Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Guy Bate, Professional Teaching Fellow, Management and International Business, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

The steady embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public and private sectors in Australia and New Zealand has come with broad guidance about using the new technology safely and transparently, with good governance and human oversight.

So far, so sensible. Aligning AI use with existing organisational values makes perfect sense.

But here’s the catch. Most references to “responsible AI” assume values are like a set of house rules you can write down once, translate into checklists and enforce forever.

But generative AI (Gen AI) does not simply follow the rules of the house. It changes the house. GenAI’s distinctive power is not that it automates calculations, but that it automates plausible language.

It writes the summary, the rationale, the email, the policy draft and the performance feedback. In other words, it produces the texts organisations use to explain themselves.

When a system can generate confident, professional-sounding reasons instantly, it can quietly change what counts as a “good reason” to do something.

This is where “value drift” begins – a gradual shift in what feels normal, reasonable or acceptable as people adapt their work to what the technology makes easy and convincing.

Invisible ethical shifts

In the workplace, for example, a manager might use GenAI to draft performance feedback to avoid a hard conversation. The tone is smoother, but the judgement is harder to locate, as is the accountability.

Or a policy team uses GenAI to produce a balanced justification for a contested decision. The prose is polished, but the real trade-offs are less visible.

For small businesses, the appeal of GenAI lies in speed and efficiency. A sole trader can use it to respond to customers, write marketing copy or draft policies in seconds.

But over time, responsiveness may come to mean instant, AI-generated replies rather than careful, human judgement. The meaning of good service quietly shifts.

None of this requires an ethical breach. The drift happens precisely because the new practice feels helpful.

The biggest ethical effects of GenAI don’t often show up as a single shocking scandal. They are slower and quieter. A thousand small decisions get made a little differently.

Explanations get a little smoother. Accountability becomes a little harder to point to. And before long, we are living with a new normal we did not consciously choose.

If responsible AI use is about more than good intentions and tidy documentation, we need to stop treating values as fixed targets. We need to pay attention to how values shift once AI becomes part of everyday work.

Hidden assumptions

Much of today’s responsible-AI guidance follows a straightforward model: identify the values you care about, embed them in GenAI systems and processes, then check compliance.

This is necessary but also incomplete. Values are not “fixed” once written down in strategy documents or policy templates. They are lived out in practice.

They show up in how people talk, what they notice, what they prioritise and how they justify trade-offs. When technologies change those routines, values get reshaped.

An emerging line of research on technology and ethics shows that values are not simply applied to technologies from the outside. They are shaped from within everyday use, as people adapt their practices to what technologies make easy, visible or persuasive.

In other words, values and technologies shape each other over time, each influencing how the other develops and is understood.

We have seen this before. Social media did not just test our existing ideas about privacy. It gradually changed them. What once felt intrusive or inappropriate now feels normal to many younger users.

The value of privacy did not disappear, but its meaning shifted as everyday practices changed. Generative AI is likely to have similar effects on values such as fairness, accountability and care.

In our research on leadership development, we are exploring how we teach emerging leaders to recognise and reflect on these shifts.

The challenge is not only whether leaders apply the right values to AI, but whether they are equipped to notice how working with these systems may gradually reshape what those values mean in practice.

Constant vigilance

The emphasis in New Zealand and Australia on responsible AI guidance is sensible and pragmatic. It covers governance, privacy, transparency, skills and accountability.

But it still tends to assume that once the right principles and processes are in place, responsibility has been secured.

If values move as AI reshapes practice, though, responsible AI needs a practical upgrade. Principles still matter, but they should be paired with routines that keep ethical judgement visible over time.

Organisations should periodically review AI-mediated decisions in high-stakes areas such as hiring, performance management or customer communication.

They should pay attention not just to technical risks, but to how the meaning of fairness, accountability or care may be changing in practice. And they should make it clear who owns the reasoning behind AI-shaped decisions.

Responsible AI is not about freezing values in place. It is about staying responsible as values shift.

– ref. AI can slowly shift an organisation’s core principles. How to spot ‘value drift’ early – https://theconversation.com/ai-can-slowly-shift-an-organisations-core-principles-how-to-spot-value-drift-early-276511

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rodney Taveira, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of Sydney

The Biennale of Sydney is returning this year for its 25th edition, and exploring a bold new theme: rememory.

