Some 50 years ago, on March 1 1975, Australian television stations officially moved to colour.
Networks celebrated the day, known as “C-Day”, with unique slogans such as “come to colour” (ABC TV), “Seven colours your world” (Seven Network), “living colour” (Nine Network) and “first in colour” (0-10 Network, which later became Network Ten). The ABC, Seven and Nine networks also updated their logos to incorporate colour.
For most viewers, however, nothing looked much different. The majority owned a black and white TV, while a coloured broadcast required a colour TV set.
Advertisers were initially reluctant to accept the change, which required them to re-shoot black and white commercials with colour stock at a significantly higher cost.
Many reasoned viewers were still watching the ads in black and white. And initially this assumption was correct. But by nine months later, 17% of Australian homes had a colour receiver. This rose to 31% by July 1976.
By 1978, 64% of Melbourne and 70% of Sydney households owned colour TV sets, making Australia one of the world’s fastest adopters of colour TV.
According to the Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations (FACTS) annual report for 1975–76, colour TV increased overall viewership by 5%, with people watching for longer periods.
The 1976 Montreal Olympics also led to an increase in TV sales, with the colour broadcast shared between the ABC, Seven and Nine.
Highlights from the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games marathon event.
A late start
With the United States introducing colour TV from 1954, it’s peculiar that Australia took so long to make the transition – especially since conversations about this had been underway since the 1960s.
In 1965, a report outlining the process and economic considerations of transitioning to colour was tabled in parliament.
Feedback from the US highlighted problems around broader acceptance in the marketplace. Colour TV sets were expensive and most programs were still being shot in black and white, despite the availability of colour.
Networks were the most hesitant (even though they’d go on to become one of the most major benefactors). In 1969, it was estimated transitioning to colour would cost the ABC A$46 million (the equivalent of $265,709,944 today) over six years.
The federal government, led by then prime minister Robert Menzies, decided to take a cautious approach to the transition – allowing manufacturers, broadcasters and the public time to prepare.
The first colour “test” broadcast took place on June 15 1967, with live coverage of a Pakenham country horse racing event in Victoria (although few people would have had coloured TV sets at this point).
Other TV shows also tested broadcasting in colour between 1972 and 1974, with limited colour telecasts aired from mid-1974. It wasn’t until March 1975 that colour TV was being transmitted permanently.
‘Aunty Jack Introduces Colour’ was a one-off television special of The Aunty Jack Show, broadcast on the ABC on February 28 1975.
The cinema industry panics
Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War created further urgency to televise in colour. With the war ending in April 1975, Australians watched the last moments in colour.
Other significant events broadcast in colour that year included the December federal election, in which Malcolm Fraser defeated Gough Whitlam after the latter was dramatically dismissed as prime minister on November 11.
With the public’s growing interest in colour TV, local manufacturers began lobbying for higher tariffs on imports to encourage domestic colour TV production.
In the mid 1970s, a new colour set in Australia cost between $1,000 and $1,300, while the average full-time annual income was around $8,000. Still in the throes of a financial recession, customers began seeking out illegally-imported colour TV sets – which were appearing at car boot markets across the country.
British childrens show The Wombles came to Australian screens shortly after colour TV was introduced.
The government also created an advertising campaign warning the public of scammers who would offer to convert black-and-white TVs to colour. These door-to-door “salesmen” claimed to have a special screen which, when placed over a TV, would magically turn it colourful.
By 1972, the estimated cost of upgrading broadcasting technology to colour had reached $116 million. The cinema industry, in a panic, even questioned whether colour TV could damage a viewer’s eyesight.
The industry had previously suffered huge losses in cinema attendance with the introduction of black-and-white TV from 1956. Cinemas had a monopoly on colour and were petrified over what the introduction of colour to television could do to their attendances.
Such fears were founded. In 1974 Australia had 68 million admissions to the cinema. By 1976, there were just 28.9 million admissions. Never again would yearly cinema admissions reach above 40 million.
But despite the complaints – from the cinema industry, advertisers, broadcasters and manufacturers – audiences were ready for colour. And any network that dared to program in black and white would subject itself to a barrage of annoyed viewers.
Colour TV was here to stay.
Stephen Gaunson 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 opposition wants to call time on letting public servants work from home. In a speech to the Menzies Research Institute this week, shadow public service minister Jane Hume said, if elected, a Coalition government would require public servants in the office five days a week:
While work from home arrangements can work, in the case of the [Australian Public Service], it has become a right that is creating inefficiency.
Hume said Labor had given public servants a “blank cheque” to work from home, creating an “unsustainable” system that was no longer working.
She stressed that exceptions “can and will be made”, but only “where they work for everyone rather than be enforced on teams by an individual”.
Few workplace issues have drawn such heated debate as whether people should be allowed to work from home. The Coalition’s latest election promise, with parallels to a similar move by Donald Trump in the United States, has brought these questions back into the spotlight.
What impact do work from home arrangements have, not only on performance and productivity but also employee wellbeing? Is it really wise to reverse course?
Our research has examined these questions in detail – and we’ve found a changing picture.
We have examined the impacts of working from home on staff performance and productivity in Australian workplaces as part of the Australian Workplace Index, surveying 2,932 Australian employees across 2022 and 2024.
This is a research collaboration project between Australian National University and University of Newcastle.
An Australian Workplace Index 2022 working paper (which has not been peer-reviewed) actually suggested working from home was linked with a number of negative impacts.
In 2022, we saw that compared to those who didn’t, employees who worked from home three to four days a week experienced lower wellbeing, higher depression and anxiety, and higher loneliness.
They also experienced more administrative hassles, higher pressure to meet targets and increased levels of conflict with supervisors and colleagues.
We found working from home was also associated with a reduction in staff productivity, job-target performance and an increase in staff turnover intentions.
A changing picture
We have recently completed analysis for a similar study based on data from 2024, to be published in an upcoming working paper. And it paints a very different picture.
We found the negative impacts of working from home, originally found in 2022, had reversed in 2024.
In the most recent 2024 Australian Workplace Index employment data, we see no significant difference in productivity between employees who work from home and those in the office.
In fact, the latest data suggest numerous benefits.
For example, staff who worked from home one or more days a week had 9.9% more autonomy in how they carried out their work. Those with higher job autonomy were up to 16.8% more productive in their work when compared to those with low job autonomy.
We found staff who work from home also save on average 100 minutes in commuting time each day.
But on top of this, staff who worked from home one or more days a week were 10.6% less burnt out from work compared to those who never did, and had reported lower intention to quit their jobs.
This positive trend likely reflects investment by employers in improving support for staff who work from home.
In 2024, we found a majority of organisations (69%) now had a work-from-home policy in place.
There was also an increase in the physical, technological and psychological infrastructure support available to staff who work from home. For example:
Physical: 82% of staff have a dedicated workspace, 93% have their own desk, and 93% have air conditioning.
Technological: 85% of staff have access to IT support, 94% have access to collaborative technology and 95% have internet access.
Psychological: 80% of staff have access to psychological support from their supervisor and 72% have access to counselling services.
Importantly, employees still value the opportunity highly. Our 2024 data show 38% of Australian employees chose to work from home for 50% or more of their work hours.
32% of Australian employees would prefer to exclusively work from home, 41% prefer a hybrid option, while 27% prefer to work exclusively from the office.
Christina Boedker has received research grant funding from the University of Newcastle’s RSP Stimulus Funding Scheme and from The Australian National University for this research project.
Kieron Meagher received research grant funding from the University of Newcastle’s RSP Stimulus Funding Scheme and from The Australian National University for this research project.
Aeson Luiz Dela Cruz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It’s been three years since floods pummelled the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Now, Cyclone Alfred is heading for the region, threatening devastation once more.
On Thursday night and Friday morning, the NSW State Emergency Service asked residents in parts of the Northern Rivers to evacuate. Rain associated with Cyclone Alfred was expected to cause rapid river rises and extensive flooding.
As you’d expect, many Northern Rivers residents feel very apprehensive right now. No-one wants to go through this again.
I know of a woman who, just last week, had painters doing final repairs to her home after it flooded in 2022. Other people can’t afford to repair their homes at all.
Damage from the last floods extends beyond the material. Many people in the Northern Rivers are still dealing with mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and PTSD after the last disaster.
Still, people are preparing for Cyclone Alfred’s arrival – and drawing lessons from the 2022 floods in the hope of a better outcome this time.
Memories of Lismore floods
I have 20 years’ experience working on climate change adaptation and disaster risk management. My research focus includes the Northern Rivers, where I live. Last year, a study I led examined community collaboration across the region in response to disasters.
The Northern Rivers is located in the NSW northeast and is drained by three major rivers: the Richmond, Tweed and Clarence. The city of Lismore is one of the most flood-prone urban centres in Australia.
As my colleagues and I have previously written, the 2022 flood in Lismore and surrounds surprised even the most prepared residents.
Floodwaters in Lismore reached more than two metres higher than the previous record. Shocked residents were left clinging to their roofs. Businesses moved their stock to higher ground, but it was still destroyed. Houses above the so-called “flood line” were inundated.
Warning systems proved inadequate, and emergency agencies were overwhelmed. More than 10,800 homes were damaged.
Landslides and boulders fell on homes and roads, leaving people trapped and isolated for up to six weeks. Others could not access cash, petrol, communications, food, schools, carer services and medical assistance for long periods.
The 2022 floods were by no means the first disaster to befall the Northern Rivers. The region also flooded in 2017. In 2019 the region, like much of Australia, was deep in drought. The Black Summer bushfires hit in 2019-20, and Covid-19 struck in 2020. Parts of the region suffered bushfires in 2023.
Now, we are facing Cyclone Alfred.
The scale of the 2022 floods forced many residents to confront a harsh reality: in a disaster, emergency services cannot always help. Sometimes, people must fend for themselves.
That realisation prompted a growing community-led resilience movement. As Cyclone Alfred approaches, that network has swung into action.
Since 2022, community-resilience groups have emerged in each local government area across the region. The groups comprise, and are led by, community volunteers.
We work with local organisations, government agencies and emergency services to help the community before, during and after a disaster. The local council convenes regular meetings between all these organisations.
My research shows strong information flows are crucial in disaster preparedness and recovery.
Since the Cyclone Alfred threat began, my community group has received regular updates from the SES on matters such as locations of sandbags and sand, the latest weather information advice, and when evacuation centres will open.
We also have an established a network of contacts who live on streets vulnerable to flooding. We pass on relevant information to other residents via Facebook and a WhatsApp group. In the past day we have been exchanging information such as whether flood pumps are working and the extent of beach erosion.
The flow of information is two-way. Byron Shire’s community resilience network is chaired by the local council, and has links to emergency management – the “lights and sirens” people. In this way, community knowledge and contributions are recognised and valued by decision-makers and other officials.
In recent days our group has fed advice up the chain to emergency services, such as the location of elderly and vulnerable people who may need help to evacuate.
A man holding a portable emergency satellite provided to a community resilience group in the Northern Rivers. Facebook
Byron Shire Council has also loaned portable Starlink satellite dishes to some community-resilience groups. These devices provide essential and communication if phone and internet services fail in a disaster.
On a broader level, the Bureau of Meteorology is producing regular video updates about Cyclone Alfred in clear, plain language. This is helping to communicate the risks widely and give people the information they need.
Community resilience groups also seek to adopt a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to disasters – such as helping residents prepare for the next flood event.
This can be challenging. Many people and organisations in the region have understandably been focused on recovery after the 2022 floods. It can be hard to do this while also preparing for the next disaster.
And sometimes, people don’t want constant reminders of the potential for flooding. Some people just want to move on and think about something other than disaster.
If Cyclone Alfred brings destruction to the Northern Rivers, community resilience groups will play a big role in supporting health and wellbeing. Not everyone accesses formal mental health support after disasters. Communities and neighbours looking out for each other is crucial.
Tough times ahead
As I write, the Northern Rivers is starting to lose power and internet access. Winds are wild and rain lashed the region all night.
As climate change worsens, all communities must consider how they will cope with more intense disasters. The model of community-led resilience in the Northern Rivers shows a way forward.
There is still much work to do in the region. However, our experience of compounding disasters means we are well along the path to finding new ways to support each other through extreme events.
Rebecca McNaught is a Research Fellow at the University Centre for Rural Health (University of Sydney) in Lismore. She has received scholarship funding from the Australian Government’s Research Training Program Stipend. She is affiliated with the South Golden Beach, New Brighton and Ocean Shores Community Resilience Team. She has also conducted paid and voluntary work for the Northern Rivers not-for-profit registered charity Plan C.
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 Western Australian state election will be held on Saturday, with polls closing at 9pm AEDT. A Newspoll, conducted February 27 to March 5 from a sample of 1,061, gave Labor a 57.5–42.5 lead, a 1.5-point gain for Labor since an early February WA Newspoll.
Primary votes were 44% Labor (up two), 29% Liberals (down three), 5% Nationals (up two), 10% Greens (down two), 3% One Nation (down one) and 9% for all Others (up two).
Labor Premier Roger Cook’s net approval was down one point to +17, with 55% satisfied and 38% dissatisfied. Liberal leader Libby Mettam’s net approval was up three to +1. Cook led as better premier by 53–34 (54–34 previously).
The Poll Bludger reported Friday that a DemosAU poll for The West Australian, conducted March 4–5 from a sample of 1,126, gave Labor a 57–43 lead. Primary votes were 43% Labor, 30% Liberals, 5% Nationals, 11% Greens and 11% for all Others. Cook led as preferred premier over Mettam by 47–32. By 49–31, voters thought WA was headed in the right direction.
At the March 2021 WA election, Labor won 53 of the 59 lower house seats on a two-party vote of 69.7–30.3, a record high for either major party at any state or federal election. Labor won 59.9% of the primary vote.
Labor was never going to match the 2021 result at this election, but if the results on Saturday reflect the Newspoll and DemosAU polls, they will exceed their 2017 result, when Labor won 41 of the 59 seats on a two-party vote of 55.5–44.5.
Upper house reforms
Prior to this election, WA had six upper house regions that each returned six members. From the ABC’s 2021 WA election pages, there were three Perth regions and three non-metro regions. Perth had 75% of WA’s enrolled voters, but only 50% of upper house seats.
Furthermore, the Mining & Pastoral region and Agricultural region had far fewer enrolled voters than the South West region. Combined, these two regions had just 10.1% of WA’s enrolled voters, but 33.3% of upper house seats.
Labor’s huge 2021 win gave them a majority in the upper house for the first time in WA history, with 22 of the 36 seats. Labor used this opportunity to convert the upper house into a single statewide electorate that will return 37 members by proportional representation with optional voter-directed preferences.
Under these reforms, a quota for election will be 1/38 of the vote or 2.63%. Parties that win about half the quota have a reasonable chance of winning a seat, so 1.3% could be enough to win. Labor also abolished group ticket voting (GTV), leaving Victoria as the only Australian jurisdiction that still uses this discredited system.
ABC election analyst Antony Green said there will be 13 groups on the upper house ballot paper and a total of 146 candidates. To get a group box above the line, at least five candidates for that group were required. The number of candidates has been more than halved from 2021, when there were 325 upper house candidates. Group ticket voting encouraged a proliferation of micro parties and candidates.
In the lower house, there will be a total of 398 candidates for the 59 seats, down from 463 in 2021. Labor, the Liberals and Greens will contest all seats, the Nationals will contest 20, the Australian Christians 54 and One Nation 41.
Labor has huge lead in a SA state poll
The next South Australian state election will be held in March 2026. A DemosAU poll, conducted February 18–23 from a sample of 1,004, gave Labor a 59–41 lead (54.6–45.4 to Labor at the March 2022 election). Primary votes were 43% Labor, 30% Liberals, 10% Greens and 17% for all Others.
Labor incumbent Peter Malinauskas led the Liberals’ Vincent Tarzia as preferred premier by 51–23. By 53–33, voters thought SA was headed in the right direction.
The Poll Bludger reported Monday electoral reforms have passed parliament that will allow postal and pre-poll votes to be counted on election night. At previous SA elections, only votes cast at ordinary election day booths were counted on election night, with other types of votes taking at least a few days to count.
In the federal part of this poll, Labor led by 53–47 in SA (54.0–46.0 to Labor in SA at the 2022 federal election). Primary votes were 35% Coalition, 34% Labor, 11% Greens, 6% One Nation and 14% for all Others. Anthony Albanese led Peter Dutton as preferred prime minister by 39–33, and by 46–39 voters did not think Australia was headed in the right direction.
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.
In our feminist classics series we revisit influential works.
Shere Hite’s The Hite Report was quickly dubbed a “sexual revolution in 600 pages”. It did something nobody had considered worth doing: investigating women’s sexuality by asking them to share their thoughts and feelings, then relaying those reflections to readers in women’s own words.
This might not sound unusual today. But in 1976, it was incendiary.
Based on a survey of 3,000 women distributed by the New York Chapter of the National Organisation for Women (the feminist group co-founded by Betty Friedan), more than 75% of the book comprises narrative responses to open ended survey questions.
It includes a plethora of startlingly frank – for its time – and explicitly detailed opinions, anecdotes, complaints and criticisms about sex, masturbation and orgasm. The book is an extraordinarily rich cultural artefact in the archive of human intimacy.
Unsurprisingly, the women who responded to Hite’s survey thoroughly enjoyed sex. “Orgasm is the ultimate pleasure – which women often deny themselves, but men never do,” claimed one. “Orgasms are a marvellous happiness”, added another. “Orgasm cancels out rage and longing for at least 48 hours,” said yet another.
But it was the manner in which Hite’s respondents got their orgasms that made the book a scandal. “I think masturbation is essential to one’s health,” said one respondent. “[A]s I learned in my marriage – a partner is not always good sexually, though he may be wonderful in other ways.”
Masturbation is better than “bad sex with an incompatible partner”, explained another respondent. “The only way I can have an orgasm is by masturbating,” said another.
‘A complex nature’
The Hite Report did not attempt to define a sexual norm, or produce a representative survey sample, or pretend its data could be generalised to an entire population. But it did contain some statistical findings.
The most significant of these – the source of the book’s notoriety – was that only 30% of women surveyed reported being able to regularly or reliably reach orgasm through heterosexual intercourse. And yet, 80% reported they could easily and regularly reach orgasm through clitoral stimulation, which was frequently obtained through masturbation, either alone, or with their partner.
In her preface Hite argued that the canonical sexological works of the past 100 years – including the works of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and William Masters and Virginia Johnson – had constructed female sexuality “as essentially a response to male sexuality and intercourse”. She set out to demonstrate that “female sexuality might have a complex nature of its own”.
Hite argued sex was a cultural institution, not a biological one. Historically, men had defined sex in terms of their own needs and preferences, then mandated their preferences as biological.
Freud, for example, knew female orgasm could be reliably obtained through clitoral stimulation, but defined clitoral orgasm as an “immature orgasm” and orgasm arising from heterosexual intercourse as a “mature orgasm”. He then labelled women who could not achieve orgasm in the required way “frigid” and “hysterical”.
The Hite Report is organised into eight chapters or themes, starting with “Masturbation”, followed by “Orgasm”, “Intercourse”, “Clitoral Stimulation”, “Lesbianism”, “Sexual Slavery”, “The Sexual Revolution” and “Older Women”. In a concluding chapter, Hite reflects on the issues raised by survey participants.
In the chapter “Lesbianism”, a significant number of heterosexual-identified women confess same sex attraction, or else identify as bisexual. They also describe lesbian sexuality as “more variable”, and the “physical actions more mutual”.
“The basic difference with a woman is that there’s no end,” claimed one respondent, “[…] it’s like a circle, it goes on and on.”
“Lesbianism” sits in stark contrast to the chapter on “Sexual Slavery”, where Hite seeks to investigate why women pursue unequal sexual relationships, especially where respondents claim to receive little or no sexual pleasure.
“Having a man love me and want to have sex with me is necessary to my happiness,” claimed one respondent. “Sex makes me feel I am a woman to my husband instead of just a live-in maid,” added another.
“I’ve never heard a word of praise from my husband in 21 years except while having intercourse,” claimed yet another. “While I resent this, I still love him […] ”
Wildly successful
Many women applauded the book. Author Erica Jong, writing in The New York Times, called it a “revelation”. Others warned of a possible male backlash. “It seems that women are finally reporting the facts of their own sex,” wrote journalist Ellen Willis in the Washington Post, “and men are putting on the earmuffs of fear and retreating to deeper fantasies.”
This backlash was not long in coming. Playboy apocryphally dubbed it “The Hate Report”, a label regularly recycled in media outlets around the world, including by female journalists. One male journalist, writing in the Miami Herald, argued women could not be regarded as truthful or reliable witnesses to their own lives. “What annoys me about The Hite Report,” he wrote, “is its smug assumption that just because women made these comments, they’re true”.
Despite – or perhaps because of – this controversy, the book was wildly successful. It was translated into ten different languages – including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew and Japanese – and sold over 2 million copies within the first 12 months.
It remains the 30th bestselling book of all time, with 50 million copies sold in 45 countries, including two recently translated editions in China, where it sparked conversations among intellectuals interested in formerly taboo western culture.
Faking orgasms
Born in smalltown Missouri, Hite gained a masters degree in social history and in 1967 moved to New York to enrol in a PhD program at Columbia University. She left when conservative faculty members refused to allow her to complete her dissertation on female sexuality. Hite worked as a model to pay her tuition fees. She joined the National Organisation for Women when they protested the sexism of the Olivetti advertising campaigns, after Hite was cast as an “Olivetti girl” for the typewriter company.
Increasingly tagged as a “man-basher” after the publication of her book, Hite’s public persona was conventionally, almost theatrically feminine. She revelled in a contemporary Baroque aesthetic; a mirage of red lipstick, froufrou dresses, pancake-style makeup and tousled orange or platinum curls. And she spoke about sex in explicit detail, in a voice that was earnest, articulate and unembarrassed.
Hite did not “discover” the clitoral orgasm. Instead, by centring women’s experiences, and taking their reflections seriously, her work threw into question centuries of sexological studies. These studies had either pathologised normal female sexual functioning or else insisted any pleasure women derived from sex had to be a by-product of conventional heterosexual intercourse.
Even Masters and Johnson, who, in their reports from 1966 onwards, clinically proved all female orgasms were the result of clitoral stimulation, had insisted on the centrality of coitus.
As Hite told television show host Geraldo in 1977,
Masters and Johnson made a tremendous step forward in that they studied, and showed clinically, for the first time, that all orgasms are caused by clitoral stimulation, and we really have them to thank for that. However, when they described how it’s done – the thrusting of the penis causes the vaginal lips to move, which causes the skin that’s connected to the clitoris to move, which causes the glands to move over the clitoris, which supposedly gives you orgasm. But that doesn’t work for most women.
And yet, although the participants in Hite’s study were overwhelmingly educated and politically progressive, many confessed they felt compelled to fake an orgasm during intercourse to please a man.
“I ‘perform’ and boost his ego and confidence,” claimed one. “I do not like to think of myself as a performer but I feel judged and also judge myself when I don’t have an orgasm.” “[M]en do expect it, so I often force myself […],” said another.
Participants also claimed how a woman was seen to orgasm mattered. “I don’t show the signs you’re supposed to,” worried one. “They think because I don’t pant, scream and claw I haven’t had one,” said another. “I used to go out of my way to offer all the mythical Hollywood signs,” revealed another.
One participant even suggested the whole issue of sex was so politically fraught that, “Maybe sex would be better if we’d never heard of orgasm”.
Respondents also told Hite the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s had intensified, rather than reduced, gender prejudices and double standards.
