Reject these racist decisions’ “But it is time for DOJ to go further and unequivocally reject these racist decisions; much as it has for other Supreme Court opinions that relied on racist stereotypes that do not abide by the Constitution’s command of equality and respect for rule of law,” he said.
Congresswoman Stacey E. Plaskett said the Justice Department had a crucial opportunity to take the lead in rejecting the Insular Cases.
“For far too long these decisions have justified a racist and colonial legal framework that has structurally disenfranchised the 3.6 million residents of US territories and denied them equal constitutional rights.”
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Durbin said the decisions still impact on those who live in US territories to this day.
“We need to acknowledge that these explicitly racist decisions were wrongly decided, and I encourage the Department of Justice to say so.”
In recent weeks, Virgin Islands Governor Albert Bryan, Jr and Manuel Quilichini, president of the Colegio de Abogados y Abogadas de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Bar Association), have also sent letters to DOJ urging the Department to condemn the Insular Cases.
Quilichini wrote to DOJ earlier this month, and this followed a 2022 resolution by the American Bar Association and similar letters from the Virgin Islands Bar Association and New York State Bar Association to the Justice Department.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When it comes to sports, they mostly experience men as coaches. However, our study shows when children are exposed to more women coaches, their perceptions and attitudes shift positively, challenging the traditional image of a coach.
Research has identified numerous reasons why few women coaches exist, with gender bias often at the centre of discussions.
The historical and dominant view in society is a qualified coach is someone who is tough, aggressive and emotionally focused on competitive success – traits which are typically associated with men.
This view is effectively a bias. We can be aware of the biases we hold, or they can be unconscious to us, unknowingly impacting our behaviour.
Social cognitive theory suggests biases are formed through our social interactions. From a young age, children begin to categorise the world around them through their early social experiences, and young children participating in sport can start to form schemas (preconceived ideas) of sport-related concepts (such as their coaches).
With men over-represented in coaching roles, it is no wonder children learn to associate men with coaching. This ultimately reinforces the dominant societal view that men are more suited to these roles.
Sports coaching is still mostly dominated by males.
What can be done?
So, can we shift the bias? To put it simply, yes.
Increased visibility of, and experience with, women as coaches, particularly at a young age, will serve to change the idea of what a sports coach “looks like” in the mind. This can ultimately minimise the deeply ingrained societal stereotype that sport leaders are men.
In our latest research, our team investigated the attitudes of 75 children (4-17 years old) and their parents towards women in coaching roles in community sport.
Across all sports, 96% of children had been coached by a man, compared to 65% who had been coached by a woman. This difference was even larger if we removed children who played netball or participated in swimming, as these were the only sports predominantly coached by women.
In a nutshell, the children were biased.
They were twice as likely to select a man’s face when asked to choose who looked like they would make the “best” coach from a series of faces of men and women.
Unsurprisingly, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – children’s attitudes, both positive and negative, towards women as coaches very much aligned with their parents’ attitudes.
Our study demonstrated that despite the relatively limited experience children had with women as coaches, when they had been coached by a woman, they were happier with the prospect of being coached by a woman in the future.
In addition, children who had previously been coached by a woman (compared to those who hadn’t) were three times more likely to choose a woman when asked to select the face they thought would make the “best” coach.
The bottom line is, children need to be coached by women as well as men. And the earlier, the better.
Quick tips for sports clubs
Changing attitudes and addressing biases is not a quick fix though. It requires consistent action from different angles, and time.
However, there are some simple and practical things sport clubs can implement to do their bit:
Expose children at an early age to women coaches
Influence positive parental attitudes towards women as coaches
Attract and retain more women as coaches.
Sport clubs should examine the level of exposure children in their clubs have of women as coaches and consider setting targets.
Investing in the promotion of women coaches can assist in influencing parental attitudes. For example, showing images and achievements of women coaches on club promotional materials such as websites, social media and newsletters.
It’s crucial to provide an inclusive and welcoming environment with opportunities for women to become and remain as coaches in sport.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Rinehart, Professor, Child and Adolescent Psychology, Director, Krongold Clinic (Research), Monash University
“Charlie” is an eight-year-old child with autism. Her parents are worried because she often responds to requests with insults, aggression and refusal. Simple demands, such as being asked to get dressed, can trigger an intense need to control the situation, fights and meltdowns.
Charlie’s parents find themselves in a constant cycle of conflict, trying to manage her and their own reactions, often unsuccessfully. Their attempts to provide structure and consequences are met with more resistance.
What’s going on? What makes Charlie’s behaviour – that some are calling “pathological demand avoidance” – different to the defiance most children show their parents or carers from time-to-time?
British developmental psychologist Elizabeth Newson coined the term “pathological demand avoidance” (commonly shortened to PDA) in the 1980s after studying groups of children in her practice.
A 2021 systematic review noted features of PDA include resistance to everyday requests and strong emotional and behavioural reactions.
Every clinician working with children and families recognises the behavioural profile described by PDA. The challenging question is why these behaviours emerge.
PDA is not currently listed in the two diagnostic manuals used in psychiatry and psychology to diagnose mental health and developmental conditions, the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
Researchers have reported concerns about the science behind PDA. There are no clear theories or explanations of why or how the profile of symptoms develop, and little inclusion of children or adults with lived experience of PDA symptoms in the studies. Environmental, family or other contextual factors that may contribute to behaviour have not been systematically studied.
Classifying a “new” condition requires consistency across seven clinical and research aspects: epidemiological data, long-term patient follow-up, family inheritance, laboratory findings, exclusion from other conditions, response to treatment, and distinct predictors of outcome. At this stage, these domains have not been established for PDA. It is not clear whether PDA is different from other formal diagnoses or developmental differences.
When a child is stressed, demands or requests might tip them into fight, flight or freeze mode. Shutterstock
Finding the why
Debates over classification don’t relieve distress for a child or those close to them. If a child is “intentionally” engaged in antisocial behaviour, the question is then “why?”
Beneath the behaviour is almost always developmental difference, genuine distress and difficulty coping. A broad and deep understanding of developmental processes is required.
Interestingly, while girls are “under-represented” in autism research, they are equally represented in studies characterising PDA. But if a child’s behaviour is only understood through a “pathologising” or diagnostic lens, there is a risk their agency may be reduced. Underlying experiences of distress, sensory overload, social confusion and feelings of isolation may be missed.
So, what can be done to help?
There are no empirical studies to date regarding PDA treatment strategies or their effectiveness. Clinical advice and case studies suggest strategies that may help include:
reducing demands
giving multiple options
minimising expectations to avoid triggering avoidance
engaging with interests to support regulation.
Early intervention in the preschool and primary years benefits children with complex developmental differences. Clinical care that involves a range of medical and allied health clinicians and considers the whole person is needed to ensure children and families get the support they need.
It is important to recognise these children often feel as frustrated and helpless as their caregivers. Both find themselves stuck in a repetitive cycle of distress, frustration and lack of progress. A personalised approach can take into account the child’s unique social, sensory and cognitive sensitivities.
In the preschool and early primary years, children have limited ability to manage their impulses or learn techniques for managing their emotions, relationships or environments. Careful watching for potential triggers and then working on timetables and routines, sleep, environments, tasks, and relationships can help.
As children move into later primary school and adolescence, they are more likely to want to influence others and be able to have more self control. As their autonomy and ability to collaborate increases, the problematic behaviours tend to reduce.
Strategies that build self-determination are crucial. They include opportunities for developing confidence, communication and more options to choose from when facing challenges. This therapeutic work with children and families takes time and needs to be revisited at different developmental stages. Support to engage in school and community activities is also needed. Each small step brings more capacity and more effective ways for a child to understand and manage themselves and their worlds.
The current scope to explain and manage PDA is limited. Future research must include the voices and views of children and adults with PDA symptoms.
Such emotional and behavioural difficulties are distressing and difficult for children and families. They need compassion and practical help.
For a child like Charlie, this could look like a series of sessions where she and her parents meet with clinicians to explore Charlie’s perspective, experiences and triggers. The family might come to understand that, in addition to autism, Charlie has complex developmental strengths and challenges, anxiety, and some difficulties with adjustment related to stress at home and school. This means Charlie experiences a fight, flight, freeze response that looks like aggression, avoidance or shutting down.
With carefully planned supports at home and school, Charlie’s options can broaden and her distress and avoidance can soften. Outside the clinic room, Charlie and her family can be supported to join an inclusive local community sporting or creative activity. Gradually she can spend more time engaged at home, school and in the community.
Nicole Rinehart receives funding from: National Health and Medical Research Council, Aspen Pharma Australia, J&S Wenig Family Philanthropy, Krongold Family Philanthropy, MECCA M-Powered Collective, Victorian Department of Education, NSW Department of Education, Grace & Emilio Foundation, Moose Children’s Foundation, National Disability Insurance Scheme ILC-DSS, Ferrero Corporate Social Responsibility, Australian Football League, Queensland Ballet.
David Moseley receives funding from: National Health and Medical Research Council, Aspen Pharma Australia, J&S Wenig Family Philanthropy, Krongold Family Philanthropy, MECCA M-Powered Collective, Victorian Department of Education, NSW Department of Education, Grace & Emilio Foundation, Moose Children’s Foundation, National Disability Insurance Scheme ILC-DSS, Ferrero Corporate Social Responsibility, Australian Football League, Queensland Ballet.
Michael Gordon 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 Hendri Yulius Wijaya, PhD Student in Political Science (Joint Supervision with Business School), The University of Melbourne
Around the world, more and more companies are publishing sustainability reports – public scorecards detailing their impacts on society and the environment.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports outline the positive and negative effects of a company’s activities, and the steps they’re taking in response.
Companies publish these reports as their own documents. But often, externally hired consultants play an invisible role in gathering data and framing it in a positive narrative the public will find easy to digest.
And getting these reports independently evaluated – “external assurance” – is still not required by many regulators around the world. As a result, they can allow companies to “greenwash”.
This could be by only disclosing information that makes a company look “sustainable” to the public. Or by only reporting on categories that paint them in a good light, and excluding the less flattering ones.
The problems inherent in this process create a blind spot for society. We urgently need to shine a light on consultants’ unseen involvement in sustainability reporting.
The business of polishing ‘facts’
It’s increasingly becoming mandatory for large publicly traded companies to disclose their social and environmental performance, particularly across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
In Australia, such reporting is voluntary, but widespread. As many as 98% of top Australian companies published sustainability reports last year. Consulting firms have quickly expanded their existing lines of service to capture this growing market opportunity.
Consultancies legitimise their expertise by offering businesses a range of frameworks and discourses. These convey the benefits of implementing sustainability measures and show how they could boost profitability.
But use of the firms has attracted heavy criticism.
Consulting firms conducting ESG work for major polluters have attracted harsh criticism. Vincenzo Lullo/Shutterstock
One argument is that consulting firms actually undermine their own sustainability services by continuing to do work for major companies in polluting industries, such as the oil and gas sector.
Another is that consulting firms’ contributions to sustainability are largely superficial. It’s too easy for companies to engage them just to tick boxes – perhaps to meet certain global standards or frameworks in bad faith, or create the impression they are responsible companies in other ways.
Problems with the process
Drawing on the lead author’s previous experience as a sustainability reporting professional in Indonesia, we wanted to take a closer look at these criticisms.
To examine the issue properly, we need to recognise that a power imbalance can arise between external consultants and the companies that hire them when sustainability reports are treated as an end in themselves or “time-bound projects”.
This attitude stands in stark contrast to the continuous strategy of measurement and disclosure that is required to create meaningful change at a company.
First, with such a narrow view of reporting, consultants are treated as simply a service provider – they are hired to complete a report within a given timeframe. But this limits their exposure to a company’s overall operations. Consultants have to rely on information passed on to them by employees, or they distribute oversimplified, generic forms for the organisation’s members to quickly fill in.
Consultants have to rely heavily on employee interviews for information on the way a company operates. fauxels/Pexels
Who they get to speak with to gather this information is also completely at the whim of their client. Under these constraints and tight deadlines, it’s difficult for them to perform meaningful data analysis.
Second, in practice, “reporting” often actually means “selecting which information shall and shall not be presented to the public”.
Using external consultants to prepare a report might seem like it would offer an unbiased or independent perspective. But the reports are heavily scrutinised by company management, who ultimately make the final decision about what to include.
And third, pressure to comply with certain regulations and standards can make companies shortsighted. Consultants are tasked with ensuring a company “ticks the box” and fulfils its reporting requirements. But if this is the primary incentive, the information presented can be superficial and lack context.
A deeper contextual analysis is necessary to describe what lies behind the raw numbers, including a company’s challenges, improvement targets and the path forward.
Consultants can still play a key role in the global move to ESG reporting. But the industry’s approach needs to change.
For one, sustainability reports cover a wide range of ESG topics – from climate to social inclusion. It is impossible for a single consultant to tackle all of them simultaneously. Companies should ensure there is a diverse range of experts in the teams they hire.
More countries could also pass laws requiring “external assurance” – independent, standardised cross checking of companies’ sustainability reports.
Meanwhile, companies and consultants need to return to the underlying principle of sustainability reporting: it’s not just about producing marketing material. Faced with a very real global crisis, it’s a key way to measure the impacts, risks and challenges of doing business, and present a company’s action plan to address them.
It’s important to be sceptical when the information in a sustainability report only shows good performance. Nobody is perfect. Neither is any business.
Hendri Yulius Wijaya is a member of the Indonesian Employers Association (APINDO)’s SMEs Sustainability Committee
Kate Macdonald does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A lot of the recent talk about maritime issues in Southeast Asia has focused on issues such as security, the Blue Economy, law enforcement and climate change. But there’s one maritime challenge that’s gone underdiscussed: underwater heritage.
Since the 1960s, Southeast Asia has seen a big rise in both commercial and illicit salvage of underwater cultural heritage. These items are often taken from unprotected sites and sold through middlemen and auction houses to collectors and museums. In this process, the connection to their original locations is lost or obscured, diminishing their cultural and historical significance.
This project aims to address that challenge by working out which object came from what shipwreck, and how it came to be out of the water and in collections.
To do this, we need to figure out where an item originally came from by applying the latest methods of archaeological science. Talking with local communities and authorities is another important way of gathering information about which shipwreck a particular object might have come from.
Learning more about and reconnecting items like this can change how communities relate to them. It can enhance everyone’s understanding of these artefacts beyond their commercial value.
The first is in Australia, consisting of about 2,300 objects purchased from antique markets across Indonesia by a private collector over many decades.
The second is in Indonesia, consisting of about 230,000 objects. This collection was amassed by the Indonesian government and is now at a shipwreck artefact warehouse in Jakarta.
Our goal is to work out which shipwrecks the items came from.
Dr Holly Jones-Amin (Grimwade Centre), Nia Naelul Hasanah Ridwan, Adria Yuky Kristiana, Sutenti (Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries), and Alqiz Lukman (National Research and Innovation Agency) examine an ‘orphaned object’. Martin Polkinghorne
A 2001 UNESCO convention prioritises protection and preservation of these sites, and international cooperation to achieve those goals. The central idea is that cultural heritage (including the kind found underwater) can help foster local, national and regional identity.
We see taking these “orphaned objects” languishing in private or institutional collections and reconnecting them with their original countries and communities as an important part of that broader goal.
Shipwrecks and their cargo can be sites of conflict
From South America to the South China Sea, state and non-state actors (such as curious tourists or people seeking to profit from shipwrecks) are making various claims on ancient shipwrecks. Some are motivated by nationalism, others by money.
It’s also important to remember local communities engage with heritage in unique ways. What makes sense to policy makers, scientists or communities in one place won’t always make sense to those in another place.
