Psyche was the Greek goddess of the soul, born a mere mortal and later married to Eros, the God of love. Who knows why the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis gave her name to a celestial object he observed one night in 1852?
Psyche was only the 16th “asteroid” ever discovered: inhabitants of the Solar System that were neither the familiar planets nor the occasional visitors known as comets. Today we know the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains millions of space rocks, ranging in size from the dwarf planet Ceres down to tiny pebbles and grains of dust.
Among all these, Psyche is still special. With an average diameter of around 226km, the potato-shaped planetoid is the largest “M-type” asteroid, made largely of iron and nickel, much like Earth’s core.
Last week NASA launched a spacecraft to rendezvous with Psyche. The mission will take a six-year, 3.6 billion kilometre journey to gather clues that Earth scientists like me will interrogate for information about the inaccessible interior of our own world.
Natural laboratories
M-type asteroids like Psyche are thought to be the remnants of planets destroyed in the early years of the Solar System. In these asteroids, heavier elements (like metals) sank toward the centre and lighter elements floated up to the outer layers. Then, due to collisions with other objects, the outer layers were torn away and most of the material was ejected into space, leaving behind the metal-rich core.
These metallic worlds are perfect “natural laboratories” for studying planetary cores.
Our current methods for studying Earth’s core are quite indirect. We sometimes get tiny glimpses into the Solar System’s early history – and hence our planet’s own history – from metallic meteorites, parts of asteroids that fall to Earth. However, this view is very limited.
Another way to study the core is using seismology: studying how the vibrations caused by earthquakes travel through the planet’s interior, in much the same way doctors can use ultrasound to see the inside of our bodies.
However, on Earth we have fewer seismographs in the oceans and in the Southern Hemisphere, which restrict what we can see of the core.
What’s more, the core is buried beneath the planet’s outer layers, which obscure our view even further. It is like looking at a distant object through an imperfect lens.
As well as seismology, we learn about the core through lab experiments attempting to recreate the high pressures and temperatures of Earth’s interior.
We take the observations from seismology and lab experiments and try to explain them using computer simulations. In a recent paper in Nature Communications, we discussed the current challenges in studying Earth’s core – and the ways forward.
What the Psyche mission hopes to discover
We can think of NASA’s mission to Psyche as a journey to the centre of Earth without having to travel down through the planet’s rocky crust, the slowly moving mantle and the liquid core.
The mission aims to find out whether Psyche really is the core of a destroyed planet, that was initially hot and molten but slowly cooled and solidified like the core of our planet. On the other hand it’s possible Psyche is made of material that was never melted at all.
NASA also wants to discover how old Psyche’s surface is, which would reveal how long ago it lost its outer layers. The mission will also investigate the asteroid’s chemical composition: whether it contains lighter elements alongside iron and nickel, such as oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, silicon and sulphur. The presence or absence of these could give us clues about our own planet’s evolution.
Information about Psyche’s shape, mass, and gravity distribution will also be gathered. Also, the potential for future mineral exploration should be studied.
All of this will be possible with the broad-spectrum cameras, spectrometers, magnetometers, gravimeters and other instruments the spacecraft carries. Scientists like me will follow with impatience the mission’s long journey through space.
Hrvoje Tkalčić receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
There have been incredible advances in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in recent years. And stories about celebrities who have “beaten” breast cancer continue to be a source of inspiration for many people.
However, this emphasis on fighting, beating and surviving cancer shuts out the voices of those who will not survive. That is, the many people diagnosed with incurable, life-limiting metastatic breast cancer, which kills nine Australians every day or nearly 3,300 people a year. Yet an estimated 10,000 Australians are living with the diagnosis.
Being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, as one of the authors has been, means ongoing treatment to live as long, and as well, as possible. It also means an ongoing need for emotional and practical support.
However, society, health-care professionals, cancer advocacy organisations, even a patient’s closest family and friends, can struggle to understand what it is like to live with an incurable and life-limiting cancer and how best to provide support.
Why is there so little awareness?
Metastatic breast cancer, also called stage four breast cancer, is the most serious form of breast cancer. Unlike early breast cancer that is contained within the breast or nearby lymph nodes, metastatic breast cancer has spread to other parts of the body, most often the bones, lungs, liver, or brain.
There is no cure for metastatic breast cancer despite decades of advocacy, funding and research. Treatment continues for as long as it helps to control the cancer and is tolerated by the patient. Median survival is two to three years, although newer, novel treatments mean some patients are living much longer.
As a society, we can be uncomfortable talking about and facing death. When it comes to cancer, we usually prefer focusing on good news stories. These narratives are often perceived to be better for fundraising and are reassuring for people newly diagnosed. But they fail to represent the diversity and reality of cancer experiences.
Despite considerable research into people with non-metastatic breast cancer, relatively little is known about Australians with metastatic breast cancer.
Through our research we wanted to better understand people’s experiences of metastatic breast cancer. We interviewed 38 participants from around Australia with diverse experiences of metastatic breast cancer. Participants were recruited through breast cancer and community organisations.
We found messages and public campaigns about cancer survivorship, which emphasise hope and positivity, drowned out the voices of those with metastatic breast cancer. The focus on “success stories” about surviving breast cancer made some people feel like it was their responsibility to “beat” cancer. If they didn’t, it was their own fault. As one interviewee told us:
I react quite badly to all the, ‘we’ve had breast cancer and we beat it and we’ve survived. Aren’t we fantastic.’ There’s almost a feeling if you haven’t beaten your breast cancer you haven’t tried hard enough.
Silence around metastatic breast cancer was common in research participants’ experiences. It prevented many from connecting with others and to the support they needed. It even affected relationships with those closest to them leaving them feeling misunderstood:
They don’t realise I’ve got to be on treatment forever. I’m not going to be cured. I think society thinks everything can be fixed; metastatic breast cancer actually can’t be fixed.
Sharing deep fears and worries about their life expectancy can leave people with metastatic breast cancer feeling drained rather than supported. Many participants reported having to support and shield family, friends, acquaintances and work colleagues from the reality of their terminal diagnosis.
You hide how you feel because you don’t want to be avoided […] You put on that big, happy face. But like an onion if you peeled the layers away, you’d find out what’s going on.
While many participants wanted to join a community of people with metastatic breast cancer, they struggled to know how to find one. Those who did, emphasised how invaluable it had been:
Being able to identify with and know that these people really get me is a huge relief and it reduces the isolation.
Being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer can be terrifying, lonely and create significant support needs. It is essential people with metastatic breast cancer have their voices listened to and their needs met.
increasing representation of people with metastatic breast cancer in advocacy, support organisations and research
nationwide access to peer-to-peer programs and professionally led metastatic breast cancer support groups.
We must ensure people with metastatic breast cancer are the ones to speak to their experience and needs. As a colleague with metastatic breast cancer said:
I read an article written by an early-stage breast cancer ‘survivor’. It felt like someone describing winter when they had only ever experienced autumn.
If you or someone you know has metastatic breast cancer, these organisations may be able to support you or connect you with others with the same diagnosis:
McGrath Foundation for information about access to metastatic breast care nurses.
The authors would like to thank the members of Breast Cancer Network Australia’s Metastatic Breast Cancer Lived Experience Reference Group for their review of this article.
Sophie Lewis receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Andrea Smith receives funding from a Daffodil Centre Research Fellowship, The Professor Martin Tattersall ECR Oncology Award and the University of Sydney Bright Ideas Award. She works on a voluntary basis with several national and international breast cancer advocacy organisations including Breast Cancer Network Australia (BCNA) and the ABC Global Alliance.
Katherine Kenny receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
While the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has been warming for decades, the annual extent of winter sea ice seemed relatively stable – compared to the Arctic. In some areas Antarctic sea ice was even increasing.
In 2018 the international scientific community agreed to produce the first marine ecosystem assessment for the Southern Ocean. We modelled the assessment process on a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). So the resulting “summary for policymakers” being released today is like an IPCC report for the Southern Ocean.
This report can now be used to guide decision-making for the protection and conservation of this vital region and the diversity of life it contains.
Sea ice is to life in the Southern Ocean as soil is to a forest. It is the foundation for Antarctic marine ecosystems.
Less sea ice is a danger to all wildlife – from krill to emperor penguins and whales.
The sea ice zone provides essential food and safe-keeping to young Antarctic krill and small fish, and seeds the expansive growth of phytoplankton in spring, nourishing the entire food web. It is a platform upon which penguins breed, seals rest, and around which whales feed.
The international bodies that manage Antarctica and the Southern Ocean under the Antarctic Treaty System urgently need better information on marine ecosystems. Our report helps fill this gap by systematically identifying options for managers to maximise the resilience of Southern Ocean ecosystems in a changing world.
We sought input from a wide range of people across the entire Southern Ocean science community.
We sought to answer questions about the state of the whole Southern Ocean system – with an eye on the past, present and future.
Our team comprised 205 authors from 19 countries. They authored 24 peer-reviewed papers. We then distilled the findings from these papers into our summmary for policymakers.
We deliberately modelled the multi-disciplinary assessment process on a working group of the IPCC to distill the science into an easy-to-read and concise narrative for politicians and the general public alike. It provides a community assessment of levels of certainty around what we know.
We hope this “sea change” summary sets a new benchmark for translating marine research into policy responses.
Southern Ocean habitats, from the ice at the surface to the bottom of the deep sea, are changing. The warming of the ocean, decline in sea ice, melting of glaciers, collapse of ice shelves, changes in acidity, and direct human activities such as fishing, are all impacting different parts of the ocean and their inhabitants.
These organisms, from microscopic plants to whales, face a changing and challenging future. Important foundation species such as Antarctic krill are likely to decline with consequences for the whole ecosystem.
The assessment stresses climate change is the most significant driver of species and ecosystem change in the Southern Ocean and coastal Antarctica. It calls for urgent action to curb global heating and ocean acidification.
It reveals an urgent need for international investment in sustained, year-round and ocean-wide scientific assessment and observations of the health of the ocean.
We also need to develop better integrated models of how individual changes in species along with human impacts will translate to system-level change in the different food webs, communities and species.
Our report will be tabled at this week’s international meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources in Hobart.
The commission is the international body responsible for the conservation of marine ecosystems in the Southern Ocean, with membership of 26 nations and the European Union.
It is but one of the bodies our new report can assist. Currently assessments of change in habitats, species and food webs in the Southern Ocean are compiled separately for at least ten different international organisations or processes.
The Southern Ocean is a crucial life-support system, not just for Antarctica but for the entire planet. So many other bodies will need the information we produced for decision-making in this critical decade for action on climate, including the IPCC itself.
Beyond the science, the assessment team has delivered important lessons about how coordinated, collaborative and consultative approaches can deliver ecosystem information into policymaking. Our first assessment has taken five years, but this is just the beginning. Now we’re up and running, we can continue to support evidence-based conservation of Southern Ocean ecosystems into the future.
Andrew J Constable has worked for the Australian Public Service in the Australian Antarctic Division, received funding from Pew Charitable Trusts, and, for the marine ecosystem assessment for the Southern Ocean, he received funding from environmental and fisheries non-government organisations (details are identified in the Summary for Policy Makers).
Jess Melbourne-Thomas receives funding from the Climate Systems Hub of the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program, and the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation.
Cities are hard for wildlife. Many animal species avoid the cars, buildings, smog and fragmented habitats of urban environments. Then there’s the noise pollution, a serious issue for humans and animals alike, according to the World Health Organization.
Human-made (anthropogenic) noise can be very bad for animals. Busy cities can make it harder for animals to reproduce, communicate and behave naturally.
But magpies have generally found our cities to their liking. There is enough food about – and they can usually out-compete other urban bird species.
Even within magpie populations, there are differences in how individuals cope with noise. Our new research has found the magpies that perform better on an associative learning task are better able to maintain their normal anti-predator behaviours in noise. That is, the smarter the magpie, the better they are likely to do in our cities.
Cities like Perth offer grass, open space – and a lot of noisy machines. Shutterstock
What does noise do to a magpie?
While magpies are often thought of as similar to crows, they’re not corvids at all and not related to Eurasian magpies. Their closest relatives are actually butcherbirds.
To date, most research on the damage done by human-made noise has examined what it means for a species or population. There’s been little work done on how individuals respond differently to noise. What we do know suggests factors such as the sex, age, body condition and prior experience with noise can change how animals cope with noise.
But what about cognition? Animals from the same species can have very different cognitive abilities – the ways an animal perceive, store and respond to information from their environment.
So would smarter animals be more able to change their behaviour to survive better in the urban jungle?
To find out, we observed all behaviours shown in timed 20-minute periods by 75 wild magpies in Perth (to a total of 333 observation periods). We also played magpie alarm calls with and without the noise of planes in the background to 24 magpies to see how plane noise affected their anti-predator response.
These wild magpies live in Perth, Western Australia and have been studied consistently since 2013. Most birds have coloured rings or bands on their legs so we can easily identify them.
Urban parks offer good foraging for magpies – if they can put up with our noise. James Blackburn, CC BY-ND
Individual identification meant we could test the intelligence of 52 of these magpies to see whether performing better on associative-learning tests would change how birds respond to and cope with anthropogenic noise.
The first thing we found was, yes, magpies find our noise difficult to handle. Our observations revealed loud man-made noises such as traffic, airplanes, or leafblowers forced magpies to spend more time vigilant and alert to threats, to sing less, and to forage less efficiently.
That’s likely because these magpies saw anthropogenic noise as dangerous or threatening stimuli, or as a distraction. That forces them to spend more time alert, with less time for other important behaviours.
But there are other potential causes too. Noise from a bustling restaurant strip may drown out small sounds magpies use as cues, such as the rustle of beetles burrowing under leaf litter.
Magpies have broadly adapted well to life in Australia’s cities. Shutterstock
We also found human-made noise made it harder for our birds to respond to a magpie alarm call, used to warn others of predators. When we played an alarm call in isolation, about 37% of birds sought cover. When we added the noise of a plane flying overhead to the alarm, only 8% of birds fled. This suggests birds couldn’t properly hear and respond to this cue of danger.
Our magpies also spent much more time on alert after an alarm call played alone compared to an alarm call played with human-made noise. This suggests their normal anti-predator response doesn’t work as well against a backdrop of our noise.
Why would intelligence help magpies deal with noise?
Researchers in the United Kingdom working on animal cognition suggest better cognition on a species level may help animals cope with new environments or environmental stress. Other researchers argue cognition is what makes it possible to adapt to and succeed in urban environments.
To test this, we gave magpies a learning task to measure their intelligence and cognition. Could they associate a colour cue with a food reward? How long did it take them to learn that, say, dark blue meant a snack?
This test is a measurement of how quickly they learn. It’s thought to be involved in how successful an animal is in foraging, social interactions and responding to predators.
We found smarter birds reacted more similarly to a standalone alarm call as they did to one with a noisy plane in the background. By contrast, less intelligent birds responded significantly less to alarm calls with plane noise compared to an alarm call alone.
For a magpie, that could be the difference between life or death. If you’re clever enough to shut out the background noise of the plane so you can better hear a warning, you stand a better chance of surviving, say, a dog rushing you at a park.
Birds with better associative learning may also be better in other aspects of intelligence too. In fact, previous research on this species found birds that performed better in one cognitive task also performed better in other cognitive tasks.
As researchers learn more about animal intelligence, we’ll find out more about how associative learning helps animals adapt – and why these abilities are so strongly conserved in evolution.
Our study reveals intelligence matters for individual animals as they grapple with how to adapt to and cope with human-induced stressors.
But adults can face the dilemma of how to talk to children about these incredibly serious issues without upsetting them further.
We are educational linguists investigating how writers and illustrators communicate ideas related to climate change to children. Books are an important way to help conversations around climate change in safe, age-appropriate ways.
Here are six books from Australian writers and illustrators that can help parents and carers look at issues related to climate change with children from preschool to the late primary years.
They have been chosen because they offer their readers hope, foster relationships to the environment and encourage agency and courage. These can all help children develop positive coping strategies around climate change.
1. Walk of the Whales by Nick Bland
For children four and up
Walk of the Whales shows children how the world around them is interconnected.
It is a simple tale of what happens when whales walk out of polluted oceans and establish homes on land. The ensuing chaos is brought to life through humorous illustrations, where the whales are shown wreaking havoc on their new homes. Imagine sharing a lane at the swimming pool with an whale or the state of the pavements when whales play jumprope!
This thought-provoking tale is told with a lightness of touch which will delight young readers while illustrating the consequences of our actions in a delicately balanced world.
2. Iceberg by Claire Saxby and illustrated by Jess Racklyeft
For children five and up
Iceberg is a beautifully illustrated book that brings the luminescent beauty of Antarctica to life. It is told from the perspective of an iceberg over the course of a year.
It presents Antarctica as rich, dynamic and teeming with abundant sea life. For children, Iceberg makes a gentle plea to appreciate and protect the world around us before it is lost forever.
How to Bee is set in a future Australia where insecticide has rendered bees extinct.
The importance of biodiversity is a key theme, as is our place within the ecosystem.
However, the strongest environmental message is carried by the fierce nine-year-old, Peony. Her fraught battle to return home parallels the return of bees to the farm and hope for the future.
For children struggling with climate anxiety and feelings of powerlessness, this novel models strategies for building resilience.
4. Bindi by Kirli Saunders and illustrated by Dub Leffler
For children eight to 12 years
With an El Niño event underway in Australia, young readers may find refuge from climate anxiety in the pages of Bindi.
This beautifully illustrated verse novel is told from the perspective of an 11-year-old Indigenous girl as her town survives catastrophic bushfires.
The poetry evokes an idyllic rural childhood while also propelling a cracking plot. Gundungurra language (from south east New South Wales) is woven throughout, inviting readers to learn Language (canbe means fire). Children will find strength in this story of perseverance and healing and may also develop a deeper connection to Country.
5. The Giant and the Sea by Trent Jamieson and illustrated by Rovina Cai
For children eight and up
This is an exquisitely illustrated picture book that tackles climate change in a lyrical and rhythmical style.