It’s a term artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi adopted from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987). In her curatorial text, Al Qasimi says:

Abandoning typical and linear storytelling, in which history and memories are presented through objectification, rememory is how we become subjects and storytellers of our collective present through events of the past.

It’s a concept that asks us to rethink not only how we remember the past, but how our engagement with memories in the present – especially memories transformed into artwork – can shape the future for ourselves and those around us.

Morrison’s concept of rememory

Morrison’s Beloved is set primarily in 1873, after the American Civil War. The novel follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by her past.

Her story is inspired by Margaret Garner, a real-life fugitive slave who killed her baby daughter and attempted to kill her three other children to prevent their recapture into slavery. Sethe, too, is forced down this path in Beloved.

Throughout the novel, rememory is an involuntary, disorienting and deeply personal form of remembering – wherein characters relive forgotten or repressed traumatic histories. These “ghosts” of the past materialise as Beloved, a mysterious young woman who embodies the main character’s dead daughter and the trauma she bears.

Beloved vividly intrudes from the past into the present, tormenting and destabilising each character – yet remains unreachable.

For Morrison, the true horrors of slavery are in many ways “unspeakable”. They cannot be adequately “counted” in official facts and figures, which often make “the institution and not the people” the centre of history.

Morrison viewed rememory as a way of “putting the authority back into the hands of the slaves, rather than the slaveholder”.

Throughout the novel, this is created by immersing the reader in each character’s interior world. We feel Sethe fight against remembering her past – the repetition of the visceral “No. No. Nono. Nonono” as she desperately tries to resist a memory breaking through.

Like the characters, the reader is haunted by Beloved’s ambiguous, lingering presence. We, too, are trying to piece together these fragments of repressed memories that emerge in fits and starts rather than a clear chronology.

Morrison throws us into a world where nobody “can bear too long to dwell on the past” and yet “nobody can avoid it”.

We cannot look away. The reader is compelled to inhabit the pain and suffering of the characters, who in turn, reclaim authority over their own past.

Rememory is a personal reckoning and a blueprint for confronting traumatic histories that can’t be neatly contained or forgotten.

Who is Hoor Al Qasimi?

In 2024, Hoor Al Qasimi was named ArtReview’s most influential person in the contemporary art world. She is a Sheikah (Emirati princess) from the United Arab Emirates, with her father serving as the emir of Sharjah. At just 22-years-old, she assumed responsibility for the 2003 Sharjah Biennial.

Al Qasimi has earned international credibility by championing non-Western and Indigenous artists, weaving political themes into large-scale exhibitions.

Her guiding philosophy appears straightforward: decentralise art and make it accessible for all, not just those in elite spaces.

We see this philosophy realised in the Sydney Biennale’s first appearance in the suburb of Penrith and its return to Campbelltown — both highly multicultural areas. As Al Qasimi explained in an interview:

People say, ‘oh, it’s too far’ and I think, far for whom?

Biennale donors and board members have debated Al Qasimi’s appointment due to her views on the war on Gaza. She has condemned the systemic destruction of Palestinians and Gaza, and voiced the sentiment that “none of us will be free until Palestine is free”.

Peter Wertheim, the co-chief executive of Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said her appointment was an “example of one of Australia’s flagship cultural institutions being captured by an extremist anti-western political agenda”.

Rememory and ethical spectatorship

Art encourages contemplating the other, breaking down their otherness and preventing the simplistic, violent divide of “us” versus “them”. Being “pro” something doesn’t automatically make us “anti” to another, seemingly opposed idea.

With this in mind, there’s another way to view Sethe’s unspeakable act in Beloved. Her decision to kill her daughter is, at face value, abominable. Yet it approaches our understanding against the backdrop of the larger unspeakable suffering of the world she was born into.

Rememory calls on all of us to engage more thoughtfully with what we encounter. In the context of art, this means not just passively viewing a work, but actively engaging with it. It also means accepting the responsibility that other people’s experiences ask of you – without rushing to simple resolutions.