Our project seeks to reconnect “orphaned” objects – cultural objects that have been recovered unethically, illegally or in some other problematic way. One example is underwater sites that have been commercially salvaged (meaning items that were recovered and then sold for profit) rather than scientifically excavated.
Identifying the original find-spots for these orphaned objects won’t be without its scientific, political and legal challenges.
But challenges can also represent opportunities. This project requires collaboration between Indonesian and Australian project partners. That builds capacity on both sides. Along the way, we’re helping develop mechanisms that could guide the return of other heritage items more broadly to their places of origin.
These ceramics are among the ‘orphaned objects’ we are researching. Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, Indonesia
Maritime heritage tourism and sustainable development
Shipwrecks are fascinating scientifically and historically. But they can also reveal local, national and international tensions.
Take, for example, the 9th century shipwreck discovered in 1998 in waters near Belitung Island, Indonesia. Indonesian laws at the time clearly allowed commercial operators to salvage shipwrecks in its territorial waters, even if this went against international standards established by UNESCO.
Then there’s the 18th century Spanish ship, the San José, which lies in the waters of the Caribbean and is the subject of a multi-country legal fight over who should get the treasure it carried.
On the other hand, shipwrecks have political value. They can bring people together around shared goals or identities. They can be better integrated into sustainable development strategies, including through community-based marine tourism.
Marine heritage tourism initiatives will enable local communities to benefit financially from heritage. Adopting environmentally sustainable practices can also help protect marine ecosystems and ensure the long-term viability of underwater cultural heritage.
This will help to grow local economies by offering different kinds of jobs, not just fishing, while also minimising underwater cultural heritage looting and illicit trafficking.
Successful initiatives along these lines are already underway in Indonesia, in places such as Karawang, Abang Island and Tidore.
Ancient shipwrecks, sunken cargoes and the submerged past are underwater cultural heritage. Priyambudi Sulistiyanto
Reconnecting orphaned objects
Orphaned objects have not received the attention they deserve.
Such objects are generally anathema to scholars, because of concerns that to study them is to legitimise them.
We agree there are important ethical considerations at play. But we also recognise these orphaned objects are a crucial part of broader geopolitical and maritime security debates.
To exclude them from scholarly study, as has largely been the case to date, is to risk missing an essential piece of the maritime puzzle.
The fossil skeleton in a secluded alcove of the cave.Rob French/Museums Victoria
Pitch-black darkness. Crushing squeezes, muddy passages, icy waterfalls. Bats and spiders. Abseiling over ledges into the unknown. How far would you go for a fossil?
On a two-year retrieval mission of nearly 60 hours in an underground cave, we met our limits – and went beyond.
The limestone slope of Potholes Cave Reserve is found in Gunaikurnai Country, north of the township of Buchan in eastern Victoria.
Here, the river valley is peppered with shadowy entrances to underground caves. Portals barely large enough to permit a willing caver open into kilometres of subterranean passages encrusted with delicate crystals twinkling in torchlight.
In one of them, Nightshade Cave, the Museums Victoria Research Institute led a team of recreational cavers and Parks Victoria rangers to excavate an extraordinary fossil: a near-complete skeleton of the extinct short-faced kangaroo Simosthenurus occidentalis. In June this year, it will appear on display at Melbourne Museum.
The fossil skeleton of S. occidentalis is 71% complete. Tim Carrafa/Museums Victoria
It started with an unusual skull
As is so often the case in palaeontology, the discovery began with engaged citizens out in nature. In 2011, a local caving group first entered Nightshade Cave through an opening previously blocked by soil. One of the group, Joshua Van Dyk, sighted an unusual animal skull.
Recognising its potential significance, he reported the find to Melbourne Museum. However, Van Dyk reckoned it was irretrievable, appearing to be crushed under boulders in a narrow vertical collapse. The cave was gated shut to protect its contents, and a decade passed quietly.
In 2021, I took an interest in the intriguing find. Members of the Victorian Speleological Association were only too happy to assist a return to the cave.
Tim Ziegler retrieving fossil bones from Nightshade Cave. Rob French/Museums Victoria
Rigging a ropeline, we abseiled down a tight ten-metre rift, emptying our lungs to pass tight points in midair. We corkscrewed into a narrow passage and wormed, single-file, through low-domed chambers hung with dripping stalactites and plastered by popcorn-like calcite formations.
Descending deeper, the cave transformed into tall, narrow, clean-walled rifts, full of dark recesses. Hours passed as we circuited the passages, until a shout echoed around: found again! We scrambled to a chimney-like chute stacked with pinned boulders, to come eye to eye with an ancient.
On reaching it, I felt sudden grief: the beautiful fossilised skull had in the intervening years begun to collapse. It seemed that, despite its long survival, the fossil was newly vulnerable – from little more than the altered air currents and changing humidity caused by the new cave entrance.
We strengthened the exposed bones with protective resins, but exited the cave having left them in place: more time would be needed to plan their retrieval.
A painstaking retrieval
On our return trips, I carefully brushed away fine layers of mud and we photographed and packed the newly freed fossils. The skull had a deep muzzle, with robust jaws and teeth that marked it as a short-faced (sthenurine) kangaroo.
Behind it were more bones. It was a marvel to see vertebrae, shoulders and hips, limbs and a narrow ribcage: many of the bones were wholly undisturbed and still in their original positions. This was a single animal, not a random scattering of bones. It felt like a fossil holy grail.
A detailed comparison to fossils in the Museums Victoria State Collection gave our skeleton its identification as Simosthenurus occidentalis. Comprising 150 preserved bones, it is the most complete fossil skeleton found in a Victorian cave to date.
That it is a juvenile rather than adult kangaroo further distinguishes it from other examples of the species. Its teeth show little wear, its skull bones are still unfused, and its limb ends had not yet joined, suggesting it was still young at its time of death.
From the size of its limbs, we estimate it weighed around 80 kilograms – as much as an average person – but might have grown half as large again had it reached adulthood.
Australia’s extinct megafauna
Short-faced kangaroos appear in Australia’s fossil record from 10 to 15 million years ago, as widespread rainforests began to give way to drier habitats. They became particularly diverse during the shift toward our current arid climate in the later part of the Pleistocene Epoch, from around 500,000 years ago.
But in a pulse of extinction around 45,000 years ago, they vanished across the continent, along with up to 85% of Australia’s megafauna. Radiocarbon dating by the Australian Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation dated the skeleton’s burial to 49,400 years ago. This means our S. occidentalis was among the very last of its kind.
Today, the hills of eastern Gippsland host a precious population of the brush-tailed rock-wallaby, a vulnerable species. Once, they shared the country with larger kin.
A key idea under investigation is whether sthenurine kangaroos walked with a striding gait, rather than hopped. The skeleton we found has a uniquely complete vertebral column, providing new insights we couldn’t get from isolated bones. With the benefit of detailed 3D models, this near-complete skeleton can also be studied from anywhere in the world.
This fossil, along with others from Nightshade Cave, is now housed and cared for in perpetuity at Melbourne Museum. Through Museums Victoria Research Institute, we can preserve a link to its once home of East Gippsland, while opening a door to global research.
Tim Ziegler received funding from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) for radiocarbon dating analysis. He is affiliated with the Victorian Speleological Association.
Imagine the tap of a card that bought you a cup of coffee this morning also let a hacker halfway across the world access your bank account and buy themselves whatever they liked. Now imagine it wasn’t a one-off glitch, but it happened all the time: imagine the locks that secure our electronic data suddenly stopped working.
This is not a science fiction scenario. It may well become a reality when sufficiently powerful quantum computers come online. These devices will use the strange properties of the quantum world to untangle secrets that would take ordinary computers more than a lifetime to decipher.
We don’t know when this will happen. However, many people and organisations are already concerned about so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, in which cybercriminals or other adversaries steal encrypted data now and store it away for the day when they can decrypt it with a quantum computer.
As the advent of quantum computers grows closer, cryptographers are trying to devise new mathematical schemes to secure data against their hypothetical attacks. The mathematics involved is highly complex – but the survival of our digital world may depend on it.
‘Quantum-proof’ encryption
The task of cracking much current online security boils down to the mathematical problem of finding two numbers that, when multiplied together, produce a third number. You can think of this third number as a key that unlocks the secret information. As this number gets bigger, the amount of time it takes an ordinary computer to solve the problem becomes longer than our lifetimes.
Future quantum computers, however, should be able to crack these codes much more quickly. So the race is on to find new encryption algorithms that can stand up to a quantum attack.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has been calling for proposed “quantum-proof” encryption algorithms for years, but so far few have withstood scrutiny. (One proposed algorithm, called Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation, was dramatically broken in 2022 with the aid of Australian mathematical software called Magma, developed at the University of Sydney.)
The race has been hotting up this year. In February, Apple updated the security system for the iMessage platform to protect data that may be harvested for a post-quantum future.
Two weeks ago, scientists in China announced they had installed a new “encryption shield” to protect the Origin Wukong quantum computer from quantum attacks.
Around the same time, cryptographer Yilei Chen announced he had found a way quantum computers could attack an important class of algorithms based on the mathematics of lattices, which were considered some of the hardest to break. Lattice-based methods are part of Apple’s new iMessage security, as well as two of the three frontrunners for a standard post-quantum encryption algorithm.
What is a lattice-based algorithm?
A lattice is an arrangement of points in a repeating structure, like the corners of tiles in a bathroom or the atoms in a diamond crystal. The tiles are two dimensional and the atoms in diamond are three dimensional, but mathematically we can make lattices with many more dimensions.
Most lattice-based cryptography is based on a seemingly simple question: if you hide a secret point in such a lattice, how long will it take someone else to find the secret location starting from some other point? This game of hide and seek can underpin many ways to make data more secure.
A variant of the lattice problem called “learning with errors” is considered to be too hard to break even on a quantum computer. As the size of the lattice grows, the amount of time it takes to solve is believed to increase exponentially, even for a quantum computer.
The lattice problem – like the problem of finding the factors of a large number on which so much current encryption depends – is closely related to a deep open problem in mathematics called the “hidden subgroup problem”.
Yilei Chen’s approach suggested quantum computers may be able to solve lattice-based problems more quickly under certain conditions. Experts scrambled to check his results – and rapidly found an error. After the error was discovered, Chen published an updated version of his paper describing the flaw.
Despite this discovery, Chen’s paper has made many cryptographers less confident in the security of lattice-based methods. Some are still assessing whether Chen’s ideas can be extended to new pathways for attacking these methods.
More mathematics required
Chen’s paper set off a storm in the small community of cryptographers who are equipped to understand it. However, it received almost no attention in the wider world – perhaps because so few people understand this kind of work or its implications.
Last year, when the Australian government published a national quantum strategy to make the country “a leader of the global quantum industry” where “quantum technologies are integral to a prosperous, fair and inclusive Australia”, there was an important omission: it didn’t mention mathematics at all.
Australia does have many leading experts in quantum computing and quantum information science. However, making the most of quantum computers – and defending against them – will require deep mathematical training to produce new knowledge and research.
Nalini Joshi 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.
Sports media misogyny was alive and well this month.
In just the few short weeks it took for star United States basketball players Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese to shoot their way from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Sweet 16 to the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) draft, two different sport reporters found themselves publicly apologising for their coverage of the women.
First, Los Angeles Times reporter Ben Bolch sparked criticism for describing Reese’s Louisiana State University (LSU) team as “dirty debutantes” in a since-redacted NCAA championships match-up preview.
LSU coach Kim Mulkey lambasted the article and those who failed to criticise it. “If you don’t think that’s sexism, then you’re in denial,” she said.
LSU coach Kim Mulkey shared an impassioned response to an LA Times article.
The Times quickly retracted the comments and Bolch posted an apology with a promise to “do better”.
This didn’t stop Indianapolis Star columnist Gregg Doyel from learning a similar lesson after he engaged in an inappropriate exchange with WNBA number 1 draft pick Clarke at a press conference, prompting yet another apology.
An issue closer to home, too
Australia is no stranger to these moments. It’s still hard to believe it was in this century that The Age columnist Greg Baum wrote “women’s soccer is a joke … women’s cricket is not much better”.
We also saw Kim Clijsters calling out Todd Woodbridge about an inappropriate text about her body, and an Australian Open commentator asking Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard to give him “a twirl”.
Kim Clijsters confronts Todd Woodbridge about a text message he had sent about her.
Just last year, Australian cricketer Maitlin Brown endured a sidelines reporter labelling her a “little Barbie”.
And it’s not just female athletes who cop it, either. In 2022, AFL journalist Tom Morris was sacked over leaked sexist and homophobic comments he made about a female colleague.
The issue is glaringly obvious. Contemporary sports media is overwhelmingly male.
Only 10% of Australian sports reporters are women (and the United States and Canadian stats are not much better).
Women are consistently reminded that sport is the territory of men, and that those who enter it are subject primarily to men’s perspectives and, too often, ridicule.
While the overt sexualisation and trivialisation that once routinely shaped women’s sport coverage is less common, some subtle but no less harmful forms of marginalisation remain.
Women’s sports are significantly less likely to receive deep analysis than men’s. Coverage tends to emphasise effort over performance and men are significantly more likely to be characterised as “well-liked”.
Sometimes it’s even unintended, and veiled by praise. For example, my study of media coverage of girl skateboarding “prodigies” at the Tokyo Olympics found that while the media celebrated the teen medallists as evidence of “girl power” at work, the coverage largely ignored the structural issues that still impact many women’s progress in skating and beyond.
Women researchers and journalists have been offering the solution for years: we need more women’s voices in sports coverage.
Diverse perspectives can create better outcomes for women – just ask the medical research sector. Sport media need the voices of women who are not just experts in their sport, but know what it’s like to be a woman playing that sport.
We’ve already been given glimpses of the magic that can happen when women are moved from the sidelines to the desk.
During the same NCAA competition that saw two reporters apologise, ESPN assembled an all-women panel of former players and sports journalists to analyse the tournament.
The trio received considerable praise for coverage of an event that would culminate in ESPN’s most-viewed match (men’s or women’s) on record.
What was so illustrative of the power of women’s perspectives was the panel’s preview of Clark and Reese’s face-off in the Sweet 16, which would also set viewership records.
Moments before the game began, the trio took a moment to nod to the sport’s past players, telling them that because they built the game, this was their night, too.
This could only come from women who know what it is like to play and report a sport that has historically struggled for attention and respect.
Australia got its own peek at the possibilities in March when an all-woman commentary team covered an A-League round – a first for any Australian professional league.
Still, commentator Kate Allman said she was unsurprised it had taken until 2024 to get there, given the “labyrinth of glass ceilings” she’d encountered during her career.
Now, we storm towards yet another Olympics, one likely to result in success for Aussie women on the soccer field, basketball court, in the pool and more.
We need to see more women covering their efforts. And we need more mentoring initiatives to demonstrate to young women the possibilities of a sport media career.
It’s an opportunity to show that sports media can belong to women, too. And that they can play a part in improving coverage for the athletes who deserve better.
Brigid McCarthy 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 core experiences of depression – changes in energy, activity, thinking and mood – have been described for more than 10,000 years. The word “depression” has been used for about 350 years.
Given this long history, it may surprise you that experts don’t agree about what depression is, how to define it or what causes it.
But many experts do agree that depression is notone thing. It’s a large family of illnesses with different causes and mechanisms. This makes choosing the best treatment for each person challenging.
One strategy is to search for sub-typesof depression and see whether they might do better with different kinds of treatments. One example is contrasting “reactive” depression with “endogenous” depression.