A giant stands watch over the sea and warns a “brave girl” the sea is rising. This girl is reminiscent of young climate activists whose warnings – like those of our child hero – are often dismissed, with increasingly disastrous consequences.
The book deals with themes of whose voices count, the problem of unsustainable growth and how humans will adapt to different futures.
The Giant and the Sea doesn’t shy away from the effects of global warming, noting, “There is only so much that bravery can do”. Despite its dystopian conclusion, young readers will find the book motivating and hopeful because it shows they have a role to play alongside adults in this multigenerational problem.
6. Blueback by Tim Winton
For children eight and up
Blueback charts the life of Abel from child to adult.
It is a fable that explores his deep connection to ocean life and the human pressures on the natural world.
Through Abel’s mother Dora, Winton offers children a hero whose dogged but successful campaign to save a threatened site spreads
like a coral spawn, those letters, tiny white messages that drifted out from Longboat Bay into the offices of people all of the country.
In such beautiful prose, Winton shows children the importance of courage and resilience and reminds us all of our collective responsibility for the environment. This is a book that can inspire readers of all ages.
Pauline Jones is currently engaged in literacy research projects funded by the NSW Department of Education and the Association of Independent Schools, NSW. She has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is President of the Primary English Teaching Association Australia.
Annette Turney is currently engaged in literacy research projects funded by the NSW Department of Education.
Anne Hellwig does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A decade ago, William Shakespeare was the most performed playwright in Australia. In 2024 not one mainstage theatre company in Australia will perform Shakespeare. The only exception will be Bell Shakespeare.
This shift has been a long time coming. Theatre makers such as Lachlan Philpott, Nakkiah Lui and Andrew Bovell have been calling for less Shakespeare and more new work since the mid-2010s.
Today, their advocacy is bearing fruit.
Of the 79 plays being performed in 2024, 68 (87%) were written after 2000, 60 (76%) were written after 2014, and 23 (29%) will have their world premiere in 2024. Only three were written prior to the 20th century – and that’s if you count Kip Williams’ new adaptation of Dracula, alongside Bell Shakespeare’s two plays.
New work is important. A truly rich cultural conversation must include a variety of voices and fresh perspectives. But alongside new work and new voices, nuanced engagement with the past is needed.
A forum for conversations
Shakespeare is important, not just because he wrote great plays, and definitely not because he is perfect. He is important because we have, for 400 years, made him important, using his work to have rich conversations about identity, truth, meaning and morality.
These conversations are worth participating in.
Australia’s mainstage comprises 11 companies: State Theatre Company of South Australia in Adelaide; Queensland Theatre and La Boite Theatre in Brisbane; Melbourne Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne; Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth; and Belvoir, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company, Ensemble Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney. All except La Boite have announced their 2024 seasons.
The fact that none of these companies will perform Shakespeare next year suggests a decline in engagement with the canon outside of adaptations.
Edwin Landseer, Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania and Bottom (1848-1851). Oil on canvas 82.0×133.0cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1932. Photo: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. CC BY-NC
This decline is, in some ways, justified. We don’t need to perform Shakespeare all the time. We certainly don’t need to trot out tired, uninspired performances just for the sake of doing Shakespeare.
But if new work is not in conversation with the canon, we risk taking an uncritical and oversimplified view of the past – and present and future. We risk understanding ourselves merely through the lens of now, rather than enriching our present through discussion with our history.
Playwrights Philpott and Bovell have expressed understandable frustration at productions tying themselves in knots trying to make Shakespeare “relevant”. If your aim is to make the text reflect modern values, why not simply perform a new play?
Perhaps we do need a break from Shakespeare if all we can do is insist he is always, and in all things, our contemporary.
There is an alternative to this false dilemma. We are not restricted to either using Shakespeare as a sock puppet to voice our own ideas, or ignoring him altogether. Rather, we can perform Shakespeare in a critically engaged, nuanced way.
This means avoiding easy categories like “problematic” or “universal”. Like any fruitful conversation, it means listening, sitting with discomfort, learning, recognising what still speaks to us, and responding to what doesn’t.
Conversing with Shakespeare does not mean smoothing over problems or forcing him to agree with us. Sydney Theatre Company’s 2022 production of The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, attempted to correct the play’s racism by radically editing the text.
By trying to solve The Tempest, the production glossed over its problems rather than engaging critically with them.
There are excellent examples of Australian theatre makers grappling with problems in Shakespeare.
Anne-Louise Sarks’ 2017 production of The Merchant of Venice for Bell Shakespeare explored the uncomfortable religious and social dynamics of the play.
The scenes in which Shylock is forced to surrender both his property and his faith were jarringly and uncomfortably melancholy. There was no attempt to shrug off the pain of the play’s conclusion for Shylock and his daughter Jessica.
Jason Klarwein and Jimi Bani’s 2022 Othello at Queensland Theatre used translation, casting and design choices to confront and interrogate the themes of the play.
This production explored and highlighted racism and sexism, both in 20th century Australia, and within the play itself.
Othello has a vexed performance history, and this production was an important contribution to a 400-year-old conversation.
In Benedict Andrews’ 2009 production of The War of the Roses for Sydney Theatre Company, Shakespeare’s Henry V was stripped back to a series of soliloquies spoken by Ewen Leslie.
Covered in glitter, then oil, and eventually blood, Leslie as Henry V invited audiences to confront not only the humanity of “the warlike Harry”, but also the horror associated with his military triumph.
Talking back to history
By confronting – rather than avoiding, removing or “fixing” problems in Shakespeare – productions can invite audiences to ask important questions. Why have certain ideas been acceptable in the past? Why are they not so now? What are we doing differently today, and what should we be doing differently?
Nuanced, two-way conversations with our cultural history are vital to progress.
Decolonising the canon does not mean ignoring it, but dialoguing with it. It means learning from, questioning, and talking back to our history. Doing this will allow us to better understand our present and know who we would like to be in our future.
Of the 79 works being performed on the 2024 Australian mainstage, 68 were written in the new millennium. Shifting the balance of old and new ever-so-slightly would enrich our cultural conversation.
For an election ostensibly fought over a “cost-of-living crisis”, there was a strong unspoken consensus between the two major parties: most people’s living standards needed to reduce to thwart inflation. Regardless of the election result, a form of austerity was always going to win.
Both National and Labour essentially agreed with the Reserve Bank hiking interest rates to bring down inflation – a crude market discipline likely to cause redundancies, suppress wages, and increase debt and inequality.
Such policies – classically neoliberal, specifically monetarist – are presented as if there is no alternative. Yet other countries have successfully used other measures to protect living standards, including wealth taxes, rent caps, windfall taxes on excessive profits, and major subsidies on energy payments.
While National and Labour both offered targeted support for those struggling to get by, such as tax cuts (National) or the removal of GST from fruit and vegetables (Labour), such mitigation seems paltry by comparison.
Only smaller parties, notably the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, offered policies aimed at changing fundamental economic settings.
Radical incrementalism?
Of course, there were and are important differences between Labour and National. Many contend Labour has abandoned the free-market fundamentalism associated with “Rogernomics” that it adopted in the 1980s.
Under the Labour governments led by Jacinda Ardern and then Chris Hipkins, there was an attempt to ameliorate the worst excesses of market capitalism.
Hipkins, for instance, insisted Labour’s policies were not simply about “tinkering around the edges of the neoliberal model”. He spoke of “radical incrementalism” – allowing a government to “do big change”.
In that light, the 2017-23 Labour government lifted the minimum wage, introduced fair pay agreements, built state houses, increased Working for Families wage subsidies, and intervened during a pandemic and natural disasters to support people and jobs.
Labour also reformed the Reserve Bank’s targets to include “maximum sustainable employment”, alongside the bank’s traditional goal of keeping inflation within a 1–3% band.
Beyond Aotearoa New Zealand, neoliberalism’s demise was proclaimed in the aftermath of the 2007-09 global financial crisis, as governments everywhere shored up the financial sector.
The obituaries have increased since the COVID pandemic. In the United States, Joe Biden’s preference for public investment prompted one commentator to claim the president had “declared the death of neoliberalism”.
The ‘third way’
Given the Labour government’s track record, then, it might seem unfair to label it a neoliberal administration. But I think such reasoning is mistaken on several counts.
A rough scholarly consensus has emerged that neoliberalism has shown a remarkable ability to evolve. Labour – and to some extent National – have rejected the harsh “vanguard neoliberalism” of the 1980s and ‘90s. Instead, they have embraced the mild neoliberalism of “third way” politics since 1999.
Sometimes called the “post-Washington consensus”, third way economics accepts the need for some government intervention in the market, something the more hardline “Washington consensus” of the late 1980s did not.
Yet under this softer form of neoliberalism, governments do not intervene to genuinely redistribute wealth. Instead, they act to temporarily support business during crises.
For example, the Labour government’s COVID business support and wage subsidy scheme was supposedly undertaken to protect workers from unemployment.
In reality, it facilitated a massive upward transfer of wealth by subsidising businesses, and boosting house prices and private savings. That wealth transfer amounted to about NZ$1 trillion, according to economic commentator Bernard Hickey.
Hickey also argued governments of both stripes have effectively cut social services such as housing, health and education in real per-capita terms, as the population has increased. For the most part, increased funding has not stayed level with inflation.
We might call this austerity by stealth, with one example being the current funding crisis in tertiary education that has resulted in many job cuts.
In this sense, the various palliative reforms made by the Ardern-Hipkins governments do not represent a fundamental swing away from neoliberalism. Crucially, both prime ministers ruled out any kind of wealth or capital gains tax, and generally kept tax levels low (despite a small increase in the highest income tax rate).
Tellingly, the US Heritage Foundation – a think tank devoted to the “principles of free enterprise, limited government [and] individual freedom” – still ranks New Zealand fifth in its global “index of economic freedom”.
While Labour’s Reserve Bank reforms appeared to modify its monetary priorities to maximise sustainable employment, its governor admitted raising interest rates to control inflation was deliberately engineering a recession, with a likely rise in unemployment.
Before becoming prime minister in 2017, Ardern agreed with the view of previous National prime minister Jim Bolger that neoliberalism had failed. She said Labour accepted the need for government intervention in the market.
This might qualify as a rejection of neoliberalism if we define it only as a set of ideas or policies designed to “hollow out the state” and promote free-market, individualistic competition.
But there is another view of neoliberalism, put forward by historian Quinn Slobodian and other scholars, that it was never about rejecting big government. Rather, at its core, it is about imposing a global and state framework that favours business and private property.
To achieve this, they argue, the state restricts democracy, trade unions and community interest groups from achieving genuine improvements in ordinary people’s lives. Slobodian sees neoliberalism as involving “re-regulation” rather than deregulation.
The underlying consensus
None of this means Labour and National mirror each other. Labour is more centrist, more committed to maintaining public services. National is more business-friendly and seems poised to make deeper cuts to public services.
To differing degrees, National and its probable coalition partner ACT reject the “progressive” aspects of what feminist scholar Nancy Fraser called “progressive neoliberalism”. They aim to roll back most of Labour’s incremental reforms, and are aligned in their opposition to what they see as excessive government spending and regulation.
But beneath those apparent ideological differences there remains an underlying neoliberal consensus. Roughly speaking, this compact aims to keep taxes low, push for free trade agreements, maintain a largely deregulated business sector, enable financial speculation, and use interest rates to combat inflation.
Above all, the goal is to be “fiscally responsible” by keeping government spending tight and the debt-to-GDP ratio low. Austerity is the means by which this is achieved, whether by stealth or through more upfront cuts.
It was perhaps predictable that governments everywhere would revert to austerity to pay down debts incurred during the pandemic. But those same governments are also struggling with broader economic, climate, housing, health and education crises.
Wars and political polarisation generally have added to a sense that neoliberalism’s hegemony is fraying. There has been a trend towards more nationalist and authoritarian government – although not yet in Aotearoa New Zealand to any great extent.
Given we are now seeing living standards squeezed to combat inflation, and government austerity to pay off COVID debts, neoliberalism still seems embedded in the political and economic fabric of Aotearoa. This is especially so with the election success of parties promising to reduce government spending.
Toby Boraman 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 priority for Gaza is not bandages and aspirins — they need loud voices condemning Israeli genocide. They need the bombing and killing to stop.
Early last week Hipkins condemned the killing of civilians in the Hamas attack on Israel but has refused to condemn Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people.
Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa John Minto . . .
The “collective punishment” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza; the withholding of food, water, electricity and fuel; the intensive massive bombing of densely populated civilian areas of Gaza — these are all war crimes. Genocide is the only name that fits.
More than 700 children have been killed so far by Israeli bombing with civilian casualties of more than 2800.
Green light to orgy of killing By refusing to condemn these killings, Hipkins is giving Israel the green light to continue its orgy of killing in Gaza.
Hipkins says he is “deeply saddened” by civilians deaths. But not deeply saddened enough to call out the colonial, apartheid state of Israel whose racist policies against Palestinians are the cause of the slaughter in Gaza.
Similarly, when Hipkins says “we call on all parties to respect international humanitarian law, and uphold their obligations to protect civilians, and humanitarian workers, including medical personnel”, it is a meaningless gap-filler in a government media release.
Hipkins’ announcement will be welcomed in Washington and Tel Aviv but will be deplored by decent people around the world who call for human rights for Palestinians and accountabilities for apartheid Israel.
The Prime Minister has our loudest voice — we demand he use it to help end the slaughter of civilians in Gaza by sheeting home blame where it belongs — with the policies of the racist, apartheid state of Israel.
John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidaity Network Aotearoa.
The above chart shows that the world’s governments, taken collectively, run financial deficits every year. This is not a weakness of the global financial system; it’s a strength, perhaps the strength of the world system. Government deficits offset private sector financial choices.
We note that when the world government deficit becomes unusually small, as in 2000 and 2006/07, the world’s financial system is at its least stable. 2000 to 2001 was the dotcom financial bust, and 2008/09 was the global financial crisis. These small crisis-preceding deficits are a result of substantial speculative activity accruing in some portions of the private sector, reducing overall private surpluses; essentially larger than usual amounts of private speculative borrowing.
After a financial crisis – indeed as a playing-out of such a crisis – the private sector (defined as combined non-government financial participants) runs unusually large financial surpluses which must be accommodated by government deficits. Any economic recession which follows a financial crisis indicates insufficient government accommodation of private retrenchment.
Those large private financial surpluses were not as large as the panicked parties would like them to have been. As a result of a financial crisis, private participants seek to pay down as much debt as they can as quickly as they can, and most reduce investment spending in favour of increased saving. The extent to which private parties can achieve their distress goals is determined by governments’ willingness to extend government debt and to run down sovereign (and local government) wealth funds.
Not all economic crises commence with a financial crisis. We see the size of the Covid19-led crisis in the 2020 balances. In this case, it was the governments who initiated their increased deficits by becoming much more willing to borrow than usual, though in a financial environment that was making the private sector much less willing to borrow. So the private sector was very happy in 2020 to underwrite new government debt.
It’s worth noting the IMF’s forecasts for 2023 to 2028 (shown in muted colours). These forecasts are conservative. While I think the post-covid recovery was on the way to creating a financially speculative environment (such as in 2005), the subsequent wars will probably lead to 2023 and 2024 balances similar to 2018 rather than to 2007.
While I think it very likely that there will be a new Great Depression commencing as soon as 2026, rather than a financial crisis the lead-up will be the military/environmental cost-crisis which is already well under way; a crisis that I imagine will precipitate a global stagflation in the later 2020s. (We note that military costs are threefold: economic activity diverted from peacetime into military production; the fact that an active military substantially exacerbates the existing environmental crises which include excessive greenhouse gas emissions; and the military destruction of human beings, ecosystems, housing, and public utility infrastructure.) In other words, the financial lead-up to the next economic crisis may be more like the lead-up to the covid pandemic crisis; nevertheless, we should look out for elements of excessive financial speculation in 2024 and 2025.
(Note on source data. The IMF does not provide World balances directly. But they do provide balances separately for advanced economies and for emerging/developing economies. The data shown is a weighted average of these two groups, with combined advanced countries having a 70% weight and emerging a 30% weight. Changing those weights would not make much difference to the chart.)
I finish here with two charts which show just how exceptional New Zealand’s financial balances have been:
Chart by Keith Rankin.Chart by Keith Rankin.
(A country’s government balance is not the exact opposite of its private balance, because a country – but not the world – also has foreign balances.)
We see that New Zealand’s private sector financial sector balances are typically negative (ie deficits); in contrast with the world, which shows positive financial balances (surpluses) each year. Sometimes these private deficits are very large. (We note that, due to a technicality, 2019 New Zealand data are contaminated by data from the first half of 2020 – meaning the initial phases of the pandemic.)
New Zealand’s exceptionalism is less apparent in the chart showing government balances for New Zealand and the world. But the exceptionalism is still clearly there; except for the crisis years at the turn of each decade within this century.
If most other countries had tried to follow New Zealand’s long-term financial model then the world economy would be in perpetual crisis. But New Zealand’s exceptional strategy does work because it is exceptional, because most others do not follow it; indeed New Zealand’s strategy offsets the very different financial strategies followed by most other advanced countries. When some countries follow one kind of destabilising strategy and others follow the opposite kind of destabilising strategy, then indeed two wrongs can make a 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.
The referendum on the indigenous Voice in Australia last Saturday was an historic event. Australians were asked to vote on whether to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia in the Constitution through an indigenous Voice.
“A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
“Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
The Voice was proposed as an independent, representative body for First Nations peoples to advise the Australian Parliament and government, giving them a voice on issues that affect them.
Here are some key points:
The proposal was to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution by creating a body to advise Parliament, known as the “Voice”.
The “Voice” would be an independent advisory body. Members would be chosen by First Nations communities around Australia to represent them.
The “Voice” would provide advice to governments on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, such as health, education, and housing, in the hope that such advice will lead to better outcomes.
Under the Constitution, the federal government already has the power to make laws for Indigenous people. The “Voice” would be a way for them to be consulted on those laws. However, the government would be under no obligation to act on the advice.