Sexual violence
Another breathtaking aspect of the book is the way participants’ answers are shot through with sexual violence. On the issue of sexual coercion, for example, one participant replied, “I’m not supposed to say ‘no’ since I’m legally married”.
On a question about the use of force in sex, another replied, “Only with my husband.” (In 1976, marital rape was legal and “acceptable” in most western nations.)
Rape myths are also common. “I define as rape someone you don’t know who attacks you,” said one respondent. “I never defined it as […] someone you know. If you define rape that way, every woman has been raped over and over.”
Another suggested rape wasn’t rape if a victim gave up fighting. “He really raped me, but not in the legal way. I couldn’t prevent him, in other words.”
Hite identified toxic gender stereotypes as the major driver of sexual violence, especially the belief that “a man’s need for ‘sex’ is a strong and urgent ‘drive’” which women were obligated to satisfy. “Women aren’t always free to not have sex,” explained one respondent.
Archival insights
The Hite archive is housed in the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. It comprises over 250 filing boxes and folios, occupying more than 30 metres of shelf space. Most of the material relates to Hite’s public career as a sex researcher, with a small scattering of personal papers.
I was at Harvard doing research for a book on Hite’s contemporary Andrea Dworkin. Although the two feminists exist as polar opposites in the public imagination, they thoroughly agreed with one another, and enjoyed a supportive working relationship. And so I wanted to take a look.
Among the publishing agreements, speaking invitations, publicity material and the copies of the edited and revised questionnaires that formed the basis of the 1976 report – which are printed in vermillion – an occasional note flips out.
One, a seemingly unpublished open letter titled “Dear Women”, bears the traces of the intense, frequently misogynistic and overtly hostile media scrutiny that marked Hite’s wild catapult to fame.
“Sometimes I feel I am dying here in the midst of all this,” she writes, “without the support of anyone”.
Another, scrawled in a flamboyant purple felt tip pen in the midst of her 1977 book tour of France, reads, “I know that I have done something good – but somehow I feel evil […] When did that start?”
There are also letters from readers. One, sent from Milan in the wake of the controversy that accompanied the Italian edition of the book, bears the typewritten subject line “Personal”. It reads:
Dear Ms Hite,
I am 43 years old and have never written a fan letter in my life until today. But I feel a moral obligation to tell you that your ‘Report’ has rehabilitated me in my own eyes. After years of thinking there was something wrong with me, your book has shown me I’m normal.
Hite’s “Dear Women” letter describes the extraordinary challenges, including the financial challenges, she faced both before and after the book was published.
Macmillan, after purchasing the rights to the book, went cold on the project when the commissioning editor resigned or, as Hite phrases it, “quit/was fired depending on your point of view”. The publisher made no plan to promote the book and assigned a 22-year-old man to answer any media queries.
Hite decided to step in, when, working in the publisher’s offices late one evening, she found a letter from her male publicist declining an invitation to discuss The Hite Report on TV as “he thought my book/subject might be too ‘ticklish’ for television”.
Hite’s contract with Macmillan gave her little or no control over international editions of the book (and severely limited the income she could take from royalties, before it was ruled unconscionable by a court). In 1978, she “flew around the world twice” attempting to stop the book from being sensationalised.
In France, the publisher had promised Hite a plain print cover, but was overruled by an all-male advertising department who “printed a cover with a nude woman”. In the second printing, the publisher agreed to revert to plain text.
In Israel, entire sections of the first edition text were censored. Protests by local journalists led to the publisher engaging an Israeli feminist to re-translate the work.
In Japan, the male translator produced a translation that was “so embarrassed and vague that it made absolutely no sense”. But on this occasion, a sympathetic female editor stepped in to rewrite entire sections of the manuscript.
Hite’s Australian reception ranked among the most hostile. Her research assistant described the trip as “hideous”, alleging Hite had “never before encountered” such “vicious attitudes” as those exhibited by male journalists.
Hite’s research assistant revealed in a separate letter that Hite’s doctors had “absolutely forbid her to do anything but rest for the next few months” after the Australian trip.
Later life
In her preface, Hite writes that she hoped to start a conversation through which men and women might “begin to devise more kind, generous, and personal ways of relating”.
Sadly, this was not what happened. Hite went on to release four major reports on human sexuality, including a report on male sexuality, one on women and love, and one on the family. Then in 1996, she revoked her US citizenship and moved to Germany, saying the media’s hostility towards her made it impossible to continue working.
Living in Germany, and later in Paris and London, she published her autobiography, The Hite Report on Shere Hite, and The Hite Reader, containing a selection of her published work. She died in 2020, aged 77.
What marks the Hite Report as an artefact from another era is less the peculiar patois of the “Age of Aquarius”, than the way in which Hite’s respondents so often defined their identities through their husband’s, whether as a wife, former wife, or woman destined to be a wife. “Wifedom” is the default state.
Equally, what makes the book disturbing, is the reality of sexual violence and coercion that lurks in so many answers, even when respondents are not being questioned about violence or coercion directly.
With shocked recognition, the reader realises society has not changed nearly as much as some would like to think. The fact it has changed at all is partly due to the second sexual revolution ignited by Hite’s work.
Camilla Nelson 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 2025 AFL season is just around the corner and fans are pondering the big questions: who will play finals? Who will finish in the top four? Who’s getting the wooden spoon?
The start of a new season brings with it many unknowns, hopes, and in some cases, trepidation.
Collingwood enters 2025 with the oldest and most experienced list – will that be the key to another deep finals run? Or are they over the hill?
Can Carlton finally break its premiership drought? Can West Coast, North Melbourne, or Richmond get back on track? What can Fremantle do with its young list and high expectations?
With so many unknowns, we turned to data.
Simulations and predictions
In La Trobe University’s Master of Sport Analytics, students need to build their own footy tipping algorithms and use them to simulate future matches.
We’ve seen lots of different approaches to this problem. Each comes with its own set of assumptions and blind spots.
One straightforward way to try to forecast what will happen in the upcoming season is to just look at history: how often does a team that finishes first on the ladder stay on top the next?
That’s happened seven times since 1990, so about 20% of the time.
We can model probabilities like this for every ladder position to get a gauge on how rankings typically shift from season to season, and apply this to the end-of-season 2024 ladder to predict the 2025 standings.
This approach does not take into account last year’s finals results, the different age profiles of teams, the 2025 fixture, or other team changes such as trades, retirements, or injuries.
Taking age into account
How about if we consider player ages as well? This should give us a better sense of a team’s expected change between seasons.
Research has suggested AFL players reach their peak performance levels at around 24-25.
A quick look at team median ages since 1990 agrees: teams with a median player age over 25 typically have a worse winning percentage the following year, and teams younger than 24 usually improve (with plenty of exceptions).
Combining last year’s ladder with age profiles gives a different view of the upcoming season.
There is more shuffling, with older teams like Collingwood and Melbourne expected to fall, while the younger Fremantle, Gold Coast and Adelaide lists are given higher probabilities of finishing near the top.
We’re still left with some important blind spots though: information from last year’s finals (Brisbane performed far better than a typical fifth-place finisher), and the difficulty of the upcoming fixture, have not been considered.
The Elo rating system
To take the full 2025 fixture into account, we need to simulate the entire season game by game.
That can be done if we use the Elo rating system to get a “strength” rating for each team.
Elo ratings track team strength over time: ratings go up with a win and down with a loss. The amount it changes depends on the opponent – beating a strong team boosts the rating more than beating a weak one, and the ratings update after every game played.
We’ll use the Elo ratings that each team ended up on at the end of last year (including finals) as a baseline for 2025.
With these ratings, we can calculate the probability of one team beating another in any given matchup. The method also considers home ground advantage by giving the home team a small rating boost.
Once we have probabilities for each match outcome, we can simulate the entire season. Here’s how it works:
Each game needs a winner. To decide, we use a computer function that picks a winner based on probability, kind of like flipping a weighted coin. If a team has a 70% probability of winning, it’s more likely to be chosen, but there’s still a 30% chance they lose
This is done for every game in the season
We then repeat this 10,000 times – simulating 10,000 different versions of the season
In each version, we create an end-of-season ladder, based on the simulated games results
After all the simulations, we can see how often each team finishes in each ladder position. This gives us a prediction for their chances of finishing first, second, third and so on.
The Elo approach favours Brisbane much more and is less kind to West Coast (35% chance of finishing last).
It does not predict the decline of Collingwood and Melbourne because, although it takes into account the finals and fixture, it doesn’t have an age component.
The ‘wisdom of the crowd’
If each approach comes with its own set of limitations, then we might expect to get a better forecast by combining lots of predictions from different sources because of the “wisdom of the crowd”.
The idea is that you get more accurate predictions if you combine multiple independent sources.
Luckily for us, each season, several AFL stats experts build models to estimate the probability of each match outcome and generously post them online.
What goes into each model is not always known, but they consider a mixture of different factors such as attacking and defending strengths, in-game statistics, home ground advantage, player lists and trades, last season’s performance and more.
For our analysis, we’ll combine the Elo model with the average of all these expert tips to get a “wisdom of the crowd” prediction for each game’s probability. The ladder can then be simulated using the same method as above.
Four groups emerge from the wisdom of the crowd:
Brisbane, Hawthorn, Geelong and the Western Bulldogs are predicted to lead the pack, surpassing last year’s top three
Sydney, Port Adelaide, GWS, Carlton, Fremantle, Collingwood and Adelaide have a wide spread of predicted finishes, skewed more towards finishing in the top eight – but there won’t be enough room for all of them
Essendon, Melbourne, St Kilda and Gold Coast might challenge for a spot in the finals, but the models are less confident in their chances
West Coast, North Melbourne and Richmond are hard to separate from each other, a cut below the rest.
Uncertainty and excitement
Each table tells a potentially different story but the most universal theme is uncertainty.
Team sports are hard to predict, especially before we’ve had a chance to observe any games, and even the most confident predictions are under 40% (meaning they are more likely not to happen).
Uncertainty leads to excitement, and this data only makes us more excited to see what will play out this season.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
What if we told you that artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT don’t actually learn? Many people we talk to are genuinely surprised to hear this.
Even AI systems themselves will often tell you confidently that they are learning systems. Many reports and even academic papers say the same. But this is due to a misconception – or rather a loose understanding of what we mean by “learning” in AI.
Yet, understanding more precisely how and when AI systems learn (and when they don’t) will make you a more productive and more responsible user of AI.
AI does not learn – at least not like humans do
Many misconceptions around AI stem from using words that have a certain meaning when applied to humans, such as learning. We know how humans learn, because we do it all the time. We have experiences; we do something that fails; we encounter something new; we read something surprising; and thus we remember, we update or change the way we do things.
Firstly, AI systems do not learn from any specific experiences, which would allow them to understand things the way we humans do. Rather they “learn” by encoding patterns from vast amounts data – using mathematics alone. This happens during the training process, when they are built.
Take large language models, such as GPT-4, the technology that powers ChatGPT. In a nutshell, it learns by encoding mathematical relationships between words (actually, tokens), with the aim to make predictions about what text goes with what other text. These relationships are extracted from vast amounts of data and encoded during a computationally intensive training phase.
This form of “learning” is obviously very different to how humans learn.
It has certain downsides in that AI often struggles with simple commonsense knowledge about the world that humans naturally learn by just living in the world.
But AI training is also incredibly powerful, because large language models have “seen” text at a scale far beyond what any human can comprehend. That’s why these systems are so useful with language-based tasks, such as writing, summarising, coding, or conversing. The fact these systems don’t learn like us, but at a vast scale, makes them all-rounders in the kinds of things they do excel at.
AI systems do not learn from any specific experiences, which would allow them to understand things the way we humans do. Rido/Shutterstock
Once trained, the learning stops
Most AI systems that most people use, such as ChatGPT, also do not learn once they are built. You could say AI systems don’t learn at all – training is just how they’re built, it’s not how they work. The “P” in GPT literally stands for “pre-trained”.
In technical terms, AI systems such as ChatGPT only engage in “training-time learning”, as part of their development, not in “run-time learning”. Systems that learn as they go do exist. But they are typically confined to a single task, for example your Netflix algorithm recommending what to watch. Once it’s done, it’s done, as the saying goes.
Being “pre-trained” means large language models are always stuck in time. Any updates to their training data require highly costly retraining, or at least so-called fine-tuning for smaller adjustments.
That means ChatGPT does not learn from your prompts on an ongoing basis. And out of the box, a large language model does not remember anything. It holds in its memory only whatever occurs in a single chat session. Close the window, or start a new session, and it’s a clean sheet every time.
There are ways around this, such as storing information about the user, but they are achieved at the application level; the AI model itself does not learn and remains unchanged until retrained (more on that in a moment).
Most AI systems that most people use, such as ChatGPT, also do not learn once they are built. Ascannio/Shutterstock
What does this mean for users?
First, be aware of what you get from your AI assistant.
Learning from text data means systems such as ChatGPT are language models, not knowledge models. While it is truly amazing how much knowledge gets encoded via the mathematical training process, these models are not always reliable when asked knowledge questions.
Their real strength is working with language. And don’t be surprised when responses contain outdated information given they are frozen in time, or that ChatGPT does not remember any facts you tell it.
The good news is AI developers have come up with some clever workarounds. For example, some versions of ChatGPT are now connected to the internet. To provide you with more timely information they might perform a web search and insert the result into your prompt before generating the response.
Another workaround is that AI systems can now remember things about you to personalise their responses. But this is done with a trick. It is not that the large language model itself learns or updates itself in real time. The information about you is stored in a separate database and is inserted into the prompt each time in ways that remain invisible.
But it still means that you can’t correct the model when it gets something wrong (or teach it a fact), which it would remember to correct its answers for other users. The model can be personalised to an extent, but it still does not learn on the fly.
Users who understand how exactly AI learns – or doesn’t – will invest more in developing effective prompting strategies, and treat the AI as an assistant – one that always needs checking.
Let the AI assist you. But make sure you do the learning, prompt by prompt.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Over the past two weeks, the media has reported several cases of serious “adverse events”, where babies, children and an adult experienced harm and ultimately died while receiving care in separate Australian hospitals.
When a serious adverse event occurs, hospitals investigate what happened and why, and propose recommendations to reduce the risk of similar harm occurring again.
About 1,600 patient safety investigations are undertaken each year. And the stakes are high. If not managed well, the hospital’s response can compound the psychological harm to the patient and their family. If lessons aren’t learnt, patient safety doesn’t improve.
Despite three decades of concerted effort, the rate of adverse events remains stubbornly high in Australia. One in ten people will experience harm associated with their hospital care.
What can be done to reduce this harm? There is no quick fix but our research shows improving hospital investigations can have a big impact. Here’s how this can be done.
What exactly are ‘adverse events’?
Thirty years ago, one of the first large-scale studies of the rates of harm to patients in Australian hospitals was published – the Quality in Australian Health Care Study.
When a serious adverse event occurs, hospitals form a team to undertake a patient safety investigation. The teams harness experts from the clinical specialties involved in the adverse event (such as emergency department or surgery) and health service safety personnel.
The investigation also informs “open disclosure” – information for the patient and family about why the adverse event occurred and what changes the health service intends to make to prevent a similar adverse event from happening again.
But our research has shown most recommendations in these investigations are unlikely to reduce harm to patients.
The complexity of health care, workforce shortages and broader pressures on the health system (such as an ageing population requiring more complex care) often work against health services effectively implementing recommendations.
So what can be done?
We are undertaking research with four state and territory governments (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory) to test these strategies and inform how they can be redesigned for safer care. Here’s what we’ve found so far.
A well-recognised problem with some investigations is their lack of specialised expertise in patient safety. The field is backed by robust research, yet often the people undertaking the investigations are experts in their clinical field, or in the running of a hospital, but not in safety science.
Added to that, the sheer complexity of health care makes the task of finding the factors that contributed to the harm and developing effective recommendations even more challenging.
Consider the contrast this has with biomedical sciences, such as developing new drugs or tests. These use large, specialist, independent research institutions with highly trained scientists. Yet patient safety problems, which are arguably as complex, are expected to be solved with fewer resources, using part-time staff with variable task-specific experience and training, at a local hospital.
Complex patient safety problems require appropriate investments in expertise and independence.
Findings of investigations tend not to be shared. This means learning remains local. Repeated investigations of the same type of adverse event may be undertaken at multiple hospitals, duplicating effort.
More sharing of adverse events by hospitals and health departments would reduce this duplication and make learning more efficient. Aviation does this well. If a commercial jet experiences a problem or near miss, the issue is shared so every airline knows about it.
If we did this, we could redesign hospital systems to support safer care. This could, for example, include standardising how medication information, such as the dose, is displayed on all hospital computer systems. Doctors going from one hospital to another would be less likely to make errors in prescribing medication, which is a common patient safety risk.
Thirty years after the rates of adverse events were first reported in Australia, patients and the broader public deserve to know that investigations are being conducted effectively and that strategies are being adopted to keep every hospital visit safer.
Peter Hibbert receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council as a Partnership Grant, with partners: the Clinical Excellence Commission in New South Wales, Safer Care Victoria, Clinical Excellence Queensland, and Australian Capital Territory Health.
He also undertakes training in undertaking patient safety investigations and consulting to health services.
Jeffrey Braithwaite receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council as a Partnership Grant, with partners: the Clinical Excellence Commission in New South Wales, Safer Care Victoria, Clinical Excellence Queensland and Australian Capital Territory Health.
During the federal election campaign we can expect to hear candidates talk passionately about school funding. This is one of the most contentious areas of education policy – and one many families and voters care deeply about.
You may hear some parties talking about how they are “fully funding” schools and other commentary about schools being under or overfunded.
How does school funding work in Australia?
Where does the money come from?
All schools in Australia receive both public and private funding. Public funding is taxpayer funding and it comes from both state and federal governments.
Private funding comes from parents and households, as well as churches and other associations, which are mostly charitable. These charitable organisations receive tax breaks.
How does government funding work?
All schools in Australia receive funding from federal and state governments.
Extra loadings are then provided for schools and students with special needs, for example students with disabilities, from low socioeconomic backgrounds or in remote areas.
The latest federal school funding policy, the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement sets out how public schools will receive 25% of the schooling resource standard from the federal government and rest from their respective state government.
Up to 80% of a non-government school’s schooling resource standard funding can be provided by the federal government. But the actual amount is adjusted by something called a school’s “capacity to contribute”.
This measures a non-government school community’s capacity to contribute to the ongoing costs of running their school. In practice, it sees lower-fee non-government schools receive more public funding than higher-fee non-government schools.
State governments also provide public funding to non-government schools. This is because school funding agreements require state governments to contribute some level of funding to non-government schools.
All schools in Australia receive private funding from parents and households.
Public schools receive private funding in the form of fees and contributions from parents. These fees and contributions can vary from a few hundred dollars at some public primary schools to thousands of dollars at some public secondary schools.
This funding is used to support building and facilities, excursions, as well as subsidise curriculum subjects, especially in secondary schools.
In media and policy debates about schools we frequently hear talk of public schools being “underfunded” or still not “fully funded”. We also hear about some independent schools being “overfunded”.
This relates to whether they are receiving what they are entitled to under the schooling resources standard.
To date approximately 2% of public schools, receive the amount they are entitled to based on the schooling resources standard. This is largely because state and territory governments, other than the ACT, have not contributed their full share.
This means the vast majority of public schools are “underfunded”.
The most recent national school funding agreement has set out a timeline to make sure all schools are eventually fully funded. In some cases, this may not be until the 2030s.
Non-government schools that charge fees in excess of the schooling resource standard will be “overfunded”. Even moderate-fee schools may be “overfunded” because of the public funding they receive on top of the private funding paid by parents.
As noted earlier, school funding agreements require federal and state governments to contribute to the schooling resource standard of all non-government schools. Even high-fee non-government schools receive substantial amounts of public funding.
For example, my 2024 research suggests high-fee non-government schools (those charging $25,000 per year or more) receive approximately $5,000 per pupil in public funding.
Are some non-government schools at risk of losing funds?
Most non-government schools will continue to receive increases in public funding due to indexation.
But there are headlines about “private school funding cuts”.
This is because some non-government schools will see less public funding if the federal government has been paying more than 80% of the schooling resource standard (due to outdated funding methods). Schools have until 2029 to transition to the current funding system.
This will only impact a small proportion of non-government schools. For example, in January, The Sydney Morning Herald reported 30 schools were projected to lose funding.
Laura Perry 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.
Maria Clementina Sobieski is one of only three women buried in the famous St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, alongside an estimated 100 or so popes. She lived a life of extraordinary defiance and determination.
Born in 1701 in Oława, Poland, Maria Clementina was the granddaughter of King John III Sobieski of Poland, who was famous for his victory in the 1683 Battle of Vienna against the forces of the Ottoman Empire.
While this ancestry provided Maria Clementina her status as a princess, it also came with significant challenges, by placing her at the centre of 18th century European dynastic politics.
At just 17 years old, she was betrothed to James Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the British throne. This match, which held immense political and religious significance, was agreed to by her father, Jakub, after negotiations with Stuart.
But her journey to marriage wouldn’t simple. It required a daring escape from imprisonment in Innsbruck, where she was held by Emperor Charles VI in a bid to prevent her union with Stuart.
Francesco Bertosi’s painting, ‘Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska, 1701–1735. Wife of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart’, 1719. National Galleries of Scotland
A high-stakes abduction
The marriage between Maria Clementina and James Stuart was a direct challenge to the Protestant king George I of Great Britain.
James Stuart, also known as the Old Pretender, was living in exile and sought to reclaim the British throne that was his by birthright. His marriage to Maria Clementina, which was endorsed by Pope Clement XI, would symbolise Catholic unity against growing Protestant dominance.
Recognising this political threat, George I asked Emperor Charles VI, his ally, to order Maria Clementina’s detention in Innsbruck while she was en route to her wedding.
Her confinement was intended to coerce her family into annulling the engagement. However, Maria Clementina, bolstered by her unwavering faith and determination, refused to capitulate.
Anton Raphael Mengs’s painting, ‘Prince James Francis Edward Stuart’, circa 1740s. Wikimedia
The perilous escape
Maria Clementina’s imprisonment at the hands of Charles VI lasted six months. During this time, she kept her spirits high through correspondence with James Stuart and her father, Jakub. Meanwhile, plans for her escape were set in motion by Charles Wogan, an Irish Jacobite loyal to Stuart.
The princess disguised herself by switching clothes with the servant of one of her rescuers, Eleanor Misset. She then slipped past imperial guards with a small group posing as a travelling family.
The escape involved avoiding imperial agents and enduring significant physical hardship, including traversing the harsh and mountainous Brenner Pass in the Alps.
In one instance, after a carriage axle broke, Maria Clementina and Eleanor Misset were forced to walk a considerable distance to find shelter. Despite the gruelling journey, Maria Clementina demonstrated remarkable resolve, earning the admiration of her companions.
Reaching safety and marriage
After crossing into Italy, the group arrived in Bologna, where Maria Clementina rested and prepared for her new role as James Stuart’s wife. Her wedding took place on May 9 1719 in a modest ceremony.
Although James Stuart was absent (not unusual for high-profile dynastic alliances at the time), the marriage formalised their union and reinforced the Jacobite claim to the British throne.
Maria Clementina wore a white dress to symbolise mourning for James Stuart’s late mother, Maria Beatrice d’Este. The ceremony was attended by Jacobite activist Charles Wogan and other members of the escape team, including Eleanor Misset.
And so Maria Clementina became the titular Catholic queen of England, Scotland and Ireland.