Reactive depression (also thought of as social or psychological depression) is presented as being triggered by exposure to stressful life events. These might be being assaulted or losing a loved one – an understandable reaction to an outside trigger.
Endogenous depression (also thought of as biological or genetic depression) is proposed to be caused by something inside, such as genes or brain chemistry.
Many people working clinically in mental health accept this sub-typing. You might have read about this online.
But we think this approach is way too simple.
While stressful life events and genes may, individually, contribute to causing depression, they also interact to increase the risk of someone developing depression. And evidence shows that there is a genetic component to being exposed to stressors. Some genes affect things such as personality. Some affect how we interact with our environments.
What we did and what we found
Our team set out to look at the role of genes and stressors to see if classifying depression as reactive or endogenous was valid.
In the Australian Genetics of Depression Study, people with depression answered surveys about exposure to stressful life events. We analysed DNA from their saliva samples to calculate their genetic risk for mental disorders.
Our question was simple. Does genetic risk for depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, anxiety and neuroticism (a personality trait) influence people’s reported exposure to stressful life events?
We looked at the genetic risk of mental illness to see how that was linked to stressful life events, such as childhood abuse and neglect. Kamira/Shutterstock
You may be wondering why we bothered calculating the genetic risk for mental disorders in people who already have depression. Every person has genetic variants linked to mental disorders. Some people have more, some less. Even people who already have depression might have a low genetic risk for it. These people may have developed their particular depression from some other constellation of causes.
We looked at the genetic risk of conditions other than depression for a couple of reasons. First, genetic variants linked to depression overlap with those linked to other mental disorders. Second, two people with depression may have completely different genetic variants. So we wanted to cast a wide net to look at a wider spectrum of genetic variants linked to mental disorders.
If reactive and endogenous depression sub-types are valid, we’d expect people with a lower genetic component to their depression (the reactive group) would report more stressful life events. And we’d expect those with a higher genetic component (the endogenous group) would report fewer stressful life events.
But after studying more than 14,000 people with depression we found the opposite.
We found people at higher genetic risk for depression, anxiety, ADHD or schizophrenia say they’ve been exposed to more stressors.
Assault with a weapon, sexual assault, accidents, legal and financial troubles, and childhood abuse and neglect, were all more common in people with a higher genetic risk of depression, anxiety, ADHD or schizophrenia.
These associations were not strongly influenced by people’s age, sex or relationships with family. We didn’t look at other factors that may influence these associations, such as socioeconomic status. We also relied on people’s memory of past events, which may not be accurate.
Genetic risk for mental disorders changes people’s sensitivity to the environment.
Imagine two people, one with a high genetic risk for depression, one with a low risk. They both lose their jobs. The genetically vulnerable person experiences the job loss as a threat to their self-worth and social status. There is a sense of shame and despair. They can’t bring themselves to look for another job for fear of losing it too. For the other, the job loss feels less about them and more about the company. These two people internalise the event differently and remember it differently.
Genetic risk for mental disorders also might make it more likely people find themselves in environments where bad things happen. For example, a higher genetic risk for depression might affect self-worth, making people more likely to get into dysfunctional relationships which then go badly.
If two people lose their jobs, one with a high genetic risk of depression the other at low risk, both will experience and remember the event differently. Inside Creative House/Shutterstock
First, it confirms genes and environments are not independent. Genes influence the environments we end up in, and what then happens. Genes also influence how we react to those events.
Second, our study doesn’t support a distinction between reactive and endogenous depression. Genes and environments have a complex interplay. Most cases of depression are a mix of genetics, biology and stressors.
Third, people with depression who appear to have a stronger genetic component to their depression report their lives are punctuated by more serious stressors.
So clinically, people with higher genetic vulnerability might benefit from learning specific techniques to manage their stress. This might help some people reduce their chance of developing depression in the first place. It might also help some people with depression reduce their ongoing exposure to stressors.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Ian Hickie is the co-director of Health and Policy at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney, which operates early-intervention youth services at Camperdown under contract to Headspace; has previously led community-based and projects supported by the pharmaceutical industry (Wyeth, Eli Lily, Servier, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Cilag), focused on the identification and better management of anxiety and depression; and is the Chief Scientific Advisor to, and a 3·2% equity shareholder in, InnoWell, which aims to transform mental health services through the use of innovative technologies.
Jacob Crouse 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 Sarah Wilson, PhD Candidate in Quantum Technology & Innovation Governance, Institue for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney
A landmark legal settlement has once again focused our attention on the dangers of “forever chemicals”.
This class of chemicals, technically known as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are widely used to make nonstick or waterproof products. The problem is, the chemicals move easily around the environment, pollute groundwater and rivers, are often carcinogenic – and they don’t degrade.
This month, one of the largest makers of these chemicals, 3M, had its offer of A$16 billion to clean up PFAS-contaminated waterways approved by a US court. It’s just the latest in a series of PFAS lawsuits across the United States.
While increased attention is welcome, there’s no guarantee of success. Removing and destroying PFAS from wastewater streams across a single US state, Minnesota, would cost a minimum of $21 billion over 20 years. Globally, a recent report by the chemical safety nonprofit ChemSec found the costs of PFAS remediation alone amount to around $26 trillion per year – not including rising healthcare costs from exposure to PFAS, or damage to the environment. The 3M settlement is just the tip of the iceberg.
The problem now is how to actually clean up these chemicals – and prevent further pollution.
Remediation is expensive – and uncertain
In Australia, contamination is worst in firefighter training grounds and on defence force bases, due to the long-term use of firefighting foams full of PFAS. The discovery of this contamination triggered a wave of lawsuits. The Department of Defence has since paid out more than $366 million in class action lawsuits.
Defence has also assumed responsibility for managing, remediating and monitoring PFAS contamination on and around its bases. In 2021, the department began to actively set about remediation.
That sounds promising – find the pollution and fix the problem. But the reality is much more complicated.
A 2022 parliamentary inquiry described PFAS remediation as an emerging and experimental industry.
This is correct. There’s a great deal of basic scientific research we have to do. This is not a simple problem. These chemicals seep into the soil and groundwater – and stay there. It’s hard to get them out.
As a result, most remediation work at defence bases to date has been part of research and development, rather than a wide-scale permanent cleanup.
To help, the defence department has brought in three major industry partners, including Emerging Compounds Treatment Technologies. We don’t know how they are doing the cleanup or if their methods work, as this information is not publicly accessible. The three companies have sought intellectual property protection to support their technological advantage in the growing PFAS remediation market.
One of the companies, Venetia, told the parliamentary inquiry:
[there] are still significant gaps in knowledge in keys areas such as human health toxicology, PFAS behaviour in the environment and remediation of PFAS in soil and water
PFAS is a much bigger problem
Significant PFAS contamination has now been reported in:
– Melbourne’s West Gate Tunnel construction site. Soil contamination at the most polluted site is hundreds of times worse than a threshold set by the state’s environmental protection agency
The full extent of PFAS contamination in Australia is still emerging. Recent research has found Australia is one of several toxic hotspots for PFAS, relative to the rest of the world.
Getting forever chemicals out of groundwater is going to be hard – but necessary. Mumemories/Shutterstock
Worse, current monitoring practices are likely to be underestimating how much PFAS is lingering in the environment, given we usually only track a handful of these chemicals – out of more than 16,000.
improved understanding of the range of PFAS embodied in consumer and industrial products […] to assess the environmental burden and develop mitigation measures
The more we look, the more alarming the picture appears. Emerging research has found PFAS in consumer products such as cosmetics, packaging, waterproofing, inks, pesticides, medical articles, polishes and paints, metal plating, pipes and cables, mechanical components, electronics, solar cells, textiles and carpets.
The size and complexity of PFAS contamination suggests we are in for a very long and expensive process to begin cleaning it up – especially given we are still making and using these chemicals.
The introduction of this concept is what forced 3M to pay up in the US. Australia has yet to follow suit, which is why the public has been footing the bill. If we introduce this legal principle, manufacturers will have to take responsibility. This would make it much less attractive for companies to make polluting products – and shift the burden from taxpayers to the companies responsible. Australia’s government is considering pursuing similar legal action against 3M.
2. Set PFAS contamination standards in line with other OECD countries, or better.
Earlier this month, the US implemented the first legally enforceable national drinking water standards for five PFAS compounds and two PFAS mixtures. Australia’s current acceptable drinking water guidelines allow up to 140 times more PFAS in our water than these strict new US standards. In the US, these new standards are drawing new investment in remediation.
3. Take it seriously.
For years, many of us thought all you had to do to avoid PFAS was not to buy nonstick pans. But these chemicals are now everywhere. They’re highly persistent and don’t leave our bodies easily. Every single person on the planet is now likely to have detectable levels of PFAS in their blood. Reducing this dangerous chemical load is going to take a lot of work to clean up existing hotspots, stop further production, and prevent recirculation of PFAS in recycled products or in our food.
The 3M settlement is a good start. But it’s only a start. Tackling this problem is going to be hard, but necessary.
Rachael Wakefield-Rann receives research funding from various government and non-government organisations. She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would financially benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic appointment.
Sarah Wilson 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.
Australians are having fewer babies, so many fewer that without international migration our population would be on track to decline in just over a decade.
In most circumstances, the number of babies per woman that a population needs to sustain itself – the so-called total fertility rate – is 2.1.
Australia’s total fertility rate dipped below 2.1 in the late 1970s, moved back up towards it in the late 2000s (assisted in part by an improving economy, better access to childcare and the introduction of the Commonwealth Baby Bonus), and then plunged again, hitting a low of 1.59 during the first year of COVID.
The latest population projections from the Australian Bureau of Statistics assume the rate remains near its present 1.6% for the next 50 years.
An alternative, lower, set of assumptions has the rate falling to 1.45 over the next five years and staying there. A higher set of assumptions has it rebounding to 1.75 and staying there.
A comprehensive study of global fertility trends published in March in the medical journal The Lancet has Australia’s central case at 1.45, followed by a fall to 1.33 by the end of the century.
Significantly, none of these assumptions envisages a return to replacement rate.
The bureau’s central projection has Australia’s population turning down from 2037 in the absence of a boost from migration.
It’s easy to make guesses about reasons. Reliable contraception has been widely available for 50 years. Rents, mortgages and the other costs facing Australians of child-bearing age appear to be climbing. It’s still difficult to have a career if you have a child, and data show women still carry the substantive burden of unpaid work around the home.
Reporting on research into the reasons, Forbes Magazine succinctly
said a broken economy had “screwed over” Americans considering having children.
More diplomatically, it said Americans saw parenthood as “harder to manage” than they might have in the past.
Half the world is unable to replace itself
But this trend is widespread. The Lancet study finds more than half of the world’s countries have a fertility rate below replacement level.
China, which is important for the global fertility rate because it makes up such a large share of the world’s population, had a fertility rate as high as 7.5 in the early 1960s. It fell to 2.5 before the start of China’s one-child policy in the early 1990s, and then slid further from 1.8 to 1 after the policy was abandoned in 2016.
South Korea’s fertility rate has dived further, to the world’s lowest: 0.72.
Most of the 94 nations that continue to have above-replacement fertility rates are in North Africa, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Some, including Samoa
and Papua New Guinea, are in the Pacific.
Most of Asia, Europe and Oceania is already below replacement rate.
A changing world order
The largest high-fertility African nation, Nigeria, is expected to overtake China to become the world’s second-most-populous nation by the end of the century.
But even Nigeria’s fertility rate will sink. The Lancet projections have it sliding from 4.7 to 1.87 by the end of the century.
The differences mean the world’s population growth will increasingly take place in countries that are among the most vulnerable to environmental and economic hardship.
Already economically disadvantaged, these nations will need to provide jobs, housing, healthcare and services for rapidly growing populations at a time when the rest of the world does not.
On the other hand, those nations will be blessed with young people. They will be an increasingly valuable resource as other nations face the challenges of an ageing population and declining workforce.
An older world, then a smaller world
Global fertility halved between 1950 and 2021, shrinking from 4.84 to 2.23.
The latest projections have it sinking below the replacement rate to somewhere between 1.59 and 2.08 by 2050, and then to between 1.25 and 1.96 by 2100.
The world has already seen peak births and peak primary-school-aged children.
In 2016, the world welcomed about 142 million live babies, and since then the number born each year has fallen. By 2021, it was about 129 million.
The global school-age population aged 6 to 11 years peaked at around 820 million in 2023.
The United Nations expects the world’s population to peak at 10.6 billion in 2086, after which it will begin to fall.
Another forecast, produced as part of the impressive Global Burden of Disease study, has the peak occurring two decades earlier in 2064, with the world’s population peaking at 9.73 billion.
Fewer babies are a sign of success
In many ways, a smaller world is to be welcomed.
The concern common in the 1960s and 1970s that the world’s population was growing faster and faster and the world would soon be unable to feed itself has turned out to be misplaced.
Aside from occasional blips (China’s birth rate in the Year of the Dragon) the fertility trend in just about every nation on Earth is downwards.
The world’s population hasn’t been growing rapidly for long. Before 1700 it grew by only about 0.4% per year. By 2100 it will have stabilised and started to fall, limiting the period of unusually rapid growth to four centuries.
In an important way, lower birth rates can be seen as a sign of success. The richer a society becomes and the more it is able to look after its seniors, the less important it becomes for each couple to have children to care for them in old age. This is a long-established theory with a name: the demographic transition.
For Australia, even with forecast immigration, lower fertility will mean changes.
The government’s 2023 Intergenerational Report says that whereas there are now 3.7 Australians of traditional working age for each Australian aged 65 and over, by 2063 there will only be 2.6.
It will mean those 2.6 people will have to work smarter, perhaps with greater assistance from artificial intelligence.
Unless they decide to have more babies, which history suggests they won’t.
Amanda Davies currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and CRC Transformation in Mining Economies
/imagine a photograph of a Thai woman, pregnant in a green and white dress with luggage at an airport departure terminal in Bangkok in 1974 with her eyes closed thinking about what happens next as she holds her hand out in a theatrical gestureSara Oscar
Since last year, I have been working on a project with my Thai mother who migrated to Australia in 1974 while pregnant with me. There are no photographs of this significant event. As a reparative act to fill in the gaps of our family archive, I used a generative AI platform to create photographs of my mother’s migration story, a project I called Counterfactual Departures.
To conjure photographs in MidJourney, I collected information to engineer a range of prompts. I noted details of my mother’s departure from Thailand – her age, the location, her clothing and the trimester of her pregnancy. I also included my own interpretation of how she would have felt as a 30-year-old woman travelling alone to white Australia in the 1970s. She spoke little English and had no family or friends of her own to begin life with my father, who she barely knew.
My attempts to piece together the past using data sets scraped from the collective archive of the internet have led me to question the role photography and memory might play in this new era of generative AI.
/imagine a hyperrealistic photograph of an Asian woman wearing red lipstick and a dress – well dressed, holding an aeroplane ticket and bags at an airport parking lot in Bangkok, Thailand, theatrical gesture and facial bodily expression of emotion in the style of Jean Martin Charcot. 2023. Sara Oscar
MidJourney and the ‘mean image’
MidJourney, like other AI image-generating platforms, creates images based on aggregates of data trawled from millions of online source photographs.
While they are not strictly photographs, AI-generated images read like photographs, look like photographs, are compared to photographs and challenge our philosophical understanding of photographs.
As relatives of photography, they are associated with qualities like pastness and memory, or even, as photographic theorist Joanna Zylinska suggests, as perceptual devices that can show us the future.