Whether you are viewing Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall’s sculptural works at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, or Dread Scott’s portraits of the incarcerated at Campbelltown Arts Centre, you can ask: whose memory is being held in the piece before me? And do I share that memory, or encounter it from a different angle?

Both positions are real and valid, and each carries different obligations. If the memory is yours, the work may ask you to see yourself in it. If it’s not yours, you may be asked not to turn away.

Even the controversy surrounding Al Qasimi’s appointment is a form of rememory, as it surfaces tensions about who can speak, grieve, resist publicly – and whose suffering matters.

Moreover, Khaled Sabsabi’s reinstatement at this year’s Venice Biennale – wherein he will become the first Australian artist to exhibit in both the main exhibition and Australia Pavilion – suggests artists who confront our complex politics should be valued as much as they are challenged.

The Biennale isn’t about resolving such tensions, but holding them open.

– ref. Sydney’s Biennale theme, ‘rememory’, urges us to confront trauma – now more relevant than ever – https://theconversation.com/sydneys-biennale-theme-rememory-urges-us-to-confront-trauma-now-more-relevant-than-ever-276394

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James J Bell, Professor of Marine Biology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

New Zealand’s earlier efforts to safeguard marine or coastal environments, particularly as marine reserves and marine protected areas, typically focused on shallow ecosystems, largely because that is where most data exists.

But following the passing of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Protection Act last year, it was good to see many deep rocky reefs among the 12 new high protection areas (HPAs).

These areas prohibit recreational and commercial fishing while allowing certain customary practices in ways that reduce or eliminate extractive activities, helping ecosystems recover and rebuild.

This is important because deeper reefs often host protected species and this recognises the need to protect these habitats.

As our new research shows, even just 50 metres of depth can separate entirely different marine communities.

In this study at the Poor Knights Islands Marine Reserve off northeastern Aotearoa New Zealand, we examined sponge assemblages – a major component of temperate rocky reefs – from 5 to 65 metres in depth.

Sponges play an important role in filtering water, recycling nutrients and creating habitat for other organisms. They are also sensitive to environmental change, including marine heatwaves.

Reefs do not simply continue unchanged with greater depth. In fact, deeper communities in the “mesophotic” zone, typically found at 30–150 metres of depth, can host very distinct species that never occur in the shallows.

If conservation efforts don’t recognise this, we may be leaving a significant portion of marine biodiversity unprotected.

Different communities at depth

Our results were striking. Sponge assemblages were strongly structured by depth.

Most species were depth specialists, found either in shallow reefs less than 30 metres deep or in deeper mesophotic zones, but not both.

Across all sites we surveyed, we identified 64 sponge species or operational taxonomic units. Only 18 occurred across multiple depths spanning both shallow and mesophotic zones. In other words, less than a third of species had distributions broad enough to potentially link the two zones.

Differences between depths were driven mainly by species replacement, not by shallow communities simply becoming poorer versions of deeper ones. This means mesophotic reefs are not just extensions of shallow reefs. They are ecologically distinct systems.

Are deep reefs climate refuges?

For years, scientists have debated whether deeper reefs might serve as refuges during disturbances such as marine heatwaves, which can disproportionately affect shallower ecosystems.

The idea, known as the deep reef refugia hypothesis, suggests deeper populations could survive warming events and later reseed damaged shallow reefs.

There is some evidence this can occur for certain species. In our study, a small subset of depth generalist sponges occurred consistently across both zones. These species may have the potential to benefit if deeper habitats avoid disturbances that impact shallower waters.

But our findings suggest this refuge effect may apply only to a minority of species. Most sponges had narrow depth ranges. If shallow populations decline, deeper reefs will not automatically act as a backup for entire assemblages.

This challenges the common assumption that deeper reefs can safeguard shallow biodiversity at an ecosystem level.

Why this matters

Marine protected areas in shallow, accessible habitats are easier to survey, monitor and manage. But biodiversity does not stop at 30 metres.

If deeper reefs host distinct communities, then protecting only the shallows leaves much of that biodiversity exposed to fishing pressure and other anthropogenic impacts.

Our assessment of the current network of 44 marine reserves in New Zealand shows the majority contain areas of rocky reef, but only half have reefs below 50 metres.