Agostino Masucci’s ‘The Solemnisation of the Marriage of James III and Maria Clementina Sobieska’, circa 1735. National Galleries of Scotland
Motherhood and family challenges
Maria Clementina’s bold actions ensured the continuity of the Jacobite line. On December 31 1720 she gave birth to her first son, Charles Edward Stuart, later known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
He was baptised within the hour by Father Lawrence Mayes, the same bishop who officiated his parents’ wedding, and his birth was widely celebrated by Jacobite supporters.
Maria Clementina’s second son, Henry Benedict Stuart, was born on March 6 1725 and was later made Duke of York.
A monument in St Peter’s Basilica dedicated to the royal Stuarts, James and his sons, Charles and Henry. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
While the birth of her sons brought joy and hope to the Jacobite cause, Maria Clementina’s relationship with James Stuart grew strained.
their tempers are so very different that though in the greatest trifles they are never of the same opinion, the one won’t yield an inch to the other.
James neglected Maria Clementina. The pair also clashed over their sons’ education, further straining the marriage.
The later years
By the end of 1725, Maria Clementina’s frustrations with her marriage reached a breaking point. She left James and took up residence at the convent of St Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, leaving her young sons behind.
For two years she embraced a devout lifestyle, focusing on her own welfare. Her return to James in 1728 was marked by a withdrawal from court life, and she spent much of her time in seclusion at Rome’s Palazzo Muti.
John Pettie (1834-93), ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie Entering the Ballroom at Holyroodhouse’, before April 1892. Royal Collection Trust, CC BY-NC-SA
Despite her struggles, Maria Clementina’s legacy as a mother was significant. Charles Edward Stuart and Henry Benedict Stuart carried the Jacobite cause forward, their lives shaped by the resilience and determination demonstrated by their mother. Her commitment to their futures ensured the Jacobite line endured, even as political realities shifted.
Maria Clementina died on January 18 1735 at the age of 32. She was given a royal funeral in St Peter’s Basilica, where she was interred with honours befitting her status as queen. Her heart was enshrined separately in the church of the Twelve Holy Apostles in Rome.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Allen-Franks, Senior Lecturer; Co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human Rights Law, Policy and Practice and Co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Intellectual Property Law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Journalist Paddy Gower’s attempts to trademark his brand have highlighted what is still considered offensive in New Zealand when it comes to trademarks. But should a government agency be the arbiter of what might offend?
In March 2024, Gower applied to trademark the name of his news entity “This Is The Fucking News”.
The application stalled at the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ), likely because the Trade Marks Act 2002 doesn’t allow people to register trademarks which are “likely to offend a significant section of the community”.
“THIS IS THE F#$%ING NEWS” however, was apparently okay. Gower applied for that mark in June last year and it was registered in December. He now has exclusive rights to use this phrase for specified goods and services.
A changing definition
New Zealand law first prohibited the registration of “scandalous” marks in 1889. The language used in the trademark statute has been “likely to offend” since 2002.
The current rules cover swear words, as in Gower’s case, but also hate speech and material which is culturally offensive.
IPONZ’s current guidance says a “distinction should be drawn between marks that are offensive and marks that would be considered by some to be in poor taste”. Offensive trademarks are said to be those that would create “justifiable censure or outrage”.
But the standards of offensiveness can and do change.
In 1999, Red Bull applied to register “BULLSHIT”. Registration was rejected on the basis that it contained scandalous matter and was contrary to morality (under the wording in the older law).
Perhaps Red Bull wouldn’t face the same difficulty if it tried again today. There is now a registration for “Shit You Should Care About”. It appears that the word shit is not considered one that’s “likely to offend a significant section of the community” anymore.
From a review of the register, it seems reasonable to conclude that IPONZ thinks that certain swear words do remain likely to offend, though. Several applications have been abandoned, including for “THE FUCKING GOOD BOOK” and “no fucks given”.
Whether a mark is offensive is supposed to be determined objectively from the perspective of the “right-thinking” member of the public. But outcomes can appear inconsistent and perhaps arbitrary — why is “F#$%ING” ok, but the proper spelling not?
Some applicants may also decry that their freedom of expression is being curtailed by a refusal to register.
The common justification for protecting freedom of expression is that we should have an open marketplace of ideas, where both good and bad ideas are shared with the public.
New Zealand is not alone in considering these issues.
In the United States, for example, Simon Tam was refused registration for “THE SLANTS” (the name of his rock band) because the law at the time prohibited registration of marks which may be disparaging. Slant is considered a racist term by some and Tam had wanted to reclaim the slur as an anti-racist statement.
In another case, designer Erik Brunetti was refused registration of “FUCT” for clothing, because the law said that immoral or scandalous marks couldn’t be registered.
Both marks have since been registered for reasons related to the fact that the US Constitution’s First Amendment allows for the right to freedom of speech.
The US trademarks register now contains a pending application for “NAZI KAZI” and a pending application for a symbol described as “roughly resembling a swastika”, as well as two pending applications for marks containing the word “N*GGER”.
These marks may not ever be registered, but the barriers against their registration aren’t what they once were.
Limiting offence or limiting rights?
New Zealand obviously has a different constitutional context than the US, but there are similarities in the underlying question about what is, and isn’t offensive – and the role of the government in determining the rules.
One big difference between the US cases and those in New Zealand, however, is that New Zealand’s Bill of Rights allows for limits on rights, if those limits are reasonable, set out in law (like the Trade Marks Act) and justifiable in a free and democratic society.
So, is there a compelling justification for the prohibition on registering offensive marks?
One argument for the prohibition is to protect the public from exposure to these kinds of marks. However, the denial of registration doesn’t prevent the marks from being used in the marketplace.
Refusal means that an applicant misses out on the benefits of a formal trademark registration (such as being able to sue others for trademark infringement). But there’s nothing stopping a person using an unregistered mark. And, refusing registration may actually free up the mark for more people to use it as it doesn’t belong to just one person or business.
Perhaps a more compelling argument for prohibition is that registration should be refused to avoid giving an official (governmental) seal of approval to offensive marks. This may be a very high bar, but it seems important that a registrar consider the likelihood of deep offence, even if the standard is not often reached.
Putting justifications for any bar aside, it remains hard to draw a line as to what is and isn’t okay. It seems in relation to “THIS IS THE F#$%ING NEWS”, that line is razor thin.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As Canada prepares to close the book on the Justin Trudeau era, some will be happy to watch him go. But in Canada’s haste to see him out the door, let’s not forget his government’s significant achievements.
But what’s undoubtedly been his single greatest achievement — prodded in no small part by the NDP — was the introduction of a national child-care program: The Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system, colloquially known as $10-a-day child care.
As scholars of social policy — as well as a mother and grandfather — we believe this program is the biggest improvement to Canada’s welfare state since the initial implementation of medicare in 1966-67, updated via the Canada Health Act in 1984.
Somehow, however, amid all the negative Trudeau headlines, this major contribution has been seemingly forgotten.
By freeing parents — mostly women — from the need to stay home with their children or from having to rely on ageing and often frail grandparents, evidence suggests Canada will experience substantial benefits to children, parents and society as a whole.
The program allows highly skilled and motivated workers to join the paid labour force and could also affect fertility decisions in some cases if, for example, families decide to have more children due to reduced child-care costs.
In purely fiscal terms, study after study shows that a dollar invested in child care yields a greater financial return over a lifetime than any other expenditure of public funds.
Massive uptake rates
The CWELCC program committed more than $30 billion federally to support early learning and child care, with specific funds dedicated to Indigenous child care.
To date, it has created 150,000 new spaces, with a goal of creating an additional 100,000 new spaces by March 2026. All provinces and territories have participated, with uptake rates among child-care centres starting at 92 per cent in Ontario and rising higher elsewhere across the country.
Notably, the road to implementing national child care in Canada has neither been short or easy.
In 2004, Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin was unable to bring national child care to fruition, despite gaining bilateral child-care agreements with all 10 provinces.
It did, however, ensure that a rhetoric of “choice” and cash in hand for in-home care for children was prioritized over women’s equal participation in the labour market. Internationally, there is consistent evidence that care allowances offered in lieu of a publicly funded child-care services reinforce traditional gendered divisions of labour and reduce female employment rates.
All provinces/territories signed up
By contrast — and no small feat in terms of negotiation skills — Trudeau’s team was able to persuade each and every province and territory to sign an Early Learning and Child Care Agreement.
Major reductions in child-care fees for eligible families followed, with all territories and four provinces at $10-a-day as of 2024 (with New Brunswick and Alberta only slightly higher, while Nova Scotia] will be at $10-a-day as of March 1, 2026.)
Even in Ontario, where rates are higher, costs now average about $23 a day.
Trudeau managed to carry out this program by starting his efforts early in his tenure, unlike with the dental and pharmacare initiatives, and building consensus across a diverse and often contentious Canadian landscape.
Supply issues
It’s not all roses, of course. Some Canadians are frustrated about the slow expansion of subsidized child-care spaces. And the program remains plagued by serious supply (availability) issues, especially in rural and remote communities.
But as we look towards the next federal election, Conservative Leader Pierre Polievre has had little to say about the national child-care program except for vague references to “flexibility” and a suggestion about replacing it with tax credits. This should set alarm bells ringing across the country.
Fortunately, Trudeau has set up a framework that will be difficult to dismantle in the future. There has been massive buy-in from users, providers, funders and much of the general public.
We urge whoever replaces Trudeau as prime minister to highlight what’s been accomplished in child care over the last few years, and to prioritize the further expansion of the program in the years ahead.
This would be Trudeau’s proudest legacy.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Trump’s outburst has, to some extent, reinvigorated European support for the war-torn country. But Zelensky’s recent statement that “Ukraine is ready to negotiate about an end to the conflict” suggests that he recognises how precarious the situation has become.
In Trump’s address to the US Congress on February 4, the US president welcomed this shift, and claimed that Russia was also ready for a truce.
What would a negotiated peace look like? The side that holds the upper hand, both politically and militarily, will have a stronger position at the negotiating table.
At the moment, the advantage is overwhelmingly with Russia, which is striving to press home its battlefield advantage and occupy as much territory as it can before a potential ceasefire. This is likely to mean a freezing of the conflict on its current lines of contact.
The war has now lasted more than three years, and since Ukraine’s failed summer 2023 counteroffensive, there have been no major changes on the battlefield, except for Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August 2024. Kyiv had hoped that seizing this territory could serve as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations.
But even this has not gone according to plan, as Russia has been steadily reclaiming the area, aided by North Korean troops.
Recent battlefield developments reaffirm the ongoing stalemate. According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) (as of March 4), Russian forces continued offensives along various key strategic points in the east and south. While Russian advances continue to be slow, it’s a situation that could change quickly, particularly with the dramatic shutdown of US assistance.
One of the key areas where Russia is now putting intense pressure on Ukrainian troops is in the Kherson oblast in the south of the country. Russian forces are reportedly attempting to cross the Dnipro river, aiming to establish footholds on the west (right) bank at four locations to allow them a clear run at the strategically important port city of Kherson.
Russia has successfully negotiated river crossings during the three-year war, but this time, the situation seems more challenging. Recent reporting from the frontlines has described Russian assaults on Dnipro crossings as “suicide missions”, causing heavy Russian casualties.
A high Russian body count is nothing new in this conflict. But why is Russia willing to sacrifice so many of its soldiers, particularly when the political prospects favour Putin and the Russians?
Oleksandr Prokudin, the governor of Kherson, suggests that Russia is desperate to establish a foothold as crossing the Dnipro would open up Kherson oblast for further advances and could be used in negotiations to strengthen Russia’s claim over the entire region. The occupation of Kherson was listed by Russian defence minister, Andrei Belousov, as a key strategic goal for 2025.
Strategic barrier
Crossing the Dnipro will not be easy. Ukraine has tried and failed in the opposite direction on several occasions for example, in April and August 2023.
At that stage, as part of the (ultimately unsuccessful) spring-summer offensive, Kyiv hoped crossing the river would be a major breakthrough that would lead to easier access to Crimea. This now looks like a lost cause – at least militarily.
State of the conflict in Ukraine, March 5 2024. Institute for the Study of War
The Dnipro is not only a natural barrier dividing the country into two parts. It’s also vital as a transport artery through the country and its dams provide energy.
Russia realises this, and it has seen the river as one of Ukraine’s “centres of gravity”. On day one of the invasion, Russian forces made a beeline for the Dnipro, crossing and taking up positions that they were later forced to abandon as Ukraine fought back.
Now, as Prokudin observed, Russia is once again throwing its troops at the river. A series of assaults in December 2024 were successfully repelled, but things have changed even in the few months since. Ukraine is in an increasingly difficult position.
Ukraine’s military is facing increasingly critical troop shortages and has a far smaller population to draw on than Russia – something which is beginning to tell.
And each day seems to bring further bad news. The US decision to pause intelligence sharing will mean its forces in the field will be virtually deaf and blind and at the mercy of Russian attacks on their positions (although there is reason to believe the pause may be reasonably shortlived).
But, with the decision to halt military aid, it’s an indication of the Trump administration’s determination to force Kyiv into a peace deal – whether or not it’s acceptable to Ukraine.
At this stage it looks almost inevitable that Ukraine will be unable to reclaim all the territory it has lost to Russia since 2014. Its best chance may be to secure what it still does control and go all-out to prevent further Russian advances. One of the ways it needs to do that right now is to ensure Russia does not establish a foothold across the Dnipro river.
Veronika Poniscjakova 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 Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has secured unprecedented access to at least seven sensitive federal databases, including those of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration. This access has sparked fears about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Another concern has received far less attention: the potential use of the data to train a private company’s artificial intelligence systems.
The White House press secretary said government data that DOGE has collected isn’t being used to train Musk’s AI models, despite Elon Musk’s control over DOGE. However, evidence has emerged that DOGE personnel simultaneously hold positions with at least one of Musk’s companies.
At the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX employees have government email addresses. This dual employment creates a conduit for federal data to potentially be siphoned to Musk-owned enterprises, including xAI. The company’s latest Grok AI chatbot model conspicuously refuses to give a clear denial about using such data.
As a political scientist and technologist who is intimately acquainted with public sources of government data, I believe this potential transmission of government data to private companies presents far greater privacy and power implications than most reporting identifies. A private entity with the capacity to develop artificial intelligence technologies could use government data to leapfrog its competitors and wield massive influence over society.
Value of government data for AI
For AI developers, government databases represent something akin to finding the Holy Grail. While companies such as OpenAI, Google and xAI currently rely on information scraped from the public internet, nonpublic government repositories offer something much more valuable: verified records of actual human behavior across entire populations.
This isn’t merely more data – it’s fundamentally different data. Social media posts and web browsing histories show curated or intended behaviors, but government databases capture real decisions and their consequences. For example, Medicare records reveal health care choices and outcomes. IRS and Treasury data reveal financial decisions and long-term impacts. And federal employment and education statistics reveal education paths and career trajectories.
What makes this data particularly valuable for AI training is its longitudinal nature and reliability. Unlike the disordered information available online, government records follow standardized protocols, undergo regular audits and must meet legal requirements for accuracy. Every Social Security payment, Medicare claim and federal grant creates a verified data point about real-world behavior. This data exists nowhere else with such breadth and authenticity in the U.S.
Most critically, government databases track entire populations over time, not just digitally active users. They include people who never use social media, don’t shop online, or actively avoid digital services. For an AI company, this would mean training systems on the actual diversity of human experience rather than just the digital reflections people cast online.
A security guard prevented U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., from entering an EPA building on Feb. 6, 2025, to see DOGE staff working there. Al Drago/Getty Images
The technical advantage
Current AI systems face fundamental limitations that no amount of data scraped from the internet can overcome. When ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini make mistakes, it’s often because they’ve been trained on information that might be popular but isn’t necessarily true. They can tell you what people say about a policy’s effects, but they can’t track those effects across populations and years.
Government data could change this equation. Imagine training an AI system not just on opinions about health care but on actual treatment outcomes across millions of patients. Consider the difference between learning from social media discussions about economic policies and analyzing their real impacts across different communities and demographics over decades.
A large, state-of-the-art, or frontier, model trained on comprehensive government data could understand the actual relationships between policies and outcomes. It could track unintended consequences across different population segments, model complex societal systems with real-world validation and predict the impacts of proposed changes based on historical evidence. For companies seeking to build next-generation AI systems, access to this data would create an almost insurmountable advantage.
Control of critical systems
A company like xAI could do far more with models trained on government data than building better chatbots or content generators. Such systems could fundamentally transform – and potentially control – how people understand and manage complex societal systems. While some of these capabilities could be beneficial under the control of accountable public agencies, I believe they pose a threat in the hands of a single private company.
Medicare and Medicaid databases contain records of treatments, outcomes and costs across diverse populations over decades. A frontier model trained on new government data could identify treatment patterns that succeed where others fail, and so dominate the health care industry. Such a model could understand how different interventions affect various populations over time, accounting for factors such as geographic location, socioeconomic status and concurrent conditions.
A company wielding the model could influence health care policy by demonstrating superior predictive capabilities and market population-level insights to pharmaceutical companies and insurers.
Treasury data represents perhaps the most valuable prize. Government financial databases contain granular details about how money flows through the economy. This includes real-time transaction data across federal payment systems, complete records of tax payments and refunds, detailed patterns of benefit distributions, and government contractor payments with performance metrics.
An AI company with access to this data could develop extraordinary capabilities for economic forecasting and market prediction. It could model the cascading effects of regulatory changes, predict economic vulnerabilities before they become crises, and optimize investment strategies with precision impossible through traditional methods.
Elon Musk’s xAI company is well financed.
Infrastructure and urban systems
Government databases contain information about critical infrastructure usage patterns, maintenance histories, emergency response times and development impacts. Every federal grant, infrastructure inspection and emergency response creates a data point that could help train AI to better understand how cities and regions function.
The power lies in the potential interconnectedness of this data. An AI system trained on government infrastructure records would understand how transportation patterns affect energy use, how housing policies affect emergency response times, and how infrastructure investments influence economic development across regions.
A private company with exclusive access would gain unique insight into the physical and economic arteries of American society. This could allow the company to develop “smart city” systems that city governments would become dependent on, effectively privatizing aspects of urban governance. When combined with real-time data from private sources, the predictive capabilities would far exceed what any current system can achieve.
Absolute data corrupts absolutely
A company such as xAI, with Musk’s resources and preferential access through DOGE, could surmount technical and political obstacles far more easily than competitors. Recent advances in machine learning have also reduced the burdens of preparing data for the algorithms to process, making government data a veritable gold mine – one that rightfully belongs to the American people.
The threat of a private company accessing government data transcends individual privacy concerns. Even with personal identifiers removed, an AI system that analyzes patterns across millions of government records could enable surprising capabilities for making predictions and influencing behavior at the population level. The threat is AI systems that leverage government data to influence society, including electoral outcomes.
Since information is power, concentrating unprecedented data in the hands of a private entity with an explicit political agenda represents a profound challenge to the republic. I believe that the question is whether the American people can stand up to the potentially democracy-shattering corruption such a concentration would enable. If not, Americans should prepare to become digital subjects rather than human citizens.
Allison Stanger receives funding from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University.
Since taking office, US president Donald Trump has implemented policies that have been notably hostile towards China. They include trade restrictions. Most recently, a 20% tariff was added to all imports from China and new technological restrictions were imposed under the America First Investment Policy. This isn’t the first time US-China tensions have flared. Throughout history the relationship has been fraught by economic, military and ideological conflicts.
China-Africa scholar and economist Lauren Johnston provides insights into how these dynamics may also shape relations between Africa and China.
How has China responded to hostile US policies?
First, China tends to have a defiant official response. It expresses disappointment, then states that the US policy position is not helpful to any country or the world economy.
Second, China makes moves domestically to prioritise the interests of key, affected industries.
Third, China will sometimes impose retaliatory sanctions.
In 2018, for instance, China imposed a 25% tariff on US soybeans, a critical animal feed source. The US Department of Agriculture had to compensate US soybean farmers for their lost income.
Another example is how, following US tech sanctions, China took a more independent technology path. It has channelled billions into tech funds. The goal is to make financing available for Chinese entrepreneurs and to push technological boundaries in areas of US sanction, such as semiconductors. These efforts are backed up by subsidies and tax reductions. In some cases, the Chinese state will invest directly in tech companies.
More recently, China retaliated to the US trade war by announcing tariffs on 80 US products. China is set to place 15% tariffs on certain energy exports, including coal, natural gas and petroleum. An additional 10% tariffs will be placed on 72 manufactured products including trucks, motor homes and agricultural machinery.
Agricultural trade has been hard hit. The day the US announced a 10% tariff on Chinese imports, China announced “an additional 15% tariff on imported chicken, wheat, corn and cotton originating from the US”. Also, “sorghum, soybeans, pork, beef, aquatic products, fruits, vegetables and dairy products will be subject to an additional 10% tariff”.
How have these Chinese responses affected Africa?
We can’t say for certain that China’s response to US trade tensions has explicitly affected its Africa policy, but there are some notable coincidences.
Less than one month after Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, and soon after the first tariffs were slapped on China’s exports to the US, China announced new measures to foster China-Africa trade efforts. The policy package aims to “strengthen economic and trade exchanges between China and Africa.”
This is the latest in a series of Chinese actions.
Later the same year, China imposed 25% tariffs on US soy bean imports and took steps to reduce dependence on US agricultural products. China also took steps to expand trade with Africa, agricultural trade in particular.
Hunan province has since taken centre stage in China-Africa relations. It’s now the host of a permanent China-Africa trade exhibition hall and a larger biennial China-Africa economic and trade exhibition (known as CAETE).
Finally, the zone is located in a bigger free-trade zone that is better connected to Africa by air, water and land corridors. African agricultural exports to China pass through Hunan, where local industry either uses these imports or distributes them across the country to retailers.
Companies in Hunan are well placed to play a key role in supporting China-Africa trade, capitalising on the opportunities left by China-US hostilities.
Hunan’s agritech giant Longping High-Tech, for instance, is investing in Tanzanian soybean farmers.
Hunan is also home to China’s construction manufacturing and electronic transportation frontier. This includes global construction giant Sany, which produces heavy industry machinery for the construction, mining and energy sectors. China’s global electronic vehicle manufacturing BYD and its electronic railway industry are also in Hunan. They have deep and increasing interests in Africa and can also support China’s key minerals and tech race with the US.
As US-China hostility enters a new era, what are the implications for China-Africa relations?
As my new working paper sets out, African countries are, for example, responding to the new opportunities from China.
At the end of 2024, while the world waited for Trump’s second coming, various African countries made moves to strengthen economic ties with China, Hunan province especially.
In December 2024, Tanzania became the first African country to open an official investment promotion office in the China-Africa Cooperation Pilot Zone in Changaha.
As China moves away from US agricultural produce, for instance, African agricultural producers can benefit. Substitute African products and potential exports will enjoy a price boost, and elevated Chinese support.
China’s newly elevated interest in African development and market potential will bring major prospects. The question will be whether African countries are ready to grasp them, and to use that potential to foster an independent development path of their own.
Lauren Johnston 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.
Shatter cones formed by the impact in the Pilbara.Tim Johnson
We have discovered the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth, in the very heart of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The crater formed more than 3.5 billion years ago, making it the oldest known by more than a billion years. Our discovery is published today in Nature Communications.
Curiously enough, the crater was exactly where we had hoped it would be, and its discovery supports a theory about the birth of Earth’s first continents.
The very first rocks
The oldest rocks on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago, and are found in the cores of most modern continents. However, geologists still cannot agree how or why they formed.
Nonetheless, there is agreement that these early continents were critical for many chemical and biological processes on Earth.