Indigenous people have called for the “Voice” to be included in the Constitution so that it can’t be removed by the government of the day, which has been the fate of every previous indigenous advisory body. It is also the way indigenous people have said they want to be recognised in the constitution as the First Nations with a 65,000-year connection to the continent — not simply through symbolic words.
It was necessary for a majority of voters to vote “yes” nationally, as well as a majority of voters in at least four out of six states, for the referendum to pass.
Unfortunately, it was rejected by the majority with more than 60 percent with the vote still being counted. In all six states and the Northern Territory, a “No” vote was projected.
The Voice vote nationally – “no” ahead with 60 percent with counting still ongoing. Source: The Guardian
According to the ABC, a majority of voters in all six states and the Northern Territory voted against the proposal.
New South Wales 81.2 percent counted, 1.81 million voted yes (40.5 percent) and 2.67M million voted no (59.5 percent).
Victoria 78.5 percent counted, 1.56 million voted yes (45.0 percent), and 1.91 million voted no (55.0 percent).
Tasmania 82.7 percent counted, 134,809 voted yes (40.5 percent), and 198,152 voted no (59.5 percent).
South Australia 79.1 percent counted, 355,682 voted yes (35.4 percent), 648,769 voted no (64.6 percent).
Queensland 74.3 percent counted, 835,159 voted yes (31.2 percent), 1.84 million voted no (68.8 percent).
Western Australia 75.3 percent counted, 495,448 voted yes (36.4 percent), and 866,902 voted no (63.6 percent).
Northern Territory 63.4 percent counted, 37,969 voted yes (39.5 percent), and 58,193 voted no (60.5 percent).
ACT 82.8 percent counted, 158,097 voted yes (60.8 percent), and 102,002 voted no (39.2 percent).
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said the next steps after the failed Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum are yet to be decided and called the expectation of having a plan just days after the vote “not respectful”.
In addition to being viewed as divisive along racial lines, concerns about how the Voice to Parliament would work (whether indigenous Australians would be given greater power) and uncertainties about how the new body would result in meaningful change for indigenous Australians contributed to the rejection.
Australia has held 44 referendums since its founding in 1901. However, the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in 2023 was the first of its kind to focus specifically on Indigenous Australians.
As part of a broader push to establish constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, the Voice proposal was seen as a significant step towards reconciliation and was the result of decades of indigenous advocacy and work.
A key turning point came in 2017 when 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates from across the country met at Uluru for the First Nations’ National Constitutional Convention. The proposal, known as the Voice, sought to recognise Indigenous people in Australia’s constitution and establish a First Nations body to advise the government on issues affecting their communities.
However, the Voice proposal was not unanimously accepted. In the course of the campaign, intense conflict and discussion ensued between supporters and opponents, resulting in what supporters viewed as a tragic outcome, while the victorious opponents celebrated their victory.
The support of Oceania’s indigenous leaders Pacific Islanders expressed their views before the referendum on the Voice to Parliament.
Henry Puna, Secretary-General of the Pacific Islands Forum, said that Australia’s credibility would be boosted on the world stage if the yes vote won the Indigenous voice referendum. He stated that it would be “wonderful” if Australia were to vote yes, because he believed it would elevate Australia’s position, and perhaps even its credibility, internationally.
The former Foreign Minister of Vanuatu (nd current Climate Change Minister), Ralph Regevanu, warned Australia’s reputation would plummet among its allies in the Pacific if the Voice to Parliament was defeated.
These views indicate the potential impact of the voice referendum on Australia’s relationship with Pacific Island nations, which it often refers to as “its own backyard”.
The “No” camp claimed the Voice was an “elite” idea, that “real” Indigenous people didn’t want it, because Peter Dutton had spoken to “shoppers”. Even with the results, they still insist communities did not want one – taking away what little voice they gothttps://t.co/kWt0hjDHEC
Division, defeat and impact A tragic aspect of the Voice proposal is the fact that not only were Australian settlers divided about it, but even worse, indigenous leaders themselves, who were in a position to bring together a fragmented and tormented nation, were at odds with each other — including full-on verbal wars in media.
While their opinions on the proposal were divided, some had practical and realistic ideas to address the problems faced by indigenous communities in remote towns. Others proposed a treaty between settlers and original indigenous people.
There are also those who advocate for a strong political recognition within the nation’s constitutional framework.
Despite these divisions among indigenous leaders, the referendum on Voice represents a significant milestone in the ongoing indigenous resistance that spans over 200 years.
It is a resistance that began on January 26, 1788, when the invasion began (Pemulwuy’s War), and continued through various milestones such as the 1937 Petition for citizenship, land rights, and representation, the 1938 Day of Mourning, the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions, the 1965 Freedom Rides, and the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972.
It further extended to 1990-2005 with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the 1991 Song Treaty by Yothu Yindi, Eddie Mabo overturning terra nullius in 1992, Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology, and the Uluru Statement from the Heart until the recent defeat of the Voice Referendum in 2023.
A dangerous settlers’ myth and its consequences The modern nation of Australia (aged 244 years) has been shaped by one of European myths: “Terra Nullius”, the Latin term for “nobody’s land”. This myth was used to describe the legal position at the time of British colonisation.
Accordingly, the land had been deemed as terra nullius, which implies that it had belonged to no one before the British Crown declared sovereignty over it.
Eddy Mabo: A Melanesian Hero An indigenous Melanesian, Eddy Mabo, overturned this myth in 1992, known as “the Mabo Case,” which recognised the land rights of the Meriam people and other indigenous peoples.
The Mabo Case resulted in significant changes in Australian law in several areas. One of the most notable changes was the overturning of the long-standing legal fiction of “terra nullius,” which posited that Australia was unpopulated (no man’s land) at the time of British colonisation.
In this decision, the High Court of Australia recognized the legal rights of Indigenous Australians to make claims to lands in Australia. It marked a historic moment, as it was the first time that the law acknowledged the traditional rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In addition, the Mabo Case contributed directly to the establishment of the Native Title Act in 1993.
Even though these changes are significant, debates persist regarding the state of indigenous Australians under colonial settlement.
Indigenous Affairs reporter Isabella Higgins says the No victory in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum could change the way Indigenous Australians will want to interact with the rest of the country going forward. pic.twitter.com/g5CxBaU0Op
Indigenous leaders need to see a big picture The recent referendum on the Voice sparked heated debates on a topic that has long been a source of contention: the age-old battle of “my country versus your country, my mob versus your mob, I know best versus you know nothing.”
While it’s important to celebrate and protect cultural diversity and the unique perspectives it brings, it’s equally important to recognise that British settlers didn’t just apply the myth of terra nullius to a select few groups or regions — they applied it to all areas inhabited by indigenous peoples, treating them as a single, homogenous entity.
This means that any solution to indigenous issues must be rooted in a collective, unified voice, rather than a patchwork of fragmented groups.
Indigenous leaders need to prioritise the creation of a unified front among themselves and mobilise their people before seeking support from Australians. Currently, they are engaging in competition, outdoing each other, and fighting over the same issue on mainstream media platforms, indigenous-run media platforms, and social media.
This approach is reminiscent of the “divide, conquer, and rule” strategy that the British effectively employed worldwide to expand and maintain their dominion. This strategy has historically caused harm to indigenous nations worldwide, and it is now harming indigenous people because their leaders are fighting among themselves.
It is important to note that this does not imply a rejection of every distinct indigenous language group, clan, or tribe. However, it is crucial to recognise that indigenous peoples throughout Oceania were viewed through a particular European lens, which scholars refer to as “Eurocentrism”.
This “lens” is a double-edged sword, providing semantic definition and dissection power while also compartmentalising based on a hierarchy of values. Melanesians and indigenous Australians were placed at the bottom of this hierarchy and deemed to be of no historical or cultural significance.
This realisation is of utmost importance for the collective attainment of redemption, unity and reconciliation.
The larger Australian indigenous’ cause From Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s momentous crossing of the Isthmus of Panama to Ferdinand Magellan’s pioneering Spanish expedition across the Pacific Ocean in 1521, and Abel Janszoon Tasman’s remarkable exploration of Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji, to James Cook’s renowned voyages in the Pacific Ocean between 1768 and 1779, the indigenous peoples of Oceania have endured immense suffering and torment as a consequence of the European scramble for these territories.
The indigenous peoples of Oceania were forever scarred by the merciless onslaught of European maritime marauders. When the race for supremacy over these unspoiled regions unfolded, their lives were shattered, and their communities torn asunder.
The web of life in Australia and Oceania was severely disrupted, devalued, rejected, and subjected to brutality and torment as a result of the waves of colonisation that forcefully impacted their shores.
The colonisers imposed various racial prejudices, civilising agendas, legal myths, and the Discovery doctrine, all of which were conceived within the collective conceptual mindset of Europeans and applied to the indigenous people.
These actions have had a lasting and fatalistic impact on the collective indigenous population in Australia and Oceania, resulting in dehumanisation, enslavement, genocide, and persistent marginalisation of their humanity, leading to unwarranted guilt for their mere existence.
The European collective perception of Oceania, exemplified by the notion of terra nullius, has resulted in numerous transgressions of indigenous laws, customs, and cosmologies, affecting every aspect of life within the entire landscape. These violations have led to the loss of land, destruction of language, erasure of memories, and imposition of British customs.
Furthermore, indigenous peoples were forcibly relocated to concentration camps, missions, and reserves.
The Declaration received support from a total of 144 countries, with only four countries (which have historically displaced indigenous populations through settler occupation) voting against it — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
However, all four countries subsequently reversed their positions and endorsed the Declaration. It should be noted that while the Declaration does not possess legal binding force, it does serve as a reflection of the commitments and responsibilities that states have under international law and human rights standards.
The challenges and concerns confronting indigenous communities are undeniably more severe and deplorable than the current “yes or no” referendum. It is imperative for the entire nation, including indigenous leaders, to acknowledge the profound extent of the Indigenous human tragedy that extends beyond the divisive binary.
Old and new imperial vultures Similar to the European vultures that once encircled Oceania centuries ago, partitioned its territories, subjugated its people, conducted bomb experiments, and eradicated its population in Tasmania, the present-day vultures from the Eastern and Western regions exhibit comparable behaviours.
It is imperative for indigenous leaders hailing from Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia to unite and demand that the colonial governments be held responsible for the multitude of crimes they have perpetrated.
Message to divided indigenous leaders Simply assigning blame to already fragmented, tormented, and highly marginalised Indigenous communities, and endeavouring to empower them solely through a range of government handouts and community-based development programs, will not be adequate.
Because the trust between indigenous peoples and settlers has been shattered over centuries of abuse, deeply impacting the core of Indigenous self-image, dignity, and respect.
My personal experience in remote indigenous communities I am a Papuan who came to Australia over 20 years ago to study in the remote NSW town of Bourke. I lived, studied, and worked at a small Christian College called Cornerstone Community.
During my time there, I was adopted by the McKellar clan of the Wangkumara Tribe in Bourke and worked closely with indigenous communities in Bourke, Brewarrina, Walgett, Cobar, Wilcannia, and Dubbo.
Unfortunately, my experiences in these places left me traumatised.
These communities have become so broken. I found myself succumbing to depression as a result of the distressing experiences I witnessed. It dawned upon me being “blackfella” — Papuan indigenous descent — was and still consistently subjected to similar mistreatment regardless of location.
This realisation instilled within me a sense of guilt for my own identity, as I was constantly made feel guilty of who I was. Tragically, a significant number of the young indigenous whom I endeavoured to aid and guide through diverse community and youth initiatives have either been incarcerated or committed suicide.
West Papua, my home country, is currently experiencing a genocide due to the Indonesian settler occupation, which is supported by the Australian government. This is similar to what indigenous Australians have endured under the colonial system of settlers.
Indigenous Australians in every region, town, and city face a complex and diverse set of issues, which are unique, tragic, and devastating. These issues are a result of how the settler colony interacted with them upon their arrival in the country.
Nevertheless, the indigenous people were not subjected to centuries of abuse and mistreatment solely based on their tribal affiliations. Rather, they were targeted by the settler government as a collective, disregarding the diversity among indigenous groups.
This included the indigenous people from Oceania, who have endured dehumanisation and racism as a result of colonisation.
It is imperative to acknowledge that the resolution of these predicaments cannot be attained by a solitary leader representing a particular group. The indigenous leaders need a unified vision and strategy to combat these issues.
All indigenous individuals across the globe, including Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, and West Papua, are afflicted by the same affliction. The only distinguishing factor is the degree of harm inflicted by the virus, along with the circumstances surrounding its occurrence.
A paradigm shift Imagine a world where indigenous peoples in Australia and Oceania reclaim their original languages and redefine the ideas, myths, and behaviours displayed on their land with their own concepts of law, morality, and cosmology. In this world, I am confident that every legal product, civilisational idea, and colonial moral code applied to these peoples would be deemed illegal.
It is time to empower indigenous voices and perspectives and challenge the oppressive systems that have silenced them for far too long.
Commence the process of renaming each island, city, town, mountain, lake, river, valley, animal, tree, rock, country, and region with their authentic local languages and names, thereby reinstating their original significance and worth.
However, in order to accomplish this, it is imperative that indigenous communities are granted the necessary authority, as it is ultimately their power that will reinforce such transformation. This power does not solely rely on weapons or monetary resources, but rather on the determination to preserve their way of life, restore their self-image, and demand the recognition of their dignity and respect.
Last Saturday’s No Vote tragedy wasn’t just about the majority of Australians rejecting it. It was a heartbreaking moment where indigenous leaders, who should have been united, found themselves fiercely divided.
Accusations were flying left and right, targeting each other’s backgrounds, positions, and portfolios. This bitter divide ended up gambling away any chance of redemption and reconciliation that had reached such a high national level.
It was a devastating blow to the hopes and aspirations for a better world for one of the most disadvantaged originals continues human on this ancient timeless continent — Australia.
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Grant, has found X (formerly Twitter) guilty of serious non-compliance to a transparency notice on child sex abuse material. The commissioner has issued X with an infringement notice for A$610,500.
The commissioner first issued transparency notices to Google, X (then Twitter), Twitch, TikTok and Discord in February under the Online Safety Act 2021. Under this legislation, the commissioner has powers to require online service providers to report on how they are mitigating unlawful or harmful content.
The commissioner determined Google and X did not sufficiently comply with the notices given to them. Google was warned for providing overly generic responses to specific questions, while X’s non-compliance was found to be more serious.
For several key questions, X’s response was blank, incomplete or inaccurate. For example, X did not adequately disclose:
the time it takes to respond to reports of child sexual exploitation material
the measures in place to detect child sexual exploitation material in live streams
the tools and technologies used to detect this material
the teams and resources used to ensure safety.
How severe is the issue?
In June, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a crucial report on child sex abuse material. It was the first quantitative analysis of child sex abuse material on the public sites of the most popular social media platforms.
The researchers’ findings highlighted Instagram and X (then Twitter) are particularly prolific platforms for advertising the sale of self-generated child sex abuse material.
These materials, and the accounts posting them, are often marked by specific recurring features. They may mention particular words or phrases paired with variations on the term “pedo”. Or they might have certain hashtags or emojis in their bios. Using these features, the researchers identified 405 accounts advertising the sale of self-generated child sex abuse material on Instagram, and 128 on Twitter.
They found searching for such content on Instagram may result in an alert of potential child sex abuse material. However, the prompt still presents a clickthrough to “see results anyway”:
Stanford’s analysis found Instagram’s recommendation algorithms are particularly effective in promoting child sex abuse material once it has been accessed.
Although the researchers focused on publicly available networks and content, they also found some platforms implicitly allow the trading of child sex abuse material in private channels.
As for X, they found the platform even allowed the public posting of known, automatically identifiable child sex abuse material.
Why does X have this content?
The creation and trading of this content is commonly regarded as one of the most harmful abuses of online services.
All major platforms – including X – have policies that ban child sex abuse material from their public services. Most sites also explicitly prohibit related activities such as posting this content in private chats, and the sexualisation or grooming of children.
Even self-proclaimed free-speech advocate Elon Musk declared that removing child exploitation material was the top priority, after he took over the platform late last year.
Moderating child sex abuse material is challenging work, and can’t be done through user reporting alone. Platforms that allow nudity, such as X, have a responsibility to distinguish between minors and adults – both in terms of who is depicted in the content and who is sharing it.
They should scrutinise content shared voluntarily by minors, and ideally should also weed out any AI-generated child sex abuse material.
Musk fired hundreds of employees responsible for content moderation after taking over at X. It would seem likely the gutting of X’s trust and safety workforce would have reduced its ability to respond to both the harmful material and the eSafety notices.
After years of leniency towards social media platforms, governments are now demanding increased accountability from them for their content, as well as data privacy and child protection matters.
Non-compliance now attracts hefty fines in many jurisdictions. For instance, last year US federal regulators imposed a US$150 million (A$236.3 million) fine on X to settle claims it had misleadingly used email addresses and phone numbers for targeting advertising.
This year, Ireland’s privacy regulator slapped Meta, Facebook’s parent company, with a €1.2 billion (almost A$2 billion) fine for mishandling user information.
This year the Australian Federal Court also ordered two subsidiaries of Meta, Facebook Israel and Onavo Inc, to pay A$10 million each for engaging in conduct liable to mislead in breach of Australian consumer law.
The latest fine of A$610,500, though small in comparison, is a blow to X’s reputation given its declining revenue and dwindling advertiser trust due to poor content moderation and the reinstating of banned accounts.
What happens now?
X has 28 days to settle the fine. If it doesn’t, eSafety can initiate civil penalty proceedings and bring it to court. Depending on the court’s decision, the cumulative fine could escalate to A$780,000 per day, retroactive to the initial non-compliance in March.
But the fine’s impact extends beyond just financial implications. By spotlighting the issue of child sex abuse material on X, it could increase pressure on advertisers to pull their ads, or empower other governments to follow suit.
Earlier this month, India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT sent notices to X, YouTube and Telegram, instructing them to remove child sex abuse material for users accessing the sites from India – while threatening heavy fines and penalties for non-compliance.
It seems X is in hot water. To get out, it’ll need to make a 180-degree turn on its approach to moderating content – especially that which harms and exploits minors.