Importantly, these include New Zealand’s larger offshore reserves (the Kermadec Islands, Auckland Islands, Bounty Islands, Campbell Island and Antipodes Island), which means the total protected area deeper than 50 metres comes to an impressive 16,294 square kilometres (about the size of the Auckland region).

However, these offshore marine reserves extend far deeper than the mesophotic zone and only a fraction of this area is rocky reef. When discounting the larger offshore reserves, the total area covered by marine reserves deeper than 50 metres is only 394 square kilometres, less than 1% of New Zealand’s territorial seas.

This has direct implications for marine spatial planning in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally.

Our research suggests ensuring the protection of both deep and shallow areas in the same geographical regions is essential if we want to safeguard the full spectrum of reef biodiversity. Protecting shallow reefs alone will not automatically protect deeper mesophotic species or vice versa.

Mesophotic reefs are often out of sight and out of mind. They lie beyond most recreational diving depths and are less studied than their shallow counterparts. Yet they can host rich sponge assemblages and other invertebrate communities that contribute significantly to ecosystem functioning.

They are also not immune to change. Ocean warming, shifting currents and sedimentation can all influence deeper habitats. While depth may buffer some disturbances, it does not guarantee protection.

Our findings add to a growing body of evidence that temperate mesophotic ecosystems should be managed as distinct ecological entities. They are not simply deeper versions of shallow reefs, nor are they universal refuges.

As climate change intensifies and marine heatwaves become more frequent, conservation planning must consider how biodiversity is structured across depth. This means designing protected areas that encompass entire reef profiles, from the surface to the limits of light penetration.

– ref. Deeper ocean ecosystems are unique – and uniquely vulnerable without better protection – https://theconversation.com/deeper-ocean-ecosystems-are-unique-and-uniquely-vulnerable-without-better-protection-276363

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Hume, Lecturer In Theatre (Voice), Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne

Few actors are imitated as often as Michael Caine. Even Michael Caine has imitated Michael Caine.

His voice has been used in birthday card greetings and been the source of jokes in various comedy sketches. It is synonymous with a certain type of Britishness.

Last week, artificial intelligence company ElevenLabs announced Caine has licensed his voice to the company. It will be available on their ElevenReader app, which allows you to listen to any text in a voice of your choosing, as well as being available on their licensing platform, Iconic Marketplace.

To understand why Caine’s voice is so iconic (and wanted by AI) we need to look deeper at what people actually hear in it.

Why do people love listening to Michael Caine?

Caine was born in London in 1933. His mother was a cook and a cleaner, and his father worked in a fish market. Caine speaks with a Cockney accent, setting him aside from most other actors of his generation.

Cockney hails from London’s East End and is often associated with London’s working class – think Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady, the Artful Dodger from Oliver!, or Bert the Chimney Sweep from Mary Poppins (although Dick van Dyke’s accent is not the most accurate, it’s still recognisably Cockney).

Traditionally, you were said to be a true Cockney if you were born within earshot of the Bow Bells – the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow church on Cheapside.

That distinctiveness matters because the accent carried heavy class meaning in mid-20th century Britain.

We don’t hear many contemporary examples of Cockney. Accents change and evolve over time and it has gradually been replaced by a new dialect called Multicultural London English (MLE).

While most actors of his age acquired a “stage accent” – known as Received Pronunciation (RP) – Caine made a conscious decision to hold onto his working-class roots and not change his accent. Instead, he built his career on it.

He once said,

I could’ve gone to voice lessons, but I always thought if I had any use […] I could fight the class system in England.

His accent became cultural capital and helped him land roles in Alfie (1966), The Italian Job (1969) and Jack Carter (1971). By the 1970s, he was a British cultural icon.

What do we hear when we hear celebrity voices?

Hearing a person’s voice is never just about acoustics. We hear social meaning: culture, identity, character and story.

Sociolinguist Asif Agha coined the term “enregisterment” to describe how a way of speaking becomes publicly recognised as signalling particular social types and values.

Over time, Caine’s voice has become enregistered as a recognisable Cockney accent associated with East London and historically linked to a working-class identity. Hearing his voice activates a socially shared register of meanings attached to Cockney.