Many geologists think these ancient rocks formed above hot plumes that rose from above Earth’s molten metallic core, rather like wax in a lava lamp. Others maintain they formed by plate tectonic processes similar to modern Earth, where rocks collide and push each other over and under.
Although these two scenarios are very different, both are driven by the loss of heat from within the interior of our planet.
We think rather differently.
A few years ago, we published a paper suggesting that the energy required to make continents in the Pilbara came from outside Earth, in the form of one or more collisions with meteorites many kilometres in diameter.
As the impacts blasted up enormous volumes of material and melted the rocks around them, the mantle below produced thick “blobs” of volcanic material that evolved into continental crust.
Our evidence then lay in the chemical composition of tiny crystals of the mineral zircon, about the size of sand grains. But to persuade other geologists, we needed more convincing evidence, preferably something people could see without needing a microscope.
So, in May 2021, we began the long drive north from Perth for two weeks of fieldwork in the Pilbara, where we would meet up with our partners from the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) to hunt for the crater. But where to start?
On the hunt for shatter cones in a typical Pilbara landscape with our trusted GSWA vehicles. Chris Kirkland
A serendipitous beginning
Our first target was an unusual layer of rocks known as the Antarctic Creek Member, which crops out on the flanks of a dome some 20 kilometres in diameter. The Antarctic Creek Member is only 20 metres or so in thickness, and mostly comprises sedimentary rocks that are sandwiched between several kilometres of dark, basaltic lava.
However, it also contains spherules – droplets formed from molten rock thrown up during an impact. But these drops could have travelled across the globe from a giant impact anywhere on Earth, most likely from a crater that has now been destroyed.
After consulting the GSWA maps and aerial photography, we located an area in the centre of the Pilbara along a dusty track to begin our search. We parked the offroad vehicles and headed our separate ways across the outcrops, more in hope than expectation, agreeing to meet an hour later to discuss what we’d found and grab a bite to eat.
Large hut-like shatter cones in the rocks of the Antarctic Creek Member at the discovery site. The rocks on the hilltop farthest left are basalts that lay directly over the shatter cones. Tim Johnson
Remarkably, when we returned to the vehicle, we all thought we’d found the same thing: shatter cones.
Shatter cones are beautiful, delicate branching structures, not dissimilar to a badminton shuttlecock. They are the only feature of shock visible to the naked eye, and in nature can only form following a meteorite impact.
An approximately one metre tall shatter cone ‘hut’, with the rolling hills of the Pilbara in the background. Chris Kirkland
Little more than an hour into our search, we had found precisely what we were looking for. We had literally opened the doors of our 4WDs and stepped onto the floor of a huge, ancient impact crater.
Frustratingly, after taking some photographs and grabbing a few samples, we had to move on to other sites, but we determined to return as soon as possible. Most importantly, we needed to know how old the shatter cones were. Had we discovered the oldest known crater on Earth?
It turned out that we had.
There and back again
With some laboratory research under our belts, we returned to the site in May 2024 to spend ten days examining the evidence in more detail.
Shatter cones were everywhere, developed throughout most of the Antarctic Creek Member, which we traced for several hundred metres into the rolling hills of the Pilbara.
Our observations showed that above the layer with the shatter cones was a thick layer of basalt with no evidence of impact shock. This meant the impact had to be the same age as the Antarctic Member rocks, which we know are 3.5 billion years old.
Delicate shatter cones within rocks typical of the Antarctic Creek Member. Tim Johnson
We had our age, and the record for the oldest impact crater on Earth. Perhaps our ideas regarding the ultimate origin of the continents were not so mad, as many told us.
Serendipity is a marvellous thing. As far as we knew, other than the Traditional Owners, the Nyamal people, no geologist had laid eyes on these stunning features since they formed.
Like some others before us, we had argued that meteorite impacts played a fundamental role in the geological history of our planet, as they clearly had on our cratered Moon and on other planets, moons and asteroids. Now we and others have the chance to test these ideas based on hard evidence.
Who knows how many ancient craters lay undiscovered in the ancient cores of other continents? Finding and studying them will transform our understanding of the early Earth and the role of giant impacts, not only in the formation of the landmasses on which we all live, but in the origins of life itself.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Issues sometimes “come at you”, Anthony Albanese declared on Thursday at the end of a news conference, held at Canberra’s National Situation Room, about Cyclone Alfred.
The cyclone is a disaster for millions of people in its path. For the prime minister, it is a major political disruptor.
Albanese cancelled his visit to Western Australia: he’d wanted to be there when Labor has its anticipated certain win at Saturday’s election.
His own election planning – which seemed headed for an April 12 election called this weekend – has been thrown into some disarray (although this is contested by those involved).
Then there was the good news that was crowded out. Wednesday’s national accounts finally showed some of the much hoped-for positive trends, especially an end to the per capita recession, which had been running for seven consecutive quarters. But with the cyclone naturally dominating attention, who noticed?
Albanese’s response to the new circumstances was to place himself at the centre of the planning for the cyclone. He stood side by side with Queensland Premier David Crisafulli at his news conference on Wednesday and was early to the Situation Room on Thursday morning, promising to give regular updates.
To questions about whether he’d abandoned any thought of calling an election at the weekend, the PM insisted (unconvincingly) that politics was furthest from his mind. Though announcing an election would appear near impossible in the circumstances, and attention had already begun turning to a May date (and a budget beforehand), Albanese on Thursday wouldn’t be drawn. Basically, he was waiting to see what happened with the weather.
The cyclone will be a passing disruptor. The disruption from the Trump administration will be with Australia (and the world) for the foreseeable future.
Next week Australia will know whether its intense lobbying for an exemption from the US tariffs on aluminium and steel has been effective. Those around the government are not optimistic.
More concerning than the immediate impact on Australia if we fail to win the exemption is the effect of US protectionism more generally.
Reserve Bank deputy Governor Andrew Hauser confirmed this week that “from a macroeconomic perspective, Australia’s direct exposure to US tariffs levied on our exports is limited”.
“[But] Australia is heavily integrated into, and reliant on, the global economy more broadly – and particularly China. Hence the bigger macroeconomic risk for us would be if the imposition of US tariffs on third countries triggered a global trade war that impaired our trade and financial linkages more broadly.
“As Australia’s long history has shown, we thrive when trade, labour and assets flow freely in the global economy, but we suffer when countries turn inwards.”
How disruptive this new world will be to the Australian economy can’t be known but it could make things very difficult for a second term Albanese government or a first term Dutton one.
As Trump tries to force a settlement on Ukraine, there’s been increasing attention on the Europeans’ plans to boost their defence expenditure. This week, we started to feel the heat on Australia to do the same.
Trump’s nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby told the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, in a written answer during his confirmation hearing, that “Australia is a core U.S. ally. […] The main concern the United States should press with Australia, consistent with the President’s approach, is higher defense spending. Australia is currently well below the 3% level advocated for by NATO Secretary General Rutte, and Canberra faces a far more powerful challenge in China.”
Presently Australia’s defence spending is about 2% of GDP, projected to increase to 2.4% by 2033–34.The Coalition has said it would spend more than Labor (but has not specified how much more).
Defence Minister Richard Marles said he could “obviously understand the US administration seeking for its friends and allies around the world to do more. That’s a conversation that we will continue to have with the US administration. […] But it’s really important to understand we are increasing that spending right now.”
It’s also important to understand that if Australia must ramp up defence further or faster than present plans, that will suck funds from other priorities, putting another squeeze on future governments.
Trump’s bullying of Ukraine and its leader Volodymyr Zelensky has not weakened the bipartisan support in Australia for Ukraine.
But a difference has emerged over whether Australia should (if asked) take part in any peacekeeping force. Peter Dutton said this role should be left to the Europeans. But Albanese flagged his government would consider it, pointing to the many other peacekeeping operations we have participated in.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison got on well with Trump during the president’s first term and has become even more signed up since. The Morrisons were at Mar-a-Lago for New Year’s eve.
Morrison was distinctly sympathetic to Trump’s approach when talking this week about Ukraine. He told an Australian Financial Review dinner, “Do we just keep fighting this war every day? The alternative is to find a peace that can be secured.
“There was no conversation, no real conversation, about peace in Ukraine up until now.” Zelensky had the “most to gain” from negotiating to end the war, he said.
Morrison is affiliated with lobbying firm American Global Strategies, which has links to the Trump administration. Colby is listed as a senior adviser. The chairman and founder of the group, Robert C. O’Brien, was formerly a national security adviser to Trump.
Morrison is one of a number of former senior Australian political figures who have a current professional or commercial lock-in to Washington politics.
Former Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey, who was close to the Trump White House when Hockey was ambassador in 2016-20, is founder and global president of Bondi Partners, a lobbying firm that operates between the US and Australia.
Another former Australian ambassador to Washington, Arthur Sinodinos, is based in Washington as a partner in the Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm.
Meanwhile former PM Kevin Rudd, as Australian ambassador in Washington, is trying to amplify Australia’s official voice with the administration.
Speculation continues about Rudd’s future if the government changed. Dutton says that would depend on how effective Rudd was, saying his present instinct would be leave him in the job.
Others are sceptical this would happen, and raise Morrison’s name as a possible replacement. Morrison has reportedly told people he would not want the post. But you couldn’t rule it out.
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.
There’s been some “great television” this past week for those who like to watch the end of the West.
The US president and vice-president effectively sided with Russia in an attempt to bring the war in Ukraine to an end in a way that benefits a) the United States, b) the US president’s vanity, and c) Vladimir Putin.
Starmer and post-Brexit Britain
But every crisis also provides an opportunity. The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, grasped the chance to slough off his uninspiring domestic image as he sought to keep the US engaged in negotiations and preserve a semblance of Ukrainian sovereignty.
In truth, Starmer’s diplomacy continues the policy of the previous government, which made Ukraine the crucible for Britain’s post-Brexit reintegration into European diplomacy.
Since the Russian invasion of 2022, Britain distinguished itself as one of Ukraine’s most vociferous backers. It provided strident rhetorical support alongside around £13 billion in aid since the conflict began.
Like his predecessors, Starmer’s support for Ukraine has offered respite from domestic challenges. His recent advocacy has led to a three-month high in the polls, albeit with a still dismal net approval rating of -28.
But we shouldn’t be overly cynical. His government has provided us with a framework to understand its approach. According to the doctrine of Progressive Realism, the UK government’s foreign policy reflects a “tough-minded” assessment of Britain’s position within the balance of power as it pursues enlightened ends.
The initial fit is evident: throughout his advocacy, Starmer’s continued appeals for a US backstop indicate awareness of British limitations while championing Ukrainian self-determination.
However, increasing Britain’s military budget to counter Russia at the expense of the country’s overseas aid budget is hardly progressive, as both Starmer and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy have previously noted. Most recently, in Lammy’s case, this concerned Trump’s cuts to USAID last month.
To his credit, Starmer has recognised that Britain cannot deter Russia alone, and is assembling a “coalition of the willing”. However, even with France and smaller players such as the Scandinavians, Canadians and Australians, this may well be insufficient. Hence the ongoing appeals to the US for security guarantees that it is clearly unwilling to provide.
If we accept Einstein’s famous definition of insanity as doing the same thing and expecting different results, how should we interpret Starmer’s plans?
Continuities and change
Amid all the crisis diplomacy and commentary suggesting this might be the end of the trans-Atlantic alliance, continuity as well as change can be observed.
One of the most striking examples is the extent to which Starmer emphasises Britain’s longstanding self-perception as a “bridge” between the US and Europe. While recent turmoil has prompted Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz to declare the need for strategic independence from the US, Starmer continues to depict the US as the “indispensable” ally with whom Britain must strengthen ties.
Considered alongside Britain’s deep integration in the US’s defence and intelligence architecture, including through AUKUS – with which Trump seemed unfamiliar – it is unlikely Britain will break with America. In fact, it may even strengthen its relationship if Trump’s remarks about a UK-US trade agreement are to be believed.
For some, these structural explanations suffice when considering Britain’s commitment to the “special relationship” and its identity as the transatlantic bridge. However, psychological factors are also worth considering. Britain’s relationship with the US has been a crucial element of Britain’s pretensions to global leadership since the second world war.
The uncomfortable truth about bridges is that they get walked over, as was evident when Starmer was blindsided by the US decision to suspend military aid to Ukraine.
Europe between the US and Russia
With regard to Europe, it is another case of “plus ça change”. As in 1945, Europe again finds itself caught in the middle between Russia and the US. Critics might say the Europeans should have seen this coming.
Following the 2022 invasion, Germany, Europe’s most significant economy, proclaimed the moment as one of Zeitenwende, or a “turning point”. However, it subsequently failed to fully substantiate the claim.
Recently, President of the European Commission and former German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen has proposed a “Rearm Europe Plan” that could see up to €800 billion (A$1.36 trillion) allocated to European defence. Whether this materialises remains to be seen.
France has sought to assume its traditional leading role in advocating for Europe’s strategic autonomy from the US. President Emmanuel Macron has been a prominent figure, but his plan for a partial one-month truce has garnered only lukewarm support.
However, Putin and Trump do have their admirers in Europe. What is perhaps surprising is that some of this has been too much even for the radical right to stomach – Nigel Farage, for example, leaped to Britain’s defence after Vance’s disparaging remarks. This only underscores the differences in attitudes towards Ukraine between MAGA Americans and Europeans.
Starmer has undoubtedly secured diplomatic plaudits. However, the structural forces at play suggest that his “coalition of the willing”, if it sticks to outdated ideas, will struggle to make liberal democracy great again, much as that is needed.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Cyclone Alfred is due to cross the coast of southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales late on Friday night or early Saturday morning. Millions of people may wake to a giant mess, if they get any sleep at all.
So how do you stay safe while you begin the clean up and recovery? It can be helpful to have a plan of action ready, before the time comes.
First, be prepared to stay inside for a day or so, even after the wild weather has passed. You may have to manage without essential services for a while. And there are several important steps to take before venturing outside.
I have 20 years’ experience in disaster studies, including how communities can recover. Here’s what you need to know about surviving the morning after Cyclone Alfred.
Before you leave your safe room
Say you’ve chosen to “shelter in place”, in the safest room in the house. That’s the smallest room with the fewest windows – usually a bathroom, in a hall or a room under the stairs.
Do not leave this room until you have been told it’s safe to do so by authorities. Even after the storm has passed, the wind gusts can be very unpredictable. Depending on your location, floodwater may still be a threat.
Tune into your local ABC radio station for official emergency updates, warnings and advice. Make sure you have
spare batteries and even a backup AM-FM radio. Try to minimise use of your mobile phone to conserve battery power and network capacity. SMS/text messages are more likely to get through than phone calls.
While you wait for normal services to resume
After the cyclone there may be no power, internet, mobile telephone reception or water supply to your home. This may persist for some time.
Ahead of the cyclone, try to store enough drinking water to provide three litres per person for several days (don’t forget water for your pets). Store water in bottles in the freezer – it keeps it cool if the power goes out and can be drinking water when it melts. You also need extra water for hygiene, cleaning up and toileting. Fill your bathtub or top-loading washing machine with water before the storm approaches.
During a flood, sewage may come up through the toilet and the drains of dwellings on the ground level. Before the cyclone, cover your drains with plastic sheeting with a sandbag on top for weight. Place a plastic bag full of sand inside the toilet to form a plug and close the seat. Consider a bucket as a short-term option for toileting.
Wait for flood waters to recede before unsealing the toilet. When the storm has passed, check local council advice on whether the sewage system is functioning before attempting to flush the toilet again.
If the power has been out your fridge can remain cool, however food inside may no longer be safe to eat. If items in your freezer have started to defrost, either cook immediately or dispose of them. Some medicines requiring refrigeration will also have to be thrown out.
Don’t use electric appliances if they are wet and check for any potential gas leaks from gas appliances before use.
Severe Weather Update 6 March 2025: Tropical Cyclone Alfred moving more slowly towards the coast.
Contact your insurance provider immediately
If you are likely to make an insurance claim, contact your insurer straight away for advice.
The insurance company will probably ask for your policy number. Try to have it (and other important documents) on hand – perhaps in a waterproof wallet, or as photos on your phone.
Don’t go straight into clean up and recovery mode until you have checked their requirements. Ripping up wet carpets and throwing out your belongings may not be consistent with your insurance policy. Disposing of proof of damage may cause your claim to be rejected.
Approaches vary between insurance companies. They may require photographs or a written inventory of damaged items. For instance, floodwater will often leave a high-water mark on the walls. Take a photo with a ruler or bottle for reference. The more you can document, the less the insurance company can dispute.
Before you head outside
Don’t leave your house until officials say it is safe to do so.
If you have it, put on protective clothing and equipment including fully covered shoes, gloves, glasses, and an N95 mask. Wear a hat, long pants and long sleeves.
Keep your children and pets secure inside for as long as you can, until you know the area is safe and clear.
Switch off your electricity, gas and solar system prior to severe weather. Before switching everything back on, check your house and appliances for any obvious damage. Then check with your utility service provider that all is in order.
Even if your house is without power, downed power lines may be live. Do not touch them, even if only wanting to move them. Call 000 if it is life threatening, or contact your local energy provider.
Check for obvious structural damage to the house such as broken windows, water leaks or damaged roofs (such as missing tiles or screws). Beware of fallen or windswept debris and broken glass.
Look out for wildlife and pests, including venomous snakes and spiders. Don’t poke anything to check if it’s alive.
Before you start cleaning up
Wear protective gear when dealing with water-damaged goods and mud. Don’t touch your face at all and if you can, wear a protective N95 mask.
The mud and dirty water may be contaminated, so be sure to disinfect and wash your hands thoroughly.
If you have cuts and scrapes, disinfect and cover them immediately, because there’s a high chance of infection.
Following floods in Northern Queensland this year, 16 people died after being infected with melioidosis, a bacterium found in mud. The bug is more prevalent after heavy rainfall. If you feel unwell, seeking medical advice.
Mould is another big issue after heavy rain and flooding. Open your windows to ventilate.
Before you venture further afield
Resist the urge to go sightseeing. Check on your neighbours and vulnerable community members neighbours instead.
Talk to friends, family, neighbours and contacts about how you’re feeling. Be honest. It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious and upset after a disaster event.
If you need extra assistance, seek help. Community recovery hubs will be set up and they will have a list of telephone numbers for support. Use the services available.
Check your local disaster dashboard or app for up-to-date information on road closures, evacuation centres, and other emergency details.
Yetta Gurtner has received funding in the past from the Bureau of Meteorology. She is a community engagement officer with the Queensland State Emergency Services.
Shakespeare’s Henry V (stylised by Bell Shakespeare as Henry 5) is famous for many things. Henry’s rousing speeches. Its chorus directly addressing the audience. Its critical treatment of war. Its comic characters like Fluellen. And the comic exchanges between the French Princess and her maid Alice, trying to speak English.
For theatre directors, these each serve as different tracks in a mixing deck that can be dialled up or down to temper the treatment of the play.
Director Marion Potts is a master of this art, bringing vitality and a cracking pace to a big play delivered in less than two hours.
A world at war
The play extends the life of Prince Hal from the Henry IV plays. He has forsaken the Boar’s Head Tavern and rejected his friendship with Falstaff, emerging as a politically astute King Henry V: a valiant monarch who will ultimately lead his depleted army to victory over the French at Azincourt.
This play begins with Henry (JK Kazzi) seeking rightful justifications for his plans to invade France from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jo Turner). This involves a lengthy speech by Canterbury about detailed legalities; Turner transforms this into a comic tour de force.
The archbishop could justify just about anything. This brings early and unexpected laughter, but allows the spirit of Shakespeare to shine too, who seems to be showing us the absurdities of war: how quickly politics can be moulded to subjective aims.
Our world, and the world of our children, continues to be at war. Shakespeare’s canon offers cathartic ways of reflecting on troubled times within the safety of the theatre.
No specific war is directly paralleled – although the pluck of Zelensky might be echoed in Henry’s costume. Brett Boardman/Bell Shakespeare
Thankfully, no specific war is directly paralleled – although the pluck of Volodymyr Zelensky might be echoed in Henry’s costume (t-shirts, sports jacket, cargo pants). Zelensky’s ethos seems to share some of the youth and people’s touch possessed by King Henry. And Zelensky was recently required to defend his dress code as a leader who remains at war, stating: “I will wear [a] costume after this war will finish”.
Costumes by Anna Tregloan distribute similar tones across the English and French soldiers, refreshingly devoid of khaki garb. These emphasise the youth of the armies, dressed in streetwear with guerilla flair, sporting boxing boots.
The prominence of body training throughout serves as an expression of youth and a perpetual readying for conflict.
Potts states in the program:
the world of our production carries the vestiges of wars past and the seeds of those to come. A world either in perpetual ‘training’ for wars or delivering on its brutal promise.
Exposing vulnerabilities
Nothing is lost in the clarity of the performances, which bring a vocal muscle to Shakespeare’s lines.
Kazzi is charismatic as the leading man, using fervency and understatement. His first set-piece, urging his troops with “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” stays low, to use a term from cricket, and could be pitched higher in its emphatic urgings, but Kazzi finds excellent range thereafter.
Kazzi, as Henry, finds excellent range in his performance. Brett Boardman/Bell Shakespeare
The neat set ploy of using a chair and microphone at which various characters sit to deliver the chorus sections works very well with Jethro Woodward’s sound design.
Perhaps emulating a battleground tribunal, the microphone connected us intimately with individual characters. Westmoreland (Alex Kirwan), the King’s dutiful mate, opens the show with “O for a muse of fire!”, quite articulately from a soldier unaccustomed to public speaking.
Exeter (Ella Prince) is a warrior amused by all the fuss. English soldiers (Rishab Kern and Harrison Mills) show sensitivity and convey the vulnerabilities of war. And the duo of French Princess Katherine (Ava Madon) and her warm and vibrant attendant, Alice (Odile Le Clezio), hit perfect moments of comic relief as two French women rehearsing the English language.
Political rhetoric
The play is otherwise stripped of several comic characters (you won’t see the Welshman Fluellen, or Bardolph, or Pistol on stage), permitting its speedy run with a relentless focus on the war. This breach is filled by the comic subplot of Alice and Princess Katherine, preparing for the outcome of the conflict.
The movable scaffold of the main set (Tregloan) proves surprisingly versatile, especially with atmospheric lighting and blackouts (Verity Hampson).
Potts’ use of a screen for subtitles allows her to daringly translate Shakespeare’s lines, so French characters speak mostly French. The musicality of the French language adds ardour and humour, while emphasising the cultural divide of the two warring nations.
Henry V is a play renowned for showing King Henry as a shrewd leader who must achieve great victories for his country, even by committing war crimes.
Henry V shows King Henry as a shrewd leader who must achieve great victories, even by committing war crimes. Brett Boardman/Bell Shakespeare
While Henry’s threats of the worst kinds of violence against women and children can be framed as political rhetoric (using harsh words to bring about peaceful ends), he strategically commands the slaying of prisoners when outnumbered by the French.
While war crimes were beginning to be codified in Shakespeare’s day, he seems to suggest true war heroes are rare, while innocent victims are common.
Potts’ re-construal of the final scene, often a clumsy betrothal between Henry and Katherine, is made more uncomfortable as Henry flippantly repeats his relentless design to marry her, despite her protestations. While royal weddings were often political instruments at the time, it all seems to be a hollow victory for Henry, who seems suddenly too shell-shocked to care anymore for the rich realm he fought to posses.
Henry 5, from Bell Shakespeare, is at the Sydney Opera House until April 5, then touring to Wollongong, Canberra and Melbourne.