Marten Risius is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Australian Discovery Early Career Award (project number DE220101597) funded by the Australian Government.
Stan Karanasios is a member of the Association for Information Systems. In recent years he has received funding from the International Telecommunications Union and the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity.
The New Zealand government is putting $5 million to address urgent humanitarian needs in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank.
The initial contribution would include $2.5 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a further $2.5 million to the World Food Programme (WFP) under the umbrella of the United Nations appeal.
The Defence Force also remains on standby to help with evacuations of New Zealanders from the area, if required.
In a statement, caretaker Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said he was “deeply saddened” by the deaths and conflict in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
“The situation continues to evolve rapidly, and New Zealand is joining other likeminded countries to support those civilians and communities affected by the conflict.
“The ICRC protects and assists victims of armed conflicts under international humanitarian law, and is working to gain access to people held hostage, distributing cash and other assistance to displaced people, and providing essential medical assistance and supplies.”
With the Erez and Kerem Shalom crossings shut, the Rafah border was the only way into and out of the Gaza Strip for people and also for humanitarian aid. But that had shut in October too.
Safe passage Western countries are also getting involved to try to secure safe passage through Rafah for both foreign passport holders in Gaza and humanitarian aid, and there have been conflicting reports about whether it would open temporarily or not.
The WFP aid would help address food insecurity concerns in Gaza and the West Bank, and ensure emergency stock was prepared once access was guaranteed, Hipkins said.
The Gaza civilian casualties keep climbing . . . 2750 Palestinian adults and 1030 children. Al Jazeera screenshot/APR
“New Zealand calls for rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access to enable the delivery of crucial life-saving assistance.
“We call on all parties to respect international humanitarian law, and uphold their obligations to protect civilians, and humanitarian workers, including medical personnel.”
Both the ICRC and WFP act with full independence and neutrality.
With the Labour-led government being in the caretaker position and trying to transition to the National Party after the general elections, the decision for aid had been made after consultation with National leader Christopher Luxon, Hipkins’ statement read.
Luxon said he was appreciative of the communication between the outgoing government and the incoming one.
“It’s important that the government owns those decisions, we are consulted, and when we’re consulted we can give our support.”
NZDF on standby On Monday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said most New Zealanders who were registered as being in Israel had already left, but 50 Kiwis were still there, and 20 were registered as being in the occupied Palestinian territories (Gaza and the West Bank).
But the government has asked for the New Zealand Defence Force to remain on standby in case it is needed to help with evacuations.
“While not everyone wanting to leave can necessarily get themselves to a departure point, the government has requested NZDF to remain on standby to deploy if necessary,” Hipkins said.
“Commercial routes remain the best option to depart the region, and MFAT is actively providing consular assistance to New Zealanders who remain in the affected region,” he said.
“Anyone who wishes to depart should take the earliest commercial opportunity to do so.”
New Zealand was also working with its partners on evacuation points for people who could not access commercial routes, but Hipkins acknowledged “the security situation on the ground make this difficult”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
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
With 79% of enrolled voters counted nationally, “no” has won the Voice referendum by a 60.7–39.3 margin. “No” has easily won in every state and territory except the ACT.
The Guardian reported Sunday that analyst Simon Jackman said that in polling booths where Indigenous Australians made up at least 50% of the population, there was an average 63% “yes” vote.
This is in line with a Resolve poll that had “yes” leading by 59–41 among Indigenous Australians, but well down on polls conducted early this year showing 80% “yes” support from the Indigenous.
In Lingiari, where 40 of the population is Indigenous, “no” leads by a 56–44 margin. Analyst Ben Raue said that remote booths, which are overwhelmingly Indigenous, voted “yes” by 73–27, but other areas of that seat, which are non-Indigenous, voted heavily “no”.
The large wins for “no” in Lingiari and other seats with high Indigenous populations are caused by non-Indigenous people in those seats voting heavily “no”.
Of 78 total Labor-held seats, the ABC has called 16 for “yes”, three where “yes” is currently ahead, two with “no” currently ahead and 57 called for “no”. Most Labor seats have substantial support for right-wing parties, so this doesn’t mean “no” won Labor voters.
The final Voice Newspoll, which gave “no” an accurate 20-point lead, had Labor voters supporting “yes” by 58–37 and Greens by 74–21, but Coalition voters were voting “no” by 81–15 and Other voters (which includes One Nation) by 69–21.
Modest “yes” support from Labor voters in most of their seats was overwhelmed by strong “no” voting from Coalition and other right-wing voters. Bradfield in New South Wales is the only Coalition-held seat to vote “yes”.
The final Newspoll also gave “yes” a 51–44 lead among those with a university education, but “no” led by 62–33 among TAFE/college educated and 62–31 among those without a tertiary education.
I have covered the education divide before and said that non-university educated people outside the cities are turning against the left. The major problem for “yes” is that they also heavily lost non-university educated people in the cities. But this divide explains the huge margins for “no” in rural seats, with 21 mostly rural seats giving “no” over 75%.
I previously covered a Resolve poll for Nine newspapers that was conducted September 22 to October 4 from a total sample of 4,728. “No” led by 56–44, understating the actual “no” margin. Additional questions on the Voice were asked of 3,116 respondents.
This poll found that key “no” campaigners in general had better net likeability ratings than key “yes” campaigners. The big exceptions were Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson and Lidia Thorpe. Dutton and Thorpe are negatively perceived for reasons other than the Voice, and Thorpe was opposing the Voice from the left.
Labor improved in pre-referendum Newspoll as Dutton sank
A Newspoll, conducted October 4–12 from a sample of 2,638, gave Labor a 54–46 lead, a one-point gain for Labor since October 3–6. Primary votes were 36% Labor (up two), 35% Coalition (down one), 12% Greens (steady), 6% One Nation (up one) and 11% for all Others (down two).
Anthony Albanese’s ratings were 46% satisfied (up one) and 46% dissatisfied (steady), for a net zero approval. Dutton’s net approval fell five points to -18. Albanese led Dutton by 51–31 as better PM (50–33 previously).
Despite the heavy defeat for the Voice, Labor’s vote has held up well in the lead-up to this referendum. It will be interesting to see what happens on voting intentions after the referendum result.
Essential poll: Albanese’s ratings steady, Dutton down
Essential have not updated their voting intentions graph with the latest poll that was conducted October 11–15 from a national sample of 1,125. Albanese’s ratings were steady since September at 46% approve, 43% disapprove (net +3), while Dutton’s net approval dropped two points to -7.
Essential has a Voice question that had “no” ahead by 53–38, out from 49–43 in early October. But I will not be including that in my assessment of polls as it was released three days after referendum day.
Given four choices, 74% thought the government’s most important priority was cost of living, 15% climate change, 6% international relations and 5% workplace rights.
On the Israel-Palestine conflict, 64% thought Australia should stay out of it, 23% provide active assistance to Israel and 13% active assistance to Palestine.
By 57–20, respondents supported the UK’s plan to end smoking by raising the legal age of smoking by one year every year, so that those aged 14 or younger will never be able to legally buy cigarettes.
Victorian Resolve poll: Coalition gains but Labor still far ahead
A Victorian state Resolve poll for The Age, conducted with the federal Resolve polls in September and October from a sample of 1,103, gave Labor 39% of the primary vote (steady since August), the Coalition 32% (up four), 12% Greens (down one), 10% independents (down three) and 7% others (steady).
While Resolve doesn’t give a two party estimate until near elections, I estimate this poll would give Labor a 57–43 lead, a three-point gain for the Coalition since August.
New Labor Premier Jacinta Allan had a 38–19 lead over Liberal leader John Pesutto as preferred premier from the October sample of 553. Former premier Daniel Andrews had a 41–32 lead in September (sample 550), a drop from 44–29 in August.
By 58–19, respondents would support a Victorian inquiry into the state government’s handling of the COVID pandemic.
Liberal conservative alliance to replace authoritarian party in Poland
I covered Sunday’s Polish election for The Poll Bludger. Poland does not have a major centre-left party. The authoritarian incumbent Law and Justice was defeated by a liberal conservative alliance. Strong results for the far-right AfD at German state elections and national polls were also covered.
Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mihiri Silva, Paediatric dentist, Senior Lecturer and Clinician-Scientist Fellow, MCRI and University of Melbourne, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
Teeth decay occurs when frequent and excessive amounts of sugar disturb bacteria in the mouth. This can lead to holes or “cavities”, which may need fillings.
If untreated, the holes can get bigger, causing pain and infection. Tooth decay is the most common cause of toothache among children and tooth decay is a leading cause of preventable hospital admission.
Parents and carers sometimes think baby teeth are less important than adult teeth. But tooth decay can impair a child’s ability to eat, sleep, learn and socialise. It can affect the quality of life of children, and their parents and carers.
The good news is tooth decay is preventable with three good dental habits: early dental check-ups, twice daily brushing and limiting sugar.
Australian and international guidelines recommend children have their first dental check-up when the first tooth emerges from the gums (usually at age six months), or by at least 12 months of age.
Yet few families follow this advice, presuming their child is too young, or that they have healthy teeth.
Early dental check-ups can pick up early signs of tooth decay. This allows simple treatments, such as topical fluoride varnish, which stop tooth decay getting worse.
Australian children from families experiencing the greatest adversity are the least likely to access dental services. However, all preschool-aged children are eligible for free dental check-ups through public dental services.
Medicare’s Child Dental Benefits Scheme also provides a capped benefit for eligible children to use at their local dentist. Around 95% of dentists bulk bill services under the Medicare scheme.
However, with uptake below 40%, most eligible families are not using the scheme, indicating cost is only one barrier. Families living in rural and remote areas, for instance, may find it difficult accessing dental services.
Many young children have teeth spaced apart, so flossing between teeth may not be necessary. However, your dentist may recommend flossing if teeth are in tight contact.
While most Australian adults brush their teeth twice daily, tooth brushing is less consistent in the early years.
For some parents and carers, tooth brushing can be a low priority, as it becomes difficult when young children are uncooperative. Dental check-ups can help parents and carers get individualised support with these important dental habits.
Manual dexterity varies between children, so it’s important to assist children with tooth brushing well into primary school. Some children may need help for longer than others. Ask at your next dental check-up whether your child is brushing well.
Parents and carers should avoid giving free sugars to children. Free sugars are those added to food and drinks (such as confectionery and soft drinks) and those naturally present in honey and fruit juices.
The World Health Organisation recommends limiting free sugars to less than 5% of total energy intake. However, many Australian children consume well above this amount.
Parents and carers should be wary of aggressive marketing and deceptive labelling of sweet drinks and snacks as healthy alternatives.
Children should also avoid eating and drinking around bedtime to reduce the risk of tooth decay. This includes consumption of milk and other sugar-sweetened drinks from bottles to sleep.
The best alternative to sugar-sweetened drinks is water. Drinking water from a fluoridated water supply will help protect your child’s teeth from decay.
Community water fluoridation was one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. But some Australians, particularly in rural and remote areas, miss out. People living in these areas might benefit from other fluoride therapies (such as fluoride mouth rinses) but should discuss this with their dentist.
Families have an important role to play in children’s dental health. Early dental check-ups, brushing teeth twice a day with age-appropriate fluoridated toothpaste, and limiting sugar will allow children to reach adulthood with healthy mouths.
Mihiri Silva receives funding from the Medical Research Futures Fund. She is affiliated with the Australian Dental Association as the chair of the Oral Health Committee.
Sharon Goldfeld receives funding from the Candian Institutes of Health Research.
Elodie O’Connor and Rachelle Welti 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.
If we’re upset about the price of petrol, why do we drive the vehicles we do?
SUVs (so-called sport utility vehicles) use more fuel per kilometre than standard cars – according to the International Energy Agency, up to 25% more.
They weigh more than standard cars – about 100 kilograms more.
And they emit more carbon than standard cars. In Australia, medium-size SUVs emit 14% more carbon per kilometre travelled than medium-size cars. Large SUVs emit 30% more than large cars.
Yet we’re buying them at a rate that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.
SUVs outsell passenger cars 3 to 1
As recently as 2012, more than half the new vehicles sold in Australia were “passenger cars” – the standard low-slung cars of the type we were used to. About one-quarter were SUVs.
Back further, in the early 1990s, three-quarters of the new vehicles we bought were passenger cars, and only 8% SUVs.
Yet after an explosion in SUV sales, today every second vehicle bought is a SUV. In August, SUVs accounted for 57% of new vehicle sales. Passenger cars accounted for just 17%. This means SUVs outsell passenger cars three to one.
Like country music, SUVs are hard to define, but you know one when you see one.
Standard passenger cars (be they hatches, sedans or wagons) sit closer to the ground, are usually lighter, and are less likely to kill or seriously injure pedestrians and cyclists, according to US insurers.
So common have the new larger SUVs become that Standards Australia is considering increasing the length of a standard parking bay by 20cm. It wants comments by November.
Also taking market share from smaller standard cars are what we in Australia call utes, which are standard vehicles (they used to be Falcons and Commodores) with a built-in tray attached at the rear.
1971 Holden Ute. Shutterstock
Utes are categorised as commercial vehicles, even though these days they tend to have four doors rather than two. They are also just as likely to be used for moving families as equipment, even if bought with small businesses tax concessions.
Vehicles defined a commercial, the bulk of them utes, accounted for one in five vehicles sold a decade ago. Now they are one in four, outselling passenger cars.
Tax only explains so much
Cars get special treatment in Australia’s tax system.
If an employer provides them and their private use is “minor, infrequent and irregular”, or if they are utes “not designed for the principal purpose of carrying passengers”, they can can escape the fringe benefits tax.
And from time to time small businesses get offered instant asset writeoffs, which means that all or part of the cost of the car can be written off against tax.
But apart from perhaps helping to explain the increasing preference for utes, these concessions seem insufficient to explain the demise of the standard passenger car and the rise of the expensive (and more expensive to fuel) alternatives.
But, in an information paper, the bureau goes on to note that SUVs “appear to be more likely to kill pedestrians than cars”.
They also appear more likely to kill the occupants of standard cars than standard cars when those cars crash, largely because they are higher – a phenomenon the insurance industry refers to as “incompatibility”.
Australia’s Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics refers to this as the “other side of the coin”.
But I think that for buyers of SUVs, it might be the same side of the coin. That is, I think it might be becoming a perverse and macabre argument for buying SUVs.
If SUVs are becoming dominant and they put other road users at risk, it makes sense not to be one of those other road users.
I am not suggesting that danger from SUVs is the only reason for the flood of buyers switching to SUVs. But I am suggesting it has helped contribute to a snowballing in demand for SUVs, along with fashion, and changed views about what’s normal.
I’m not sure what can be done at this stage. Higher petrol prices ought to have helped, but they don’t seem to have.
SUV purchases have increased, even as petrol prices have climbed. Extra taxes have been proposed to help curb road deaths, but they mightn’t help either. SUVs are already expensive.
Tighter standards would help
One thing we ought to do straight away is to shift the burden of decision-making from buyers to makers.
Ideally, those standards would require the entire fleet of vehicles sold by each manufacturer to meet a gradually-tightening average efficiency standard.
Putting more electric vehicles into each fleet would help. But so would increasing the efficiency of its conventionally-powered SUVs – which would mean reducing their weight, and with it, their danger to other people on the road.
The design of the scheme is up for grabs, and the Grattan Institute’s Marion Terrill has made a submission.
She says regardless of the switch to electric cars, Australians are going to be buying petrol and diesel vehicles for some time. That’s why it’s so important those cars become as fuel efficient (and, she could add, as safe) as they can be.
The horse-human partnership has existed for around 4,000 years, and humans and horses share a co-evolutionary history. Given this, it’s unsurprising the horse has a high emotional impact.
Tensions around wild horse management also exist in other countries, particularly around mustangs in the United States, which are a federally protected species. However, the Australian context retains a unique flavour: the brumby has become a focus for concerns around what it means to belong in Australia for settler-colonial Australians.
But too often our discussions of brumbies and Australia’s “special” relationship with the horse don’t consider the darker aspects of the horse’s role in Australian history.
Sociologist Catriona Elder has argued ideas about being Australian are fundamentally tied to
a desire for the land, a fear of others who may claim the land and, as a result of this, a deep ambivalence about belonging to this space.
Horses were crucial to the colonisation of this land.
They increased settler mobility in both speed and range. Being mounted offered improved field of vision when deploying a firearm. Even the body of the horse could act as a weapon, particularly when attacking camps. Taken together, the horse represented a devastating tactical advantage to settlers. They proved integral to the frontier violence that created modern-day Australia.
W. A. Cawthorne, 1844, A Fight at the Murray. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW
Historian Nanette Mantle argues the figure of the stockman is a celebratory story that evolved to mask the dark truth of Aboriginal dispossession.
Richard Swain (Wiradjuri) is an ambassador for the Invasive Species Council and a founding member of Reclaim Kosci, an organisation that seeks to raise awareness about the impacts of feral horses and create support for their humane reduction.
He has been targeted in racist attacks from the pro-horse lobby, including being threatened with the “colonial experience”.
This reference, wielded as a threat, is fitting.
As Tim Flannery writes, The Man from Snowy River is “an archetypal Australian hero – one of the brave Aussies who tamed the rugged land”.
It was these stockmen mounted on horseback, Flannery writes, who were “the shock-troops in our Aboriginal wars”.
Horses also represent a particular identity associated with Britain and Europe.
Compare horses with camels. Camels were integral to the exploration and opening up of inland Australia and, like horses, were used in the battle of Beersheba in the Sinai and Palestine campaign of the first world war. Like brumbies, Australia also has the largest feral camel population in the world.
Camels are culturally and historically significant for Arab peoples, yet here they are routinely culled without a second thought.
Australia has the largest feral camel population in the world. Shutterstock
Despite their long history in Australia, camels are associated with Asia and the Middle East and seen as exotic and foreign. Horses, on the other hand, have Anglo-European connotations that fit comfortably within Australia’s white identity.
As horses that have successfully adapted to Australia’s extreme conditions, brumbies are used to justify the coloniser’s presence on the land: if horses belong, surely we do too.