This contrasts with, say, Queen Elizabeth II, whose accent was enregistered with royalty, prestige and wealth.

Another useful concept here is what sociolinguists sometimes call “dialectal memes”: the images and character types that circulate around particular accents. These memes are transmitted through books, television, film, and even celebrity figures themselves.

Caine has been a carrier of Cockney dialectal memes in popular culture.

When you look at it this way, AI voice licensing commodifies not just the acoustic properties of Caine’s voice, but the enregistered social meanings audiences recognise in it.

What AI licensing means for Caine

ElevenLabs describes its Iconic Marketplace platform as “the performer-first approach the entertainment industry has been calling for”. Through licensing, actors maintain ownership of their voices in a digital, AI landscape.

Caine licensing his voice theoretically ensures he receives credit and compensation, and prevents unauthorised clones appearing elsewhere.

It is possible this is exactly the direction actors want AI to go in – for use of their voice to be controlled by themselves, with clear credit and payment.

However, this model is not without risk to the actor or the listener. We should ask: do we need to hear something in Caine’s voice? Will we process information differently or hear it with more authority if it’s delivered in the voice of a cultural icon like Caine?

Giving power over to machines

People who admire Caine may want him to read to them. Some will be willing to pay for it. We need to remain conscious of the decisions we are making here.

In the 1960s, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the world’s first chatbot, Eliza, warned about the dangers of forming relationships with machines. He was alarmed to see users confiding in Eliza and responding to the chatbot as if it actually understood them, even when they knew it did not.

What happens if an AI voice is not actually generic, but recognisably tied to a real human?

An actor’s likeness and voice may be protected with licensing, but their human self is not. That creates a pathway to attachment or even infatuation.

Caine is not just licensing his voice, but also the Cockney persona audiences recognise in it. Suddenly, a machine speaks with the authority of a real human behind it.

– ref. Michael Caine’s voice is iconic. Why would he sell that to AI? – https://theconversation.com/michael-caines-voice-is-iconic-why-would-he-sell-that-to-ai-276506

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elke Schwarz, Professor of Political Theory, Queen Mary University of London

The very public feud between the US Department of Defense (also known these days as the Department of War) and its AI technology supplier Anthropic is unusual for pitting state might against corporate power. In the military space, at least, these are usually cosy bedfellows.

The origin of this disagreement dates back months, amid repeated criticisms from Donald Trump’s AI and crypto “czar”, David Sacks, about the company’s supposedly woke policy stances.

But tensions ramped up following media reports that Anthropic technology had been used in the violent abduction of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by the US military in January 2026. It was alleged this caused discontent inside the San Francisco-based company.

Anthropic has denied this, with company insiders suggesting it did not find or raise any violations of its policies in the wake of the Maduro operation.

Nonetheless, the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has issued Anthropic with an ultimatum. Unless the company relaxes its ethical limits policy by 5.01pm Washington time on Friday, February 27, the US government has suggested it could invoke the 1950 Defense Production Act. This would allow the Department of Defense (DoD) to appropriate the use of this technology as it wishes.

At the same time, Anthropic could be designated a supply chain risk, putting its government contracts in danger. These extraordinary measures may appear contradictory, but they are consistent with the current US administration’s approach, which favours big gestures and policy ambiguity.

At the heart of the dispute is the question of how Anthropic’s large language model (LLM) Claude is used in a military context. Across many sectors of industry, Claude does a range of automated tasks including writing, coding, reasoning and analysis.

In July 2024, US data analytics company Palantir announced it was partnering with Anthropic to “bring Claude AI models … into US Government intelligence and defense operations”. Anthropic then signed a US$200 million (£150 million) contract with the DoD in July 2025, stipulating certain terms via its “acceptable use policy”.

These would, for example, disallow the use of Claude in mass surveillance of US citizens or fully autonomous weapon systems which, once activated, can select and engage targets with no human involvement.

According to Anthropic, either would violate its definition of “responsible AI”. Hegseth and the DoD have pushed back, characterising such limits as unduly restrictive in a geopolitical environment marked by uncertainty, instability and blurred lines.