Kirk Dodd 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 Aotearoa New Zealand union representing many of NZME’s journalists says it is “deeply worried” by a billionaire’s plans to take over its board.
Auckland-based Canadian billionaire Jim Grenon is leading a move to dump the board of media company NZME, owners of TheNew Zealand Herald and NewsTalk ZB.
He has told the company’s board he wants to remove most of the current directors, replace them with himself and three others, and choose one existing director to stay on.
He took a nearly 10 percent stake in the business earlier in the week.
Michael Wood, negotiation specialist at E tū, the union that represents NZME’s journalists, said he had grave concerns.
“We see a pattern that has been incredibly unhealthy in other countries, of billionaire oligarchs moving into media ownership roles to be able to promote their own particular view of the word,” he said.
“Secondly, we have a situation here where when Mr Grenon purchased holdings in NZME he was at pains to make it sound like an innocent manoeuvre with no broader agenda . . . within a few days he is aggressively pursuing board positions.”
What unsaid agendas? Wood said Grenon had a track record of trying to influence media discourse in New Zealand.
“We are deeply concerned about this, about what unsaid agendas lie behind a billionaire oligarch trying to take ownership of one of our biggest media companies.”
Canadian billionaire James Grenon . . . track record of trying to influence media discourse in New Zealand. Image: TOM Capital Management/RNZ
“We are deeply concerned about this, about what unsaid agendas lie behind a billionaire oligarch trying to take ownership of one of our biggest media companies.”
He said it would be important for New Zealand not to follow the example of the US, where media outlets had become “the mouthpiece for the rich and powerful”.
E tū would consult its national delegate committee of journalists, he said.
Grenon has been linked with alternative news sites, including The Centrist, serving as the company’s director up to August 2023.
The Centrist claims to present under-served perspectives and reason-based analysis, “even if it might be too hot for the mainstream media to handle”.
Grenon has been approached for comment by RNZ.
Preoccupations with trans rights, treaty issues Duncan Greive, founder of The Spinoff and media commentator, said he was a reader of Grenon’s site The Centrist.
“The main thing we know about him is that publication,” Greive said.
“It’s largely news aggregation but it has very specific preoccupations around trans rights, treaty issues and particularly vaccine injury and efficacy.
“A lot of the time it’s aggregating from mainstream news sites but there’s a definite feel that things are under-covered or under-emphasised at mainstream news organisations.
“If he is looking to gain greater control and exert influence on the publishing and editorial aspects of the business, you’ve got to think there is a belief that those things are under-covered and the editorial direction of TheHerald isn’t what he would like it to be.”
The Spinoff founder and media commentator Duncan Greive . . . Investors “would be excited about the sale of OneRoof”. Image: RNZ News
Greive said the move could be connected to the NZME announcement in its annual results that it was exploring options for the sale of its real estate platform OneRoof.
“There are a lot of investors who believe OneRoof is being held back by proximity to the ‘legacy media’ assets of NZME and if it could be pulled out of there the two businesses would be more valuable separate than together.
“If you look at the shareholder book of NZME, you don’t image a lot of these institutional investors who hold the bulk of the shares are going to be as excited about editorial direction and issues as Grenon would be . . . but they would be excited about the sale of OneRoof.”
Wanting the publishing side Greive said he could imagine a scenario where Grenon told shareholders he wanted the publishing side, at a reduced value, and the OneRoof business could be separated off.
“From a pure value realisation, maximisation of shareholder value point of view, that makes sense to me.”
Greive said attention would now go on the 37 percent of shareholders whom Grenon said had been consulted in confidence about his plans.
“It will become clear pretty quickly and they will be under pressure to say why they are involved in this and it will become clear pretty quickly whether my theory is correct.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sanjeev Kumar Srivastava, Associate Professor of Geospatial Analysis, University of the Sunshine Coast
Tropical Cyclone Alfred is now expected to make landfall early on Saturday morning – later than initial estimates that suggested it would strike southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales on Friday.
So, how do scientists track cyclones and make predictions about when and where they will hit?
I’m a geospatial analyst who uses satellites and other remote-sensing technology for natural resources management. I study data about storms, wildfires and vegetation regrowth around the world.
Remote-sensing satellites travel through space collecting data about Earth’s surface and atmosphere.
When it comes to cyclones, information these satellites collect about clouds, temperatures, wind speeds and other variables is crucial. It helps scientists make accurate weather predictions – enabling communities to prepare and protect themselves.
Remote-sensing satellites move with the Earth. They observe the same hemisphere constantly and send real-time images back to scientists on the ground. The main ones we use in Australia are called Himawari-8 and -9, and they were launched by the Japan Meteorological Agency.
As reported by the ABC, Himawari-9 captured images showing how Cyclone Alfred travelled down the coast of Queensland earlier this week and then headed toward Brisbane.
Himawari satellites images show how Cyclone Alfred has moved along its path.
Geostationary remote sensing satellites are excellent at helping us detect:
the centres of tropical cyclones over the ocean
developing thunderstorms
volcanic material in the atmosphere and
how clouds are moving.
Himawari collects images and information from the visible and infrared spectrum. This can give us cloud temperature, which can provide more precise information about where the eye of a cyclone is (the eye tends to have a higher temperature).
They collect information at various intervals and send it back to Earth. Well-known polar orbiting satellites include Landsat 8-9 (run by the US Geological Survey), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Joint Polar Satellite System.
The polar-orbiting satellites give us clear images but not very often. They are just snapshots. They are more useful for providing post-cyclone damage assessments than they are for predicting the path of cyclones.
Valuable images, and data in the visible, infrared, and microwave range
Both geostationary and polar orbiting satellites collect data in the visible and infrared regions. There are polar satellites collecting data in the microwave range.
This means we can look at Earth through the cloud, get cloud temperature information and wind direction.
In addition to these satellites, the Bureau of Meteorology have their own weather watch radar sensors on the ground. These ground-based radar are set up at various locations and can detect moisture very easily, which helps us work out how moisture is moving into and through clouds.
Cyclone Alfred is currently shaping up to be a category two cyclone. This means once it makes landfall, it would have an average wind speed of between 89 and 117 kilometres an hour, and gusts between 125 and 164 kilometres an hour.
Wind speed is predicted using complex algorithms.
Why do predictions sometimes change?
Meteorology is a very complex area of science and predictions are based on many, many different data points.
Sometimes a cyclone’s path will deviate from initial projections, but this is very normal. It’s really hard to predict the future track of a cyclone!
This is particularly true when cyclones form over the Coral Sea, as in the case of Alfred. There, cyclones paths are among the most unpredictable in the world.
Sometimes unexpected factors may arise. For example, a recently arrived low pressure system in the west is currently slowing down the arrival of Cyclone Alfred.
Despite cyclone predictions being difficult, the Bureau of Meteorology is the most reliable and up-to-date source of information on Cyclone Alfred.
Sanjeev Kumar Srivastava has received funding in the past from the Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research, various local councils and several cooperative research centres. He is a member of Earth Observation Australia.
Cyclone Alfred has now been delayed, as the slow-moving system stalls in warm seas off southeast Queensland. Unfortunately, the expected slow pace of the cyclone will bring even more rain to affected communities.
This is because it will linger for longer over the same location, dumping more rain before it moves on. Alfred’s slowing means the huge waves triggered by the cyclone will last longer too, likely making coastal erosion and flooding worse.
Cyclone Alfred is unusual – the first cyclone in half a century to come this far south and make expected landfall.
When unusual disasters strike, people naturally want to know what role climate change played – a process known as “climate attribution”. Unfortunately, this process takes time if you want details on a specific event.
We can’t yet say if Alfred’s unusual path and slow speed are linked to climate change. But climate change is driving very clear trends which can load the dice for more intense cyclones arriving in subtropical regions. These include the warm waters which fuel cyclones spreading further south, and cyclones dumping more rain than they used to.
So, let’s unpick what’s driving Cyclone Alfred’s behaviour – including the potential role of climate change.
A Bureau of Meteorology update on Cyclone Alfred dated Thursday, March 6.
Not necessarily climate linked: Alfred’s southerly path
Many cyclones make it as far south as Brisbane – but they’re nearly all far out at sea. Weather patterns mean most cyclones heading south are diverted to the east, where remnants can hit New Zealand as large extratropical storms.
The fact that Alfred is set to make landfall is very unusual. But we can’t yet definitively say this is due to climate change. Cyclones are steered by winds and weather patterns, and the Coral Sea’s complex weather makes cyclone paths here very hard to predict.
Alfred’s abrupt westward shift is due to a large region of high pressure to its south, which has pushed it directly towards heavily populated areas of southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales. These steering winds are not very strong, which is why Alfred is moving slowly.
In 2014, researchers showed cyclones are reaching their maximum intensity in areas further south in the southern hemisphere and north in the northern hemisphere than they used to. In 2021, researchers also found cyclones were reaching their maximum intensity closer to coasts, moving about 30 km closer per decade.
Climate link: Warmer seas
Cyclones typically need water temperatures of 26.5°C or more to form.
More than 90% of all extra heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions is stored in the seas. The oceans are the hottest on record, and records keep falling. But normal seasonal variability and shifting ocean currents are still at work too, and we can get unusually warm waters without climate change as a cause.
What we do know is that ocean temperatures around much of Australia have been unusually warm.
The northeastern Coral Sea, where Cyclone Alfred formed, experienced the fourth-hottest temperatures on record for February and the hottest on record for January.
In the Coral Sea, sea surface temperatures were the fourth highest on record in February 2025 and the highest on record in January 2025. This figure shows the trend over time for February. Bureau of Meteorology, CC BY-NC-ND
We also know Australia’s southern waters are warming up too.
The energy available to power tropical cyclones in subtropical regions has also increased in recent decades, due largely to rising ocean temperatures.
Average sea surface temperatures in central and southern Queensland on Thursday March 6th. Point Danger is on the Gold Coast. Bureau of Meteorology, CC BY-NC-ND
Climate link: Fewer cyclones but more likely to be intense
In the northern hemisphere, researchers have found a trend towards fewer cyclones over time. But of those which do form, a higher proportion are more intense.
It’s not fully clear if the same trend exists in the southern hemisphere, though we are seeing fewer cyclones forming over time.
This summer, eight tropical cyclones have formed in Australian waters. Six were classified as severe (category 3 and up). Historically, Australia has experienced a higher proportion of category 1 and 2 cyclones, which bring weaker wind speeds.
On average, we see about 11 cyclones form and 4-5 make landfall. There has been a downward trend in the number of cyclones forming in the Australian region in recent decades.
Fewer cyclones, but more likely to be intense: this figure shows the number of severe (Category 3 and up) and non-severe tropical cyclones (Category 1 and 2) since 1970/71. Bureau of Meteorology, CC BY-NC-ND
Climate link: Cyclones dumping more rain
The intensity of a cyclone refers to the speed of the wind and size of the wind-affected area.
But a cyclone’s rain field is also important. This refers to the area of heavy rain produced by storms when they’re at cyclone intensity and afterwards as they decay into tropical lows.
The rate of rainfall brought by cyclones in Australia isn’t necessarily increasing, but more cyclones are moving slowly, such as Alfred. This means more rain per cyclone, on average.
Rising ocean temperatures mean more water evaporates off the sea surface, meaning forming cyclones can absorb more moisture and dump more rain when it reaches land.
Why are cyclones slowing down? This is likely because air current circulation in the tropics has weakened. This has a clear link to climate change. Wind speeds have fallen 5 to 15% in the tropics, depending on where you are in the world. It’s hard to pinpoint the change clearly in our region, because the historic record of cyclone tracks isn’t very long.
For every degree (°C) of warming, rainfall intensity increases 7%. This is well established. But newer research is showing the rate may actually be double this or even higher, as the process of condensation releases heat which can trigger more rain.
Clear climate link: Bigger storm surges due to sea level rise
When a cyclone is about to make landfall, its intense winds push up a body of seawater ahead of it – the storm surge. In low lying areas, this can spill out and flood streets.
Because climate change is causing baseline sea levels to rise, storm surges can reach further inland. Sea-level rise will also make coastal erosion more destructive.
What should we take from this?
We can’t say definitively that climate change is behind Cyclone Alfred’s unusual track.
But factors such as rising sea levels, slower cyclones and warmer oceans are changing how cyclones behave and the damage they can do.
Over time, we can expect to see cyclones arriving in regions not historically affected – and carrying more rain when they arrive.
Liz Ritchie-Tyo receives funding from The Australian Research Council and the U.S. Office of Naval Research
Andrew Dowdy receives funding from University of Melbourne as well as supported through the Australian Research Council.
Hamish Ramsay receives funding from the Australian Climate Service.
It’s hard to keep track of US President Donald Trump’s many notable acts since returning to the White House. His recent pro-Russia stance on the war in Ukraine has, rightly, received a lot of attention.
But for every big moment, there are others that fly under the radar. One such issue is the politicisation of the Department of Justice (DoJ).
Although there is longstanding precedent that the DoJ remains politically neutral in its operations, recent events have indicated a dramatic break from that tradition.
And, importantly, Trump has been laying the groundwork to justify this for nearly two years, using a propaganda tactic that’s been employed by authoritarian governments throughout history.
Strategic sidelining
The current administration has attempted to fire or sideline anyone at the DoJ who was involved with prior investigations and prosecutions of the now-president.
This includes special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into several aspects of Trump’s wrongdoing, which have since ended. Several lawyers have been fired, ostensibly because “the Acting Attorney-General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda”.
This action is not only vindictive, but likely designed to intimidate would-be investigators and make them think twice before further examining any wrongdoing by Trump or his associates.
Equally noteworthy has been the department’s attempts to drop corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams.
The official reason is that pursuing the charges might “interfere” with Adams’ reelection campaign.
In reality, however, Adams has been accused of cutting a deal with the administration: he agrees to assist with Trump’s immigration crackdown in return for having the charges against him withdrawn (although not dropped entirely).
So deeply problematic was all this that two US attorneys for the Southern District of New York opted to resign in protest, rather than be party to what they saw as a nakedly corrupt act.
The whole scenario is eerily reminiscent of 1973’s “Saturday Night Massacre”, when President Richard Nixon ordered his Attorney-General Elliot Richardson to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.
Nixon eventually had his way, but not before refusals and resignations from both Richardson, and the Deputy Attorney-General William Ruckleshaus.
But, where Nixon’s move dramatically hastened his own downfall, Trump’s actions have barely raised an eyebrow. Why?
The propaganda play
The answer lies in a propaganda technique known as “accusation in a mirror”, which entails accusing one’s opponents of the very wrongdoing one plans to commit.
a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one’s enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them.
Accusation in a mirror has been used in the past, including in the Rwandan genocide. There, trusted voices claimed the Tutsi wanted to “exterminate” the Hutu. Tragically, it helped bring about the exact opposite circumstance.
Similarly, in February 2022 Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the Ukrainian government of committing genocide against Russian-speaking populations in the Donbas region. This baseless accusation provided a justification for invading Ukraine, which mirrored Russia’s own indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian civilians.
We suggest Trump has been using this technique since he was first criminally indicted, in early 2023, on 34 felony charges related to the falsification of business records. He and his supporters have insisted the department, under President Joe Biden, was “weaponised” against him.
Yet Trump’s accusations of a partisan DoJ completely reframed legitimate investigations into alleged political vendettas. In doing so, it effectively justified his subsequent decisions.
A self-fulfilling prophecy
The idea that “if they did it to me, I’m entitled to do it back” was made explicit by Trump in late 2023.
When asked if he would use the DoJ to go after his political rivals, Trump argued he would only be levelling the playing field, stating:
they’ve already done it, but if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse.
In short, Trump’s false claim of being victimised by a politicised DoJ served as moral cover for his own politicisation of it.
This is a textbook example of how accusation in a mirror can help manufacture the reality it pretends to condemn.
Addressing the problem
This tactic has long been a play by totalitarian and authoritarian leaders.
Foundational propaganda scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ellul highlighted how authoritarian rulers often repeat falsehoods – flipping the aggressor and victim – until the masses become desensitised, alienated and confused.
Once enough people believe the system is already corrupt and untrustworthy, they are less likely to be shocked by an actual purge (such as firing DoJ officials).
The implications of such tactics extend internationally, not just to the US.
History cries out to us about the risks of this sort of public discourse. It erodes trust in institutions and liberal democratic processes, paving the road for leaders to undermine them further, corrupting the system in the name of rooting out corruption.
Ultimately, one of the best antidotes is awareness. By exposing these tactics, we can better safeguard against disinformation, protect the rule of law and hold leaders accountable.
Stephen Harrington receives funding from the Australian Research Council, for the Discovery Project ‘Understanding and Combatting “Dark Political Communication”‘.
Timothy Graham receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) for his Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, ‘Combatting Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour on Social Media’. He also receives ARC funding for the Discovery Project, ‘Understanding and Combatting “Dark Political Communication”‘.
Cyclone Alfred has now been delayed, as the slow-moving system stalls in warm seas off southeast Queensland. Unfortunately, the expected slow pace of the cyclone will bring even more rain to affected communities.
This is because it will linger for longer over the same location, dumping more rain before it moves on. Alfred’s slowing means the huge waves triggered by the cyclone will last longer too, likely making coastal erosion and flooding worse.
Cyclone Alfred is unusual – the first cyclone in half a century to come this far south and make expected landfall.
When unusual disasters strike, people naturally want to know what role climate change played – a process known as “climate attribution”. Unfortunately, this process takes time if you want details on a specific event.
We can’t yet say if Alfred’s unusual path and slow speed are linked to climate change. But climate change is driving very clear trends which can load the dice for more intense cyclones arriving in subtropical regions. These include the warm waters which fuel cyclones spreading further south, and cyclones dumping more rain than they used to.
So, let’s unpick what’s driving Cyclone Alfred’s behaviour – including the potential role of climate change.
A Bureau of Meteorology update on Cyclone Alfred dated Thursday, March 6.
Not necessarily climate linked: Alfred’s southerly path
Many cyclones make it as far south as Brisbane – but they’re nearly all far out at sea. Weather patterns mean most cyclones heading south are diverted to the east, where remnants can hit New Zealand as large extratropical storms.
The fact that Alfred is set to make landfall is very unusual. But we can’t yet definitively say this is due to climate change. Cyclones are steered by winds and weather patterns, and the Coral Sea’s complex weather makes cyclone paths here very hard to predict.
Alfred’s abrupt westward shift is due to a large region of high pressure to its south, which has pushed it directly towards heavily populated areas of southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales. These steering winds are not very strong, which is why Alfred is moving slowly.
In 2014, researchers showed cyclones are reaching their maximum intensity in areas further south in the southern hemisphere and north in the northern hemisphere than they used to. In 2021, researchers also found cyclones were reaching their maximum intensity closer to coasts, moving about 30 km closer per decade.
Climate link: Warmer seas
Cyclones typically need water temperatures of 26.5°C or more to form.
More than 90% of all extra heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions is stored in the seas. The oceans are the hottest on record, and records keep falling. But normal seasonal variability and shifting ocean currents are still at work too, and we can get unusually warm waters without climate change as a cause.
What we do know is that ocean temperatures around much of Australia have been unusually warm.
The northeastern Coral Sea, where Cyclone Alfred formed, experienced the fourth-hottest temperatures on record for February and the hottest on record for January.
In the Coral Sea, sea surface temperatures were the fourth highest on record in February 2025 and the highest on record in January 2025. This figure shows the trend over time for February. Bureau of Meteorology, CC BY-NC-ND
We also know Australia’s southern waters are warming up too.
The energy available to power tropical cyclones in subtropical regions has also increased in recent decades, due largely to rising ocean temperatures.
Average sea surface temperatures in central and southern Queensland on Thursday March 6th. Point Danger is on the Gold Coast. Bureau of Meteorology, CC BY-NC-ND
Climate link: Fewer cyclones but more likely to be intense
In the northern hemisphere, researchers have found a trend towards fewer cyclones over time. But of those which do form, a higher proportion are more intense.
It’s not fully clear if the same trend exists in the southern hemisphere, though we are seeing fewer cyclones forming over time.
This summer, eight tropical cyclones have formed in Australian waters. Six were classified as severe (category 3 and up). Historically, Australia has experienced a higher proportion of category 1 and 2 cyclones, which bring weaker wind speeds.
On average, we see about 11 cyclones form and 4-5 make landfall. There has been a downward trend in the number of cyclones forming in the Australian region in recent decades.
Fewer cyclones, but more likely to be intense: this figure shows the number of severe (Category 3 and up) and non-severe tropical cyclones (Category 1 and 2) since 1970/71. Bureau of Meteorology, CC BY-NC-ND
Climate link: Cyclones dumping more rain
The intensity of a cyclone refers to the speed of the wind and size of the wind-affected area.
But a cyclone’s rain field is also important. This refers to the area of heavy rain produced by storms when they’re at cyclone intensity and afterwards as they decay into tropical lows.
The rate of rainfall brought by cyclones in Australia isn’t necessarily increasing, but more cyclones are moving slowly, such as Alfred. This means more rain per cyclone, on average.
Rising ocean temperatures mean more water evaporates off the sea surface, meaning forming cyclones can absorb more moisture and dump more rain when it reaches land.
Why are cyclones slowing down? This is likely because air current circulation in the tropics has weakened. This has a clear link to climate change. Wind speeds have fallen 5 to 15% in the tropics, depending on where you are in the world. It’s hard to pinpoint the change clearly in our region, because the historic record of cyclone tracks isn’t very long.
For every degree (°C) of warming, rainfall intensity increases 7%. This is well established. But newer research is showing the rate may actually be double this or even higher, as the process of condensation releases heat which can trigger more rain.
Clear climate link: Bigger storm surges due to sea level rise
When a cyclone is about to make landfall, its intense winds push up a body of seawater ahead of it – the storm surge. In low lying areas, this can spill out and flood streets.
Because climate change is causing baseline sea levels to rise, storm surges can reach further inland. Sea-level rise will also make coastal erosion more destructive.
What should we take from this?
We can’t say definitively that climate change is behind Cyclone Alfred’s unusual track.
But factors such as rising sea levels, slower cyclones and warmer oceans are changing how cyclones behave and the damage they can do.
Over time, we can expect to see cyclones arriving in regions not historically affected – and carrying more rain when they arrive.
Liz Ritchie-Tyo receives funding from The Australian Research Council and the U.S. Office of Naval Research
Andrew Dowdy receives funding from University of Melbourne as well as supported through the Australian Research Council.
Hamish Ramsay receives funding from the Australian Climate Service.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ferdi Botha, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, The University of Melbourne
The HILDA Survey has been following the same people every year since 2001, which makes it possible to examine how the lives of Australians have changed across several aspects.
With data from 2001 to 2022, in this year’s report we looked at issues including income inequality, household chores, and the impact of natural disasters on Australian households.
Income inequality is the highest since 2001
Funded by the Australian government and managed by the Melbourne Institute, the survey is one of Australia’s most valuable social research tools.
HILDA examined the lives of 14,000 Australians in 2001 and has kept coming back each year to discover what has changed over the course of their lifetimes. It now covers 17,000 Australians, due to the expansion of participants’ families.
The survey shows that since COVID-era financial support ended, income inequality has risen substantially.
The increase in inequality stems from growth in higher incomes as compared to middle incomes, as well as a fall in the growth of lower incomes relative to middle incomes.
This means, relative to the median earner, Australians already earning a high income have seen the growth in their incomes rise. In contrast, Australians with low incomes have seen a decrease in the rate of growth in their incomes.