An evolving conversation
Our thinking about brumbies has evolved in recent years. The debate has moved from uncritically accepting stories of wild horses as part of Australian culture, through debates focused primarily on management, to the current recognition of the role these animals play as cultural markers.
If we can look beyond the celebratory stories and accept the role the horse has played as a highly effective tool of dispossession, we can more readily accept the truth of Australia’s colonisation. From there, we will be better positioned to resolve the brumby debate, able to move forward as a society on a mutually-agreed rather than deeply contested pathway.
Beyond the wild horses, an understanding and acceptance of this element of our dark colonial history may also better enable us to embrace reconciliation.
Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is correct to condemn Hamas killing Israeli civilians in its attacks on Israel this week.
The killing of civilians or taking them hostage is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and should be universally condemned.
However, the Labour government has been deathly silent on the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians under Labour’s watch these past six years.
Under his prime ministerial watch this year, Chris Hipkins has looked the other way while Israel has built more illegal Israeli settlement homes on Palestinian land; killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians; supported Israeli settler pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages across the occupied West Bank and encouraged highly-provocative Israeli ministerial and settler incursions into the Al Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem.
Why does he only wake up when Israelis are killed? Why does he think Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives?
The Prime Minister’s pro-Israel stance is one-sided and blatantly racist.
New Zealand, along with other Western countries, bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in recent days because we have never held Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people.
We have given Israel a free pass to murder and abuse Palestinians and this led to the inevitable tragedy last weekend.
It is precisely the attitude of Western leaders such as our Prime Minister which has meant so many lives have been lost.
The Prime Minister has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on his hands.
John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
Gaza Strip . . . about 2.3 million people have been living trapped under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007. Image: Al Jazeera (CC)
The besieged Gaza Strip The Palestinian enclave — home to about 2.3 million people — has been under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007, reports Al Jazeera. More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and thousands have taken shelter in UN schools as Israeli attacks intensify, forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.
Buildings, mosques and offices have been targeted as Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” for the deadly attacks that has sent shockwaves across Israel.
Harrowing images from inside Gaza have emerged with 19 members of a family killed when an air strike on Sunday hit their residential building. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes currently in Israel.
Israel has maintained a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza since 2007, a year after Hamas was democratically elected into power. The voting came nearly two years after Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from the enclave.
The blockade gives Israel control of Gaza’s borders, and Egypt has stepped in to enforce the western border.
Israel has stated it has blocked the borders to protect its citizens from Hamas, but the act of collective punishment violates the Geneva Conventions and has long been considered illegal by groups including the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane McAdam, Scientia Professor and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney
In conflicts around the world, evacuations have long been used to rescue people from serious harm. During the second world war, for instance, thousands of children across Europe were sent to rural areas or abroad under evacuation schemes initiated by governments and child welfare agencies.
The contrast in Gaza today is stark. We are witnessing an urgent, chaotic evacuation ordered by a belligerent party to the conflict, which is fast becoming a humanitarian catastrophe. Israel has told 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move to the south ahead of an impending ground invasion.
Put yourself, your family, your friends or colleagues into this horror for a moment. How would you evacuate if you or your child was sick? How would you get your elderly parents out if they couldn’t walk? How would you move rapidly to southern Gaza if you had no fuel or transport?
Any of this would be hard at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a war zone, on short notice and with nowhere safe to go. As one 20-year-old woman, who had tried to flee south, said:
I was terrified, I thought I was about to die […] They told us to escape and then they bomb people on the road. My father drove back to Gaza City. He said if we are dying anyway, let’s be at home in Gaza.
Evacuating civilians under international law
Evacuations in armed conflict are strictly governed by international humanitarian law, which seeks to balance military and humanitarian needs. Israel’s warning to civilians in Gaza of impending attacks must be “effective”, meaning it must not only reach people but allow them sufficient time to evacuate safely.
The extremely tight time-frame Israel has given Gaza residents to leave is insufficient and unrealistic for an evacuation of this scale, especially amid its fast-tempo bombardment across the strip and under conditions of total siege.
Israel must also ensure evacuated civilians have the means to survive. International law requires it to allow and facilitate the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief for civilians in need. This includes food, water, medical supplies, clothing, bedding, shelter, heating fuel and other supplies and services essential for survival. The starvation of civilians is a war crime.
Yet, Israel unlawfully imposed a “complete siege” of Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on Israeli border communities last week, ordering no electricity, food, water or gas into the territory.
Cramming more than a million extra people into southern Gaza – doubling its population – will also place impossible strains on its infrastructure, which has already been much degraded by 16 years of blockade.
There is debate over whether Gaza is still legally “occupied” by Israel since the withdrawal of its ground forces in 2005.
The traditional view is that occupation requires Israeli “boots on the ground” to administer Gaza from within. A more contemporary view is that Israel still retains a sufficiently high level of control over life in Gaza, despite its withdrawal of troops. If it is occupied, additional legal rules apply to the present situation.
As an occupying power under international humanitarian law, Israel may order an evacuation for imperative military reasons, or for the safety of civilians, but civilians must still be protected. Specifically, Israel must ensure displaced civilians have adequate shelter, hygiene, health, safety and nutrition, and that family members are not separated.
The specific needs of children, expectant and nursing mothers, people with disabilities and the elderly must be addressed. All of this is on top of the requirement to allow rapid and unimpeded humanitarian relief, which applies regardless of whether Gaza is considered occupied.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the US and Israel have agreed to work on a plan to get humanitarian aid into Gaza and consider ideas for “safe zones” that would theoretically be shielded from strikes, but nothing has been implemented yet, with the situation continuing to deteriorate.
‘Extremely dangerous’
The UN relief agency for Palestinians says it has run out of capacity to help, declaring an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe”.
Gaza is being strangled and it seems that the world right now has lost its humanity.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the custodian of the law of war, rarely publicly rebukes governments. However, it has also called the evacuation order illegal. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has condemned it, as well, saying it is “extremely dangerous” and potentially impossible.
The World Health Organization criticised Israel’s further orders to evacuate 22 hospitals in northern Gaza, stating that it would “further worsen the current humanitarian and public health catastrophe”.
Forcing more than 2,000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence.
Treating Gazans as refugees
Gazans are also unable to reach safety in other countries. The border crossing into Egypt remains closed.
Many Palestinians do not want to leave their homeland if there’s a chance they won’t be allowed to return, a risk etched in their collective memory since the exodus of the 1948 war.
But those who do wish to leave are entitled to do so under international law, and other countries must not refuse them entry given the real risk to their lives.
Gazans are normally protected as refugees by the UN relief agency for Palestinians, under a bespoke legal regime.
However, the relief agency’s present inability to provide protection and assistance means Palestinian refugees who do reach another country should be automatically protected as refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention, without the need for further status determination.
Anyone who refuses to evacuate Gaza – or simply cannot evacuate – remains protected as a civilian. People do not lose that right simply because they stay put.
Ben Saul has engaged in past work with the Israeli Defence Forces (a training seminar, conferences and field visits), the Palestinian Authority (legal advice and research), and Israeli and Palestinian NGOs. He is also an associate fellow with the International Centre for Counter-terrorism in The Hague.
Jane McAdam 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.
Melanesians all across Aotearoa are coming together in Auckland this weekend to celebrate their unique cultural heritage.
This is the second time the annual Melanesian Festival Aotearoa is being held and it is an opportunity for community members from Fiji, Kanaky New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to fully immerse in their culture.
More than 7000 people attended the inaugural event last year which was a huge success.
Cultural performances, musical showcases, traditional food, arts and craft were on display and enjoyed by all.
Festival director Albert Traill said this festival is “something unique for New Zealand because New Zealand is a predominantly Polynesian-based society when it comes to Pacific Islands communities”.
He expressed that sometimes the Melanesian community feel left out or lost in the crowd and their numbers are smaller in comparison to their Polynesian brothers and sisters.
The five Melanesian nations parade their flags . . . Fiji (from left), Kanaky New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Image: Melanesian Festival Aotearoa
“Melanesian culture and music is really different to Polynesia. Very similar, but it has its own unique feel,” Traill said.
Annual event The community have been talking about organising their own cultural festival for years, and with the support of Creative New Zealand, it is now an annual event.
“It’s an opportunity for our Melanesian community to come out and have a space for us to share our culture, our food, and just to come together and celebrate each other’s identity and culture.
“We love it here in New Zealand because New Zealand is a country that loves and supports cultural diversity.”
Community members sing and dance along. Image: Melanesian Festival Aotearoa
Traill has a smile in his voice as he reflects on the success of last year’s festival, sharing how many of the performances were youth driven.
The young ones spent months researching their countries and consulting with community elders and knowledge holders, to produce outstanding items.
Their pride and passion shone on stage, striking a string in the hearts of their family and friends
‘Everyone in tears’ “And pretty much everyone was in tears hearing them share how special they felt. Normally they get lumped in with Polyfest and, and all the other festivals and stuff. But this one, for the first time ever, they could say, ‘this is my festival. It’s Melanesian’.”
“We’re doing it for the young people,” he says.
“So hopefully one day when we’re not here, they can stand up with the same pride and say, ‘Yeah, you know what? I’m Melanesia. And I’m proud to share my culture’.”
The festival will be held at the Waitemata Rugby Club Grounds in Henderson from 9am onwards with a packed programme.
The cultural performances begin at 10am and there are a few popular reggae artists and bands hailing from the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
Community groups from Christchurch, Tauranga, Waikato and Wellington are travelling up to participate and the entertainment will continue until late in the afternoon.
Cultural activation spaces will also be spread around the grounds showcasing the traditional weaving and tapa printing of Melanesia.
Ancient tatooing style The ancient style of Papua New Guinea tattooing will also be on display.
It will be a vibrant hub of cultural identity and heritage and the the organizers warmly welcome any interested ones to come along and join in the celebrations.
“Come and have a look, come and see Melanesia,” Traill said.
“Melanesia is like the Tuakana of the Pacific, the older sibling, the older ancient cultures. You’re looking at 10,000 years of history in the Pacific. A lot of these are ancient old cultures and very complex.”
Young Fijian men prepare for their performance. Image: Melanesian Festival Aotearoa
The organisers expect this year to be even bigger and better, and it will only grow each consecutive year.
They are already looking into further expanding the festival for 2024 and are looking to collaborate with embassies to fly across talented local artists and cultural performance groups to join in next years Melanesia Festival.
Proud family members watch their young ones perform. Image: Melanesian Festival Aotearoa
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brandon Michael Sideleau, PhD student studying human-saltwater crocodile conflict, Charles Darwin University
Shutterstock
On January 4 this year, a three-metre saltwater crocodile heaved itself out of the water and up the beach. Nothing unusual about that – except this croc was on Legian Beach, one of Bali’s most popular spots. The emaciated reptile later died.
Only four months later, a large crocodile killed a man who was spearfishing with friends in Lombok’s Awang Bay, about 100 kilometres east of Bali. Authorities caught it and transferred it to captivity.
You might not associate crocodiles with Bali. But the saltwater crocodile once roamed most of Indonesia’s waters, and attacks are still common in some regions. I have been collecting records of crocodilian attacks since 2010, as the creator of the worldwide database CrocAttack. What’s new is that they’re beginning to return to areas where they were wiped out.
Does this mean tourists and residents should be wary? It’s unlikely these islands can host anywhere near the same population densities as the wide, fish-filled rivers of Australia’s tropical north. And in Bali, it’s unlikely we’ll see any crocodile recovery because of the importance of beaches to tourism and a high human population.
This 4.6-metre saltwater crocodile was captured in Lombok after the fatal attack in May. Bali Reptile Rescue, CC BY-ND
What happened to Indonesia’s crocodiles?
Saltwater crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus) are also known as estuarine crocodiles, as they prefer to live in mangrove-lined rivers. They’re the largest living reptile, reaching up to seven metres in length – far larger than Indonesia’s famous Komodo dragon, which tops out at three metres.
Crocodiles in Bali and Lombok were killed off by the mid-20th century, and later across Java. But they survived in more remote parts of the island nation.
Salties are now being regularly sighted in Indonesia’s densely populated island of Java, including in seas off Jakarta. At least 70 people are killed by crocs every year across the archipelago, with the highest numbers of attacks being reported from the Bangka-Belitung islands off Sumatra and the provinces of East Kalimantan, East Nusa Tenggara, and Riau.
Are crocodiles returning in numbers?
These incidents means numbers are increasing. But recovery may not be as significant as it seems.
On many Indonesian islands, there’s very limited mangrove habitat suitable for crocodiles, and many creeks and rivers may be naturally too small for more than a small number of them. Even a small population recovery could quickly fill up the croc capacity of estuaries and creeks. These crocodiles are the most territorial of all crocodilians. Dominant males push out smaller male crocodiles, who set out in search of new habitat.
To date, Indonesia’s crocodile surveys reveal mostly small and low-density populations. But even the arrival of a single crocodile into human territory can spark conflict – and threaten the conservation of the species.
Worldwide, saltwater crocodiles are listed as a species of least concern on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, thanks to their full population recovery in parts of northern Australia after hunting was banned in the early 1970s. But in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam the species is extinct.
You might look at a map and think crocodiles moving back into Bali are coming from Australia. But there is currently no evidence of significant crocodile movement between Australia and Indonesia. It would be a brave crocodile to swim more than 1,000 kilometres from Australia to Bali.
What we are likely witnessing is a crocodile exodus from nearby areas, though we would need to do genetic analysis to prove it. That’s because the surviving croc population centres are much closer than Australia. For Bali and Lombok, crocodiles are likely migrating from the islands to the east, such as Flores, Lembata, Sumba and Timor.
The most likely source of Java’s crocodile arrivals is southern Sumatra, which is less than 30km from Java at its nearest. This area has long been prone to crocodile attacks.
The spike in sightings and attacks suggests we’re going to have to find ways of living alongside these reptiles. The coastal waters and estuaries of Lombok and western Java are now likely home to a small resident population.
What can be done to prevent attacks? First, people have to know that crocs are back. Increasing crocodile awareness and caution is vital to save lives.
Some researchers believe attacks on us and our livestock get more likely if mangroves have been destroyed or fishing grounds fished out. Protecting crocodile habitat and prey species can both secure the future of the species and cut the risk of attacks.
Does it mean you should cancel your next Bali trip? No. While restoration efforts have brought back tracts of mangroves along some coastlines in Bali, the sheer popularity of the island means it’s unlikely any crocodile population will ever be reestablished there.
But we could well see crocodiles slowly return to less populated parts of Java and Lombok. While that may fill us with anxiety, they’re a vital part of the ecosystem. Crocodiles are meant to be there.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Goldstein, Associate Professor, Dianoia Institute of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Australian Catholic University
In 1950, British computer scientist Alan Turing proposed an experimental method for answering the question: can machines think? He suggested if a human couldn’t tell whether they were speaking to an artificially intelligent (AI) machine or another human after five minutes of questioning, this would demonstrate AI has human-like intelligence.
Although AI systems remained far from passing Turing’s test during his lifetime, he speculated that
“[…] in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers […] to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70% chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
Today, more than 70 years after Turing’s proposal, no AI has managed to successfully pass the test by fulfilling the specific conditions he outlined. Nonetheless, as some headlinesreflect, a few systems have come quite close.
One recent experiment tested three large language models, including GPT-4 (the AI technology behind ChatGPT). The participants spent two minutes chatting with either another person or an AI system. The AI was prompted to make small spelling mistakes – and quit if the tester became too aggressive.
With this prompting, the AI did a good job of fooling the testers. When paired with an AI bot, testers could only correctly guess whether they were talking to an AI system 60% of the time.
Given the rapid progress achieved in the design of natural language processing systems, we may see AI pass Turing’s original test within the next few years.
But is imitating humans really an effective test for intelligence? And if not, what are some alternative benchmarks we might use to measure AI’s capabilities?
Limitations of the Turing test
While a system passing the Turing test gives us some evidence it is intelligent, this test is not a decisive test of intelligence. One problem is it can produce “false negatives”.
Today’s large language models are often designed to immediately declare they are not human. For example, when you ask ChatGPT a question, it often prefaces its answer with the phrase “as an AI language model”. Even if AI systems have the underlying ability to pass the Turing test, this kind of programming would override that ability.
The test also risks certain kinds of “false positives”. As philosopher Ned Block pointed out in a 1981 article, a system could conceivably pass the Turing test simply by being hard-coded with a human-like response to any possible input.
Beyond that, the Turing test focuses on human cognition in particular. If AI cognition differs from human cognition, an expert interrogator will be able to find some task where AIs and humans differ in performance.
Regarding this problem, Turing wrote:
This objection is a very strong one, but at least we can say that if, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection.
In other words, while passing the Turing test is good evidence a system is intelligent, failing it is not good evidence a system is not intelligent.
Moreover, the test is not a good measure of whether AIs are conscious, whether they can feel pain and pleasure, or whether they have moral significance. According to many cognitive scientists, consciousness involves a particular cluster of mental abilities, including having a working memory, higher-order thoughts, and the ability to perceive one’s environment and model how one’s body moves around it.
The Turing test does not answer the question of whether or not AI systems have these abilities.
The Turing test is based on a certain logic. That is: humans are intelligent, so anything that can effectively imitate humans is likely to be intelligent.
But this idea doesn’t tell us anything about the nature of intelligence. A different way to measure AI’s intelligence involves thinking more critically about what intelligence is.
There is currently no single test that can authoritatively measure artificial or human intelligence.
At the broadest level, we can think of intelligence as the ability to achieve a range of goals in different environments. More intelligent systems are those which can achieve a wider range of goals in a wider range of environments.
As such, the best way to keep track of advances in the design of general-purpose AI systems is to assess their performance across a variety of tasks. Machine learning researchers have developed a range of benchmarks that do this.
For example, GPT-4 was able to correctly answer 86% of questions in massive multitask language understanding – a benchmark measuring performance on multiple choice tests across a range of college-level academic subjects.
It also scored favourably in AgentBench, a tool that can measure a large language model’s ability to behave as an agent by, for example, browsing the web, buying products online and competing in games.
Is the Turing test still relevant?