Responsible AI should, they insist, encompass “any lawful use” of AI models by the US military. A memorandum issued by Hegseth on January 9 2026 stated:

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the Department of War, so we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological ‘tuning’ that interferes with their ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts.

The memo instructed that the term “any lawful use” should be incorporated in future DoD contracts for AI services within 180 days.

Anthropic’s competitors are lining up

Anthropic’s red lines do not rule out the mass surveillance of human communities at large – only American citizens. And while it draws the line at fully autonomous weapons, the multitude of evolving uses of AI to inform, accelerate or scale up violence in ways that severely limit opportunities for moral restraint are not mentioned in its acceptable use policy.

At present, Anthropic has a competitive advantage. Its LLM model is integrated into US government interfaces with sufficient levels of clearance to offer a superior product. But Anthropic’s competitors are lining up.

Palantir has expanded its business with the Pentagon significantly in recent months, giving rise to more AI models.

Meanwhile, Google recently updated its ethical guidelines, dropping its pledge not to use AI for weapons development and surveillance. OpenAI has likewise modified its mission statement, removing “safety” as a core value, and Elon Musk’s xAI (creator of the Grok chatbot) has agreed to the Pentagon’s “any lawful use” standard.

A testing point for military AI

For C.S. Lewis, courage was the master virtue, since it represents “the form of every virtue at the testing point”. Anthropic now faces such a testing point.

On February 24, the company announced the latest update to its responsible scaling policy – “the voluntary framework we use to mitigate catastrophic risks from AI systems”. According to Time magazine, the changes include “scrapping the promise to not release AI models if Anthropic can’t guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance”.

Anthropic’s chief science officer, Jared Kaplan, told Time: “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead.”

Ethical language saturates the press releases of Silicon Valley companies eager to distinguish themselves from “bad actors” in Russia, China and elsewhere. But ethical words and actions are not the same, because the latter often entails a real-world cost.

That such a highly public spectacle is happening at this time is perhaps no accident. In early February, representatives of many countries – but not the US – came together for the third time to find ways to agree on “responsible AI” in the military domain. And on March 2-6, the UN will convene its latest conference discussing how best to limit the use of emerging technologies for lethal autonomous weapons systems.

Such legal and ethical debates about the role of AI technology in the future of warfare are critical, and overdue. Anthropic deserves credit for apparently resisting the US military’s efforts to undercut its ethical guidelines. But AI’s role is likely to be tested in many more conflict situations before agreement is reached.

– ref. Anthropic v the US military: what this public feud says about the use of AI in warfare – https://theconversation.com/anthropic-v-the-us-military-what-this-public-feud-says-about-the-use-of-ai-in-warfare-276999

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Titov, Lecturer in Modern European History, Queen’s University Belfast

As Ukrainian officials meet with US negotiators in Geneva with the possibility of full three-way talks involving Moscow, Kyiv and Washington in early March, there’s a glimmer of hope that an end to the conflict may be in sight. But the fact that after four years this remains a glimmer speaks volumes about the difficulties in ending the war.

Even Donald Trump, who promised to end the war in one day, has now stopped issuing ultimatums and deadlines to the warring parties.

In what has become a war of attrition, discussions about vulnerabilities and losses are only meaningful when compared with those of the opposing side. Reflecting on how each side’s theories of victory changed over the four years helps to grasp the war’s overall trajectory.

Russia’s initial plan for a swift knockout of Ukraine was foiled within the first few days of the invasion. Instead, it settled into a conflict of grinding the enemy down through slow advances on the battlefield and debilitating attacks on the energy infrastructure in the rear, with the expectation in Moscow that at some point Ukraine would throw in the towel.

But the question is whether Russia has enough manpower and economic resources for this strategy.

Russia is finally experiencing economic difficulties due to a combination of western sanctions and falling oil prices, which fell from over US$100 (£74) per barrel in 2022 to approximately $60 in 2025. In 2026, the Kremlin had to raise taxes and reduce its reliance on oil, whose share of Russia’s budget fell from 40% in 2019 to 25% in 2025. Perhaps the Kremlin is beginning to realise that this cannot continue forever.