Between 2021 and 2022, 51.2% of respondents reported their real incomes have declined. This is up from about 41% in preceding years, suggesting a decrease in people’s purchasing power.
A technical measure called the Gini coefficient was 0.32 in 2022, the highest since we started the survey in 2001. The measure ranges from 0 to 1 and is an index that measures overall inequality, with higher scores suggesting greater income inequality.
Older Australians are getting richer too
Over the same period, household wealth has continued to grow.
However, there are large and growing age differences in the growth in household wealth. For young people aged between 18 and 34, net wealth rose by 72.4% to $238,942 over the 20 years to 2022.
But for older Australians aged 65 to 74, net household wealth jumped by 125% to about $1.26 million.
These age disparities in household wealth are partly explained by rates of home ownership, which are much higher among older Australians.
Home ownership is also the most important asset component in terms of total wealth. In 2022, almost 65% of households owned their home, and just over 20% of households held investment properties and holiday homes.
As a proportion of total wealth, the family home accounts for 44.5% and investment properties account for 14.9%.
Women are still doing most of the housework
Australian women still undertake the majority of housework, whereas men’s share of housework has remained constant over 20 years.
Women’s time spent on housework (such as cleaning, cooking, running errands) has fallen slightly from 23.8 hours per week in 2002 to 18.4 hours per week in 2022.
Men spent 12.8 hours per week on housework, precisely the same amount they did 20 years earlier. Thus, women are still doing close to 50% more housework than men are.
Men have increased the time they spend on caring responsibilities (such as playing with their children, helping with homework, caring for an elderly relative), from 5 hours per week in 2002 to 5.5 hours per week in 2022. The time women spend on care has risen from 10.1 hours per week to 10.7 hours per week over the same period. In 2022, women spent almost double the time on care duties than men.
Among couples, men are generally more satisfied than women are with the current division of unpaid work. Most women feel they do more than their fair share at home. Men tend to believe they share the housework and care fairly with their partner.
Surge in home damage due to weather-related disasters
Respondents were asked if a weather-related disaster (such as floods, bushfires or cyclone) had damaged or destroyed their home in the past 12 months. In 2022, 4.5% reported experiencing such an event.
This is a substantial increase from the year before, when only 1.3% of Australians reported weather-related home damage, and exceeding the previous peak of 2.7% in 2011.
There are also regional differences, closely corresponding with the timing of specific floods or bushfires in the states and territories. In 2022, 9% of New South Wales residents and 6% of Queensland reported home damage, consistent with major floods experienced in these regions in the months prior to the survey.
Among all Australians who in 2022 reported home damage due to a weather-related disaster, 62.5% were in NSW and 27.3% were in Queensland.
With the current cyclone Alfred forecast to hit Queensland and northern NSW on Friday, we expect a further significant increase in reported home damage.
Ferdi Botha is affiliated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course.
US company Colossal Biosciences has announced the creation of a “woolly mouse” — a laboratory mouse with a series of genetic modifications that lead to a woolly coat. The company claims this is the first step toward “de-extincting” the woolly mammoth.
The successful genetic modification of a laboratory mouse is a testament to the progress science has made in understanding gene function, developmental biology and genome editing. But does a woolly mouse really teach us anything about the woolly mammoth?
What has been genetically modified?
Woolly mammoths were cold-adapted members of the elephant family, which disappeared from mainland Siberia at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago. The last surviving population, on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, went extinct about 4,000 years ago.
The house mouse (Mus musculus) is a far more familiar creature, which most of us know as a kitchen pest. It is also one of the most studied organisms in biology and medical research. We know more about this laboratory mouse than perhaps any other mammal besides humans.
Colossal details its new research in a pre-print paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. According to the paper, the researchers disrupted the normal function of seven different genes in laboratory mice via gene editing.
By tinkering with different genes, researchers produced mice with different kinds of fur. Colossal Biosciences
Six of these genes were targeted because a large body of existing research on the mouse model had already demonstrated their roles in hair-related traits, such as coat colour, texture and thickness.
The modifications in a seventh gene — FABP2 — was based on evidence from the woolly mammoth genome. The gene is involved in the transport of fats in the body.
Woolly mammoths had a slightly shorter version of the gene, which the researchers believe may have contributed to its adaptation to life in cold climates. However, the “woolly mice” with the mammoth-style variant of FABP2 did not show significant differences in body mass compared to regular lab mice.
What would it mean to de-extinct a species?
This work shows the promise of targeted editing of genes of known function in mice. After further testing, this technology may have a future place in conservation efforts. But it’s a long way from holding promise for de-extinction.
Colossal Biosciences claims it is on track to produce a genetically modified “mammoth-like” elephant by 2028, but what makes a mammoth unique is more than skin-deep.
De-extinction would need to go beyond modifying an existing species to show superficial traits from an extinct relative. Many aspects of an extinct species’ biology remain unknown. A woolly coat is one thing. Recreating the entire suite of adaptations, including genetic, epigenetic and behavioural traits that allowed mammoths to thrive in ice age environments, is another.
Prehistoric drawings of an ibex (left) and a mammoth (right) found at Rouffignac cave in France. Cave Painter / Wikimedia
Unlike the thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger) — another species Colossal aims to resurrect — the mammoth has a close living relative in the modern Asian elephant. The closer connections between the genomes of these two species may make mammoth de-extinction more technically feasible than that of the thylacine.
But whether or not a woolly mouse brings us any closer to that prospect, this story forces us to consider some important ethical questions. Even if we could bring back the woolly mammoth, should we? Is the motivation behind this effort conservation, or entertainment? Is it ethical to bring a species back into an environment that may no longer sustain it?
Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world. And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.
It’s hard to argue with the first part of that. But focusing on bringing back extinct species distracts from a more urgent reality: species are going extinct right now, and we are not doing enough to save them.
We should first focus on promises to save surviving species, rather than promises to bring back the dead.
With more investment in threatened species monitoring, new pest control methods, and conservation genetic management, we can turn the tide of extinction and secure the future for species that remain.
There’s a long list of threatened species that are still alive now. With the right funding and conservation attention, we can do something to save them before it’s too late.
Emily Roycroft receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme, and the Australian Academy of Science.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who oversees the health of more than 340 million Americans, says vitamin A can prevent the worst effects of measles rather than urging more people to get vaccinated.
In an opinion piece for Fox News, the US health secretary said he was “deeply concerned” about the current measles outbreak in Texas. However, he said the decision to vaccinate was a “personal one” and something for parents to discuss with their health-care provider.
Here’s what the vitamin A study actually says and why public health officials are so concerned about Kennedy’s latest statement.
Why is a measles outbreak so worrying?
Measles is a highly contagious disease caused by a virus. It spreads easily including when an infected person breathes, coughs or sneezes.
Measles initially infects the respiratory tract and then the virus spreads throughout the body. Symptoms include a high fever, cough, red eyes, runny nose and a rash all over the body.
Measles can also be severe, can cause complications including blindness and swelling of the brain, and can be fatal. Measles can affect anyone but is most common in children.
Vitamin A is essential for our overall health. It has many roles in the body, from supporting our growth and reproduction, to making sure we have healthy vision, skin and immune function.
Foods rich in vitamin A or related molecules include orange, yellow and red coloured fruits and vegetables, green leafy vegetables, as well as dairy, egg, fish and meat. You can take it as a supplement.
Vitamin A can also be used therapeutically. In other words, doctors may prescribe vitamin A to treat a deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency has long been associated with more severe cases of infectious disease, including measles. Vitamin A boosts immune cells and strengthens the respiratory tract lining, which is the body’s first defence against infections.
Because of this, the CDC has recently said vitamin A can also be prescribed as part of treatment for children with severe measles – such as those in hospital – under doctor supervision.
One key message from the CDC’s advice is that people are already sick enough with measles to be in hospital. They’re not taking vitamin A to prevent catching measles in the first place.
The other key message is vitamin A is taken under medical supervision, under specific circumstances, where patients can be closely monitored to prevent toxicity from high doses.
Kennedy cites and links to a 2010 study, a type known as a systematic review and meta-analysis. Researchers reviewed and analysed existing studies, which included ones that looked at the effectiveness of vitamin A in preventing measles deaths.
They found three studies that looked at vitamin A treatment by specific dose. There were different doses depending on the age of the children, measured in IU (international units). Having two doses of vitamin A (200,000IU for children over one year of age or 100,000IU for infants below one year) reduced mortality by 62% compared to children who did not have vitamin A.
The 2010 study did not show vitamin A reduced your risk of getting measles from another infected person. To my knowledge no study has shown this.
To be fair, Kennedy did not say that vitamin A stops you from catching measles from another infected person. Instead, he used the following vague statement:
Studies have found that vitamin A can dramatically reduce measles mortality.
It’s easy to see how a reader could misinterpret this as “take vitamin A if you want to avoid dying from measles”.
We know what works – vaccines
The World Health Organization recommends all children receive two doses of measles vaccine.
The CDC states two doses of the measles vaccine (measles-mumps-rubella or MMR vaccine) is 97% effective against getting measles. This means out of every 100 people who are vaccinated only three will get it, and this will be a milder form.
relying on vitamin A instead of the vaccine is not only dangerous and ineffective […] it puts children at serious risk.
Evangeline Mantzioris is affiliated with Alliance for Research in Nutrition, Exercise and Activity (ARENA) at the University of South Australia. Evangeline Mantzioris has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, and has been appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council Dietary Guideline Expert Committee.
“It’s really sore,” my (Josh’s) five-year-old daughter said, cradling her broken arm in the emergency department.
“But on a scale of zero to ten, how do you rate your pain?” asked the nurse.
My daughter’s tear-streaked face creased with confusion.
“What does ten mean?”
“Ten is the worst pain you can imagine.” She looked even more puzzled.
As both a parent and a pain scientist, I witnessed firsthand how our seemingly simple, well-intentioned pain rating systems can fall flat.
What are pain scales for?
The most common scale has been around for 50 years. It asks people to rate their pain from zero (no pain) to ten (typically “the worst pain imaginable”).
This focuses on just one aspect of pain – its intensity – to try and rapidly understand the patient’s whole experience.
How much does it hurt? Is it getting worse? Is treatment making it better?
Rating scales can be useful for tracking pain intensity over time. If pain goes from eight to four, that probably means you’re feeling better – even if someone else’s four is different to yours.
Consider my daughter’s dilemma. How can anyone imagine the worst possible pain? Does everyone imagine the same thing? Research suggests they don’t. Even kids think very individually about that word “pain”.
People typically – and understandably – anchor their pain ratings to their own life experiences.
This creates dramatic variation. For example, a patient who has never had a serious injury may be more willing to give high ratings than one who has previously had severe burns.
“No pain” can also be problematic. A patient whose pain has receded but who remains uncomfortable may feel stuck: there’s no number on the zero-to-ten scale that can capture their physical experience.
In reality, pain ratings are influenced by how much pain interferes with a person’s daily activities, how upsetting they find it, their mood, fatigue and how it compares to their usual pain.
Other factors also play a role, including a patient’s age, sex, cultural and language background, literacy and numeracy skills and neurodivergence.
For example, if a clinician and patient speak different languages, there may be extra challenges communicating about pain and care.
Still, we work with the tools available. There is evidence people do use the zero-to-ten pain scale to try and communicate much more than only pain’s “intensity”.
So when a patient says “it’s eleven out of ten”, this “impossible” rating is likely communicating more than severity.
They may be wondering, “Does she believe me? What number will get me help?” A lot of information is crammed into that single number. This patient is most likely saying, “This is serious – please help me.”
In everyday life, we use a range of other communication strategies. We might grimace, groan, move less or differently, use richly descriptive words or metaphors.
Collecting and evaluating this kind of complex and subjective information about pain may not always be feasible, as it is hard to standardise.
As a result, many pain scientists continue to rely heavily on rating scales because they are simple, efficient and have been shown to be reliable and valid in relatively controlled situations.
But clinicians can also use this other, more subjective information to build a fuller picture of the person’s pain.
Visual scales are one tool. For example, the “Faces Pain Scale-Revised” asks patients to choose a facial expression to communicate their pain. This can be particularly useful for children or people who aren’t comfortable with numeracy and literacy, either at all, or in the language used in the health-care setting.
A vertical “visual analogue scale” asks the person to mark their pain on a vertical line, a bit like imagining “filling up” with pain.
Modified visual scales are sometimes used to try to overcome communication challenges. Nenadmil/Shutterstock
Listen for the story behind the number, because the same number means different things to different people.
Use the rating as a launchpad for a more personalised conversation. Consider cultural and individual differences. Ask for descriptive words. Confirm your interpretation with the patient, to make sure you’re both on the same page.
Patients
To better describe pain, use the number scale, but add context.
Try describing the quality of your pain (burning? throbbing? stabbing?) and compare it to previous experiences.
Explain the impact the pain is having on you – both emotionally and how it affects your daily activities.
Paediatric health professionals are trained to use age-appropriate vocabulary, because children develop their understanding of numbers and pain differently as they grow.
A starting point
In reality, scales will never be perfect measures of pain. Let’s see them as conversation starters to help people communicate about a deeply personal experience.
That’s what my daughter did — she found her own way to describe her pain: “It feels like when I fell off the monkey bars, but in my arm instead of my knee, and it doesn’t get better when I stay still.”
From there, we moved towards effective pain treatment. Sometimes words work better than numbers.
Joshua Pate has received speaker fees for presentations on pain and physiotherapy. He receives royalties for children’s books.
Dale Langford has received honoraria and research support from the Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trials, Translations, Innovations, and Opportunities Network (ACTTION), a public-private partnership with the United States (US) Food & Drug Administration. She has also been supported by the US National Institutes of Health.
Tory Madden works for the University of Cape Town, where she directs the African Pain Research Initiative. She receives funding from the US National Institutes of Health. She is affiliated with the University of South Australia, KU Leuven, and the Train Pain Academy not-for-profit organisation.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
For the past three weeks the arts have been dominated by a recent decision made by the board of Creative Australia. On February 7 it was announced Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino had been chosen as the artistic team to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2026.
One week later, the board announced Sabsabi and Dagostino would no longer be representing the country because their selection would cause “a prolonged and divisive debate”.
This about-turn represents a low point in the relationship between artists and their funding body, Creative Australia.
Creative Australia (known as the Australia Council until 2023) has historically endured many attacks from the public, the media and political parties. This past weekend, for example, The Weekend Australian published three different stories critiquing Creative Australia and its arts funding processes.
While the amount of money Creative Australia receives is minuscule in relation to overall government spending (in 2023–24 it received A$258 million), the arts themselves enjoy a profile much greater than their monetary value.
So how does Creative Australia operate? And what does this decision on Sabsabi mean for its relationship with artists?
What is the peer review system?
Funding decisions at Creative Australia are based on two key principles: peer review, and arm’s length funding.
Peer review means decisions on who is funded are made by artists and arts workers with a deep understanding of the artform at hand.
Arm’s length funding means that, while the government funds Creative Australia, artists are supported free from direct political intervention.
The Australia Council, established in 1975, was originally structured around several artform boards, made up of peers from each of the artform sectors. These peers were given the task of overseeing their artforms and making funding decisions. Peers were selected by the government, usually after nomination by the Australia Council, and served terms of between two to five years.
Membership of an artform board was seen as an honour as well as a duty by those selected: a way of influencing funding decisions, but also a way of giving back to the sector.
As a result of an internal review in 2012, the process of peer decision making changed dramatically. The Australia Council in 2013 removed the artform boards (with a couple of exceptions) and introduced an ad hoc peer system where individuals were asked to self-nominate if they wanted to be part of the selection process. Staff then chose individuals, from a large pool of peers, to sit on a panel for each funding round.
As a result of the 2013 reforms the relationship with the minister for the arts was also changed. Up till then, the minister only had the power to appoint the members of the Australia Council board and the members of the various artform boards. In 2013 the act was changed so the minister could also give policy direction to the Australia Council.
In 2019, another category of selector was introduced. Industry advisors advise on multi-year funded applications, with the final decision made by Creative Australia staff.
The changing make-up of decision makers
The membership of the Australia Council’s governing board was historically more politicised, but its members were also often leading figures in the field.
The chair position was usually a leading figure from the arts and cultural field, including writers Donald Horne, Rodney Hall and Hilary McPhee, and music specialist Margaret Seares.
In the 2000s this changed under the Howard government, with the re-framing of the arts as businesses. This led to the appointment of business-people onto the board, particularly as chairs. Chairs this century have included business leaders David Gonski, James Strong, Rupert Myer and now Robert Morgan.
This meant priorities other than artform quality were introduced into the overall decision making.
The Venice Biennale process
Australia has been participating in the Venice Biennale since 1954.
Until 2019 there was a commissioner responsible for the selection of the Australian artist. The role was occupied by notable individuals in the arts world, such as philanthropist and art collector Simon Mordant. Artists would be individually invited by the commissioner to be the Venice representative.
In 2019 the Australia Council took over the role, and the process changed to an application system where artists were assessed by a panel of experts, before the final representatives (such as Sabsabi and Dagostino for 2026) were selected from a shortlist of six.
While all of the details of what happened in the lead up to rescinding Sabsabi’s invitation are unknown, some facts have been laid out: The Australian published an article criticising his selection; Coalition arts spokesperson Claire Chandler asked about his selection in Question Time; and Arts Minister Tony Burke phoned Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette.
That night, Collette and the board decided Sabsabi’s invitation would be rescinded.
Who gets a say in the arts?
It seems now the funding model that Australia has created for the arts may no longer be serving the artists. The board’s decision following Burke’s phone call to Collette calls into question the principles of peer review and arm’s length funding.
The structure and decision-making processes of Creative Australia should now be reviewed as a matter of urgency. The peer system works remarkably well if structured appropriately. At present it would seem it is not.
Artists deserve a body that defends their rights, so they are not sacrificed for political needs.
Jo Caust has previously received funding from the Australia Council. She is a member of NAVA and the Arts Industry Council(SA). She also worked at the Australia Council in the 1980s.
The Trump presidency is turning much of the world order on its head. Tne United States president is arm-twisting Ukraine, playing nice with Russia, and using protection as an economic and political weapon.
The Australian government is pessimistic about escaping American tariffs on aluminium and steel when a decision is announced next week. Meanwhile, the message from the US is clear: we need to boost defence spending.
To discuss Trump Mark 2 on the world stage and what that means for Australia, we’re joined by James Curran, professor of modern history at the University of Sydney.
Curran says,
One gets the sense that we are looking at the kind of tectonic plates of world politics shifting before our very eyes.
Trump is about might is right. He does have an expansionary view of American power in the western hemisphere if we are to judge him by his statements on the Panama Canal and Greenland. But I think more broadly, his interpretation of American power is to simply “get out of America’s way”.
In terms of economic implications, [it’s] a confirmation that we are looking at the permanence of protectionism in the United States. This administration, along with the Biden administration and the first Trump administration, have been putting a wrecking ball through the multilateral trading system and the WTO. And that is certainly a not a good thing for free trade and for countries like Australia.
Curran explains what America’s expectation that countries need to spend more on defence would mean for Australia,
This has been the great concern, if you like, over a number of years – that Australia has got defence on the cheap, that it’s put so much of its national wealth into the middle class and welfare and infrastructure and developing the nation that it’s been able to rely on the American blanket of protection while it pursues its prosperity.
So if [defence spending] is to rise to 3% [of GDP], then that’s going to mean, firstly, a concentration on what are the lower cost alternatives to defend this continent? And secondly, where will the trade offs come? What will be sacrificed from the national budget? And what political leader in this country will front the Australian people and squarely and honestly and earnestly have a conversation about these dramatic strategic circumstances and why greater sacrifice is required from Australians to enable a higher defence expenditure.
Is the Trump world the new normal, or will this be over when Trump eventually leaves the White House?
I’m a little bit sceptical about this idea that we grit our teeth and close our eyes and hope that the nightmare is over in four years time. There is a really big question mark over how America can snap back in terms of its institutional robustness. The pressure that the courts, the media and the Congress are under. Does this all just snap back in four years time? Do we really think that either a Republican or a Democrat successor to Trump will ride into Washington, down Pennsylvania Avenue in a glittering chariot of liberal internationalism? To say everyone shouldn’t worry because the liberal international order is back and it’s gleaming and it’s working.
I really think this is up to America’s allies, both in Europe and in East Asia, to continue to protect as many of those rules and those institutions that have worked so well for so many of us, as much as they possibly can.
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.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Markela Panegyres and Jonathan Strauss in Sydney
The new Universities Australia (UA) definition of antisemitism, endorsed last month for adoption by 39 Australian universities, is an ugly attempt to quash the pro-Palestine solidarity movement on campuses and to silence academics, university workers and students who critique Israel and Zionism.
While the Scott Morrison Coalition government first proposed tightening the definition, and a recent joint Labor-Coalition parliamentary committee recommended the same, it is yet another example of the Labor government’s overreach.
It seeks to mould discussion in universities to one that suits its pro-US and pro-Zionist imperialist agenda, while shielding Israel from accountability.
The UA definition comes in the context of a war against Palestinian activism on campuses.
The false claim that antisemitism is “rampant” across universities has been weaponised to subdue the Palestinian solidarity movement within higher education and, particularly, to snuff out any repeat of the student-led Gaza solidarity encampments, which sprung up on campuses across the country last year.
Some students and staff who have been protesting against the genocide since October 2023 have come under attack by university managements.
Some students have been threatened with suspension and many universities are giving themselves, through new policies, more powers to liaise with police and surveil students and staff.
Palestinian, Arab and Muslim academics, as well as other anti-racist scholars, have been silenced and disciplined, or face legal action on false counts of antisemitism, merely for criticising Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine.
Randa Abdel-Fattah, for example, has become the target of a Zionist smear campaign that has successfully managed to strip her of Australian Research Council funding.
Intensify repression The UA definition will further intensify the ongoing repression of people’s rights on campuses to discuss racism, apartheid and occupation in historic Palestine.
By its own admission, UA acknowledges that its definition is informed by the antisemitism taskforces at Columbia University, Stanford University, Harvard University and New York University, which have meted out draconian and violent repression of pro-Palestine activism.
It should be noted that the controversial IHRA definition has been opposed by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) for its serious challenge to academic freedom.
As many leading academics and university workers, including Jewish academics, have repeatedly stressed, criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism is not antisemitic.
UA’s definition is arguably more detrimental to freedom of speech and pro-Palestine activism and scholarship than the IHRA definition.
In the vague IHRA definition, a number of examples of antisemitism are given that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but not the main text itself.
By contrast, the new UA definition overtly equates criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism and claims Zionist ideology is a component part of Jewish identity.
The definition states that “criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic . . . when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel”.
Dangerously, anyone advocating for a single bi-national democratic state in historic Palestine will be labelled antisemitic under this new definition.
Anyone who justifiably questions the right of the ethnonationalist, apartheid and genocidal state of Israel to exist will be accused of antisemitism.
Sweeping claims The UA definition also makes the sweeping claim that “for most, but not all Jewish Australians, Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”.
But, as the JCA points out, Zionism is a national political ideology and is not a core part of Jewish identity historically or today, since many Jews do not support Zionism. The JCA warns that the UA definition “risks fomenting harmful stereotypes that all Jewish people think in a certain way”.
Moreover, JCA said, Jewish identities are already “a rightly protected category under all racial discrimination laws, whereas political ideologies such as Zionism and support for Israel are not”.
Like other aspects of politics, political ideologies, such as Zionism, and political stances, such as support for Israel, should be able to be discussed critically.
According to the UA definition, criticism of Israel can be antisemitic “when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions”.