The Turing test is a measure of imitation – of AI’s ability to simulate the human behaviour. Large language models are expert imitators, which is now being reflected in their potential to pass the Turing test. But intelligence is not the same as imitation.
There are as many types of intelligence as there are goals to achieve. The best way to understand AI’s intelligence is to monitor its progress in developing a range of important capabilities.
At the same time, it’s important we don’t keep “changing the goalposts” when it comes to the question of whether AI is intelligent. Since AI’s capabilities are rapidly improving, critics of the idea of AI intelligence are constantly finding new tasks AI systems may struggle to complete – only to find they have jumped over yet another hurdle.
In this setting, the relevant question isn’t whether AI systems are intelligent — but more precisely, what kinds of intelligence they may have.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
They don’t treat you like a person. They treat you like an ‘it’.
This was how Richard*, who has an intellectual disability, described his general experiences with medical professionals.
He was among 18 adults with intellectual disability and eight support people we spoke to for a study on how people with intellectual disability have experienced medical care. We were especially interested in experiences with genetic health care (where, for example, a person may get genetic testing to learn more about their disability).
This work, part of a broader body of research on intellectual disability and medical care, has revealed an urgent need to shift the deeply entrenched assumptions many health-care workers often hold about patients with intellectual disability.
Our research suggests health professionals need training to deliver more inclusive, person-centred and respectful health care.
Our team included not just genetics researchers, bioethicists and disability education researchers but also adjunct lecturer Julie Loblinzk OAM, a mother and self-advocate leader with intellectual disability (who is also a co-author on this article).
Together, we formed the inclusive research group GeneEQUAL.
We set out to involve people with lived experience of intellectual disability in the project design, implementation and interpretation.
We’ve now produced a number of studies revealing the startling extent to which people with intellectual disability are often excluded from discussions about their own health.
People with intellectual disability told us how they generally felt cut out of their own health-care appointments, as health-care practitioners often spoke to their support person or family member instead of to them.
Many spoke of how little effort health-care professionals often put in to use accessible language or offer easy-to-read materials. As Lillian told us:
It’s very hard to read the form? Even my mum found it hard to read.
This meant people with intellectual disability were often unsure why they were having a genetic test at all.
Many felt excluded from decisions about consent for genetic tests, or even what was talked about in the appointment.
The video below shows an all-too-common experience for people with intellectual disability seeing a doctor for genetic testing.
The next video, by contrast, shows what accessible, inclusive and respectful practice would look like.
Genetic counselling is often emotionally triggering. It touches on deeply personal issues of identity, health implications for children and extended family, and future health. For example, after a genetic diagnosis Katrina said:
I feel like I’m not normal now. And I’ve told people about it, and they’re my friends and family and they don’t mean to pick on me about it, but they look like, ‘You’re just a retard. You’re not all there now’.
Three participants said they’d considered suicide after their diagnosis.
However, people with intellectual disability told us they were rarely connected with appropriate psychological supports after their diagnosis. There is also a shortage of these kinds of supports. One interviewee, Katarina, told us:
you’ve got to watch the way you present things to us, because we will just break down and cry and think it’s other things […] we get very, like, broken-hearted about things. We dwell on it, we stew on it.
The deficit-based language of genetics is peppered with words such as mutation, risk, impairment and abnormality. This can reinforce people’s lifelong experiences of bullying and stigma. As Aaron told us:
In my mind, Mum has said to me, ‘You’re missing a bad chromosome’. […] I knew I wasn’t normal to others – I knew I was missing, some part of my brain has gone missing.
All of this means the potential benefits of a genetic diagnosis were often wasted.
Virtually none of the participants in our research knew the name or nature of their genetic condition, let alone what health checks or therapies were recommended.
Worse, their ongoing health-care teams (including their GPs) were often equally in the dark.
Genetic counselling is often emotionally triggering. Shutterstock
Failing to address this means fewer people with intellectual disability getting health checks and screenings, leading to poorer long-term health. The average life expectancy of Australians with intellectual disability is already shockingly low compared to the general population.
But slowly, change is underway.
Based on our research, NSW Health funded our team to work with self-advocacy groups and health-care professionals to co-produce the GeneEQUAL Educational Toolkit. This resource empowers medical professionals to deliver better, more equitable genetic healthcare and features Easy Read booklets about genetic conditions and clinics.
People with intellectual disability identified three key guiding principles. Health-care professionals need to:
make reasonable adjustments, such as allowing long enough appointments to explain options in an understandable way
practice person-centred care, such as making genetic reports and letters available in Easy Read (a style of presenting information simple and easy-to-understand ways) and ensuring the genetic diagnosis and management plan is shared with the patient themselves, their support person and their clinical team
offer choices and deliver trauma-informed care, given the high rate of abuse and stigma experienced by people with intellectual disability; language should be strengths-based and environments welcoming.
This toolkit has been widely used in Australia and internationally since its launch, with many showing interest not just in the content but also in the collaborative way it was produced.
*Names changed to protect identities. If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Elizabeth Emma Palmer has received funding from the NHMRC and NSW Health. She is a clinical geneticist at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network-Randwick and a member of the medical and scientific advisory committee for Rare Voices Australia, the national peak body for Australians living with a rare condition.
Iva Strnadová has received funding from the NHMRC and the NSW Department of Health. She is also a Board member of Self Advocacy Sydney, an organisation run by and for people with intellectual disability.
The institute that Jackie Leach Scully directs has received funding from the NHMRC and the NSW Department of Health.
Julie Loblinzk has received funding from the NHMRC and the NSW Department of Health. She is also a Board member of Self Advocacy Sydney, an organisation run by and for people with intellectual disability.
It might sound like science fiction, but “marine cloud brightening” is being seriously considered as a way to shield parts of the ocean from extreme heat.
We’re using water canons to spray seawater into the sky. This causes brighter, whiter clouds to form. These low marine clouds reflect sunlight away from the ocean’s surface, protecting the marine life below from the worst of climate change.
Australia’s Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program – a collaboration between several universities, CSIRO and the Australian Institute of Marine Science – is exploring whether cloud brightening could reduce coral bleaching. As an oceanographer and engineer I lead the program’s research into cooling and shading techniques.
We started exploring cloud brightening after the mass bleaching event in 2016. First, we needed to develop and test the underlying technologies in the lab. Then we began pilot testing in the central Great Barrier Reef near Townsville during January 2020. After several iterations we have now moved beyond “proof of concept” to investigating the response of the clouds themselves.
The Cloud Brightening Field Trip of 2021 (Southern Cross University)
British cloud physicist John Latham originally proposed cloud brightening in 1990 as a way to control global warming by altering Earth’s energy balance. He calculated that brightening clouds across the most susceptible regions of the world’s oceans could counteract the global warming caused by a doubling of preindustrial atmospheric carbon dioxide. That’s a level likely to be reached by the year 2060.
Recently, scientists have begun to consider regional rather than global application of cloud brightening. Could brightening clouds directly over the Great Barrier Reef for a few months reduce coral bleaching during a marine heat wave?
Modelling studies are encouraging and suggest it could delay the expected decline in coral cover. This could buy valuable time for the reef while the world transitions away from fossil fuels.
Lowering the heat stress on the ecosystem would produce other benefits when combined with other reef interventions – such as improved control of invasive crown of thorns starfish and planting of corals with increased heat tolerance.
But these studies also show there’s a limit to what can be achieved. Long-term benefits are only possible if the cloud brightening activity occurs alongside aggressive emissions reductions.
Cloud brightening does have risks as well as benefits, but the prospect of intermittent regional use is very different to large-scale “solar geo-engineering” proposals for shading and cooling the whole planet.
We expect the regional effect will be short-lived and reversible, which is reassuring. The technology must be operated continuously to modify clouds and could be stopped at any time. The sea salt particles sprayed in the process typically only persist in the atmosphere for one to several days.
Southern Cross University’s aerosol and cloud microphysics aircraft operating over the Southern Great Barrier Reef. Southern Cross University
A warm cloud (as opposed to an ice cloud) is a collection of small water droplets floating in the air.
A cloud of many small droplets is brighter than one with fewer large droplets – even if both clouds contain the same amount of water overall.
Every droplet begins with the condensation of water vapour around a nucleus, which can be almost any kind of tiny particle suspended in air.
Typically, in the lower atmosphere over land there are thousands to tens of thousands of these tiny particles suspended in every cubic centimetre of air. We call these airborne particles “aerosols”.
Aerosols may be natural such as dust, sea salt, pollen, ash and sulphates. Or they may come from human activity such as burning fossil fuels or vegetation, manufacturing, vehicle exhaust and aerosol spray cans.
When a cloud forms under these conditions, water vapour is forced to condense around fewer nuclei, creating larger droplets and fewer of them. Large droplets reflect less light for the same volume of cloud water.
To brighten such clouds, we can spray large quantities of microscopic seawater droplets into the air. This process of atomising seawater mimics the generation of sea salt aerosols by wind and waves in the ocean. If these are incorporated into a cloud and create extra droplets, the cloud will be brightened.
The latest cloud brightening generator (V model) in action. Southern Cross University
Testing the theory
Although scientists have researched cloud brightening for more than 30 years, no one had ever directly tested the theory. In Australia, we have now developed technology to a point where we are starting to measure the response of the clouds.
We are beginning such tests with the support and permission of Traditional Owners, who have sustainably managed their Sea Country for tens of thousands of years.
Our research program involves more than 15 research institutions and has multiple levels of governance and oversight.
Most people probably don’t realise we are already inadvertently brightening the clouds. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates humanity’s unintentional release of aerosols offsets around 30% of the warming effect due to greenhouse gases.
Sulphates in ship exhaust are such a potent source of aerosols for droplet formation, the passage of ships leaves cloud trails called ship tracks.
When the International Maritime Organisation introduced new rules limiting the sulphur content of marine fuels, the number and extent of ship tracks drastically reduced, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. A recent study even suggests the devastating heat wave that swept the Northern Hemisphere earlier this year was worsened by the absence of ship tracks.
The world-first research we are conducting in Australia aims to determine if we could harness the clouds in an effective, environmentally responsible and socially acceptable manner for the future conservation of one of our most precious ecosystems.
Daniel Patrick Harrison receives funding from the The Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program which is funded by the partnership between the Australian Governments Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
He would like to acknowledge the many indigenous traditional owners of the Great Barrier Reef whom have supported this work and thank them for their valuable insights and contribution to the design and conduct of the research.
Viewed from the Voyager 1 space probe as it passed beyond the edge of the solar system, Earth and Venus might not look too different – same diameter, similar mass and distance from the Sun.
But from a human perspective, Venus is a hostile spot. Its much denser atmosphere enables a greenhouse effect on steroids, with surface temperatures approaching 500°C.
An image of Venus captured from a spacecraft. NASA, CC BY-SA
While the timeline that brought Venus’ climate to where it is today is still being researched, the critical difference between the two planetary systems is the ocean. Venus possibly never had one, but oceans on Earth have shielded us from the worst climate impacts by storing around 90% of the heat captured by the changing atmosphere.
We have managed to land a camera on the surface of Venus, with the Soviet space probe Venera 9 in 1975. Like the “Earth rise” image captured during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, this again proved the power of visual imagery. Yet we’re still learning about our own oceans.
The first images of the surface of Venus arrived a year before we discovered mid-ocean hydrothermal vents and three years before we first looked beneath an Antarctic ice shelf.
If we want to better understand the climate-regulating role of Earth’s oceans, we must increase the effort we put into observing them, with a focus on our planet’s largest heat sink, the Southern Ocean.
Sea ice up against an ice shelf. Craig Stevens/K132/NIWA, CC BY-SA
Direct observations
Thanks to a variety of Earth-orbiting satellites and resource-intensive computer simulations, we have made progress in observing Earth’s oceans.
But as powerful and all-encompassing as these observations are, we still make surprise discoveries, such as vent systems on the seafloor and life in under-ice cavities. This is why we need to continue exploring and ramp up our capacity to measure the oceans directly.
Nowhere is this more true than in the Southern Ocean, the connector of all oceans.
Several unique features distinguish the Southern Ocean from Earths’ other oceans. One is Antarctica’s sea ice – the continent’s skirt of frozen ocean that comes and goes with the seasons.
The dramatic decline in Antarctic sea ice is of concern to the climate science community because of its several major roles: as a mirror that reflects solar energy back into space, a pump that ventilates the deep ocean, and an essential habitat for polar life, from algae to Emperor penguins.
The Southern Ocean’s other unique feature is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current – a massive flywheel of energy driven by winds, spinning non-stop from west to east. The flow rate in this giant ocean current dwarfs even the largest river, the Amazon, by three orders of magnitude.
Ocean sensors being retrieved by the Korean icebreaker IBRV Araon in Robertson Bay, Antarctica. Fiona Elliott/NIWA/ANTA1801, CC BY-SA
Fostering collaboration
The rapid changes in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica make it clear we need to increase our capacity to observe and measure this environment. But it is a very expensive place to work.
While it is not quite Venus in terms of difficulty, measurements have to target and prioritise the major science questions.
Earlier this year, more than 300 researchers gathered for the first Southern Ocean Observing Symposium in Hobart to express their growing concern. They came together to assess the state of the ocean and to develop new ways to collaborate, share information and to connect efforts from national research programmes as much as possible.
A recent analysis looked at how we might measure connections between the Ross Sea and far-East Antarctica. These are critical because major ice-free ocean areas, known as polynyas, and the massive ice shelf in the Ross Sea region, influence waters flowing westward into East Antarctica.
The risks of the unknown
We are entering a new era of observing the Southern Ocean. The urgency of the climate emergency has prompted a range of new technologies to be deployed to monitor and understand the changing conditions, including a fleet of autonomous Argo floats that monitor temperature and salinity at depth.
It isn’t cheap to track changes in such a remote location. Sending ships and deploying robust instrumentation, and then retrieving the gear and data, all adds up. But it is almost certainly far less expensive than responding to the impacts of climate change.
The lack of direct observations is one reason we continue to be surprised by changes in the region. As a community, we have been caught out by the sudden decline in sea ice around Antarctica. But the lack of a consistent method to measure sea ice thickness over large areas has been a known major gap in our knowledge for decades.
The Venus analogy may be a stretch, but there is little doubt the observations in the Southern Ocean and around Antarctica are a harbinger of changes to a climate system that, to date, has enabled our species and cultures to flourish.
Craig Stevens receives funding from the New Zealand Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), Antarctica New Zealand Antarctic Science Platform (ASP), MBIE Strategic Science Investment Fund and the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fund. He is on the Council of the New Zealand Association of Scientists.
Natalie Robinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
There is a huge amount of pressure on parents today – from feeding babies the “best organic purees” to making sure older children get all the developmental opportunities they could possibly need, while of course documenting the whole thing on Instagram.
There is also no shortage of advice about how to go about this. Just as there is no shortage of debate about the “best way” to parent your child.
But what if parents just focused on being a “good enough parent” instead? You do not have to be perfect in order to do a good job of raising a child. In fact, it may be better if you are not.
We know parenting matters in a child’s life. Research tell us parents influence their child’s development, resilience and expectations of themselves and others. This in turn determines their behaviour and wellbeing.
He found children actually benefit from mothers who “fail” them in some ways.
This does not mean parents can neglect or minimise their role in making sure children are safe where they live, learn and play. Children also need to have their emotional needs met. They need to know they are loved and feel a sense of belonging.
But good enough parenting recognises parental failure is an inevitable part of life. Experiencing sadness, tears and anger are part of childhood and parents should allow children to gradually tolerate some frustration. The good enough parent realises it is not possible to be available and immediately responsive all of the time.
Winnicott noted when babies are very little, their needs are attended to almost immediately. If a baby cries, the parent will feed or change them.
But as the child grows, they do not necessarily have to have their needs met immediately. Parents can allow them to develop a tolerance for some uncertainty – or things not going the way they wanted – while still caring and responding to their basic needs.
This is important because life does not always go as we expect it to and children need to develop resilience.
What does good enough parenting look like everyday?
As a starting point, ask yourself “what does my child need from me?”
Good enough parenting focuses on tuning in to and responding to your child’s emotions and needs. These needs will change over time. For example, a good enough parent realises they need to respond quickly to their baby’s hunger cry. Whereas a teenager is learning to navigate life. A good enough parent will at times have to allow their child to face consequences of their choices.
At the same time, don’t try and “stop” emotions. Good enough parenting is about being there for your child if they are sad or angry, but not preventing them from being sad or angry in the first place. It can be helpful to think about suffering as not caused from emotional pain but from avoidance of uncomfortable emotions.
And don’t set unrealistic standards for your child. For example, if it’s dinner time and they are tired and hungry, don’t expect them to tidy their room.
Don’t suppress or ‘stop’ emotions if your child is upset. Instead, try and empathise with them. Yan Krukau/Pexels
Set boundaries
Being a good enough parent also means accepting your child for who they are. Children need unconditional love from a parental figure to develop a healthy sense of self. So, if you have a child who is more interested in soccer than maths (or vice versa) don’t try and change them.
At the same time, do set boundaries – such as “please don’t interrupt me when I’m talking” or “I’d like you to knock before you come into my room” – and try and be consistent about enforcing them. Not only does this help define your relationships (as a parent and child, not two friends), it also teaches your child about healthy boundaries in any relationship.
Things won’t always go to plan
As we know, things won’t always go as we want or expect. So if you feel angry with your child, model how to emotionally regulate and try and talk to them as calmly as you can. If you make a mistake – such as raising your voice or losing your temper – apologise.
But also find ways to give yourself a break. This means you will have the energy and capacity to parent tomorrow and into the future.
And ask for help when you need it. This could be from your partner, family or professionals, such as a GP, family counsellor or psychologist. Remember, this is about being good enough, not super human.
Cher McGillivray does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When was the last time you used cash? For many Australians using cash or even swiping a card has become a rare event.
The move towards a cashless society started 50 years ago with the introduction of the Bankcard and was driven by technological advancements. But it really took off with the COVID pandemic when consumers and retailers were reluctant to handle potentially infected notes and coins.