But Russia’s weakness is relative to that of Ukraine. This applies to war losses: Putin believes that Ukraine’s manpower losses are higher than Russia’s (which flies in the face of what some western researchers estimate) and that Ukraine, with a much smaller population than Russia, has much less staying power.

Ukraine’s theory of victory, meanwhile, has evolved from a belief in an outright military victory in 2022–23, to just trying to exhaust Russia’s military in 2025 by using the “wall of drones”. But as the Russian army had captured some key strongholds, such as Siversk, Pokrovsk and Hulyaipole, Kyiv’s new defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov (the fourth since the start of the war), declared that Ukraine’s path to victory now was to kill 50,000 Russian soldiers per month. That’s more than most estimates of Russia’s recruitment, which is believed to be around 30,000 per month.

Western politicians and analysts have embraced this theory, arguing that Russia’s unsustainable losses justify Ukraine continuing with the war with their support.

But after four years, Kyiv’s position is hampered by the loss of the full support of what was once its key ally: Washington. The Ukraine frontline is being slowly but steadily forced back and in 2025 for the first time in the war there was no major Ukrainian offensive.

Kyiv’s best hope is to freeze the conflict along the current line of contact, get security guarantees from the west, join the EU, and maintain pressure on Russia through western sanctions. Unfortunately for Ukraine, there are issues with every item on this list.

The situation at home is challenging and funding from the west is declining, thanks to the US. Meanwhile, its energy infrastructure has been severely damaged, there are ongoing issues with unpopular mobilisations, and the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has suffered a significant blow from a major corruption scandal involving his closest aides.

However, crucially, Ukraine is still fighting and its best hope now is an economic collapse in Russia. Attacks on Russia’s oil industry were intended to hasten that collapse, but Moscow’s destruction of Ukraine’s energy grid has demonstrated its greater capacity for escalation. This year will not be easy for Ukraine.

Europe’s position

Since the start of the invasion, Europe’s ideal plan for helping Ukraine win has not changed. It is believed that a combination of economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine will eventually cause Russia’s economic collapse and military defeat.

Other than this there is no European plan to end the war, except to try to prevent Trump from striking a deal which would favour Russia and gut Ukraine. For the best part of a year, the so-called coalition of the willing (Kyiv’s European allies led by France, the UK and Germany) has been talking about post-war plans with itself.

But the irony is that – despite being Ukraine’s biggest donor – coalition countries have been excluded from negotiating with Russia, whose consent to any western military deployment as a security guarantee for Kyiv will be essential.

Whatever happens, the EU will have to pay Ukraine’s bills, either to continue the war or to cover its post-war reconstruction. The EU’s promise to accept Ukraine as a member would also require increased funding over an indefinite period.

Whose side is the US on?

Under the Biden presidency, the US and Europe had the same theory of victory. However, since returning to power in January 2025, Trump has forced Europe to finance the supply of US military equipment to Ukraine. Meanwhile, it has opened negotiations with Russia to end the war.

The US push for peace remains a mystery. After all, if the Ukrainians are willing to fight and the Europeans are willing to pay for it, it is unclear why the US is so eager to end a war that is exhausting one of its geopolitical rivals in Russia.

Perhaps Trump genuinely wants to stop the killing. Or perhaps he believes that if the war is not stopped now, the eventual peace deal will be much worse for Ukraine and the west. Or maybe it’s simply a matter of stopping “Biden’s war”. A war that Trump has no interest in and that he clearly feels is hampering his plans to do business with Putin.

As with Gaza, a deal can be reached only when the parties involved in the conflict are exhausted and ready to stop fighting. In these circumstances, Trump’s mediation could succeed. For now, however, each side is still clinging to its vision of victory.

On its fourth anniversary, there is hope that this may be the last year of the war. While all sides are growing increasingly exhausted, it will be the “last mile” that matters most — who can muster the willpower and resources in the final stretch to end the war on their terms.

– ref. Ukraine: after four years of war, exhaustion on both sides is the main hope for peace – https://theconversation.com/ukraine-after-four-years-of-war-exhaustion-on-both-sides-is-the-main-hope-for-peace-276783

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pandanus Petter, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and new Liberal leader Angus Taylor have invoked “Australian values” to justify taking a hard line on immigration, especially from countries that supposedly don’t share our values.