While it would be wrong for any individual or community, because they are Jewish, to be held responsible for Israel’s actions, it is a fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former minister Yoav Gallant for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But under the UA definition, since Netanyahu and Gallant are Jewish, would holding them responsible be considered antisemitic?
The implication of the definition for universities, which teach law and jurisprudence, is that international law should not be applied to the Israeli state, because it is antisemitic to do so.
The UA’s definition is vague enough to have a chilling effect on any academic who wants to teach about genocide, apartheid and settler-colonialism. It states that “criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions”.
What these are is not defined.
Anti-racism challenge Within the academy, there is a strong tradition of anti-racism and decolonial scholarship, particularly the concept of settler colonialism, which, by definition, calls into question the very notion of “statehood”.
With this new definition of antisemitism, will academics be prevented from teaching students the works of Chelsea Watego, Patrick Wolfe or Edward Said?
The definition will have serious and damaging repercussions for decolonial scholars and severely impinges the rights of scholars, in particular First Nations scholars and students, to critique empire and colonisation.
UA is the “peak body” for higher education in Australia, and represents and lobbies for capitalist class interests in higher education.
It is therefore not surprising that it has developed this particular definition, given its strong bilateral relations with Israeli higher education, including signing a 2013 memorandum of understanding with Association of University Heads, Israel.
All university students and staff committed to anti-racism, academic freedom and freedom of speech should join the campaign against the UA definition.
Local NTEU branches and student groups are discussing and passing motions rejecting the new definition and NTEU for Palestine has called a National Day of Action for March 26 with that as one of its key demands.
We will not be silenced on Palestine.
Jonathan Strauss and Markela Panegyres are members of the National Tertiary Education Union and the Socialist Alliance. Republished from Green Left with permission.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Opinion/Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Germany’s important election last week struggled to make the news cycle, even on Germany’s own Deutsche Welle(DW), Germany’s equivalent of Britain’s BBC. Especially (but not only) in the international media, most of the focus was on a single party (AFD, Alliance for Germany) that was never going to have the most votes and was (almost) never going to become part of the resulting government.
Germany is the world’s third largest national economy, and traditionally dominates the politics of the European Union; an important example of this dominance was the Eurozone financial crisis of the first-half of the 2010s; a crisis that was (unsatisfactorily) resolved, thanks to a problematic and controversial program of fiscal austerity.
At present, Germany, like New Zealand, is experiencing an economic recession. (Provisional annual economic growthwas -0.2% in 2024 and -0.3% in 2023.) The cause is similar, too, in both countries: the same ‘balance the Budget’ mentality that gave the world the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Election Result
The ‘winner’ of the German election was the CDU/CSU Alliance (see Wikipedia for a better presentation of the results), which works a bit like the Liberal/National Coalition in Australia. (The Christian Social Union functions in Bavaria much like Australia’s National Party functions in rural Queensland.) CDU/CSU (like National in New Zealand) comfortably prevailed with 28.5 percent of the vote, entitling that alliance to 33 percent of the seats in the Bundestag (Parliament).
The new Chancellor (equivalent to Prime Minister) will be Friedrich Merz; a 69-year-old version of our own Christopher Luxon, as far as I can tell. He is strongly anti-Putin and pro-Israel. He has come to power well and truly under the international media radar; and will be in a strong position to exert near-absolute power, given that he will always be able to turn to the AFD (who got more votes than the Social Democrats; 20.8%) for support in the Bundestag for any measure that is not palatable to Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. In the new Parliament, the Greens and the Left merely make up the numbers.
Merz’s Christian Democrats will form a coalition government with the losing SPD (Social Democratic Party, like Labour in New Zealand) who came third with 16.4 percent of the vote; 19 percent of the seats. Together these two parties of the establishment centre hold 52% of the new parliament, despite having less than 45% of the vote. (The outgoing minority government was a centrist coalition of the SPD and the Greens; the election was held early because the ACT-like Liberal Party – the FPD, Free Democrats – withdrew from the coalition. The FPD vote shrunk from 11.4 percent in 2021 to just 4.3 percent of the vote this time.)
The result in Germany proved to be very much like that of the United Kingdom in 2024: a slide in support for the two major parties (‘the establishment centre’), a consolidation of power to the self-same establishment centre, and a shift of that establishment centre to the right. (See my chart in Germany’s stale (and still pale) political mainstream, Evening Report 27 February 2025, for a timeline of decline.) While both countries technically underwent a change of government, in both countries the establishment has entrenched its power, and in both countries the political assumptions of the power centre have shifted to the right.
Clearly this is problematic for democracy, because historically disastrous popular support for the ‘broad church’ parties of the establishment centre has coincided with increased power to those parties, as well as policy convergence between them. Further, based on legislative electoral requirements, neither Germany nor the United Kingdom (nor the United States for that matter) will have a new government until 2029. At a time when a week is a long time in international politics, 208 weeks is an eternity. World War Three, a distinct possibility, may be in its second or third year by then.
Voting System
Germany represents the prototype upon which New Zealand’s MMP voting system is based. There are some differences though, and some recent changes.
Germany calls its all-important ‘party vote’ the ‘second vote’, disguising its importance. It is possible that many German voters do not fully appreciate its significance. The electorate vote is called ‘first vote’, and winners (by a plurality, not necessarily a majority) are elected ‘directly’. The second (party) vote is understood as a top-up vote to ensure proportionality.
Party lists are regional in Germany. And ‘ethnic parties’ may get special privileges.
In one respect the German version is more proportional than the New Zealand version of MMP, in that it no longer allows overhang MPs. (However, the most recent result is not proportional in the important sense that two parties together with less than 45% of the vote have 52% of the seats.) In MMP, one can easily imagine an overhang situation being frequent if the ‘major’ parties, which win most electorates, only get between 16% and 29% of the party vote.
In 2013, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court decided that overhang seats were too big a threat to proportionality. So, they introduced ‘levelling seats’. In effect, it meant that if one party gets an overhang, then all parties get an overhang. The result was, in 2013, that a parliament that should have had 598 members (Deputies) ended up with 631, an effective overhang of 33. In 2017 that effective overhang grew to 111, and to 137 in 2021.
For 2025, they decided to abandon overhang representation altogether, by not guaranteeing direct election through the first vote. And they fixed the size of the Bundestag to 630 Deputies, up from a base-size of 598.
If the new German system was in place in New Zealand in 2023, then two of the Te Pati Māori electorate seats from 2023 would have been forfeit, going instead to second placed candidates; proportionality in 2023 entitled Te Pati Māori to four seats, not the six which they have. However, we should note that, if New Zealand was using the present German version of MMP, there would be no special Māori electorates, but the Māori Party would be exempt the five percent party threshold. Ethnic-privileged parties in Germany are incentivised to focus on the party vote, not the electorate vote. In Germany there is a Danish ethnic party (South Schleswig Voters’ Association) which is exempt the threshold. Its leader, Stefan Seidler, did not win his electorate. But his party got 0.15% of the nationwide vote, meaning it qualified for 0.15% of the 630 places in the Bundestag; one seat, for him.
New Zealand voters seem to have more tactical and strategic political nous than do German voters. Thus, it has been very rare for a party in New Zealand to miss out qualifying for Parliament because of getting between 4% and 5% of the party votes (noting that both countries operate a 5% disqualification threshold). In Germany, party-vote percentages just below 5% are not uncommon. In New Zealand, voters, conscious that they want to play a role in coalition-building, actively help parties near the threshold to get over the line. (Indeed, I voted New Zealand First in 2023, because I was 99.9% sure that the only post-election coalition options would be National/ACT or National/ACT/NZF; I favoured the three-party alternative, so I used my vote strategically to help block a National/ACT government.)
Indeed the latest German result was a bit like the latest New Zealand result, but with a party resembling New Zealand First (BSW) getting 4.972% of the vote, so getting no seats at all. BSW getting just a few more votes would have meant a substantial erosion of the two-party power result which eventuated. It is extremely difficult for new non-ethnic parties to get elected in Germany.
In 2025, two parties scored just under five percent of the vote. As well as the BSW, the (ACT-like) Free Democrats who had been part of the previous government, and who had indeed precipitated the early election, scored 4.3%. Indeed, fifteen percent of the votes were ‘wasted’ – that is, cast for ultimately unsuccessful parties. In New Zealand the wasted vote is typically around four percent. Indeed, this high wasted vote turns out to be a more serious challenge to proportionality in German than uncompensated overhang seats.
Both Germany and New Zealand have the contentious (in New Zealand) ‘electorate MP’ rule; the rule that’s misleadingly dubbed in New Zealand as the ‘coat-tail’ rule. (Misleading, because most MPs come in on the coat-tails of their party leadership, and always have.) In Germany the rule is stricter than in New Zealand. In order to avoid disqualification by getting less than 5% of the party vote, New Zealand requires that the party get one electorate MP. In Germany the rule (initially the same as New Zealand), since 1957 has been a requirement for three electorate MPs. In Germany in 2021, the Left Party got 4.87% of the vote and three electorate MPs; they just squeezed in, on both criteria!
Overall, United States’ Vice-President JD Vance’s pre-election comments about democracy in Germany were valid. German politics continues to exclude the non-establishment parties of both the right and the left, despite support for these parties having been increasing for a while, and now representing the majority of German voters.
Media Framing
German television electoral coverage, if DW is anything to go by, is superficial; indeed, is quite insensitive to the national and local dramas taking place. I watched the coverage live. In the hour before the Exit Poll results were announced, the discussion barely mentioned the potential dramas taking place, despite both the BSW and FDP parties pre-polling only just under the five percent threshold. The state of the economy was mentioned in a perfunctory way; clearly it was not a big issue for the political class on display.
At 6 o’clock exactly, the exit-poll results were read out, as if they were the election result. As indeed they turned out to be, more-or-less; the same as the pre-election polls. The subsequent uninterested attitude towards the actual counting of the votes was disappointing. There had been a bit of this in the 2024 UK election as well; as if the exit poll was the election result. In the UK case, Labour’s actual result (for the popular vote) was well under the exit poll result, while the Conservatives did significantly better than their exit poll tally; those facts, though, were for the nerds and psephologists.
In my observation, early votes and exit polls favour the parties supported by the political class; election day votes much less so. So, in New Zealand in 2023 it was initially looking like there would be a two-party coalition of the right. But, to the attentive, as the night wore on, the National Party percentage fell from 41% to 38%, meaning that NZF would have to be included in any resulting coalition.
I suspected something quite similar would happen in Germany, and I was only partially wrong. The exit poll results, and the subsequent counts, were presented to just one decimal place; indeed, the presentation of the numbers was very poor throughout. So, it was hard to see to what extent BSW was improving as the votes were counted.
In the exit poll, two parties – FPD and BSW – were shown as being on 4.7%, and the AFD was on 19.5%. So, the two 4.7% parties were largely written out of the subsequent discussion. We did see an early concession by the FPD, who – representing a segment of the political class – understood the polling dynamics rather well. And we did see the AFD’s Alice Weidel being asked if she was disappointed to get under 20%. Ms Weidel put on a brave face, but she did seem disappointed. When the votes were actually counted, her party got 20.8% exactly on Weidel’s prior expectations.
BSW was completely ignored. There was simply no interest in the possibility that they might reach the 5% threshold, even when the vote count had them upto 4.9%. In the end BSW reached 4.972%; so close! Out of sight, out of mind! In the official results the BSW were lumped with ‘Other Parties’. The DW election panel were too unaware to make any comments about the party itself, its philosophies, or how its possible success might influence the process of forming a coalition government. (Of particular importance was that, with just a few more votes, BSW might have given Eastern Germany a voice in a three-way coalition government.)
For DW, their perennial concern is the place of Germany within Europe and the World; they had little time to give the outside world a glimpse into the domestic lives and politics of ordinary Germans. And we heard nothing about the ‘ethnic vote’, the privileged Denmark Party notwithstanding. I suspect that many if not most of the recent immigrants who do much of the work in Germany either could not vote or did not vote. The election was about them, not for them; denizens, not citizens.
However, DW did invite on a gentleman who mildly focussed the attention of the discussants by suggesting that one of the priorities of the new Chancellor – Friedrich Merz – would be to acquire nuclear weapons! I don’t think the rest of the world had any prior insights into that; ordinary Germans were probably equally in the dark.
Who is Friedrich Merz? Who knows? It turns out that he dropped out of politics for a while, to play a leading role in BlackRock, the international acquisitions company which until recently owned New Zealand’s SolarZero (refer Update on SolarZero Liquidation by BlackRock, Scoop, 29 January 2025). Our media told us that the election was all about the “far-right” AFD Party; that is, the far non-establishment-right. We in New Zealand heard nothing about the far establishment-right; the shadowy man (or his party). Some now fear Merz will be an out-and-out warmonger. Even Al Jazeera, which can be relied upon to cover many stories about places New Zealand’s media barely touches (and in a bit more depth), had the portraits of Olaf Scholz and Alice Weidel on the screen, on 22 February, the day before the election, despite the certainty that Merz world become the new Chancellor.
In that vein, I heard a German woman interviewed in Christchurch, on RNZ on 25 February. She, disappointed with the election result, spent her whole edited four minutes railing about the AFD, as if the AFD had won. There was no useful commentary, by her or RNZ, of the actual result of Germany’s election.
Are we so shallow that we don’t care; that some of us with the loudest voices only want to rail against a non-establishment party, and to see the democratic support for alternative parties as being somehow anti-democratic?
East Germany
People of a certain age in New Zealand will remember the former East Germany; the DDR, German ‘Democratic’ Republic. Most people in Germany itself will have had knowledge of it, including the Berlin-based political staff of DW who were mostly in their thirties, forties and fifties. But the ongoing issues of Eastern Germany were barely in their mindframes.
In Eastern Germany – the former DDR – (especially outside of Berlin), support for the AFD was close to 40%, for BSW over 10%, and the Left much higher than in Western Germany. In the former East Berlin (which I visited in 1974), the Left seems to have been the most popular party. Support in the East for the establishment parties combined was between 25% and 30%, and with a lower turnout.
BSW, it turns out, is Left on economic policy and Right on social policy. And, in the German discourse, is categorised by the political class as ‘pro-Putin’. If BSW had got 5% of the vote, Merz could have tried to bring them into his government; or Merz might have turned to the Green Party instead of a ‘pro-Putin’ party. But I cannot see even the German Greens being able to govern as a junior partner to a belligerent establishment-right CDU-led government. BSW’s failure to get 5% of the vote may turn out to be one of the great ‘might-have-beens’ of Germany’s future history.
As JD Vance stated, this Eastern German situation poses a danger for democracy in Germany and in Europe. Eastern Germany is where the German state is at its most vulnerable. The majority of voters there have voted for ‘pro-Putin’ parties; and, significantly, parties prioritising the problems of economic failure over the big-politics of extranational power-plays.
The new German government, it would seem, is set to aggravate (or, at best, ignore) the problems of Germany’s ‘near-East’, while setting out to inflame the problems of Europe’s ‘far-East’.
The Debt Brake
This is Germany’s equivalent of Ruth Richardson’s 1994 ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act’ (now entrenched in New Zealand law and lore). This is the major single reason why New Zealand has had so many infrastructure problems this century, and why so many young men and families emigrated to Australia in the 1990s, with some of these emigrants coming back to New Zealand in recent years as ‘501s’.
The Merkel debt-brake is the self-inflicted single major reason why many European economies are in such a mess today; and Germany in particular. Germany is congenitally deeply committed to all kinds of financial austerity, with government financial austerity being the most ingrained. Rather than circulating as it should, money is concentrating. The debt-brake is “a German constitutional rule introduced [in 2009] during the Global Financial crisis to enforce budget discipline and reduce [public] debt loads in the country” (see Berlin Briefing, below).
Germany still has a parliamentary session under the old Parliament, before the new parliament convenes. Michaela Küfner (see Berlin Briefing, below) suggests the possibility that the old “lame duck” Parliament could remove the debt-brake from the German constitution, because she sees the make-up of the new more right-wing parliament as being less amenable to address this ‘elephant in the room’. Seems democratically dodgy to me, even talking about pushing dramatic constitutional legislation through a ‘lame duck’ parliament; like Robert Muldoon, pushing through a two-year parliamentary term for New Zealand in the week after the 1984 election!
(Two-year parliamentary terms are not unknown, by the way; the United States has a two-year term for its Congress. This is almost never mentioned when we discuss the parliamentary term in New Zealand. In the United States at present, there will be many people for whom the 2026 election cannot come fast enough; an opportunity to reign-in Donald Trump.)
Future German relations with the United States
On 27 February (28 Feb, New Zealand time) – before the fiasco in the White House on 28 February – I watched Berlin Briefing on DW. This programme is a regular panel discussion of the political editorship of Deutsche Welle.
The context here is that Friedrich Merz made an important speech the evening after the election; a speech that had the Berlin beltway – “people behind the scenes here in Berlin” – all agog. Merz said: “For me the absolute priority will be strengthening Germany so much so that we can achieve [defence] independence from the United States.”
The discussion proceeded as follows:
“How important is this anchoring in Nato of the idea of the United States as ‘The Great Protector’?” Nina Haase, DW political correspondent: “I don’t think there’s a word, ‘massive’ is not enough; people behind the scenes here in Berlin … they talk about are we going to part with the United States amicably or are we going to become enemies [my emphasis] … Europe has relied on the US so much since the Second World War is completely new thinking; just to prepare for a scenario with, if you will, would-be enemies on two sides; in the East with Russia launching a hybrid attack and then [an enemy] in the West as well.” They go on to talk about the possible need for conscription in Germany.
The political correspondents were talking like bourgeois brat adult children who had expected that they should be able to enjoy a power-lifestyle underwritten by ‘big daddy’ always there as a financial and security backstop; and just realising that the rug of entitlement might be being pulled from under them. Michaela Küfner (Chief Political Editor of DW) goes on to talk about an “existential threat from the United States”, meaning the withdrawal (and potential enmity) of the great protector. “Like your Rich Uncle from across the ocean turning against you”, she said.
Nina Haase: “Pacifism, the very word, needs to be redefined in Germany … Germans are only now able to understand that you have to have weapons in order not to use them.” She was referring to earlier generations of pacifists (like me) who saw weapons as the problem, not the solution.
Ulrike Franke: “Everything needs to change for everything to stay the same”, basically saying Germany itself may have to pursue domestic Rich Uncle policies to maintain the lifestyles of the (entitled) ten percenters.
Michaela Küfner, towards the end of the discussion: “The AFD is framing [the supporters of] the parties which will make up the coming coalition as the political class who we will challenge”. And she noted, but only at the very end of the long discussion, that the effectively disenfranchised people in Eastern Germany are “a lot more Russia-friendly”.
Maybe Merz has a plan to build employment-rich munitions factories in Eastern Germany, to address both his security concerns and the obvious political discontent arising from unemployment and fast-eroding living standards? But Merz will have to abandon his innate fiscal conservatism before he can even contemplate that; can he do a Hoover to Hitler transition? Rearmament was Hitler’s game; his means to full employment after the Depression.
Implications for Democracy
I sense that Friedrich Merz will become the face of coming German politics, just as Angela Merkel once was, and as Trump and Starmer are very much the faces of government in their countries; becoming – albeit through democratic means – similar to the autocrats that, in Eastern and Middle-Eastern countries, they [maybe not Trump] rail against.
We might note that if we look carefully at World War One and World War Two, the core conflict was Germany versus Russia. Will World War Three be the same? And which side will ‘we’ (or ‘US’) be on? In WW1 and WW2, we were on Russia’s side. (Hopefully, in the future, we can be neutral with respect to other countries’ conflicts.)
Democracy is under strain worldwide. The diminishing establishment-centre – the political and economic elites and the people with secure employment and housing who still vote for familiar major parties – is clinging on to power, and for the time-being remains more powerful than ever in Europe.
In the Europe of the early 1930s, it was the Great Depression as a period of abject political failure that resulted in the suspension of democracy. All the signs are that the same failures of democratic leadership – worldwide from the 1920s – will bring about similar consequences.
For democracies to save themselves, they should bring non-establishment voices to the table. In 2025. Germany will be another important test case, already sowing the seeds of political failure. We should be wary of demonising the far non-establishment-right while lionising the far establishment-right.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Some of Australia’s major professional sports – such as the Australian Football League (AFL) and its clubs, the National Rugby League (NRL) and its clubs and Cricket Australia – are treated as not-for-profits. This means they do not pay income tax.
Not-for-profits and charities
The not-for-profit sector in Australia consists of about 600,000 organisations, 59,000 of which contributed $43 billion to Australia’s economy in 2010 (2010 is the most recent available data).
Some not-for-profit organisations receive special designation as charities and must have a charitable purpose that benefits the public.
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is aware of more than 200,000 entities that receive one or more tax concessions. But only 61,010 are registered charities.
Professinal sports and tax
Within the regulation of not-for-profits exists professional sport.
Sports receive an exemption from income tax if, under section 50-45 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997, a club or association encourages or promotes a game or sport.
In addition, the organisation must not conduct business for the purpose of profit for members.
The sports exemption does not differentiate between professional and community (or amateur) sport, as is the case in New Zealand, where charities and taxation law limit a sports charity to an amateur organisation.
Therefore, major Australian professional sports are considered not-for-profits and do not pay income tax.
None of these entities are registered charities.
This raises questions of fairness: these organisations receive revenue that ranges from tens of millions of dollars in the case of clubs to hundreds of millions and even billions for leagues.
When the sports exemption was introduced in the 1950s, it was designed to assist small community clubs. This might include the local golf club that operates on a public course and has operating revenue of $10,000, or the local tennis or football club with similar revenues.
The big business of pro sports
In recent years, the revenues of professional sport have ballooned, primarily due to lucrative broadcasting deals.
Also, the AFL and NRL receive a percentage of the income of betting agencies, reportedly $30 million a year for the AFL and $50 million for the NRL.
Half of the NRL clubs are sponsored by betting companies and three NRL stadiums are named after betting agencies.
Some non-Victorian AFL clubs, such as Brisbane and Greater Western Sydney, have gambling sponsorships, but Victorian clubs have signed up to the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation’s “Love the Game, Not the Odds” program.
This reliance on sports betting revenues raises issues as to the public benefit of these organisations and whether they should receive tax exemptions.
The issue of unrelated business income (the income a not-for-profit earns from commercial activities not related to its charitable purpose), especially from gambling and poker machines, raises concerns.
North Melbourne was the first Victorian AFL club to sell its poker machines in 2008. In 2016, it was the only club without pokies.
Collingwood sold its machines in 2018 and Hawthorn sold its two poker machine venues in 2022. But Carlton, Essendon, Richmond and St Kilda earned a collective $40 million from poker machines in 2022/2023.
The profits of poker machines by Victorian AFL clubs can be distinguished from sports clubs in New South Wales, where not less than 0.75% of poker machine profits must be distributed to charities under community development and support expenditure.
Poker machine venues are a considerable source of revenue in the NRL. In 2021, rugby league received $9.8 million from regional licensed clubs – $7.28 million to grassroots rugby and $2.52 million to NRL clubs.
Metropolitan venues gave $29.67 million to rugby league – $17.09 million to grassroots rugby and $12.58 million to NRL clubs.
A possible solution
Unrelated business income tax (UBIT) is a tax on the unrelated business income of not-for-profits. Related business income for a not-for-profit is membership fees and services directly related to the members such as restaurants or meals.
However, the major source of unrelated business income for sports are sponsorship and income from gambling companies and poker machines.
In the context of professional sport, a UBIT would fairly treat leagues and clubs, which increasingly engage in commercial activities outside their charitable activities, with a public benefit without removing the tax exemption.