The problem that emerges out of generating images from photographic data sets is the way information is aggregated to form an image as a statistical average. As artist Hito Steyerl has observed:
They represent the norm by signalling the mean. They replace likenesses with likelinesses […] in style and substance they are: mean images.
By sampling from a range of information sources and creating composites, MidJourney accentuates the most prominent features of a dataset, this mean.
The first photographs produced of my mother illustrated this tendency. In the image, my mother and I (in utero) stand in an oversized grey suit, looking out of the frame in a parking lot among suitcases and a wasteland of plastic bags. We appear to be somewhere in Los Angeles, rendered in the style of staged photography. Generated from the statistical mean of data sets, they could also be described adjectivally as mean.
/imagine a hyperrealistic photograph of a pregnant Thai woman 30 wearing a suit in 1974, holding bags in an airport parking lot in Bangkok, Thailand, looking out of the frame, wide shot, cars in background, daylight. Sara Oscar
Looking back on these early photographs, part of the project’s problem was my over-emphasis on how the past should have looked. To shift the way this event was represented as a statistical mean of racial stereotypes, I had to place less emphasis on the generated image and turn image generation into a generative process of dialogue and discussion.
The conversations we have about a photograph, whether real or not, can constitute a form of memory-work. Memory-work refers to how we process memories through the social relations we build around artefacts, such as photographs, text, objects or family albums. It is a valuable method for artists who deal with events outside of history because the process of art making serves a reparative function.
For cultural historian Annette Kuhn this cultivates dialogue about the past. She writes, memory-work means we can look at photographs as:
material for interpretation, to be interrogated, mined, for its meanings and its possibilities.
By shifting my emphasis from the generative image to the dialogue it generated, I began performing the act of memory-work. Images were used to generate conversations about this significant event. This created space to identify a gap between my imaginative recreation of events, my mother’s memories and the mean image generated by AI.
/imagine a Thai woman early 30s, seated on luggage on an airport tarmac wearing a suit, appears to be waiting, looking to the left of the frame into the distance, slight frown, daylight, 1970s. Sara Oscar
This collaborative process between my mother, AI and me has been revelatory. It has allowed me to fill the gaps in our family biography playfully. It has given my mother an opportunity to say, “no, it wasn’t like that, I came to Australia with dignity” and to recognise racial stereotypes of representation.
AI has the potential to create proxy representations of us and to create a dialogue around significant events and life experiences.
/imagine a photograph of a Thai pregnant woman in a green and white dress carrying papaya and luggage, looking at the camera, airport parking lot, Bangkok, dusk, after rain. 2024. Sara Oscar
From moral panic to collaboration
Much moral panic around generated images has been fuelled in the media by an inability to discern between the real and the fake.
Mimicry, whether contributing to false memory, fake news, breaches of copyright, or the replacement of humans with machine labour, is at the centre of this debate.
But what if generative AI were able to be put to use as a tool of memory-work, to facilitate dialogue and interaction? This approach reconnects AI-generated images with earlier social and cultural practices of photography. It offers a more intimate example of what AI can do.
Sara Oscar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A score of Palestine solidarity protesters draped themselves in white shrouds with mock blood in a sombre “die-in” demonstration at Te Komitanga Square — the heart of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city — today as speakers urged people to take a stronger boycott against Israeli products.
The rally by hundreds of protesters marked Israel’s killing of more than 34,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — and wounding more than 75,000 in its genocidal war on Gaza.
The war has lasted 205 days so far with no let-up in the deadly assault on the besieged enclave and protesters staged 35 events around New Zealand this week as global demonstrations continue to grow.
Opposition MPs took part in the rally, including Labour’s Shanan Halbert and Green Party’s Steve Abel and Ricardo Menéndez March.
Activist and educator Maryam Perreira called on Palestine supporters to step up their boycott and divestments pressure — “it’s working, sanctions brought down apartheid South Africa and this will bring down the Israeli genocidal regime”.
“Food not bombs for Gaza”. Video: Café Pacific
Send Israeli ambassador home Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) secretary Neil Scott called for sanctions action by the New Zealand government.
He urged Palestine supporters to call on the government to:
• Send the Israeli ambassador home, and • End the working holiday visa for 200 Israelis who come to New Zealand to rest and relax “after committing genocide in Gaza”.
Scott called on New Zealanders to email Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters and Immigration Minister Erica Stanford to take action.
“Try just one email and see how it goes. Then another on another topic. Then another. That’s how I started a while ago,” Scott said.
“We need a tide of emails to get them to understand that Kiwis don’t want the Israeli ambassador here.
“Neither do we want the young Israelis committing genocide today and to walk among us tomorrow.”
More than 13,000 people have signed a petition calling for the closure of the Israeli embassy in Welington.
“They can’t demonise an entire nation.” Video: Café Pacific
He spoke about the NZ government’s Superfund which has investments all over the world.
“A few years ago, they invested in Israeli banks which were investing in the building of illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestine Territories. They were involved in investing and enabling crimes against humanity,” Scott said.
He called on people with KiwiSaver fund accounts to check them out for investments in “Israeli companies who are in any way involved in the occupation”.
“We’re now calling for everyone to boycott Israeli products — or those companies which are complicit in Israeli crimes against humanity or the illegal occupation, land theft, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and now genocide.”
Scott cited the boycott target list of the global BDS movement — Ahava (“Dead Sea mineral skin care products”), BP and Caltex, Hewlett-Packard, McDonalds, Obela Hummus and SodaStream.
“The key is for all of us to take action today. Remember — boycott, divest, sanction.”
Palestinian flags in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square today. Image: APR
Meanwhile, 1News reports that three New Zealand doctors planning to sail with an independent flotilla carrying aid to Gaza have had their mission “scuppered at the last minute”. They blame Israel for the delay.
The doctors — Dr Ali Al-Kenani, Dr Wasfi Shahin and Dr Faiez Idais — left for Istanbul 10 days ago where they joined other international volunteers in the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, said 1News.
Tackling violence against women will be the sole agenda item for a national cabinet meeting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has convened for Wednesday.
The meeting, held remotely, follows thousands of Australians attending rallies across the country, as community anger surges over the horrific number of women killed so far this year.
One topic is expected to be bail laws. NSW already has an inquiry, after a man charged with crimes against a woman was granted bail and then allegedly killed her.
Albanese was at the Canberra rally on Sunday, where he received some heckling. He was accompanied by the Minister for Woman Katy Gallagher and the Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth.
“We are here today to demand that governments of all levels must do better, including my own, including every state and territory government,” the Prime Minister told the crowd.
“We’re here as well to say that society, and Australia, must do better.
“We need to change the culture. We need to change attitudes. We need to change the legal system. We need to change the approach by all governments – because it’s not enough to support victims.
“We need to focus on the perpetrators and focus on prevention.”
National cabinet would “talk about what we can do, including as part of the national plan to end violence against women and children, where in the first two budgets, we’ve added $2.3 billion,” Albanese said.
He said, “I know that we all must do better,” but “it’s not just governments’ problem. It’s a problem of our entire society” and a “a national crisis”.
“We need to make sure that this isn’t just up to women. It’s up to men to change men’s behaviour as well.”
The federal government has rejected calls for a royal commission into the issue, saying it already has a plan.
Rishworth told Sky on Sunday that victim survivors and many experts had had input into that plan. “So we believe we need to get on with the job.
“We have a Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner and Commission that our government stood up. That role is incredibly important in monitoring. We believe we just need to continue to have this sustained effort. We believe that is what will make the difference,” she said.
In the latest incident, in Perth a 35-year-old man was charged with murdering a 30-year-old mother late last week.
A police statement said: “It will be alleged […] the accused physically assaulted the victim at their shared home on Currie Street [in Perth]”.
“It will be further alleged the accused set the property alight while the victim was still inside.” The woman was later found dead.
So far this year 27 women have died in gender-based violence in Australia.
eSafety review opens public consultations
Meanwhile, amid growing concern about the negative effects of social media (including its contribution to gender-based violence) and the government’s fight with Elon Musk over the post of the Assyrian church stabbing, public consultations are opening on strengthening eSafety laws. An issues paper is being released on Monday.
A review by Delia Rickard, a former deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, is underway. She has already been consulting academics, civil society and government departments and agencies to determine issues, the review’s are scope and the public consultation processes.
“The Review is considering the effectiveness of the current framework, including whether more powers are needed to address new and emerging harms,” Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.
It is also looking at “options to reduce harms caused by online hate, as well as new harms raised by emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence”.
Among the matters the issues paper raises are
further steps to ensure the industry acts in children’s best interests
adequacy of existing penalties and enforcement powers
accessibility of laws and regulations dealing with online content and harms, and
international developments in online safety regulation, including whether a new duty of care should be imposed on digital platforms.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The protest outside the White House correspondents’ dinner hotel. Image: Anatolu video screenshot APR
More than two dozen Palestinian journalists had called for a boycott of the dinner, writing an open letter urging their American colleagues not to attend.
“You have a unique responsibility to speak truth to power and uphold journalistic integrity,” said the letter from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.
“It is unacceptable to stay silent out of fear or professional concern while journalists in Gaza continue to be detained, tortured, and killed for doing our jobs.”
‘It hurts our souls’ Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary was one of the signatories of the letter calling for the boycott.
“This isn’t something that has been ending. It has been continuous every single day for more than 200 days.
“We have been killed, displaced and homeless, and we’re not only reporting on this, but we’re also living it with every single detail.
Gaza journalist Hind Khoudary . . . Palestinian press plea to boycott the White House dinner. Image: @Hind_Gaza
“We’re living this war in all aspects of life. We have not seen our families as journalists. We have not been able to eat well. We have been dehydrated.
“We have been reporting in one of the harshest conditions any reporter can go through despite losing a lot of colleagues, and it hurts our souls and our hearts every single day.
“We have been constantly targeted by the Israeli air strikes and shelling.
“All of these daily things we have been living as journalists are overwhelming [and] exhausting, but we still continue because there have been at least 100 Palestinian journalists whom I personally know that have been killed since October 7.
“If they were here today with us, they would be reporting, and they would be raising the voice of the voiceless Palestinians.”
Protesters pose as Palestinian media casualties in Gaza surrounded by blue press protective jackets. The death toll of Gaza journalists since October 7 is 142. Image: Anatolu video screenshot APR
From France to Australia, university pro-Palestine protests in the United States have now spread to several countries with students pitching on-campus camps.
And students at Columbia and other US universities remain defiant as campuses have witnessed the biggest protests since the anti-Vietnam war and anti-apartheid eras in the 1960s and 1980s.
But authorities have cracked down at some institutions against the peaceful demonstrations with at least 550 being arrested in the US, reports Al Jazeera.
Clashes between students and police officers have been reported across the US during intensifying university protests with encampments in at at least 20 institutions.
Ali Harb, a Washington-based commentator on US foreign policy, Arab-American issues, civil rights and politics, says the Gaza-focused campus protest movement “highlights a generational divide over Israel” in the US.
Young people are willing to challenge politicians and college administrators across the country, he says.
“The opinion gap — with younger Americans generally more supportive of Palestinians than the generations that came before them — poses a risk to 81-year-old Democratic President Joe Biden’s re-election chances,” says Harb.
“It could also threaten the bipartisan backing that Israel enjoys in Washington.”
Divestment from Israel What started as the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, where students camped inside campus to push their institute to divest from companies linked to Israel, has since spread to campuses in California, Texas and other states.
The students are protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza, where Israel’s military offensive has killed more than 34,000 people and its blockade has caused starvation.
Students have been demonstrating worldwide in support of Gaza since the outbreak of the war on October 7.
Following the Columbia encampments, the protests have further spread to universities from France to Australia. Here is a summary:
In Paris, France, Sorbonne University students have taken to the streets. Additionally, the Palestine Committee from Sciences Po, is organising a protest where students set up about 10 tents on Wednesday. Despite a police crackdown, the protesters regathered on Thursday.
In Australia, students from the University of Sydney set up pro-Palestine encampments on Tuesday, and they were continuing to protest yesterday. Also, University of Melbourne students have pitched tents on the south lawn of their main campus.
In Rome, Italy, students from Sapienza University organised demonstrations, sit-ins and hunger strikes on April 17 and April 18.
Investigating Israeli ties In the United Kingdom, students from the University of Warwick’s group Warwick Stands With Palestine have occupied the campus piazza. In Leicester, a protest broke out on Monday in which students from the University of Leicester Palestine Society also participated.
Last month, students from the University of Leeds occupied a campus building in protest against the university’s involvement with Israel.
Hicham, a student protesting at Sciences Po, which is also called the Paris Institute of Political Studies, told Al Jazeera, “We have a few demands but one of them is to start investigating all of the ties they [Sciences Po] have with the state of Israel, which [are] academic and financial”.
The students are calling on the French government to provide more help to the Palestinians.
Caretaker prime minister Manasseh Sogavare’s Our Party did the best, securing 15 out of the 50 seats in the House.
The former opposition leader Matthew Wale’s Democratic Party is first runner-up with 11 MPs, which is also equal to the number of independent MPs which have been elected.
As for the rest of the field, the United Party secured six seats, the People’s First Party won three, and the remaining four minor parties won a seat each.
So what happens now? The Governor-General of Solomon Islands, Sir David Vunagi, will only call a meeting to elect the country’s prime minister once official results have been gazetted and Parliament informs him that all elected members have returned from the provinces to the capital Honiara.
This was confirmed by the Governor-General’s private secretary, Rawcliffe Ziza, who also sought to refute some misinformation about the election of the prime minister — which said it would only be called once a party or a coalition of parties had secured the numbers to form government.
As political parties lobby to secure the numbers to rule, local media will be providing blow-by-blow accounts and social media feeds are awash with coalition predictions.
But the reality is things will remain fluid right up until and including when the elected members meet in parliament to cast secret ballots to elect the country’s prime minister.
There are also rumours of MPs defecting from or joining different groupings.
But the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties has confirmed to RNZ Pacific it has not received applications of either kind, and so as of Friday, party numbers remain true to the final election results below.
Solomon Islands final election results by party:
Our Party — 15 MPs
Solomon Islands Democratic Party — 11
Independents — 11
Solomon Islands United Party — 6
Solomon Islands People’s First Party — 3
Umi For Change Party — 1
Kadere Party — 1
Democratic Alliance Party — 1
Solomon Islands Party for Rural Advancement — 1
According to Government House, most of the newly elected members of Parliament are already in the capital.
But the Governor-General will wait until next week to consider a date for the election of the prime minister, to allow time for members from more remote constituencies to make their way back to Honiara and for the official election results to be gazetted.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards, Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)
New Zealand Government’s Fast Track legislation.
Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its arguments for such a bold reform. As part of a new series providing scrutiny of the fast-track legislation (#FastTrackWatch), this first column rounds up the commentary and arguments in favour of what the Government is proposing.
Chris Bishop puts the case for getting things done
The architect of the overturn of RMA is Infrastructure and Housing Minister Chris Bishop. He has developed the new regime, with the central purpose of enabling the country to “get things done” – i.e. for development to occur. This goal comes in the context of widespread awareness and consensus that things have been moving too slowly in New Zealand, and major and important infrastructure and housing have been held back by structural and governmental regulation.
Much of this relates to the Resource Management Act 1991, which most politicians want replaced. Bishop’s answer is to essentially deregulate the sector and turbo-charge the ability of developers to get their projects off the ground. And in finding a way to do this, he’s picked up what the last Labour Government had already done with their own Covid-era fast-track processes and expanded that into a more permanent and extensive escalated process.
The new processes mean that three cabinet ministers (those responsible for transport, regional development, and infrastructure) can select a select number of development proposals to essentially get exemptions from normal resource consenting processes. An expert panel is also involved in advising the ministers and suggesting conditions to be placed on developers, but the three ministers have the ultimate say.