The federal government last week underscored its recognition of this trend by unveiling reforms to regulate digital payment providers. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said:
As payments increasingly become digital, our payments system needs to remain fit for purpose so that it delivers for consumers and small businesses. We want to make sure the shift to digital payments occurs in a way that promotes greater competition, innovation and productivity across our entire economy.
From big cities to remote rural corners the shift towards digital payments is evident. This raises the question, is a cashless society inevitable?
The phenomenal growth of the digital payments
The convenience of digital transactions has become irresistible for consumers and businesses and has led to the sector eclipsing traditional payment methods.
The relentless march of technology has produced myriad innovative platforms from mobile wallets to buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) schemes, each vying for a piece of this burgeoning market.
A recent report by the Australian Banking Association paints a vivid picture of the digital payment industry’s explosive expansion.
The use of digital wallet payments on smartphones and watches has soared from $746 million in 2018 to over $93 billion in 2022. Cash only accounts for 13% of consumer payments in Australia as of the end of 2022, a stark contrast to 70% in 2007.
Digital wallets are popular with most age groups. Young Australians aged between 18 and 29 are leading the pack, with two thirds using digital wallets to pay for goods and services.
About 40% of Australians are comfortable leaving home without their actual wallets or even credit or debit cards, as long as they have their mobile devices with digital wallets.
The astonishing speed at which Australians have embraced digital payments places the country among the top users of cashless payments globally, surpassing the United States and European countries.
Digital wallets are not the only players in this space. The use of BNPL products is also growing rapidly in Australia, which was where many of the large-scale products in this category started.
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) reports the total value of all BNPL transactions increased by 79% in the 2018–19 financial year. This continues into 2022 with an annual growth beyond 30% according to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).
PayID and PayPal payments are also claiming their shares in this space.
Are government regulations necessary?
The government’s planned regulation of the system, contained in amendments to the Reforms to the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act 1998, is a big step towards establishing a secure and trustworthy cashless society in Australia.
It will subject BNPL and digital wallet service providers like Apple Pay and Google Pay to the same oversight by the RBA as traditional credit and debit cards.
The regulations will require providers meet clear standards for security measures, data protection and dispute resolution to give Australians confidence their funds and personal information are safeguarded.
With increasing concern over cyber attacks, the regulations will help reduce the risk of fraudulent activities and money laundering and help identify suspicious transactions, maintaining the integrity of the financial system.
Also, regulation will promote fair competition and market stability by levelling the playing field and by preventing monopolies.
While banks support the forthcoming regulation, new market players are less positive. For example, Apple Pay says it is merely providing technical architecture rather than payment services.
The current regulatory debate is not new. When credit cards made their debut in Australia in the early 1970s, there were hardly any safeguards for consumers. This led to card users being hit with high interest rates on money owed, sneaky fees and aggressive marketing tactics.
Consequently, regulations were introduced to hold card providers to a standard of responsible behaviour. Today, they must openly disclose interest rates, fees and charges, and follow stringent guidelines in advertising their products and services.
Regulating digital wallet providers strikes a crucial balance between innovation and accountability, ensuring life-changing technology continues to serve the public interest.
The shift towards a cashless society in Australia isn’t just a possibility, it’s already well underway.
The blend of technological advancements, changing consumer preferences and regulatory adaptations has set the stage for this transformation. The new regulations will help Australians navigate this transition more confidently.
Angel Zhong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Halloween season is here, bringing with it the promise of new horrors at the box office. This year it’s all about renewed cinematic horrors.
Alongside the tenth Saw film, there is The Exorcist: Believer, directed by David Gordon Green, the sixth Exorcist film and the first instalment of a new trilogy which cost US$400 million in worldwide rights alone.
Believer follows certain rules and conventions with roots in William Peter Blatty’s bestselling 1971 novel: think demonic possession, projectile vomiting and spinning heads. Aficionados expect these things from works bearing The Exorcist imprimatur.
Green’s film manages to hit these markers – albeit with a twist.
Believer is a “retcon”, an example of retroactive continuity: a movie which ignores or re-imagines events in previous films.
Believer follows directly on from the plot of William Friedkin’s masterly adaptation 1973 of Blatty’s book, while disregarding all other films (and the underrated television series) in the franchise.
However, what seems at first blush to be an innovative approach to franchise movie-making is, in truth, nothing more than a creative dead end – a futile exercise in cinematic nostalgia.
The retcon is not a new phenomenon (Arthur Conan Doyle’s resurrection of Sherlock Holmes being a case in point), but the concept has become ubiquitous in recent years.
Green has form with the genre. He was also behind the Halloween trilogy (2018–22), drawing on the 1978 film of the same name.
The 2018 Halloween made over US$250 million at the global box office and breathed new commercial life into a desiccated corpse of a franchise.
There were nine Halloween films between the first in 1978 and Green’s in 2018, but Green simply disregards the sequels while subtly tweaking the ending of the original.
Green’s slasher picks up after the first Halloween left off, with scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie Strode.
This is where things take a discernibly revisionist
turn. For those who haven’t seen it: the original Halloween climaxes with a confrontation between the teenage babysitter Laurie and the franchise’s unstoppable antagonist, Michael Myers (Nick Castle).
After a seemingly deadly struggle, Michael disappears into thin air. Having evaded capture, Michael then returns in the 1981 sequel to wreak further havoc.
In Green’s revisionary sequel, set 40 years after the original, the story presupposes Michael was captured and imprisoned immediately after his brutal killing spree. Disregarding the sequels, the 2018 iteration begins with Michael still incarcerated.
Suffice it to say, once things get going, it doesn’t take him long to break out.
By pretending there is only one Halloween, Green gives himself space to spruce up the original mythology, while re-imagining it for a modern audience.
(The 2018 film was a financial and critical success. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the two cinematicbombs that followed.)
A pale rehash
This brings us to The Exorcist: Believer.
Green clearly thinks he has found a winning recipe with legacy sequels and retcons.
In keeping with other legacy sequels, both Halloween and Believer rely on hefty doses of celluloid gravitas and pre-existing star power.
Where the 2018 Halloween had Curtis as a damaged, alcoholic Laurie, the 2023 Exorcist has the 90-year-old Ellen Burstyn returning as Chris MacNeil.
In the original, Chris’s daughter Regan (Linda Blair) falls victim to demonic possession. In Believer, Chris, who has written a bestselling memoir about Regan’s possession, is now a leading authority on demonology. She somehow ends up attempting an impromptu exorcism.
It does not go well.
As with the 2018 Halloween, Believer also assumes there is only one Exorcist film in existence. This approach has benefits: it means Green doesn’t have to worry about the notorious 1977 sequel, the worst film of all time.
Believer’s plot focuses on two friends, Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) and Angela (Lidya Jewett), who head into the woods to commune with the dead. They vanish. Once reunited with their families, it becomes clear something is amiss. Things go from awful to catastrophic, and various personages and priests try to help. Cue the pea soup.
If this sounds more or less like a pale rehash of Friedkin’s Exorcist, that is because it pretty much is. The only difference is the crushingly dull (and not scary) Believer features not one but two possessed girls.
In the lead up to the film’s release, Green claimed he wanted to leave his directorial mark on the world of the Exorcist, while simultaneously breaking the rules of what he considers the Holy Grail of horror franchises.
Ultimately, the film fails on all fronts. From the opening shot of two dogs fighting in a Haitian street (a callback to the dramatic prologue of Friedkin’s box-office smash) to the entirely predictable final act, it is clear what we have here is an empty exercise in brand recognition. It is hard not to feel short-changed.
Green’s execrable new Exorcist is not only one the most breathtakingly cynical movies of recent memory – it serves as an indictment of what cultural theorist Mark Fisher once condemned as the creative paucity of retcon culture in general.
It is very difficult to care about films of this sort, the cinematic equivalent of, in Fisher’s memorable phrase, “microwave-reheated comfort food”.
Had he lived long enough, I imagine Friedkin’s head would have been left swivelling at the horror of it all.
And to think: there are two retconned Exorcist sequels still to come. This is truly the stuff of filmic nightmares.
Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Auckland Museum lit its building up in blue and white. On social media, the museum said it had lit up “in solidarity with Israel”.
“Our thoughts go out to the many civilians impacted as a result of the terrorist attack a week ago,” the museum had said.
“As a war memorial, we value the importance of peaceful dialogue and understanding.
“We condemn all acts of violence and terrorism. This evening the museum is lit in blue and white in condemnation and as an expression of hope for peace.”
Researcher Dr Arama Rata said within hours, about 100 people had gathered outside the museum, many holding Palestine flags and chanting “Free Palestine”.
She said a verbal confrontation arose between the Palestine supporters and a group of Israel supporters.
Red fabric-covered lights Dr Rata said Palestine supporters subsequently covered the lights with red fabric blacking out the display.
She said the museum must issue a formal apology to the community, saying its actions have caused deep divisions for people who are already hurting.
Alternative Jewish Voices co-founder Marilyn Garson, a Jewish woman who spent four years in Gaza providing humanitarian aid to shelters, said the board of the War Memorial Museun was either partisan, or uninformed.
“They feel solidarity only with Israel. So they single out one acknowledged crime while massive crimes against Palestinians are unfolding. I don’t understand how Palestinian civilians can be invisible to the board of a war museum,” she said.
“It seems to me that it is the antithesis of a war memorial’s mission to downgrade some human lives. They’re saying that they feel for these civilians and not those civilians. So someone really doesn’t understand the concept of civilian safety.
“A war memorial should act to hold back the violence, they need to learn into their blind spot. I want them to call for the end of this horror.”
Personally apologised In a statement, chief executive David Reeves said he personally apologised and they were reviewing the feedback they had received from Sunday night.
“I acknowledge the depth of feeling around our decision to light the museum on Sunday night,” Reeves said.
“We wanted this to be an expression of hope for peace — our approach was wrong, and I personally apologise for the distress and hurt caused to members of our community,” he said.
“I am carefully reviewing and reflecting on all of the feedback we have received. As a War Memorial Museum, we continue to hope for deeper understanding and a peaceful resolution to conflict.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vasso Apostolopoulos, Professor of Immunology, Vice-Chancellors Distinguished Professorial Fellow, Head of Immunology and Translational Research, Victoria University
So what exactly is tuberculosis, how is it treated and what is Australia doing to prevent its transmission?
It starts as a respiratory infection
Tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, starts as a respiratory infection when inhaled.
Once in the lungs, the immune system responds by forming granulomas, clusters of immune cells (mainly macrophages and T cells), in an attempt to contain the infection.
Over time, some granulomas may calcify, with calcium salts accumulating within these structures.
These calcifications are visible on X-rays and indicate latent tuberculosis infection. This means the Mycobacterium tuberculosis are in a dormant state, causing no immediate symptoms but posing a potential risk of reactivation if the host’s immune defences weaken.
Reactivation can lead to active tuberculosis, characterised by symptoms such as a persistent cough, fever, weight loss and fatigue.
Active tuberculosis is contagious, especially when it affects the lungs, as it primarily spreads through respiratory droplets released during coughing or sneezing.
Early treatment is key
Early diagnosis and treatment reduces the infectious period and helps prevent spreading the disease to others. It can also halt the progression of a latent infection to active disease.
Delayed treatment can lead to complications such as lung damage and scarring; damage to the bones, kidneys, lymph nodes and central nervous system; and infection in the brain and spinal cord. Delayed treatment can also be fatal.
However, it can be lengthy, lasting several months or more. This can be physically and emotionally challenging for patients, especially as it includes periods of isolation.
Treating tuberculosis can also be a notable burden on the health system, due to the need for isolation, contact tracing, and specialised care.
Tackling drug-resistant bacteria
The Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria can quickly become resistant to antibiotics, so routine treatment includes multiple antibiotics which increases adverse effects.
The emergence of drug-resistant tuberculosis strains is a major concern because it makes treatment significantly more challenging and costly. Managing drug-resistant tuberculosis often requires extended treatment courses with second-line drugs, which can lead to more severe side effects and demand close monitoring.
Treating tuberculosis can sometimes be a long and difficult process. Shutterstock
The prolonged and complex treatment regimens increase the risk of treatment non-compliance and failure, posing not only a threat to affected people but also raising concerns about potential community transmission of these drug-resistant strains.
Who is susceptible to tuberculosis?
The risk of acquiring tuberculosis is higher among people who live in densely populated housing, those with compromised immune systems and people with poor access to health care.
This includes Indigenous Australians, recent migrants and refugees, people with underlying health conditions (such as HIV or diabetes), people in corrections facilities, remote and rural communities, the elderly, health-care workers and people who are homeless.
Children are also at greater risk of tuberculosis, as their immune systems are still developing.
Tuberculosis often presents differently in children, making it challenging to estimate the true global burden. However, the World Health Organization estimates 11% of the 10.6 million tuberculosis cases worldwide are in children. Some 14% of all tuberculosis-related deaths occur in children under 15 years old.
Common symptoms of paediatric tuberculosis include prolonged cough, wheezing, weight loss, loss of appetite, respiratory symptoms, failure to thrive, swelling of the lymph nodes, fever and night sweats.
disseminated tuberculosis. This spreads throughout the body via the bloodstream and lymphatic system to the liver, spleen, bone marrow, kidneys and brain
tuberculous meningitis. This is a life-threatening condition where the infection from the lungs has gone to the brain and spinal cord
congenital tuberculosis. This is a rare condition where a newborn baby is born with active tuberculosis, transmitted from infected mother to baby.
What can we do about TB?
Despite Australia’s relatively low incidence of tuberculosis, we have a robust control program, targeting efforts to vulnerable populations through culturally sensitive health-care services, public health campaigns, and community engagement.
The Bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccine provides partial protection, primarily against severe forms of tuberculosis. It’s not routinely given in Australia because we’re not considered a high-risk country, but it’s given in local regions with tuberculosis outbreaks.
Testing for active tuberculosis is also a part of the immigration process. Visa applicants aged 11 years and over must have a chest X-ray for evidence of active tuberculosis.
SA Health is working with Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations and other partners to respond to this outbreak with information and videos.
Timely and effective tuberculosis control measures help not only in treating individuals but also in preventing further transmission. This reduces the overall impact of the disease on public health and the health-care system.
Dr Ena Husaric, a doctor at The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, co-authored this article.
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.
Pacific leaders fear they will have little or no voice in the new National-led government in Aotearoa New Zealand with the real possibility of not a single Pacific person making it into the new coalition.
Labour had 11 Pacific members of Parliament, then 10 when then Communications Minister Kris Faafoi left. Included was Carmel Sepuloni who became Deputy Prime Minister when Chris Hipkins became leader.
National currently has one possible Pacific MP, Angee Nicholas, but she may lose the Te Atatū seat on special votes, leading with only a margin of 30 over Labour’s Phil Twyford.
But even though the race is tight, she said on social media she had been stopped and congratulated by community members.
“It is going to be close but I hope to bring it home now,” Angee said in a post to social media.
Angee Nicholas says she has been getting positive responses from people in her community . . . “This beautiful family stopped me today to say congratulations. Thank you.” Image: RNZ Pacific/Angee Nicholas/Facebook
National list MP Agnes Loheni has not made the cut as things currently stand.
Pacific political commentator Thomas Wynne said it meant that the number of Pacific people in government might very well go to one or even zero.
Who is it? “Here’s my question to National, who is it exactly that you’re going to have as the minister for Pacific people? Because if Angee doesn’t get in and neither does Agnes, then who?” Wynne asked.
“Because you don’t have any Pacific people in there.
“Chris Luxon has said he has a party of diversity, well I’m sorry but that’s just not the case.”
At the moment Dr Shane Reti is the Pacific people’s spokesperson for National.
On the campaign trail Dr Reti said “attending to the cost of living” was one of the most impactful things that could be done for Pacific people.
Thomas Wynne is part of the Marumaru Atua voyagers. Here he helps guide the vaka into Avarua Harbour in Rarotonga. Image: RNZ Pacific/Daniela Maoate-Cox
Pacific community advocate Melissa Lama said she did not know how National planned to make decisions on Pacific issues.
“To me that’s really scary to have one person represent a massive group of New Zealand society who are visible which is our Pacific people, I just can’t get over that.”
Disheartened over results Lama said she felt disheartened after the results.
“If we look at some of the campaigning slogans and narratives that particularly on the right side, National and Act, have had throughout this election it doesn’t necessarily give me hope for what’s to come for my future and my children’s future,” she said on Sunday.
“I’m definitely gutted. I feel a bit low mood today.”
Dunedin community leader Melissa Lama . . . “I’m definitely gutted. I feel a bit low mood today.” Image: RNZ Pacific/Fire Fire/The Outliers
On Saturday, at a Pacific election watch party in Ilam, Christchurch, most attendees opted to socialise outside instead of watching the results.
Views on what’s to come for Pasifika are mixed. There’s some excitement for change but also nerves.
A common thread was concern that the Ministry for Pacific Peoples would be scrapped.
However, just last week the now incoming Prime Minister told RNZ Pacific he would not bow to ACT.
“Our position very strongly is I’ve been supportive of the Pacific Peoples Ministry. I haven’t been supportive of the management of it. When you have a $40,000 farewell I think that’s insane,” Luxon said.
Keeping an optimistic outlook Deputy Mayor of Waitaki Hana Halalele who is also the general manager of Oamaru Pacific Island Community Group said she was disappointed about the results but was trying to be optimistic.
Hana Halalele . . . disappointed but trying to be optimistic. Image: RNZ Pacific/Waitaki District Council
Despite the drop in Pacific representation in Parliament, Wynne wants to focus on the positives and asks frustrated Pacific community members to hold National and ACT to account on what they have promised.
“I feel it’s time for us to not think about what we’re losing because that day is done — that was yesterday and really we need to start looking at the opportunity of what this new government affords us, because shouting from the sidelines is not going to help,” he said.
Wynne said Act’s vision was for less government and more community involvement could be beneficial.
He also said Act had promised a return of charter schools, which could be good for Pasifika.
Tongan community leader Pakilau Manase Lua, who is leading the charge on fighting for justice for ongoing Dawn Raids said National and Act had been clear on overstayers.
“They don’t support any pathway to residency for people who are overstaying or who may have been stuck here during the lockdowns and had no other option but to try and find a way to settle.”