The phrase summons comforting and nostalgic images of football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars, but politicians are rarely asked to spell out what our national values actually are.

When they do, they are often talking about different things.

So, what exactly do Australians “value”? And do these values line up with what politicians are saying about migration?

A ‘fair go’

One frequently invoked idea in the context of Australian values is a “fair go”.

It’s an official part of our immigration system. The Australian Values Statement, which all visa applicants must sign and agree to abide by, includes an explicit mention of “a fair go for all”.

Our research on this longstanding national ideal shows people attach many different meanings to it.

Most people thought it included the belief that migrants should have the same opportunities as everyone else.

What did we find?

In 2024–25 we ran a module in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to ask the public what they thought a “fair go” meant.

Respondents were presented with a range of statements about a “fair go” and asked to give a score between one and seven according to how much they agreed, with one being the lowest and seven the highest.

The table reveals widespread agreement that a “fair go” is about people being able to get ahead without facing discrimination, with a common view that all should have access to the same quality of education and healthcare.

Fewer people agreed a fair go was about the redistribution of wealth and income, or people being free to “do what they want”.

Instead, the idea of reward for effort was strongly associated with the fair go.

Importantly for the present debate about immigration, 52% of people gave the highest possible level of agreement that recent migrants should have the same opportunity as everyone else to get ahead in life. Only 7% actively disagreed.

The sentiment towards immigration

We were also interested in how these beliefs coalesced together, and how they related to attitudes toward migrants as people, and toward levels of immigration.

We found that fair-go beliefs fell into two main clusters: an “egalitarian” group that embraced the anti-discriminatory aspects of equal opportunity most strongly, and a “meritocratic” group that favoured ideas of striving and reward for effort.

Those in the first cluster were generally positive both toward migrants as people and toward immigration in general. Those with the second set of beliefs were also somewhat positively aligned toward people of migrant backgrounds, though less supportive of increased immigration.

Of course, not everyone has positive feelings about migrants.

In the survey, around 28% of people thought people born in Australia should be given preference over others, and on levels of migration, people were divided. While 43% thought current levels should remain the same or rise, nearly 47% thought they should be lowered.

These results show the fair go is a collection of disparate beliefs, reflecting underlying ideological and partisan differences in our country.

Australian culture and values blend ideas of equality of opportunity, equitable access to education and health, safety nets for the disadvantaged, and an emphasis on reward for effort.

Australians don’t all sing from the same hymn sheet on migration. But they are also mostly strongly in favour of the view that our core national value requires us to treat new migrants as equals.

Beyond the difficulty of defining Australia’s national values lies the further challenge of deciding which source countries supposedly share them.

This has become a theme in current debates, where certain countries, especially non‑European ones, are portrayed as fundamentally misaligned with Australian values.

The assumption that Australian values are coherent is flawed, and the same flawed assumption is often projected onto other countries.

The tension between values and politics

We also interviewed current and former politicians across the political spectrum.

While all endorsed the importance of the fair go, they differed in how widely they believed this value was shared.

Many politicians from the Labor Party argued their party was the true champion of the fair go, and spoke of conservative efforts to undermine it.

Unsurprisingly, the Greens and One Nation attached very different policy meanings to the phrase, particularly on issues such as migration and same‑sex rights.

Politicians inevitably invoke cultural idioms such as the fair go for their own strategic purposes, and these divergent interpretations reinforce how difficult it is to find common ground on what constitutes Australian values.

While our results show support for migration, they also sound a warning. We asked if the fair go was alive and well today and only 40% answered positively.

On the possibility of people in the future getting more of a fair go than they do today, only 19% agreed.

Instead of invoking Australian values to justify exclusion, our leaders need to build on values we genuinely share, including a fair go for migrants, and make the fair go something people can see and experience in their daily lives.

– ref. Politicians say immigration threatens ‘Australian values’, but our research shows no one knows exactly what that means – https://theconversation.com/politicians-say-immigration-threatens-australian-values-but-our-research-shows-no-one-knows-exactly-what-that-means-276746