Bishop explained all of this in his column in the Herald yesterday, in which he paints a dark picture of the status quo, which justifies a new approach: “It’s too hard to get things done in New Zealand. Too hard to build new renewable energy, too hard to build roads and public transport, too hard to build houses and too hard to develop the sort of sensible economic development projects that provide jobs and growth” – see: Fast Track Approvals Bill – New Zealand has become an obstruction economy (paywalled)
To illustrate how the status quo needs radical change, Bishop is good at using anecdotes about the frustrations of a dysfunctional and bureaupathetic consents system: “I recently met a housing developer who had finally received consent after a three-year process only to have an official turn up on the very day earthworks were to begin and demand a Wildlife Act permit. That process took more than a year to complete. Such ineptitude would be funny if kids weren’t living in cars and a generation were not locked out of home ownership.”
Bishop has cleverly turned the tables on critics who has sought to tar the fast-track process as being about helping construction and mining companies to get their way. Instead, he sells his solution as being about improving housing availability, making roads safer, and decarbonising the economy to fight climate change.
He also puts forward a very clear explanation of how the new fast-track process will work as a streamlined “one-stop-shop” process for developers: “it doesn’t just deal with resource consents, it also deals with all the other things often needed for development, like conservation permits, heritage and so on. It makes sense to do all of that at the same time, rather than strung out over many years and with multiple different government agencies.”
Shane Jones’ populist approach
New Zealand First’s Shane Jones is the second biggest voice selling the fast-track proposal to the public. And although Bishop is the main architect of it, it’s been said that Jones, as Resources Minister, is the schemes’ “godfather”. Crucially, he was responsible for getting the scheme included in the coalition agreement between National and New Zealand First.
Jones’ sales pitch for the fast-track is less subtle than that of Bishop, and more populist, saying it’s about driving a metaphorical bulldozer through all the red- and green-tape to get things done for “the people”, especially in the neglected regions. He promises more jobs and economic growth as a result. It’s all very much in line with his “Make New Zealand Great Again” mode in which leaders need to break rules to get things done.
Jones takes delight in promising more consents for the extractive sector, including mining on conservation land, and appeals to New Zealanders, who he says are sick of environmental protections slowing down progress too much. In debating the new legislation in Parliament, Jones explained the new approach: “Gone are the days of the multicoloured skink, the kiwi, many other species that have been weaponised to deny regional New Zealand communities their right to a livelihood, their entitlement to live peacefully with their environment but derive an income to meet the costs of raising families in regional New Zealand.”
More famously, Jones has also referred to allowing land that is currently protected against mining to protect the Archey’s frog: “In those areas called the Department of Conservation estate, where it’s stewardship land, stewardship land is not DOC land, and if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddy.”
Mike Hosking: The Most important thing the Govt is doing
The one person outside of government and industry circles who is almost a lone voice in championing the fast-track regime is Newstalk broadcaster Mike Hosking. He put forward his best defence of it this week, saying the proposal “might well be the most important thing this Government does” given that New Zealand’s has an infrastructure crisis and needs to get on with building and fixing things, which is what this bill is about – see: This Government was elected on change — embrace it
Hosking reminds us that the current Resource Management Act isn’t working, and so it’s important that we innovate to try new ways of getting on with creating economic growth and rebuilding the country. It’s a message that will resonate with a public that is impatient for change and transformation, especially given that this is a widespread feeling that “the country is broken” or in decline.
Hosking’s other key argument is to attack those that are questioning the fast-track proposal – he describes them as “incessant moaners” and “handwringers” who are holding back progress. Here’s his key point: “Submissions on the legislation closed last week and you can imagine who turned up. It’s the same people who believe not doing things is the preferred option. The same people who have held this country to ransom over their individual myopic view of what’s important to save, or treasure, or talk more about.”
The New Zealand Initiative: In favour of centralising power in Wellington
The pro-business lobby group and think tank the New Zealand Initiative has come out firmly in favour of the Fast Track Approvals Bill, saying that it’s “a necessary step to streamline decision-making for projects with significant economic benefits, and it should proceed.”
This group is normally an advocate for “localism”, devolution, and against the ethos of “Wellington knows best” – which means they might have been expected to rail against this concentration of power in the Beehive. But in this case, they support the Government taking back control so that they can push through development without cause for local participation and impediments in the decisions.
The Initiative’s main spokesperson on the issue, Nick Clark, has written a column for the Herald this month about how the bill might not be perfect, but it should be supported because it “represents an improvement on the status quo” – see: Fast-tracking for infrastructure fix is needed now (paywalled)
In talking about the concerning imperfections in the fast-tracking proposal, such as the increased likelihood of corruption, the Initiative concludes that these aren’t important enough to prevent the Bill from being implemented in its current form, especially given the urgency of New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit.
The Initiative therefore takes a highly pragmatic argument in favour of fast-tracking, pointing to, like Bishop, the many economic problems facing the country, which now means that a centralisation of powers is desirable in order to push through developments, even if they are opposed by locals.
Infrastructure Commission
Some fast-track supporters have used material produced by the Government’s Infrastructure Commission to show the need for the new reforms. Although the Commission doesn’t appear to have taken a stance on this major infrastructure issue, it has published a report on the problems with the existing resource management rules.
The report was prepared for the Commission by the Sapere consultancy company, and it shows that the current consenting process costs the economy about $1.3 billion per year. It also pointed out that over the last five years, the average time taken to get consent has doubled.
The Commission is also under pressure to come up with ways to speed up developments. A poll last year showed that 61 per cent of New Zealanders believe that not enough is being done to meet the country’s infrastructure needs. Priorities, according to survey respondents, were flood defences and new housing supply. For more on this, see Andrea Vance’s recent column,Why Nimbyism is the biggest risk to the Government’s fast-track regime (paywalled)
Business interests welcome fast-tracking
“Manna from heaven” is how the fast-track bill is being described by the chief executive of the mining lobby group Straterra, Josie Vidal. She says that “the country is in trouble. We need to get on and do some things”, and suggests that politicians have become too ponderous in their decision-making – see Brent Edwards’ NBR article, Opponents and supporters of fast-track bill want changes (paywalled)
As to the criticisms of the bill, Vidal writes this off: “There is a lot of fearmongering from environmental groups.”
Similarly, Newsroom’s editor Tim Murphy has said: “This Govt is certainly making some people happy. The mining, marine aquaculture, roading, energy and land developer industries must be wondering whether they’ve died and gone to heaven with the new fast-tracking law.”
Certainly, businesses and other lobby groups have reacted very positively to the fast-track bill. Press statements have been put out in its support by Infrastructure New Zealand, Transporting New Zealand, Energy Resources Aotearoa, and Civil Contractors NZ.
Some iwi are also supportive of the fast-track, as many have economic interests in aquaculture and energy industry. For example, Ngāi Tahu has been reported as hoping to use the new fast-track to finally get the greenlight for its previously-blocked proposal for a massive salmon farm off Stewart Island.
The public’s appeal for “getting things done”
The fast-track regime is likely to be very popular with the public. There’s a widespread frustration with how little government gets achieved, and how society is held back by regulations. This is especially the case in terms of building and resource management consents.
….This column continues. To access this, please follow this link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz) and subscribe: Upgrade to paid.
An Australian author and advocate, Jim Aubrey, today led a national symbolic one minute’s silence to mark the “blood debt” owed to Papuan allies during the Second World War indigenous resistance against the invading Japanese forces.
“A promise to most people is a promise,” Aubrey said in his open letter marking the debt protest — “unless that promise is made by the Australian government.”
After the successes of Australian and US troops against the Japanese in New Guinea, the Allies continued the advance through what was then Dutch New Guinea then on to the Philippines.
The first landing was at Hollandia (now Jayapura) in April 1944, which involved the Australian navy and air force.
Aubrey said in his letter:
“The Australian government’s WWII remembrance oath to Papuan and Timorese allies by the RAAF in flyers dropped over East Timor and the island of New Guinea — ‘FRIENDS, WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU!’ — is in reality one of history’s most heinous bastard acts in war and diplomacy.
“Betrayal is the reality of this blood debt and includes consecutive Australian governments’ treachery and culpability as a criminal accomplice and accessory to six decades of the Indonesian government’s crimes against humanity.
“Barbarity that shames us! Genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and relentless ethnic cleansing.
Aubrey, spokesperson for Genocide Rebellion and the Free West Papua International Coalition, said that he and supporters were commemorating the Second World War “Papuan sacrifice for us” — Australian and American servicemen and women — four days before ANZAC Day without inviting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese or any government minister [and] without inviting US President Biden.
“To have them with us on this special solemn occasion, while honouring the fact that many of us — children and grandchildren – would not be here if it were not for Papuan courage, loyalty, and sacrifice so steadfastly given to our forebears, would be dishonourable.
‘Heartless complicity’ “We condemn outright their heartless complicity and premeditated exploitation of Papuans in their time of peril. A blood debt not honoured by a single Australian government or US administration!
Author Jim Aubrey salutes the Morning Star flag of West Papuan independence earlier today . . . “A blood debt not honoured by a single Australian government or US administration.” Image: Genocide Rebellion
“Lest We Forget . . . six decades of providing the Republic of Indonesia with an environment of impunity for crimes against humanity — 500,000 victims in Western New Guinea, 250,000 in East Timor [now Timor-Leste after the 1999 liberation].
“Future historians will teach their undergraduates that Australian governments did forget! That Australian governments also contravened Commonwealth and State criminal codes by helping the Indonesian government prevent the legal decolonisation of Western New Guinea and achieve their subsequent unlawful annexation; and by concealing and destroying evidence of the 1998 Biak Island Massacre.
“It is not only a matter of honour and truth, it’s personal. I have only just discovered that my father and my uncle were Australian servicemen in the Pacific Theatre campaigns across New Guinea.
“Honourable Australians and Americans, however, only need to know our duty of care and our international obligations cannot be compromised for political and economic plunder. The victims of crimes against humanity deserve the support and the protection they are by law, by right, and decency entitled to.
“Pacific Island nations look to the East for a relationship of integrity in their international affairs. Who can blame them with Australian governments track record of treachery, dishonour, and their demeaning elitism and history in the genocide of indigenous peoples.”
All the required paperwork has been submitted to the port authority, and the cargo has been loaded and prepared for the humanitarian trip to the besieged enclave.
However, organisers received word of an “administrative roadblock” initiated by Israel in an attempt to prevent the departure.
Israel is reportedly pressuring the Republic of Guinea Bissau to withdraw its flag from the flotilla’s lead ship — Akdeniz (“Mediterranean”).
This triggered a request for an additional inspection, this one by the flag state, that delayed yesterday’s planned departure.
“This is another example of Israel obstructing the delivery of life-saving aid to the people in Gaza who face a deliberately created famine,” said a Freedom Flotilla statement.
“How many more children will die of malnutrition and dehydration because of this delay and an ongoing siege which must be broken?”
Israeli tactics This is not the first time that Israel has used such tactics to stop Freedom Flotilla ships from sailing.
“We have overcome them before and are diligently working to overcome this latest attempt,” said the flotilla statement.
“Our vessels have already passed all required inspections and we are confident that the Akdeniz will pass this inspection provided there is no political interference.
“We expect this to be no more than a few days delay. Israel will not break our resolve to reach the people of Gaza.”
‘Freedom flotilla’ defying Israel’s Gaza blockade. Video: Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera reports that lawyers, aid workers and activists are on board the ship in preparation for efforts by the flotilla to break the Israeli air, land and sea blockade of Gaza.
About 100 media people are on board as well, hoping to provide a more global eye on what is happening in Gaza.
Chief Mandla Mandela, the grandson of former South African President Nelson Mandela, is part of the flotilla that plans to soon set off for Gaza.
“For us South Africans, the Palestinian issue has always been close and dear to our hearts,” Mandela said, noting that this grandfather had also said, “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinian people.”
Palestine solidarity protesters today demonstrated at the Auckland headquarters of Television New Zealand, accusing the country’s major TV network of broadcasting “propaganda” backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
About 50 protesters targeted the main entrance to the TVNZ building near Sky Tower and also picketed a side gate entrance for media workers for about an hour.
The protest climaxed a week of critical responses from commentators and critics of TVNZ’s Q&A senior reporter/presenter Jack Tame’s 45-minute interview with Israel ambassador Ran Yaakoby last Sunday which Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) secretary Neil Scott described as “a platform for propaganda to excuse the genocide happening in Gaza over the last six months”.
Waving Palestine flags and placards declaring “Bias”, “silence is complicity — free Palestine,” and “Balanced journalism — my ass,” the protesters chanted “Jack Tame, you cannot hide – you’re complicit with genocide.”
Protester Joseph with a Palestine flag outside the entrance to TVNZ’s headquarters today. Image: APR
Chalked on the pavement and on the walls were slogans such as “Jack ‘Shame’ helped kill MSM”, “TVNZ stop platforming genocide and Zionism”, “TVNZ genocide apologists” and “137 journalists killed” in reference to the mainly Palestinian journalists targeted by Israeli military forces.
Across the street, a wall slogan said: “TVNZ (Q&A) broadcast Israeli lies about Gaza”. Other slogans condemned the lack of Palestinian voices in TVNZ coverage – there are about 288 Palestinian people in New Zealand, according to the 2018 Census.
Ironically, TVNZ tonight screened a rare Palestinian story — a heart-rending report about the tragic death in Gaza of a baby girl, Sabreen Joudeh, “Patience” in Arabic, who had been saved from her dying mother’s womb after an Israeli air strike on their family home.
The TVNZ report interviewed the related Gouda family in Auckland hours before Abdallah Gouda, a doctor, flew out to Turkiye to join a humanitarian aid flotilla leaving for Gaza.
PSNA’s Neil Scott criticises TVNZ coverage of Gaza. Video: Café Pacific
Criticism of ‘complicity’? “Jack Tame, you’re a professional,” yelled PSNA secretary Scott through a loud hailer addressing TVNZ. “You know what would be set up, you have to know.
“But you allowed it to happen!”
“I don’t get you Jack, stupid or complicit? Complicit or stupid? One of the two.”
Critics are understood to be filing complaints about the alleged “one-sidedness” of the programme citing many specific criticisms.
“We’re here today because of Jack Tame’s Q&A report for TVNZ,” said Scott. Among some of his complaints were Tame:
interviewing Ambassador Yaakoby at the Israeli Embassy in Wellington instead of at a TVNZ studio with the New Zealand flag being showed alongside the Israeli flag. “Tying the two countries together – a professional would have had the New Zealand flag removed.”
Not providing context around the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel at the start of the interview – “more than 75 years of repression since 750,000 Palestinians were expelled as refugees from their homeland in the 1948 Nakba.”
Asking a series of questions that the Israeli ambassador “avoided, changed, or outright lied” in his response.
Not following up with the questions as needed.
Avoiding the questions that “would have placed the issue of the Israeli attack on Gaza” in context.
A protester holds a “Silence is complicity” placard outside TVNZ in Auckland today. Image: APR
Platform for propaganda “Essentially, Tame gave Israel a platform for propaganda to excuse the genocide happening in Gaza over the last six months,” said Scott.
Among the contextual questions that Scott claimed Tame should have questioned Ambassador Yaakoby on were the envoy’s unchallenged claim that “1400 people had been butchered” by Hamas fighters.
“The ambassador didn’t mention that more than 350 Israeli soldiers were among those killed — at their military posts,” Scott said.
“Many of the others were aged between 18 and 40 and in the military reserves.”