For example, a UBIT would tax the profits of clubs with poker machines. It would also tax some of Australia’s most profitable professional sports clubs and leagues for revenue not related to promoting the sports.
It would also help distinguish between “real” not-for-profits and professional sports.
In doing so, it would also create a fair regulatory environment for the operation of for-profit and not-for-profit businesses.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Europe is warmed by heat from ocean currents, which move water from the warm tropics to the colder North Atlantic. Once the warm, salty water from the tropics reach the polar region, they cool enough to sink to the depths and flow back towards the Southern Ocean.
This enormous system of currents is known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Climate scientists are increasingly worried about the AMOC, which appears to be slowing down.
While there’s still debate over whether the AMOC has weakened over the last decades, climate models consistently show the AMOC will significantly weaken over the coming century due to the increase in heat-trapping atmospheric greenhouse gases. As more heat stays in the system, the ocean heats up and ice melts, adding fresh water to polar oceans. The overall effect is to slow these currents. The AMOC could weaken 30% by 2060.
A weaker AMOC would mean big changes in Europe, which benefits directly from the warmer waters it brings. But it would also change the climate in the Southern Hemisphere. Our new research shows a weakening of the AMOC would lead to a large change in rainfall patterns, leading to wetter summers in northern Australia and a drier New Zealand year-round. Indonesia and northern Papua New Guinea would also become drier.
Running AMOC?
In the Earth’s long history, the AMOC has gone through many periods of weakening. These were most common during ice ages, when glaciers expanded, but they also occurred during periods as warm as today.
To reconstruct past climates, researchers use data from ice cores, marine sediment cores and speleothems (mineral deposits in caves such as flowstone and stalagmites), as well as simulations performed with climate models. These data show a weaker AMOC strongly affected the climate in the Northern Hemisphere. When flows of warmer water faltered, sea ice expanded in the North Atlantic, while Europe endured colder, drier conditions and the northern tropics became drier.
If the AMOC weakens significantly, it will mean major change for Northern Hemisphere nations. Average temperatures could actually drop 3°C in Western Europe.
At present, the AMOC’s flows of warmer water give European nations more pleasant climates and keeps ports ice free, while the Canadian side of the North Atlantic has a much more severe climate.
What does it mean for the Southern Hemisphere?
Data from ice cores and marine sediment cores also showed Antarctica and the Southern Ocean became warmer during these past AMOC weakening events. Until now, we haven’t understood what an AMOC weakening would mean for rainfall in the Australasian region.
To find out, we ran climate model simulations with the Australian Earth system model, ACCESS-ESM1.5. Our modelling reveals a complex and regionally varied response, primarily shaped by large-scale atmospheric changes.
As the AMOC weakens, it sets off a chain reaction in the oceans and atmosphere which alter rainfall and temperatures across Australasia.
A weaker AMOC would affect ocean temperatures, cooling surface waters in the northern hemisphere and warming waters in the southern hemisphere. This would push the Intertropical Convergence Zone – a belt of heavy rain near the equator – further south.
This means areas such as northern Papua New Guinea and Indonesia will get less rain, while northern Australia will cop wetter summers.
Next, a warmer south equatorial Atlantic triggers atmospheric waves – large-scale movements of air that travel across the globe. These waves lower air pressure over northern Australia, pulling in more moisture and making summer rainfall even heavier.
At the same time, a weaker AMOC disrupts the usual tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean dynamics, altering wind patterns and pressure systems in the Southern Hemisphere. High pressure systems shift southward, affecting storm tracks. The overall effect is fewer storms reaching southern Australia and New Zealand, leading to drier winters.
Last, as the Atlantic currents peter out, heat builds up in Southern Hemisphere oceans rather than being carried to the poles. This results in hotter summers, particularly in southern Australia and New Zealand.
Deluges and droughts
It’s likely we will see these important currents weaken this century, bringing major change to both hemispheres.
Those in Australia and New Zealand are likely to see a magnification of some existing climate shifts, such as a drier south and wetter north.
Policymakers and resource managers need to prepare for a future where water becomes an increasingly uncertain resource.
In the north, more rain over summer could mean a greater reliance on water storage and flood mitigation. In the south, drier conditions may force increased water use efficiency and drought planning.
In New Zealand, a year-round drying trend could challenge farm productivity and hydropower generation. Long-term water management will be critical.
What happens in the North Atlantic doesn’t stay there. It ripples through the atmosphere and oceans, with far-reaching consequences.
Himadri Saini receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Laurie Menviel receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
When Donald Trump’s benefactor and cost-cutter-in-chief Elon Musk recently supported a call for the United States to quit NATO and the United Nations, it should perhaps have been more surprising.
But the first months of the second Trump presidency have already seen key parts of the current international order undermined. Musk’s position fits a general pattern.
The drive to slash the federal deficit dovetails with this general abandonment of expensive international commitments. If the Trump regime follows through on its apparent strategy of manufacturing crises to advance its agenda, then leaving the UN entirely is a logical next step.
Undermined ideals
This is all in stark contrast to the central role the UN has traditionally played within the US-led international order since 1945.
Along with other institutions, the UN allowed the US to shape the international system in its own image and spread its domestic values and interests across the world. Along with NATO, the UN was designed as a global security institution to produce global stability.
In theory at least, the political and economic values of the US and other democracies enabled the construction of the postwar order. According to political scientist John Ikenberry, this was based on “multilateralism, alliance partnerships, strategic restraint, cooperative security, and institutional and rule-based relationships”.
But by the 21st century, US actions had undermined many of these principles. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 bypassed the authority of the UN, causing then secretary-general Kofi Annan to declare that “from the charter point of view [the invasion] was illegal”.
This undermined the legitimacy of the UN and America’s place within it. But it also diminished the organisation as a force for maintaining international security and national sovereignty in global affairs.
The subsequent human rights violations by the US through its use of rendition, torture and detention at facilities such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib further weakened the UN’s credibility as a protector of liberal international values.
Since the 1990s, several Republican politicians have argued for the US to withdraw entirely from the UN. In 1997, senator Ron Paul introduced the American Sovereignty Restoration Act, aimed at ending UN membership, expelling the UN headquarters from New York and ending US funding.
Although it received minimal support and never reached committee hearings, Paul reintroduced the act in every congressional session until his 2011 retirement. It was then taken up by other Republicans, including Paul Broun and Mike Rogers.
Americans’ hard-earned dollars have been funnelled into initiatives that fly in the face of our values – enabling tyrants, betraying allies, and spreading bigotry.
In 1920, US isolationists blocked the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, and with it US participation in the League of Nations (the predecessor to the United Nations). Although the US would interact with the League of Nations until the UN’s formation in 1945, it never became an official member.
Criticism of the UN also has a bipartisan angle, with the US withdrawing funding of UNRWA in 2024 during Joe Biden’s presidency after Israel accused the agency of links to Hamas.
A diminished UN
If Trump harnesses these historical and modern forces to pull the US out of the UN, it would fundamentally – and likely irrevocably – undermine what has been a central pillar of the current international order.
It would also increase US isolationism, reduce Western influence, and legitimise alternative security bodies. These include the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which the US could potentially join, especially given Russia and India are both members.
More broadly, the reduced influence of the UN will endanger general peace and security in the international sphere, and the wider protection and promotion of human rights.
There would be greater unpredictability in global affairs, and the world would be a more dangerous place. For countries big and small, a UN without the US will force new strategic calculations and create new alliances and blocs, as the world leaps into the unknown.
Chris Ogden is a Senior Research Fellow with The Foreign Policy Centre, London.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Henry Cutler, Professor and Director, Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, Macquarie University
Over the weekend the Australian government announced A$644 million to build an extra 50 Medicare urgent care clinics around Australia. This is on top of nearly $600 million previously committed to establish 87 clinics.
Once these 50 new clinics open in the 2025–26 financial year, the government says four in five Australians will live within a 20 minute drive to a clinic. While this seems like a worthy pursuit, the question is whether they are worth the taxpayer dollar, when we already have GPs and emergency departments.
So what does the evidence say? Are urgent care clinics worth the money?
Remind me, what are urgent care clinics?
Urgent care clinics provide bulk-billed care for urgent but not life-threatening conditions, seven days a week for extended business hours. No appointment is necessary and anyone with a Medicare card can walk in and receive care. You can search online for your closest clinic.
Clinics are staffed by GPs and nurses. They treat people who perhaps don’t want to wait for a GP appointment, attend an emergency department or call healthdirect. Injuries and illnesses treated include minor infections and cuts, minor sports injuries and respiratory illness.
Patients may benefit from urgent care clinics through quicker access to care and lower costs if they would not otherwise be bulk billed.
They don’t however get to see their regular GP, which may reduce the appeal for patients who value continuity of care, such as those with chronic or mental health conditions.
Meanwhile, access to GP bulk-billing services has declined. The government is trying to address this by paying GPs billions more to reduce costs for patients.
Medicare urgent care clinics were introduced to reduce workload pressure on GPs, take pressure off public hospital emergency departments, and improve access to affordable primary care.
They were first announced by the Labor Party in 2022 when in opposition. Labor wanted to build its reputation as being “Medicare’s guardian”, a theme continued in the lead up to this next federal election.
Is there any evidence they work?
Medicare urgent care clinics were first established less than two years ago. While some states had already introduced these types of clinics, it will take time for Medicare urgent care clinics to embed themselves into the health-care system and for patients to become familiar with them.
Cost and waiting times are significant factors for people choosing between primary care, urgent care clinics and the emergency department.
Around 19% of people visited an emergency department in 2022–23 because the GP was not available when required.
Research suggests many people may have used urgent care clinics to avoid GP co-payments, and many may have used them because waiting times to see a GP were too long.
The Albanese government reported there had been one million visits to urgent care clinics as of December 2024 (about 1.5 years after they first opened). While this may seem impressive, it should be viewed in the context of emergency department presentations. There were 9 million of those in 2023–24.
Direct evidence on whether Medicare urgent care clinics are taking pressure off emergency departments does not yet exist. While research from the United States suggests these types of clinics reduce emergency department presentations, the effects won’t necessarily be the same in Australia.
The amount of time patients spend in emergency departments continues to rise across Australia.
Many patients will still use emergency departments despite access to clinics. Around 40% of emergency department presentations address an ailment that an urgent care clinic may handle, but only 16% of people who attend an emergency department think their care could have been delivered by a GP.
How can we improve their chance of success?
We need targeted public messaging to make sure patients understand how and when to best use urgent care clinics.
If we channel minor injuries and illness after hours into an urgent care clinic, rather than funding multiple after hours general practices to remain open, we could reduce health system costs. That is because the cost per patient will go down as the number of patients treated within a clinic increases.
None of this will work unless we have enough health workers to staff these clinics. Currently there are shortages of GPs and nurses, so urgent care clinics are competing with general practices for their workforce.
These workforce shortages are less than ideal and could increase GP waiting times or reduce the viability of urgent care clinics. The Mount Gambier urgent care clinic recently went into liquidation amid staff shortages.
The government has announced additional funding to train more GPs and nurses. Workforce investment is crucial to meet increasing demands, but will take time.
To the future
The government has committed more than $1 billion to urgent care clinics to date. Understanding whether urgent care clinics substitute for GP or emergency department presentations, or merely provide additional health-care access, is vital to their success. We need comprehensive and long-term evaluations to fully understand the extent to which urgent care clinics meet their objectives.
Henry Cutler has previously received funding from Northern Territory Health.
Frogs and other amphibians rely on the surrounding environment to regulate their body temperature. On hot days they might seek shade, water or cool spaces underground. But what if everywhere is too hot?
There is a limit to how much heat amphibians can tolerate. My colleagues and I wanted to work out how close amphibians are to reaching these limits, globally.
Our new research, published today in Nature, shows 2% of the world’s amphibians are already overheating. Even when they have access to shade and moisture, more than 100 species are struggling to maintain a viable body temperature.
If global temperatures rise by 4°C, nearly 400 species (or 1 in 13 amphibians) could be pushed to their limits. However, this assumes access to shade and water, so it’s probably an underestimate. Habitat loss, drought and disease will likely make even more amphibians vulnerable to heat stress.
Here is why that matters — and what we can do about it.
Finding the missing pieces of the puzzle
The critical thermal maximum is the temperature beyond which an ectothermic (“cold-blooded”) species simply cannot function.
In laboratory experiments, it is defined as the temperature that renders the frog or salamander unable to right themselves when flipped on their back, or when they start having muscular spasms.
At this temperature, they are incapacitated and unable to escape. If amphibians stay under those conditions for extended periods, they will eventually die.
First, we searched the scientific literature for data on heat tolerance in amphibians and compiled a database. This database covers more than 600 species, but that’s only 7.5% of amphibians on Earth. Knowledge of the heat tolerance of amphibians from tropical regions and the Global South is especially sparse.
To build a global picture, we needed to fill those gaps. We used statistical models to predict the heat tolerance of species missing from the database.
Think of it like solving a puzzle: if a piece is missing, we can make an educated guess of what it looks like, based on the pieces around it.
By using what we know about a species’ biology and how its relatives cope with heat, we can predict how much heat it is likely to tolerate. With this approach, we estimated heat tolerance limits for more than 5,000 amphibian species — around 60% of all known species.
We then compared each species’ tolerance limits to temperatures experienced over the past decade, as well as future conditions under different climate scenarios. That allowed us to see which species could be pushed over the edge by extreme heat events.
We found 2% of amphibians (about 100 species) are probably already overheating. This is an optimistic scenario, assuming they always have access to shaded and humid conditions. In reality, many amphibians live in disturbed habitats, where shade and water are in short supply.
If global temperatures rise by 4°C, the number of vulnerable species jumps from 2% to about 7.5%. That’s nearly a fourfold increase, meaning almost 400 species — 1 in 13 amphibians — could be pushed to their heat tolerance limits.
We also found some interesting regional patterns. In the southern hemisphere, tropical species are most exposed to overheating. However, in the northern hemisphere, species outside the tropics often face higher risk. This underscores how local temperatures and species-specific tolerance limits matter more than just the distance from the equator, challenging common assumptions about the greater vulnerability of tropical species.
Local extinctions — where a species can no longer survive in a particular area — may occur if extreme heat events become too frequent. Amphibians often cannot just hop to cooler places. Many cannot relocate to different areas because they depend on specific wetlands, steams and ponds to breed and feed. If these habitats disappear or become too hot, some amphibians may have nowhere else to go.
Dense vegetation and reliable water sources act like natural air conditioners for amphibians. Our results show that if amphibians can stay hydrated and cool, many can survive heatwaves. Yet climate change is rapidly making these moist refuges more scarce.
With increasing deforestation, habitat disturbance, and droughts, amphibians are losing their ability to cope with the heat. Active efforts to protect, restore, and connect forested areas and wetlands are increasingly needed to boost their chances of survival.
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is also crucial. It’s clear every fraction of a degree counts. Keeping climate warming as low as possible will reduce the risk of sudden, widespread overheating events, not only for amphibians but also for countless other species.
But if we protect and restore forests, wetlands, ponds, and streams — and reduce carbon emissions — many species may stand a chance.
More research on amphibians is needed. Our statistical models help us predict which species are most at risk, but these predictions cannot replace on-the-ground research.
By studying these species directly, we can better understand the threats they face and optimise conservation efforts. This is particularly needed in the lesser-studied areas of South America, Africa and Asia.
Amphibians have been around for millions of years. They are part of our cultural heritage and play vital roles in balancing ecosystems. Let’s not lose them to a climate crisis we hopefully still have time to fix.
Patrice Pottier works as a postdoctoral researcher for The University of New South Wales, Sydney. This research was funded by a UNSW Scientia PhD scholarship. Patrice Pottier is also a board member of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology (SORTEE).
Boycotts are back. With people worried about everything from labour practices and human rights to tariffs and equal opportunity initiatives, collective consumer resistance has been rising globally.
Right now, there are several month-long boycotts of Target underway in the United States due to the company abandoning its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programme. Longer boycotts of specific corporations, beginning with Amazon, are scheduled for March and April.
Last week, the non-partisan, grassroots People’s Union USA organised a “national economic blackout” by urging consumers to avoid buying anything beyond essentials. The inaugural event was, in part, spurred by anger at government cuts being made in the US by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, with organisers saying:
Our strength lies in economic power. If corporations control politicians through money, then we control corporations by withholding ours. Targeted boycotts, economic blackouts, and financial pressure will make them listen.
More widely, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction (BDS) campaign against Israeli goods and companies has been operating for years now. And anti-American boycotts are underway in Canada as increased tariffs take effect .
As these campaigns gain momentum, some consumers will question how effective boycotts are at changing corporate behaviour. But there is a long history of ordinary citizens successfully “voting with their wallets”, even before the term “boycott” was coined.
Origins of the boycott
In 1792, a British campaign to stop buying sugar produced by enslaved Africans in the West Indies began. This originated in the American colonies with Quakers rejecting sugar in the 1750s. They viewed enslaved Africans as stolen people, and therefore slave products as stolen goods.
In Britain, the abolitionist movement appealed to women as household managers to give up slave products and sign a petition to end slavery. The power of this ethical consumerism gave women, not yet allowed to vote, a voice to parliament and a tangible way to participate in the cause.
The word “boycott” itself originated during the 1880 Irish Land Wars, and referred to the resistance to English land agent and former army officer Captain Charles Boycott. Tenants of the absentee landlord he represented complained he “treated his cattle better than he did us”.
Protests outside the gates of Captain Boycott’s residence during the Land League boycott in Ireland in 1880. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
After Boycott imposed fines and employed police to attempt evictions, the Irish Land League responded with a campaign to ostracise him. Crowds intimidated workers so his crops would not be harvested, local shops refused to sell to him, and the post boy was threatened to stop deliveries.
The parish priest, Father John O’Malley, adopted the term “boycott” for this collective action because he thought the County Mayo locals wouldn’t remember the word “ostracise”. Boycott was forced to flee Ireland, and the new term spread across the country.
Some 75 years later, across the Atlantic, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman, as required by Alabama’s racial segregation laws. In 1955, the Montgomery Improvement Association organised a 13-month long boycott of the city’s buses, led by Martin Luther King Jr.
African-Americans, who made up 75% of passengers, refused to ride the buses. In 1956, the US Supreme Court ruled segregated public buses were unconstitutional.
American civil rights activist Rosa Parks sparked the 381 day Montgomery bus boycott, part of the wider civil rights movement in the US. Underwood Archives/Getty Images
Can boycotts work in the 21st century?
Boycotts are not the exclusive province of progressive activists. Across the political spectrum, the rejection of brands because of corporate behaviour has had moments of significant traction.
In 2023, beer company Bud Light collaborated with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador. A backlash from conservative consumers saw the boycott cost parent company Anheuser-Busch Inbev an estimated US$1 billion.
Bud Light also lost is status as the best-selling beer in the US to Mexican import Modelo. The brand then tried to back away from its marketing strategy, which only alienated the LGBTQIA+ community.
Broad campaigns, such as the historical ones mentioned here, can be successful. But specifically targeted boycotts tend to be more effective in attracting media attention and sustaining momentum in the modern consumer age.
The most recent economic data show US consumer confidence is faltering, with its biggest drop since the summer of 2021. Inflation and the potential impact of a trade war are dampening retail sentiment.
This fragile economic environment may amplify the effects of boycotts, if not in terms of profit, then in terms of brand reputation. As messaging becomes more common in the news and on social media, the current consumer boycotts in the US will be a test of how effective the strategy still is.
Garritt C. Van Dyk has received funding from the Getty Research Institute.
You can doubt just about anything. But there’s one thing you can know for sure: you are having thoughts right now.
This idea came to characterise the philosophical thinking of 17th century philosopher René Descartes. For Descartes, that we have thoughts may be the only thing we can be certain about.
But what exactly are thoughts? This is a mystery that has long troubled philosophers such as Descartes – and which has been given new life by the rise of artificial intelligence, as experts try to figure out whether machines can genuinely think.
Known for his proposition ‘cogito, ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’), Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a leading figure in early modern philosophy and science. Wikimedia
Two schools of thought
There are two main answers to the philosophical question of what thoughts are.
The first is that thoughts might be material things. Thoughts are just like atoms, particles, cats, clouds and raindrops: part and parcel of the physical universe. This position is known as physicalism or materialism.
The second view is that thoughts might stand apart from the physical world. They are not like atoms, but are an entirely distinct type of thing. This view is called dualism, because it takes the world to have a dual nature: mental and physical.
To better understand the difference between these views, consider a thought experiment.
Suppose God is building the world from scratch. If physicalism is true, then all God needs to do to produce thoughts is build the basic physical components of reality – the fundamental particles – and put in place the laws of nature. Thoughts should follow.
However, if dualism is true, then putting in place the basic laws and physical components of reality will not produce thoughts. Some non-physical aspects of reality will need to be added, as thoughts are something over and above all physical components.
Why be a materialist?
If thoughts are physical, what physical things are they? One plausible answer is they are brain states.
This answer underpins much of contemporary neuroscience and psychology. Indeed, it is the apparent link between brains and thoughts that makes materialism seem plausible.
There are many correlations between our brain states and our thoughts. Certain parts of the brain predictably “light up” when someone is in pain, or if they think about the past or future.
What explains these correlations? One answer is that our thoughts just are varying states of the brain. This answer, if correct, speaks in favour of materialism.
Why be a dualist?
That said, the correlations between brain states and thoughts are just that: correlations. We don’t have an explanation of how brain states – or any physical states for that matter – give rise to conscious thought.
There is a well-known correlation between striking a match and the match lighting. But in addition to the correlation, we also have an explanation for why the match is lit when struck. The friction causes a chemical reaction in the match head, which leads to a release of energy.
We have no comparable explanation for a link between thoughts and brain states. After all, there seem to be many physical things that don’t have thoughts. We have no idea why brain states give rise to thoughts and chairs don’t.
Scans can show when and where our brains ‘light up’, but a clear connection between thoughts and brain states eludes us. Shutterstock
The colour scientist
The thing we are most certain about – that we have thoughts – is still completely unexplained in physical terms. That’s not for a lack of effort. Neuroscience, philosophy, cognitive science and psychology have all been hard at work trying to crack this mystery.
But it gets worse: we may never be able to explain how thoughts arise from neural states. To understand why, consider this famous thought experiment by Australian philosopher Frank Jackson.
Mary lives her entire life in a black-and-white room. She has never experienced colour. However, she also has access to a computer which contains a complete account of every physical aspect of the universe, including all the physical and neurological details of experiencing colour. She learns all of this.
One day, Mary leaves the room and experiences colour for the first time. Does she learn anything new?
It is very tempting to think she does: she learns what it’s like to experience colour. But remember, Mary already knew every physical fact about the universe. So if she learns something new, it must be some non-physical fact. Moreover, the fact she learns comes through experience, which means there must be some non-physical aspect to experience.
If you think Mary learns something new by leaving the room, you must accept dualism to be true in some form. And if that’s the case, then we can’t provide an explanation of thought in terms of the brain’s functions, or so philosophers have argued.
Minds and machines
Settling the question of what thoughts are won’t completely settle the question of whether machines can think, but it would help.
If thoughts are physical, then there’s no reason, in principle, why machines couldn’t think.
If thoughts are not physical, however, it’s less clear whether machines could think. Would it be possible to get them “hooked up” to the non-physical in the right way? This would depend on how non-physical thoughts relate to the physical world.
Either way, pursuing the question of what thoughts are will likely have significant implications for how we think about machine intelligence, and our place in nature.
Sam Baron receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
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