Also, no mention was made of the controversial Hannibal Directive which reportedly led to the Israeli military killing many of its own countrymen and women captives as the resistance fighters retreated back to Gaza.
The controversial Q&A interview with Israeli Ambassador Ran Yaakoby. Video: TVNZ
Among other responses to TVNZ’s Q&A this week, Palestine solidarity advocate and PSNA chair John Minto declared in an open letter to TVNZ published by The Daily Blog that the programme “breached all the standards of decent journalism. In other words it was offensive, discriminatory, inaccurate and grossly unfair.”
A protester holding up a “Bias” placard outside TVNZ in Auckland today. Image: APR
‘Unchallenged lies’ “It wasn’t journalism – it was 45-minutes of uninterrupted and unchallenged Israeli lies, misinformation and previously-debunked propaganda. It was outrageous. It was despicable,” Minto wrote.
“The country which for six months has conducted genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza was given free rein to pour streams of the most vile fabrications and misinformation against Palestinians directly into the homes of New Zealanders. And without a murmur of protest from Jack Tame.
“Even the most egregious lies such as the ‘beheaded babies’ myth were allowed to be broadcast without challenge despite this Israeli propaganda having been discredited months ago.
“The interview showed utter contempt for Palestine and Palestinians as well as New Zealanders who were assailed with this stream of racist deceits and falsehoods with Q&A as the conduit.”
Among a stream of social media comments, one person remarked “On John Tame’s YouTube channel it gained a lot of comments fairly quickly . . .
“These comments were encouraging as at least 95 percent were denouncing the interview . . . with a lot of them debunking the endless stream of blatant lies and atrocity propaganda that poured out of the Israeli ambassador’s mouth.
“Most of the posters were obviously from our country and it was a great example of how Israel’s actions have shattered its reputation with their propaganda fooling hardly anyone anymore.
“It’s a bit like a little child with chocolate all over their face denying they ate the chocolate . . . except in Israel’s case it’s civilian blood all over their face . . .
“Anyway, when I revisited the thread the comments had been purged and deleted.”
On the Q&A YouTube channel, @ZaraLomas commented: “The fact that Q&A are deleting critical comments speaks volumes about their integrity (or lack thereof), and their faith in this shocking piece of ‘journalism’.
Television New Zealand . . . under fire over its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Image: APR
US Senator, James William Fulbright. Image courtesy of: Wikimedia.org.
Opinion by Lynley Hood.
Forty years on from my 1985 Fulbright Grant, my disquiet over the war in Gaza evoked some troubling questions.
The answer to my first question – What is the primary purpose of the Fulbright Programme? – was on the Fulbright NZ website. It says:
US Senator, James William Fulbright. Image courtesy of: Wikimedia.org.
The Fulbright programme was established in 1946 as an initiative of US Senator J. William Fulbright, to promote mutual understanding through educational and cultural exchanges between the US and other countries. Informed by his own exchange experience as a Rhodes Scholar, Senator Fulbright believed the programme could play an important role in building a lasting world peace in the aftermath of World War II.
The Fulbright Programme has been described as one of the largest and most significant movements of scholars across the face of the earth and now operates in over 155 countries, funding around 8,000 exchanges per year for participants to study, research, teach or present their work in another country.
In Senator Fulbright’s words, the programme aims “to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.” This goal has always been as important to the programme as individual scholarship. (ref. https://fulbright.org.nz/ )
My next question was: If Senator Fulbright really did say that, why isn’t the international Fulbright community in an uproar over the anti-Palestinian war-mongering being pursued by the USA, Israel, Germany and the UK? They’re all Fulbright countries, but instead of working for peace they’re faciliating genocide by supplying arms and ammunition for the war in Gaza.
After finding no answer to that question, my inner protester told me to speak out, and my inner editor told me to check my sources first. So after scrolling through scores of unsourced quotes, I took my search for reliable sources to Dunedin second hand bookshops – and found a treasure.
The Arrogance of Power by J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1967. Here are some quotes:
Having done so much and succeeded so well, America is now at that historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it. Other great nations, reaching this critical juncture, have aspired to too much, and by overextention of effort have declined and then fallen.
The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that it’s power is a sign of God’s favour, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s work. The Lord, after all, surely would not choose you as His agent and then deny you the sword with which to work His will. German soldiers in the First World War wore belt buckles imprinted with the words “Gutt mit uns [God is with us].” It was approximately under this kind of infatuation — an exaggerated sense of power and an imaginary sense of mission — that the Athenians attacked Syracuse and Napoleon and then Hitler invaded Russia. In plain words, they overextended their commitments and they came to grief.
The stakes are high indeed: they include not only America’s continued greatness but nothing less than the survival of the human race in an era when, for the first in history, a living generation has the power of veto over the survival of the next.
When the abstractions and subtleties of political science have been exhausted, there remains the most basic unanswered questions about war and peace and why nations contest the issues they contest and why they even care about them. As Aldous Huxley has written:
There may be arguments about the best way of raising wheat in a cold climate or of reafforesting a denuded mountain. But such arguments never lead to organised slaught. Organised slaughter is the result of arguments about such questions as the following: Which is the best nation? The best religion? The best political theory? The best form of government? Why are other people so stupid and wicked? Why can’t they see how good and intelligent we are? Why do they resist our beneficent efforts to bring them under our control and make them like ourselves?
Many of the wars fought by man — I am tempted to say most — have been fought over such abstraction. The more I puzzle over the great wars of history, the more I am inclined to the view that the causes attributed to them — territory, markets, resources, the defence or perpetuation of great principles — were not the root cause at all but rather explanations or excuses for certain unfathomable drives of human nature. For lack of a clear and precise understanding of exactly what these motives are, I refer to them as the “arrogance of power”— as a psychological need that nations seem to have in order to prove that they are bigger, better, or stronger than other nations. Implicit in this drive is the assumption, even on the part of normally peaceful nations, that force is the ultimate proof of superiority — that when a nation shows that it has the stronger army, it is also proving that is has better people, better institutions, better priciples, and in general, a better civilisation.
Evidence for my proposition is found in the remarkable discrepancy between apparent and hidden causes of some modern wars…
The United States went to war in 1898 for the stated purpose of liberating Cuba from Spanish tyranny, but after winning the war — a war which Spain had been willing to pay a high price to avoid — the United States brought the liberated Cubans under an American protectorate and incidentally annexed the Philippines, because, according to President McKinley, the Lord told him it was America’s duty “to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Cristianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as fellowmen for who Christ also died.”
Isn’t it interesting that the voice was the voice of the Lord but the words were those of Theordore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Admiral Mahan, those “imperialists of 1898” who wanted America to have an empire just because a big powerful country like America ought to have an empire? The spirit of the times was expressed by Albert Beveridge, soon thereafter elected to the United States Senate, who proclaimed Americans to be “a conquering race;” “We must obey our blood and occupy new markets and if necessary new lands,” he said, because “In the Almighty’s infinite plan . . . debased civilisations and decaying races” must disappear “before the higher civilisations of the nobler and more virile type of man.”
It has been a particularly distressing start to the year. There is little that can ease the current grief of individuals, families and communities who have needlessly lost a loved one to men’s violence in recent weeks.
A spate of cases involving women dying, allegedly at the hands of men, in the Ballarat region. The shocking case of Molly Ticehurst, allegedly murdered by her ex-boyfriend in central west New South Wales. The fact so many of the victims of the violence at Bondi Junction were women.
It is clear there is a collective grief across our nation. The headlines express our shared hurt and disbelief that women continue to lose their lives to men’s violence against them. This weekend, a National Rally Against Violence will urge governments to take more assertive action to end gender-based violence in our communities.
So what’s being done – and are we making any progress?
At this time, it is appropriate we seek to ease our individual and collective grief.
It is a time for expressing our respect for the women who have lost their lives, and for renewing our commitments that we will not stand by and do nothing while women continue to be harmed.
We have not been standing in silence.
Australians have been – and will continue – taking action to end gender-based violence.
This plan emphasises prevention and early intervention, as well as improving support for victim-survivors and justice responses. There is also a focus on recovery and healing.
For the first time, there is a specific Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan to address violence against women and children in First Nations communities.
The Commonwealth government has also committed to centring Aboriginal women’s leadership in the development of a standalone National Plan for First Nations women.
Across our communities, workplaces are implementing new policies and programs to prevent sexual harassment and to promote equity and respect at work.
The media, too, are reporting with greater sensitivity and respect for victim-survivors of violence.
Universities are embarking on a program of policy, services and cultural change to address sexual violence and harassment.
More and more schools are delivering on respectful relationships education with children and young people.
From sports clubs to faith communities, to licensed venues and public spaces, there is a heightened awareness of family and sexual violence, and the role we all have to play in responding to and preventing it.
Is it working?
Our national data is telling us that these shared efforts are starting to show impact in our communities. Of course, zero preventable deaths should be our goal.
But the data from the Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Homicide Monitoring Program does show a continuing decline in rates of intimate partner homicide, in particular.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Personal Safety Survey, the most accurate measure of self-reported experiences of all forms of personal violence in Australia, also shows some promising trends. It shows the 12-month rate of family violence may have reduced in some states, while remaining the same in others.
There is so much policy and program work that Australia has committed to – but much is still in its infancy of implementation.
Police and justice systems in several states have been reviewing policies and practices that have too often failed to protect women’s lives.
Accountability of men who choose to use violence is critical – but there is also a need for more work with men who want to change their behaviour, and for early intervention programs to prevent men’s violence from escalating.
We also urgently need funding for recovery and healing services for victim-survivors.
It is unacceptable that many of those experiencing lasting trauma and other impacts of family and sexual violence face a lack of affordable, accessible, trauma-informed support beyond a situation of dangerous crisis.
It has been less than ten years since we have had a national framework to guide evidence-based strategies to prevent the violence before it occurs. Addressing the underlying drivers of gender-based violence goes hand-in-hand with our response efforts, if we want to see lasting change.
Impact on survivors
The recent headlines on gender-based violence have also undoubtedly affected remaining victim-survivors.
For some, hearing about these recent cases may add to existing trauma. It can prompt an unnerving sense of unsafety; a feeling of endless risk that too often women are left to navigate largely on their own.
Others may feel the time is right to disclose their own experience of violence to a friend or family member, or contact a helpline like 1800 RESPECT.
If you find yourself responding to a disclosure of violence, remember your initial response can have a lasting impact.
Now, more than ever, she will need to be listened to without blame or judgement. She will need to be believed, and she may need some support to connect with specialist support services.
Many men too, will no doubt be reflecting on what needs to be done to end this violence. There is a particularly important role for non-violent men to play in speaking out against gender-based violence and helping break these patterns.
We must not lose heart, but rather accelerate the progress we have begun to make.
We must continue to take action if we are to fulfil our shared commitment to an Australia where women – and indeed, all of us – live free from all forms of violence.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732. In immediate danger, call 000.
Anastasia Powell receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Criminology Research Council, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), and Family Safety Victoria. Anastasia is also a director of Our Watch (Australia’s national organisation for the prevention of violence against women), and a member of the National Women’s Safety Alliance (NWSA).
Asher Flynn receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Criminology Research Council and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS). Asher is also a Chief Investigator and Deputy Lead of Research Ethics & Training for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, the Centre for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW).
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne
Once known only to those studying biology, the word symbiosis is now widely used. Symbiosis is the intimate relationship of different species living together. It’s much more common and older than many of us might realise.
One of the most common symbiotic relationships is between various species of algae and fungi, or between cyanobacteria (commonly known as blue-green algae though it’s not algae) and fungi. These paired species take the form of lichens.
The term symbiosis was first used in the 19th century to describe the lichen relationship, which was thought to be highly unusual. Since then, we’ve discovered symbiosis is the norm, rather than the exception. In fact, it has shaped the evolution of most life on Earth.
Clownfish and anenomes have one of the best-known symbiotic relationships between animals. melissaf84/Shutterstock
Lichens are diverse. They grow on tree trunks, on roof tiles and on ancient rocks.
The symbiosis of two different species allows both to survive in environments they might not be able to colonise otherwise. The fungus provides a suitable environment for its partnering species of algae or cyanbacteria to grow – it might otherwise be too exposed or dry, for example. In return, the fungus gets to share some of the carbohydrates produced by photosynthesis.
This is an example where both partners benefit from their relationship. It’s called mutualistic symbiosis.
Lichens are often very good indicators of air quality and more general ecosystem health. Their absence can indicate poor air quality. Because they absorb air pollutants such as heavy metals they can be used as biomonitors.
In another very common example of mutualistic symbiosis, most plant species live in a close relationship with fungi in the soil. It’s known as a mycorrhizal association.
The plants harness the energy in sunlight to make sugar from water and carbon dioxide in the process called photosynthesis. The plants share this food with the fungus, which relies on them for survival. In return, the fine threads of the fungus greatly increase the surface area of the plant roots for absorbing water and nutrients.
A microscopic view of a rice plant root showing the threads of a mycorrhizal fungus. melissaf84/Shutterstock
Not all symbiotic relationships benefit both partners.
In parasitic symbiosis, one partner benefits at the expense of the other. Examples include the fungi Phytophthora, Fusarium and Armilleria, which often kill their plant hosts.
In cases of commensalism, one organism benefits and the other neither gains nor loses. Small birds, for example, sometimes perch on large herbivores, eating insects disturbed by the larger animals.
As in any relationship, it’s possible things can change over time. For example, a mutualistic symbiosis between a tree and its mycorrhizal fungus might change to parasitism as the tree ages and declines, or if environmental conditions change.
The relationship between mistletoe and its host plant can be complex and change with the conditions. Ken Griffiths/Shutterstock
Symbiosis has played a huge role in the evolution of life. The cells that make up the bodies of animals and plants are the result of symbiotic relationships.
Cells are complex. They contain structures called organelles, such as the nucleus (the control centre of the cell) and mitochondrion (involved in cellular respiration, which uses oxygen to break down food molecules to make energy available). Plant cells also contain chloroplasts, the sites of photosynthesis.
The organelles of complex cells were once single-celled life forms that survived being engulfed by other simple cells. They formed a more complex and efficient cell, which has become the basic cell type for large multicellular life forms.
All large multi-cellular organisms living on Earth – animal and plant – possess this type of cell. It’s proof of how successful this evolutionary symbiotic strategy has been.
Cell respiration in both plant and animal cells involves mitochondria, which indicates they were engulfed early in evolutionary history. Later a cell type already containing mitochondria engulfed the chloroplast. This led to the evolution of complex plants.
The incorporation of one cell type into another is called endosymbiosis. It allowed cells and parts of cells to become highly specialised. This specialisation improved their efficiency and capacity to survive under a wider range of conditions.
When I was a postgraduate botany student in the late ’70s, colleagues one day brought samples of common sea lettuce, Ulva latuca, to the laboratory, where I was studying photosynthetic physiology. Sea lettuce is a seaweed found in many shallow waters around the Australian coast.
We noticed a little marine slug grazing on the plant, so we popped it into our system for studying photosynthesis. To our surprise the slug was photosynthesising! We discovered the slug partly digested the sea lettuce cells, but some chloroplasts passed through the lining of the slug’s gut and continued to photosynthesise.
We thought we had made an important discovery, only to learn others had published similar work. After that I never doubted the validity of endosymbiosis, which was still a controversial theory at the time.
Chloroplasts can continue photosynthesising inside the body of sea slugs that absorb them when grazing on algae. Sarah Frost/Shutterstock
Symbiosis turns out to be the norm
We now know symbiosis is the norm for most organisms, including humans.
Our gut flora represent symbiosis on a massive scale. The diversity and huge numbers of bacteria living happily in our gut can have a huge impact on our general health and wellbeing. In the case of a healthy gut, both the person and the bacteria do well out of the relationship: a nice example of mutualistic symbiosis.
COVID focused public attention on viruses. But not all viruses are harmful; many actually benefit the organisms they infect. Some viruses even protect us from disease-causing viruses. For example, in people who are HIV-positive the disease progresses more slowly in those who are also infected with GB virus C (GBV-C).
Of course, the full range of symbiotic relationships with viruses is possible, from mutual benefit to an infected host suffering great harm. And, as with bacteria, there is accumulating evidence viruses have helped many species evolve, including our own.
An organism must live within a complex set of relationships to survive and thrive in any environment. Some relationships will be more positive than others, but it should not surprise that mutualistic symbiosis is so often the key to success.
Gregory Moore 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 Kim Hemsley, Head, Childhood Dementia Research Group, Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University
“Childhood” and “dementia” are two words we wish we didn’t have to use together. But sadly, around 1,400 Australian children and young people live with currently untreatable childhood dementia.
Broadly speaking, childhood dementia is caused by any one of more than 100 rare genetic disorders. Although the causes differ from dementia acquired later in life, the progressive nature of the illness is the same.
Half of infants and children diagnosed with childhood dementia will not reach their tenth birthday, and most will die before turning 18.
Yet this devastating condition has lacked awareness, and importantly, the research attention needed to work towards treatments and a cure.
Most types of childhood dementia are caused by mutations (or mistakes) in our DNA. These mistakes lead to a range of rare genetic disorders, which in turn cause childhood dementia.
Two-thirds of childhood dementia disorders are caused by “inborn errors of metabolism”. This means the metabolic pathways involved in the breakdown of carbohydrates, lipids, fatty acids and proteins in the body fail.
As a result, nerve pathways fail to function, neurons (nerve cells that send messages around the body) die, and progressive cognitive decline occurs.
Most children initially appear unaffected. But after a period of apparently normal development, children with childhood dementia progressively lose all previously acquired skills and abilities, such as talking, walking, learning, remembering and reasoning.
Childhood dementia also leads to significant changes in behaviour, such as aggression and hyperactivity. Severe sleep disturbance is common and vision and hearing can also be affected. Many children have seizures.
The age when symptoms start can vary, depending partly on the particular genetic disorder causing the dementia, but the average is around two years old. The symptoms are caused by significant, progressive brain damage.
Are there any treatments available?
Childhood dementia treatments currently under evaluation or approved are for a very limited number of disorders, and are only available in some parts of the world. These include gene replacement, gene-modified cell therapy and protein or enzyme replacement therapy. Enzyme replacement therapy is available in Australia for one form of childhood dementia. These therapies attempt to “fix” the problems causing the disease, and have shown promising results.
Other experimental therapies include ones that target faulty protein production or reduce inflammation in the brain.
Death rates for Australian children with cancer nearly halved between 1997 and 2017 thanks to research that has enabled the development of multiple treatments. But over recent decades, nothing has changed for children with dementia.
In 2017–2023, research for childhood cancer received over four times more funding per patient compared to funding for childhood dementia. This is despite childhood dementia causing a similar number of deaths each year as childhood cancer.
The success for childhood cancer sufferers in recent decades demonstrates how adequately funding medical research can lead to improvements in patient outcomes.
Another bottleneck for childhood dementia patients in Australia is the lack of access to clinical trials. An analysis published in March this year showed that in December 2023, only two clinical trials were recruiting patients with childhood dementia in Australia.
Worldwide however, 54 trials were recruiting, meaning Australian patients and their families are left watching patients in other parts of the world receive potentially lifesaving treatments, with no recourse themselves.
That said, we’ve seen a slowing in the establishment of clinical trials for childhood dementia across the world in recent years.
Recently, we were awarded new funding for our research on childhood dementia. This will help us continue and expand studies that seek to develop lifesaving treatments.
More broadly, we need to see increased funding in Australia and around the world for research to develop and translate treatments for the broad spectrum of childhood dementia conditions.
Dr Kristina Elvidge, head of research at the Childhood Dementia Initiative, and Megan Maack, director and CEO, contributed to this article.
Kim Hemsley has previously received research funding from Lysogene and Shire Human Genetic Therapies, companies seeking to develop treatments for childhood dementia.
Kim Hemsley has received funding from the Australian NHMRC and MRFF in addition to the Sanfilippo Children’s Foundation (Australia), Cure Sanfilippo (US), National MPS Society (US), Sanfilippo Foundation Switzerland, Women’s and Children’s Foundation, Little Heroes Foundation and the SA Government.
Kim is a Childhood Dementia Initiative Scientific and Medical Advisory Committee member, a Sanfilippo Children’s Foundation (Australia) Scientific Advisory Board member and is currently Chair, Scientific Advisory Board to the National MPS Society (USA). All roles are voluntary.
Nicholas Smith receives institutional research funding from BlueBird Bio, Ultragenyx and Cyclo Therapeutics. He receives consulting fees (under academic institutional contract) from Forge Biologics. All listed companies are biotechnology companies developing therapies including for diseases within the childhood dementia spectrum. He has received funding from the Medical Research Future Fund, Sanfilippo Children’s Foundation and the Women and Children’s Hospital Foundation for research developing therapies for childhood dementia. He is a member of the Scientific and Medical Advisory Board, Childhood Dementia Initiative; Scientific Advisory Board, Sanfilippo Children’s Foundation; Scientific Advisory Board, Batten’s Disease Support and Research Foundation; Rare Finds Foundation Board, and a committee member of the Australian Mitochondrial Disease Medical Network. All are voluntary with no pecuniary interest. He is a consultant neurologist involved in the care of patients with childhood dementia and Chief / Primary Investigator on multiple national / international trials across disorders within the childhood dementia spectrum.
Siti Mubarokah receives funding from Sanfilippo Children’s Foundation, The Little Heroes Foundation and SA Government.
The government’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee has just published its second report. It was set up by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth in 2022 to provide:
non-binding advice on boosting economic inclusion and tackling disadvantage, including policy settings, systems and structures, and the adequacy, effectiveness and sustainability of income support payments.
This year, the report tackled a burning question: why has the gap between unemployment payments and age pensions widened?
Unemployment and related payments for working-age people were given a welcome increase in the 2023–24 budget. But they remain well below pensions, and far from adequate on all measures.
Way below the pension
After the latest regular indexation increase in March, a single jobseeker gets about A$258 per fortnight less than a pensioner in basic payments, and $345 per fortnight less than a pensioner on payments including supplements.
It’s important to understand what’s led us to this point.
The committee’s first report last year noted that the amounts paid are set through a complex historical process that has involved “long periods of inaction” interspersed with “bursts of activity” to address the previous inaction.
The amounts paid out are regularly increased, typically via “indexation” to either wages growth or inflation (prices growth).
Indexation of pensions and benefits was enshrined in legislation in 1976, but at times of high inflation was suspended.
By 1982, unemployment payments were about 80% of the single pension.
From 1983 onwards, the Hawke government increased unemployment payments relative to pensions so that by the time Paul Keating left office as prime minister in March 1996 the rate for a single adult facing unemployment had climbed to 92% of the basic pension.
What widened the gap?
The gap began to widen increasingly quickly from 1997, when the Howard government “benchmarked” pensions to 25% of “male total average weekly earnings”.
This means that although pensions increased in line with the consumer price index, as did unemployment payments, they had to be lifted further to ensure they couldn’t fall below 25% of male total average earnings, whereas unemployment payments did not.
By the early 2000s, the single unemployment payment was worth around 87% of the support for a pensioner, including supplements.
As real wages grew strongly during the mining boom of the early 2000s, the gap widened further to $142 per fortnight ($179 including supplements) by 2009.
And then, although wages were growing less strongly as a result of the global financial crisis, the gap widened again.
The Rudd government lifted single pensions substantially following the recommendations of the 2009 Harmer Review.
Support for unemployed singles fell from 79% of the single pension to just 68% – the biggest gap so far. For couples, the gap fell from 83% to 81%.
The pandemic sparked a brief reprieve
The gap continued to widen until early 2020, when the temporary $550 a fortnight Coronavirus Supplement almost doubled the effective JobSeeker payment, lifting it above the age pension for a short period.
In April 2021, after the gap returned, the Morrison government helped narrow it by lifting JobSeeker by $50 per fortnight, and in 2023 Treasurer Jim Chalmers lifted it a further $40 per fortnight.
But over the past 30 years, the gap has still widened significantly, mainly as an effect of deliberate policy choices to lift support for pensioners.
But from here on, things are set to get worse
Under current indexation and benchmarking arrangements, it is inevitable this gap will continue to widen.
This can be seen in all of the projections of the Intergenerational Reports prepared for the government since 2002.
The latest 2023 report assumes average earnings will increase by 3.7% per year and prices by 2.5% per year over the next 40 years. If this happens, the single rate of JobSeeker will fall to less than half of the pension by 2063.
The improvements achieved through payment increases in 2022 and 2023 would be undone by 2035.
This would lead to much higher rates of relative poverty among working-age benefit recipients in the future. Child poverty would also increase substantially.
What needs to change
The committee has recommended the government commit to a substantial increase in the base rates of JobSeeker and related working-age payments as a first priority, and spell out the time frame in which it will happen.
To ensure this doesn’t need to keep happening, we have also recommended the government improve the indexation arrangements to make sure payments for the unemployed don’t fall behind.
It would still need to regularly review and monitor the relationship between working-age payments and widely accepted measures of community living standards, including wages, but not nearly as often.
Peter Whiteford receives funding from the Australian Research council. He is a member of the Interom Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. Any views expressed are personal.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
The Queensland state election will be held in October. A YouGov poll for The Courier Mail, conducted April 9–17 from a sample of 1,092 people, gave the Liberal National Party a 56–44% lead over Labor, a four-point gain for the LNP since the early October 2023 YouGov poll.
Primary votes were 44% LNP (up three points), 27% Labor (down six), 15% Greens (up two), 10% One Nation (up two) and 4% for all others (down one).
Labor Premier Steven Miles had a -22 net approval rating, compared with former Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s -20 rating in the October poll, with 47% of those polled dissatisfied with his performance and 25% satisfied.
This is the worst net approval for a Queensland premier in YouGov polls for The Courier Mail.
LNP leader David Crisafulli’s net approval was +14, up three points from October. Crisafulli led Miles as better premier by 40–27% (he was 37–35% against Palaszczuk in the October poll).
Asked who they would prefer as premier between Miles and Palaszczuk, voters backed Miles by 53–47%. Labor voters supported Palaszczuk by 51–49%, while LNP voters favoured Miles by 57–43%.
Labor has governed in Queensland since an upset victory at the January 2015 election. But the party is now facing a heavy defeat at the October election after almost ten years in power.
Labor extends lead in federal YouGov poll
A national YouGov poll, conducted April 19–23 from a sample of 1,514 people, gave Labor a 52–48% lead over the Coalition, a one-point gain since March. Primary votes were 36% Coalition (down two points), 33% Labor (up one), 13% Greens (steady), 8% One Nation (up one) and 10% for all others (steady).
Respondents were given two statements regarding Australian military commitments:
Australians have died for Australia, and we should also be prepared to fight for our country’s values if called upon.
We should be sceptical of politicians who want to commit troops to wars not necessary to the direct defence of Australia.
Overall, voters favoured the prepared to fight statement by 46–42%. However, younger age groups were far more inclined to be sceptical than older people. Those aged 25–34 favoured the sceptical statement by 50–34%, while those 65 and older favoured the prepared to fight statement by 60–34%.
On Monday, I covered drops for Labor in the Resolve, Freshwater and Morgan polls. Polls released since then have been better for Labor – the party improved in YouGov and regained the lead in Morgan.
In economic data, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the March quarter inflation report on Wednesday. While the 12-month inflation rate slowed from 4.1% in December to 3.6% in March, the quarterly inflation was 1.0% in March, up from 0.6% in December. Persistent inflation probably explains Labor’s mediocre poll ratings.
Essential poll: Coalition regains lead as One Nation surges
A national Essential poll, conducted April 17–21 from a sample of 1,145 people, gave the Coalition a 49–47% lead over Labor (including undecided voters) – a reversal of Labor’s 48–46% lead in early April.
Primary votes were 35% Coalition (up one point), 31% Labor (up two), 11% Greens (down three), 9% One Nation (up three), 1% UAP (down one), 9% for all others (up one) and 4% undecided (down two). Analyst Kevin Bonham said this is the highest One Nation
primary vote from any pollster this term.
Albanese’s net approval was steady since February at -5, with 48% disapproving of his performance and 43% approving. Dutton’s net approval jumped seven points to +3, with Bonham saying this is Dutton’s first positive net approval from any pollster this term. However, Newspoll gave Dutton a net approval of -15.
On Israel’s military action in Gaza, 32% said Israel should permanently withdraw (down five points since March), 19% favoured a temporary ceasefire (down one), and 19% said Israel’s action was justified (up one). By 29–24%, voters supported recognising Palestine as an independent state.
By a 49–26% margin, voters thought the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy would have a positive impact on Australia as a whole, but were less positive about the personal impact (36–23% positive). And by a 52–31% margin, voters supported Australia developing nuclear energy (compared to 50–33% in October).
Asked which type of energy was most expensive, 40% said renewables (up two points since October), 36% nuclear (up two) and 24% fossil fuels (down four).
By 50–38%, voters thought it unlikely Australia would reach net-zero emissions by 2050 (compared to 57–31% in October).
Morgan poll: Labor regains lead
A national Morgan poll, conducted April 15–21 from a sample of 1,617 people, gave Labor a 52–48% lead over the Coalition, a reversal of a 51–49% Coalition lead from the previous week.
Primary votes were 35.5% Coalition (down three points), 30.5% Labor (up 0.5), 16% Greens (up 2.5), 5.5% One Nation (steady), 7.5% independents (steady) and 5% others (steady).
Additional questions from Newspoll and Resolve
I previously covered the last Newspoll and Resolve poll for Nine newspapers. Recently, Albanese announced a plan to have taxpayer money used for loans and subsidies for projects to help Australia transition to clean energy. Voters backed this plan in Newspoll by 56–38%.
When asked about the Israel-Gaza conflict in the Resolve poll, 46% of voters agreed it had made Australia less safe, compared to 40% in March. By a 61–12% margin, voters thought there had been a rise in racism and religious intolerance in Australia as a result of the conflict (compared to 57–15% in March).
On who Australia should support, 57% (up 12 points since November) said we should take no action, 17% support Israel (down 14) and 9% support Gaza (up two).
Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Naeni, PhD candidate at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University
There’s been much talk in recent months about what a possible second Donald Trump presidency in the United States could mean for Europe, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Israel-Palestinian conflict and China. But there’s one more country closely watching the race: Iran.
Another Trump presidency could pose immense risks for the Iranian leadership, especially given the recent tit-for-tat strikes with Israel, the looming threat of a wider Middle East war, and other significant internal challenges.
Under such conditions, there are three ways a new Trump administration might pose a threat to the clerical establishment: a potential economic shock, bolder military action against the regime and increased protest movements.
In 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and imposed crippling sanctions on the country as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign on the Iranian government.
Iran’s then-vice president, Eshagh Jahangiri, described the subsequent year as the “toughest” since the Islamic Republic’s inception. Trump’s campaign reduced Iran’s oil exports to a historic low of under 400,000 barrels per day, significantly slashing the country’s petrodollars, which represent about 70% of government revenues. Moreover, between 2018 and 2020, Iran’s national currency depreciated by more than 600%.
After Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, Iran has managed to increase its oil exports. It was recently reported that Iran’s oil exports have reached a six-year high of around 1.56 million barrels per day in the first three month of 2024. Republicans in the US blame the Biden administration for not enforcing sanctions against Iran, while the White House insists they are.
With Iran’s economy still weakened, Trump’s potential return could bring a new wave of pressure. Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture has noted, for instance, that a Trump return will cause Iran’s oil exports to “suffer again”.
The head of Iran’s Parliament Research Centre has also highlighted the country’s current budget deficit of US$3.7 billion, warning a Trump return would necessitate being ready for “increased sanctions pressure and an economic shock”.
Another economics expert, Morteza Afghe, struck a more dire note when he warned of a potential “collapse of Iran’s economy”. Due to Iran’s more strident anti-Western policies under President Ebrahim Raisi and the dominance of radical factions in parliament, Afghe believes Trump would be even more determined to escalate his “maximum pressure” campaign on the country.
There are concrete signs of this nervousness already – Trump’s sweep of the Republican nominating contests earlier this year coincided with a 20% fall in the value of the Iranian rial.
On the security front, Trump’s possible return is reminding the Iranian leadership of a significant loss under his presidency: the 2020 killing of General Qassem Soleimani, the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, in a US airstrike.
When he was killed, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, described Soleimani as the architect behind the Iran-backed militia networks in the Middle East, known as the “axis of resistance”. Khamenei also said he “bows to Soleimani” for his achievements with the Quds Force. This illustrates the profound impact the US strike had on Iran’s security interests.
A recent Israeli airstrike on the Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria’s capital this month also killed seven members of the Quds force, including two generals. This led to Iran’s unprecedented retaliatory attack against Israel, which Trump responded to by reposting a threatening tweet from 2018.
He also said at a rally:
[Israel is] under attack right now. That’s because we show great weakness. […] It would not have happened if we were in office.
Given this rhetoric and the heightened tensions with Israel, a potential Trump return could make the Iranian leadership feel even more vulnerable. It could, for instance, lead to increased US or Israeli military action against Iranian proxy militias in Iraq and Syria, or potentially bolder strikes against Iran itself.
Even before the recent Israel-Iran tensions, Mehdi Mohammadi, an advisor to Iran’s parliament speaker on strategic affairs, said Iran’s national security could face “very difficult” years under another Trump presidency, reintroducing the prospect of “maximum threats” against Tehran.
Increasing unrest at home
Elections were held earlier this year for Iran’s parliament and the Assembly of Experts, the body that appoints the supreme leader. The official voter turnout was reported at just 41%. In the capital of Tehran, turnout was only 24%, the lowest in the history of the Islamic Republic.
This marks the third time in four years — including two parliamentary elections and one presidential election — in which voter turnout was below 50%. Prior to 2020, voter turnout typically exceeded 60% or even 70%.
Given these declining rates of voter participation and three major, nationwide protest movements since 2017, Iran’s leadership is in the midst of the most serious legitimacy crisis in the Islamic Republic’s history.
This has coincided with the 2021 election of the hardliner Raisi as president and this year’s election, in which radical factions strengthened their position by winning many seats in the new parliament. These lawmakers want Iran to more forcefully challenge the US and its allies and implement even harsher restrictions on domestic life, including stronger internet censorship and enforcement of Sharia law.
Within the country, media outlets have suggested the rise of unpopular, ultraconservative political figures could further deepen public dissatisfaction with the regime. In such conditions, possible economic repercussions from a second Trump presidency could fuel a new wave of nationwide protests in the country.
And if Trump is elected, Iran’s supreme leader would be about 86 years old when he took office. A transfer of power in Iran during a Trump presidency could bring even more uncertainty at a very critical time in Iranian politics.
Amin Naeni 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.
Seventy thousand years ago, the sea level was much lower than today. Australia, along with New Guinea and Tasmania, formed a connected landmass known as Sahul. Around this time – approximately 65,000 years ago – the first humans arrived in Sahul, a place previously devoid of any hominin species.
Due to the patchy nature of the archaeological record, researchers still don’t have a full picture of the routes and speed of human migration across the region.
In research published in Nature Communications, our team has reconstructed the evolution of the landscape during this time. This allowed us to better understand the migration strategies of the first peoples in what is now Australia, along with the places they lived.
When trying to understand the dispersion of first humans in Sahul, one overlooked aspect has been the impact of the changing landscape itself.
Our planet’s surface is constantly shifted by various physical, climatic and biological processes, changing on a grand scale over geological time – a process known as landscape evolution.
We used a landscape evolution model that details climatic evolution from 75,000 to 35,000 years ago.
The model allows for a more realistic description of the terrains and environments inhabited by the first hunter-gatherer communities as they traversed Sahul.
On top of the evolving landscape, we then ran thousands of simulations, each describing a possible migration route.
We considered two entry points into Sahul: a northern route through West Papua (entry time: 73,000 years) and a southern one from the Timor Sea shelf (entry time: ~75,000 years).
Results from our simulations predicted migration routes passing through 34 of the 40 archaeological sites older than 35,000 years (white circles are identified archaeological sites). Colours represent the number of moves between consecutive circles; the size of the circle is scaled based on the cumulative distance travelled by groups of hunter-gatherers. Salles et al., Nature Communications (2024)
From these simulations, we calculated the speeds of migration based on available archaeological sites. Estimated speeds range between 0.36 and 1.15 kilometres per year. This is similar to previous estimates, suggesting people spread across the continent quite rapidly.
For both scenarios, our simulations also predicted a high likelihood of human occupation at many of the iconic Australian archaeological sites.
Probability of human presence across Sahul by 35,000 years ago, combining the northern and southern entry points. White circles indicate locations of archaeological sites. Grey lines overlaying the map show the dominant movement corridors interpreted as super-highways of human migration across Sahul before 50,000 years ago. Salles et al., Nature Communications (2024)
Following rivers and coastlines
From the predicted migration routes, we produced a map of most likely visited regions, with probability of human presence as shown above.
We found that human settlers would have dispersed across the continental interior along rivers on both sides of Lake Carpentaria (the modern Gulf of Carpentaria). The first communities would have mainly been foraging along the way, following water streams. They also travelled along the receding coastlines as sea levels rose once more.
Based on our model, we didn’t identify well-defined migration routes. Instead, we saw a “radiating wave” of migrations.
However, our model did indicate a high likelihood of human presence near several already-proposed most likely pathways of Indigenous movement (called super-highways), including those to the east of Lake Carpentaria, along the southern corridors south of Lake Eyre, and traversing the Australian interior.
There’s one particularly interesting outcome from our map that shows the probability of human presence in Sahul. In a cost-effective way (without needing to travel across the entire continent), it could potentially pinpoint areas of archaeological significance.
Our approach can’t tell us how well a given location might be preserved for archaeological finds. However, our simulations do give an indication of how much specific sites may have eroded or received extra sediment.
We could use this to estimate if artefacts at a potential archaeological site have moved or been buried over time.
Our study is the first to show the impact of landscape changes on the initial migration on Sahul, providing a new perspective on its archaeology. If we used such an approach in other regions as well, we could improve our understanding of humanity’s extraordinary journey out of Africa.
Tristan Salles receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Ian Moffat receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Flinders University and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.
Laurent Husson receives funding from CNRS, Université Grenoble-Alpes, Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Manon Lorcery receives funding from Université Grenoble-Alpes (UGA).
Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Leakey Foundation and Google Arts & Culture.
I live on the edge of Parramatta, Australia’s fastest-growing city, on the kind of old-fashioned suburban street that has 1950s fibros constructed in the post-war housing boom, double-storey brick homes with Greek columns that aspirational migrants built in the 1970s and half-crumbling, Federation-era mansions once occupied by people whose names still appear in history textbooks.
Parramatta’s population is predicted to almost double in the next 20 years. My street, like so many others, has recently been rezoned for high-density living. Many of these houses are being sold to developers.
It’s a local story but it’s also a national one: suburbs near our cities are disappearing everywhere along with the crucial histories of Australian life they represent.
Australia is still a suburban nation: 70% of us live in the suburbs and this figure is increasing with the rapid growth of “McMansion” areas in the far outskirts of our cities.
Suburbia looms large in our imagining of ourselves, so what happens when we lose those suburban streets whose houses are too young to be heritage-listed but still old enough to tell an important story of our social and economic history? As urban researcher Larry Bourne argued, we have yet to really write the history of suburban life because we haven’t paid enough attention to recording the private everyday experiences of people and their homes there.
So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past several months, walking the street with suburban photographer Garry Trinh and talking to my neighbours about their relationships with their homes before they are lost.
A few houses down from me, Craig lives in a cottage that he believes “shows a different attitude towards life”. He spends his weekends restoring parts of his home.
It takes a lot of time to maintain. People took longer to do things. They had a different sense of time – they did things one time so they didn’t have to do it again.
He enjoys the idea that living in a house like this “you grow old together”. He shows me the places where the tiles on the floor don’t fit perfectly. The “walls and roofs are never even”, but that’s part of the place’s charm – you can see where others have added a living room or tried to fix a leak.
These homes have layers of history that don’t exist anywhere else.
To Craig, these houses represent why other generations felt more of the kind of safety and security that allowed them to build a greater sense of community.
You used to buy one house and you never changed it, one car […] people stayed in the same place […] people feel so restless now because we are no longer safe. Everything changes. Our houses are rezoned. There’s no certainty.
Jenny’s parents bought the largest block on the end of the street because the previous owners refused to sell to developers. She recently moved back home to care for her mother.
It’s a sprawling Federation-era home called “Coo-Wong” and it feels like big history must have happened there, despite its absence from any local history archives. There are clues, though, about the kind of people who might have lived here before: Chinese coins found on the property, a shed full of bric-a-brac.
Mostly, the whole family lives in the kitchen or the light-filled corner at the back of the house where Jenny’s mother grows flowers. Her father’s family lost everything during the Cultural Revolution and he moved here to find a better life. He’s in the building industry and their home is filled with the spare parts from other houses, doors, drawers and other supplies that might go into extending or renovating their home one day.
Jenny remembers when they moved into the neighbourhood there was an older generation of people who embraced them. There were fruit trees and “all of these edible things in people’s yards”. In their backyard, a giant satellite dish, which her parents bought to watch their shows from China, still looms big even if it isn’t needed anymore.
It’s these small details in Jenny’s home that tell the larger story of how various generations of migrants sewed themselves into the fabric of our suburbs.
George, his wife, Jennifer, and their two adult children live in the house George’s father built in 1973 when the street was filled with vacant blocks. His family was the first to move here from their village in Lebanon, so their house became a kind of community hub – there were always people there.
George’s family passed the plans he used to build the house onto other Lebanese families that moved in. It means there are slightly different versions of this house in many other places on the street.
George’s dad and his uncles built many houses in this area together. Sometimes they didn’t quite get it right though: only one door in their house is hung straight – all the rest are hung backwards. The family has been trying to restore parts of the house for a long time, including the Art Deco railings and Victorian lights.
As an expert in post-war housing, Mirjana Lozanovska says this layering of architectural details found in these post-war suburban homes “expanded the image and aesthetic spectrum of what it is to be Australian”.
Carol lives in a long row of houses at the end of the street that are all for sale. She has, to put it lightly, a lot of stuff. Her odd collection of tents and furniture and well-loved succulents spill from her house to its immense lawns.
The quest for affordable housing has pushed Carol further and further west over time. When the landlord sells the house she’ll head further away, looking for some other suburban street where the houses are still intact and maybe there’ll still be lemon trees.
Felicity Castagna and Garry Trinh were able to undertake the research and photography for this article with support and funding provided by Parramatta Artists’ Studios’ Next Project.
There is an ongoing global debate over whether the high inflation seen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic can be lowered without a recession.
New Zealand is not immune to this issue. Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr has said a recession is needed to tame inflation – described as a “hard landing”. Others have disagreed, arguing New Zealand could and should aim for a soft landing (a reduction of inflation with no recession).
But are reductions in inflation inextricably linked to recessions?
New Zealand’s own economic history, it turns out, can give some guidance on this, and point to the risk factors within the country’s economic outlook.
Are we in recession yet?
There is no hard and fast definition of a recession. The term “technical recession” is widely used to refer to a period with two consecutive quarters of negative real growth in gross domestic product. By this measure, New Zealand entered a recession at the end of last year.
But many economists prefer the alternative definition from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the United States: a recession is “the period between a peak of economic activity and its subsequent trough, or lowest point”.
Technical recessions and recessions meeting the NBER criteria do not always coincide.
In 2014, two researchers used the Bry-Boschan algorithm, which is based on the NBER definition, to identify New Zealand’s recessions between 1947 and 2012.
The question is whether we can identify these recessions in real time rather than in hindsight. The so-called Sahm rule stipulates a recession is likely when the unemployment rate starts to increase after recent lows, which can help with timely analysis of the economic conditions.
The dashed line in the graph below shows a recession indicator based on unemployment, dating back to 1986 when quarterly unemployment data was first published. The indicator usually coincides (within one quarter) with the start of a recession based on the Bry-Boschan algorithm.
Since 1961, New Zealand has experienced eight falls in inflation (disinflations) of four percentage points or more. (Disinflation refers to when inflation drops but remains positive, while “deflation” occurs when the inflation rate falls below zero).
This four percentage point drop is required for New Zealand’s inflation to reach the Reserve Bank’s target of 1-3%, down from the 7.3% recorded in the third quarter of 2022.
Each letter in the graph above identifies the inflation peak before historical disinflation episodes. The shaded area identifies recessions up to 2012.
The graph shows four drops in inflation – B, E, F and C – seem to be associated with recessions, while drops A, D and G were not. Disinflation G does have a recession quite late in the piece, the Asian Financial Crisis, but approximately half the inflation fall had already occurred before the crisis took hold.
The message is a positive one: a fall in inflation does not necessarily have to be associated with a recession.
But are any of the historical disinflation episodes more instructive than others about what might happen in the current situation?
Disinflations D and G, which were associated with soft landings, followed increases in short-term interest rates (such as New Zealand has recently experienced). Disinflation D was also helped by a halving in oil prices between November 1985 and March 1986.
Disinflation H is a bit of an anomaly. The inflation peak in 2011 was an artificial high as it came on the back of an increase in the goods and services tax in 2010.
A common theme with hard landings
Turning to the hard landings in the sample, early 1974 saw a large increase in oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The resulting global recession, coupled with restrictive domestic fiscal policy to quell oil price-induced inflation, contributed to disinflation between the second quarter of 1976 and the fourth quarter of 1978 (marked B on the graph).
Disinflation F, between the second quarter of 1990 and the first quarter of 1992, again occurred against the backdrop of a slowdown in the world economy. This reflected, in part, the increase in oil prices in 1990 due the first Gulf War, and tight domestic monetary and fiscal policies.
Disinflations B and F share similarities with New Zealand’s current situation, including restrictive (monetary) policy and unrest in the Middle East. Oil prices are up more than 15% this year, although they are yet to reach their mid-2022 highs.
Disinflations C and E were also associated with recessions reflecting global events. During deflation C, events in Iran led to an oil price increase, which both directly and through policy actions sent the US into recession in the early 1980s.
Disinflation E coincided with the October 1987 sharemarket crash which set off instability in New Zealand’s newly-liberalised financial system.
So if New Zealand is not currently in a recession, what are the country’s chances of avoiding one while trying to reduce inflation?
History suggests it is possible. But favourable global conditions are needed and, in particular, favourable geopolitics. Recent events in the Middle East, coupled with the ongoing war in Ukraine, are not positive signs.
Michael Ryan 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.