Pakilau said while there was concern for overstayers, he was still holding out hope the new government would surprise him.
Community leader Pakilau Manase Lua at a Tongan Council of Churches and Aotearoa Tonga Response Group church service . . . leading the charge on fighting for justice over ongoing Dawn Raids. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
On October 16 1923, brothers Walt and Roy set up a modest cartoon studio. Their goal was to produce short animated films. They created a new character: a mouse, with large ears.
Named “Mickey”, he soon became one of the world’s most recognisable images.
Walt Disney was an innovator in terms of space, colour and movement. He had an uncanny ability to provide pleasure for millions of viewers struggling through the Great Depression.
Disney has influenced countless other animation studios and artists. It has received Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature for the likes of The Incredibles, Up and Frozen. Walt himself holds the record for most nominations (59) and Oscar wins (22 competitive awards, plus four honorary awards) for a single individual.
Just how did Disney manage to do it?
Steamboat Willie and technological wonders
Based in Los Angeles, Disney set about innovating. He created The Alice Comedies, a series of short films featuring a live-action child actress in a cartoon world. Then came Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a precursor to Mickey Mouse.
Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, was the world’s first fully synchronised sound cartoon. His pioneering use of sound quickly became an industry norm.
A simple story featuring Mickey as a steamboat captain trying to navigate the boat while dealing with various comical situations, Steamboat Willie was universally praised. After a short theatrical run in New York, the film was exhibited nationwide and set Disney on its way.
The clip of Mickey holding the ship’s wheel and whistling became the company’s logo in 2007, reminding audiences of Steamboat’s enduring importance.
New characters emerged post-Steamboat, such as Donald Duck and Mickey’s love interest, Minnie, which still endure today.
Flowers and Trees, made in 1932, was the first animated short film to win an Academy Award – it was also Disney’s (and the industry’s) first full-colour three-strip Technicolor film.
By the end of the 1930s, Disney had pivoted to feature-length animated films, releasing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.
What followed Snow White is often referred to as Disney’s “golden age”, with the release of Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
Those early films still dazzle today – think of the Sorcerers’ Apprentice scene in Fantasia (1940) or the Pink Elephants hallucinogenic number in Dumbo. And is there any scene, in any film, more heart-wrenching than the death of Bambi’s mother?
But the golden age never really stopped. The hits just kept on coming – Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Mary Poppins (1964) remain enduring classics. In the 1990s, a new generation fell in love with Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994) – and these films were then remade as live-action versions in the 2010s.
Even a minor Disney film like Zootopia (2016) could make a billion dollars at the box-office.
Disneyland and diversification
In 1955, Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. He wanted to build an inclusive theme park where all the family could have fun.
After Disneyland came Disney World in Florida in 1971, then versions of Disneyland in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
A famous diagram, sketched by Walt himself in 1957, foreshadowed the direction Disney would ultimately take: a huge business empire of synergies, merchandising and cross-promotion.
Buyouts and a cultural behemoth
In 2006 Disney bought Pixar, in 2009 it bought Marvel and in 2012 it bought LucasFilm. These acquisitions solidified Disney’s position as the brand leader in the entertainment industry.
Pixar was known for films like Toy Story (1995) and Finding Nemo (2003) and the purchase would lead to multiple collaborations between the two.
Most recently, in 2019, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox for a staggering US$71 billion. The deal gave them instant access to Fox’s vast back catalogues.
The deal made some industry insiders uneasy: Disney had become a cultural behemoth, strangling competition, homogenising content and swallowing up entire franchises.
Disney films proudly prioritise family values, stress teamwork and empathy and promote gender equality. Yet until relatively recently, its heroes and heroines were very visibly white, and the studio was criticised for invoking messages of privilege, racial hierarchy and standards of beauty.
Its 1946 film Song of the South has long been criticised for its racist portrayal of African Americans and its romanticisation of the plantation era. Since 1986, Disney have tried to keep it out of circulation, although clips can be found online.
Many old films streaming on Disney+ now feature a disclaimer telling viewers some scenes will include “negative depictions” and “mistreatment of people or cultures”.
LGBTQ+ representation has become more visible since LeFou became Disney’s first openly gay character in its 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast. But the backlash was troubling, and Disney also ran into trouble with conservative critics with its same-sex kiss in Lightyear (2022), and would later be mocked as “woke Disney” by conservative politicians and media personalities.
CEO Bob Iger – who stepped down in 2021 but was then brought back in 2022 on a huge salary – has not fared well during the recent SAG-AFTRA disputes, with comments deemed out of touch and tone-deaf by many.
Still, despite these tricky issues, Disney’s corporate stranglehold shows no sign of abating. Its reach is gigantic. From cartoons to comics to CGI, Disney controls much of our popular culture.
“If you can dream it, you can do it,” Walt once said. As Disney turns 100, with a market capitalisation today of more than US$150 billion, that’s some dream come true.
Ben McCann does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
But with almost a million species worldwide and some 30,000 calling Australia home, the (unusually) warm weather also presents an opportunity to appreciate these remarkable and essential insects with whom we share our world.
Despite their sheer diversity, we’re likely to encounter only a select few flies daily. So who are these curious insects, and how should we think about their presence in our lives?
Familiar faces
Bush flies (Musca vetustissima) are the iconic Australian fly, and are found country-wide. They slake their thirst on the sweat and tears of mammals and so linger around our heads, shoulders and faces in search of a refreshing drink.
They’re so persistent that they’re credited with inspiring the “Aussie salute”. These small explorers are otherwise harmless, and pose no serious threat to health or home beyond being a mild nuisance.
The ‘Aussie salute’ is a characteristic gesture of waving flies – specifically the persistent Australian bush flies – away from the face. Mick and Rortles / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
Similar in appearance are house flies (Musca domestica), which frequent our homes. Unlike bush flies, however, they’re more interested in scraps of food and waste left unprotected. They regurgitate digestive juices to break solids into a mush more amenable to their straw-like mouths, and can pose a minor hygiene concern as a consequence.
Blowflies bring some sparkle to the fly world, and are easily recognised by their often large, shiny bodies. Although sometimes a pest, they’re also voracious scavengers and effective pollinators. In this way they do their bit to break down organic matter, recycle nutrients, and transport pollen to support plant life.
The golden bluebottle (Chrysomya incisuralis) is one of many species of Australian blowfly. Shutterstock
The sheer size of horseflies makes them powerful fliers, which can often be heard and seen at a distance. Females demand a blood meal and so pack a hearty bite to mammals, including us, and can be a nuisance to livestock. They are also, however, excellent pollinators, with some orchids relying on their hard work and specialised mouthparts for survival.
Finally, and famously, are mosquitoes. (Yes, they are a type of fly.) Many summer evenings are spent swatting females as they sip our blood.
More serious is their role as vectors for diseases that have helped to topple empires, and which remain a significant health burden, especially in the Global South. Malaria is among the farthest-reaching, while Ross River Virus, chikungunya, zika and dengue all circulate with help from mosquitoes.
Shoo fly?
For the minority of flies that prove a recurring annoyance, the primary goal is to deter rather than kill them. In this case, the remedies are simple:
use topical repellents containing DEET or Picaridin, and wear loose-fitting clothing when outside
install flyscreens in the house, and check them regularly for holes
keep your food covered, both at home and when out enjoying the warm weather
empty your bins regularly and minimise standing water, both of which can attract unwanted attention.
Avoid reaching for the bug-bombs and sprays, which have devastating impacts on beneficial insects. If a chemical last resort is required, choose selective sprays rather than broad-spectrum options such as pyrethroids and neonicotinoids, which kill the many good bugs with the few bad ones.
Similarly, those noise-emitting, electrified or smelly gadgets that promise a fly-free existence are best avoided, as most are either ineffective, or harm far more than their intended targets.
From pesky to paramount
While our daily encounters with a handful of fly species may taint our perception of the group as a whole, such a view is both unwarranted and unjustified. Flies are among the most diverse animals on the planet, and are utterly crucial for the healthy function of our ecosystems.
The larvae of the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) are highly effective decomposers, eating twice their own bodyweight every day. Didier Descouens / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
On the other side of the circle of life are outstanding decomposers, such as black soldier flies. Each individual larva can eat twice its bodyweight daily, which at the scale of tens of thousands of grubs presents a promising pathway towards sustainable waste management. They are also a rich source of protein for livestock, or even humans.
Just as a very few flies are pests, many serve as remedies in their role as biological controls. The 10,000-odd species of tachinid, or example, make a living as parasitoids of other insects. That is, they lay their eggs inside, and eventually kill, the developing young of others, which include pest caterpillars, flies and bugs.
As the warm weather rolls around, then, take the opportunity to look a little closer at our nimble neighbours, and consider both their staggering diversity and the vital roles they humbly fill. The natural world – us included – would not be the same without them.
Thomas White receives funding from The Australian Research Council, Agrifutures, and the Hermon Slade Foundation. He is also affiliated with the conservation charity Invertebrates Australia.
Tanya Latty receives funding from the Australian Research Council and AgriFutures Australia. She is affiliated with conservation organisation Invertebrates Australia and is president of the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
Unlike nearly every other species of shark, scalloped hammerheads are highly social. They gather in large groups, or aggregations, numbering in the hundreds. But why? We don’t know.
With the help of drones, we now know a bit more. In our new research, we describe finding a location in a marine park off the coast of Perth where juvenile scalloped hammerheads (Sphyrna lewini) gather in numbers.
Scalloped hammerheads – one of ten species in the hammerhead family – prefer warm waters. But they have become regular visitors to the waters off Perth in summer, now the southernmost part of their range. The sharks are not considered dangerous to humans.
These iconic sharks are among the world’s most threatened species due to over-fishing. And incredibly they are still legally fished in Australia, despite their populations falling by 80% in just 55 years.
They are in danger unless we protect them.
What’s special about these oceanic wayfarers?
Scalloped hammerheads are named for the dents on their hammer-shaped head or cephalofoil. They’re skilled long-distance swimmers and exceptional free divers, able to hunt in the dark waters 500 metres below the surface. They grow slowly and live for up to 55 years.
They’re a challenging species to study because they cover long distances and spend lots of time down deep. Finding a place where these sharks regularly aggregate offers us a remarkable opportunity to learn more about these oceanic wayfarers.
From our drones, we could watch as the scalloped hammerheads grouped together each month. Author provided, CC BY-ND
How did we find them?
Small commercial drones are revolutionising the way we study marine wildlife – especially sharks. The aerial perspective lets us see things we couldn’t see before. Drones have shed light on elusive behaviours we have otherwise been unable to verify. Footage can also be used to identify, count and measure animals.
We heard surf lifesavers had observed hammerhead sharks off Perth beaches during their helicopter shark patrols. We began our search at the Shoalwater Islands Marine Park, off the coast from Rockingham, in Perth’s southern suburbs.
Over two successive summers, we used drones to successfully spot and then track scalloped hammerheads as they aggregated inside the marine park.
The juvenile sharks aggregate in the shallow waters of the Shoalwater Islands Marine Park, south of Perth. Author provided, CC BY-ND
What did we learn?
We learned many things. First, the scalloped hammerheads aggregating at the marine park were juveniles, not adults.
We only found them in a small area of the marine park. They were present with the full moon.
Once aggregated, they would swim in formation, moving in winding patterns through the shallow waters of the marine park.
In terms of what were they doing, our study suggest they’re seeking a place to rest and recover. Sharks often hunt more on the nights with a full moon, taking advantage of better light to see prey.
That would mean these juveniles are tired after a night’s hunting. Now they need to rest and digest. Gathering in a group could also provide some degree of protection from other predators in the area.
It’s likely, therefore, these shallow waters are important shelter for scalloped hammerheads.
This scalloped hammerhead was filmed by a baited remote underwater video system (BRUVS) off the Cocos Keeling Islands, Western Australia. Author provided, CC BY-ND
How can we protect them?
Our research points to the urgent need to strengthen protection of scalloped hammerheads in the popular Shoalwater Islands Marine Park.
We need a code of conduct to prevent water users such as boaters, kayakers, and swimmers from disturbing the animals, similar to those protecting whale sharks and humpback whales. Boat speed limits and bans on chasing animals are essential if we are to protect these endangered animals.
Stopping fishing at the aggregation site is vitally important. Hammerheads are extremely vulnerable to any capture and are unlikely to survive “catch and release” fishing. The marine park should be a safe spot for the sharks to shelter and rest.
We need to strengthen protections in the marine park, shifting from multiple use status – which allows fishing – to highly protected, which prohibits fishing.
Right now, the federal government is reviewing the status of these sharks. Given ongoing fishing pressure, there are clear reasons to assess them as endangered rather than their unclear status as “conservation dependent”.
Australia is fortunate to host remarkable and endangered species such as hammerhead sharks. As our understanding grows, so does our responsibility. There are simple steps available to the state and federal government to safeguard the future of this threatened species and maintain healthy marine ecosystems.
Naima Andrea López received funding for her PhD research from the Australian Government RTP Scholarship, The Jock Clough Marine Foundation through the Oceans Institute Robson and Robertson Award and The Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment & The Ecological Society of Australia.
Jessica Meeuwig 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 March 1976, American Leonard Mack was convicted of sexual assault and holding two female victims at gunpoint. In September 2023, Mack’s wrongful conviction was finally overturned by a New York judge on his 72nd birthday with the help of the Innocence Project, an organisation that uses DNA evidence to prove factual innocence.
Mack’s conviction took 47 years to overturn. He served seven-and-a-half of these years in a New York prison. His case is the longest in United States history to be overturned using DNA evidence.
In June 2023, a similar historic moment occurred in Australia. Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned and released after 20 years in prison for the murder and manslaughter of her four young children.
Considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Australian history, Folbigg’s release has sparked discussion over whether Australia needs a formalised body to deal with post-conviction appeals.
Mack and Folbigg are only two individuals on different sides of the world who have spent decades fighting to prove their innocence.
Many others are still fighting. The prevalence of wrongful convictions is hard to determine. The National Registry of Exonerations in the United States has recorded 3,396 exonerations nation-wide since 1989.
But data on official exonerations fail to capture the many individuals whose convictions are yet to be overturned.
Estimates of the prevalence of wrongful convictions in the United States range from 0.5 to 5%. The exact prevalence in Australia is less clear but we do know 71 cases of wrongful convictions have been identified in Australia between 1922 to 2015.
Some have argued there could be 350 convictions per year of individuals who are factually innocent in Australia.
A witness mistakenly identifying an innocent suspect is common in many wrongful conviction cases.
Eyewitness misidentification is the leading contributing factor in wrongful convictions overturned by the Innocence Project, present in 64% of their successful cases.
In Australia, 6% of recorded wrongful convictions involved an eyewitness error.
This may be an underestimate given many applications to innocence initiatives in Australia alleging wrongful conviction, such as the Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative, report eyewitness evidence as a potential contributing factor.
In Mack’s case, two victims misidentified him as the perpetrator. These identifications proved to be instrumental in his wrongful conviction. How did the two victims get it wrong?
How problematic procedures influence eyewitnesses
Eyewitness identification evidence relies on witnesses to accurately remember criminal perpetrators. Several factors affect eyewitness memory accuracy. Features of the crime can impact memory, such as whether it was light or dark, or whether the perpetrator wore a disguise.
Memory can also be affected by characteristics of the witness at the time of the crime, such as their stress or intoxication levels.
These factors are present at the time of the crime and cannot be changed. What is perhaps more crucial is that eyewitness memory can also be affected by the procedures law enforcement use to collect identification evidence.
In Mack’s case, there were serious problems with the procedures used to get the identifications from the victims. One of the victims made three separate identifications of Mack. Witnesses should only complete one identification procedure for each suspect, because the first identification will bias future identification attempts.
For two of the identifications the victim made, she was only shown Mack by himself surrounded by police. Showing a lone suspect without any other lineup members may increase mistaken identifications, particularly when the context in which they are shown is highly suggestive.
Seeing Mack in handcuffs and in the presence of police may have led the victim to identify him. Mack was the only person shown to the witness in these identification attempts, so the police officers organising the process knew he was the suspect.
“Single-blind” administration of identification procedures – where the police officers organising the lineup know who the suspect is – increase the likelihood of mistaken identifications.
For the other identification this victim made, she picked Mack out of a photo lineup containing seven images. Mack’s photo was the only photo in the lineup that contained visible clothing and the year (1975) in the background. All members of a lineup must be matched and no one lineup member should stand out, but Mack’s photo was distinct.
With all these problematic practices combined, we can see how Mack was misidentified and convicted.
These recommendations serve to reduce mistaken identifications and enhance accurate ones.
The recommendations address the problematic practices in Mack’s case, but also include things like making sure there is sufficient evidence to place a suspect in a lineup, and giving appropriate instructions to witnesses during the procedure.
Identification procedures should also be video recorded to identify any poor practices.
While these recommendations will go a long way to reducing wrongful convictions resulting from faulty eyewitness identifications, they will only be effective if followed by police.
The next step is ensuring these recommendations are embedded into everyday policing practice.
Hayley Cullen previously worked on a voluntary basis for Not Guilty: The Sydney Exoneration Project, an organisation that reviews cases of potential wrongful conviction. She was not involved in any of the cases discussed in this article.
You’ve finished a workout, so you’re hot and drenched with perspiration – but soon you begin to feel cool again. Later, it’s a sweltering summer evening and you’re finding it hard to sleep, so you kick off the covers.
Sweating is a normal part of the body’s cooling system, helping to release heat and maintain optimal body temperature. But regularly waking up during the night, soaked through from excessive sweating is not.
Night sweats are repeated episodes of excessive or intense sweating at night. They are an unpleasant part of life for many people.
Many conditions and factors can trigger night sweats by changing the body’s tightly regulated temperature set point, at which the body attempts to maintain its core temperature. Some triggers are harmless (a hot bedroom) or even related to positive lifestyle changes (exercise). Others have an underlying cause like menopause, infection, disease or medication.
Temperature control and sweating
The hypothalamus, located in the brain, is part of the endocrine system and the temperature control centre for the body. It contains temperature sensors that receive information from nerve cells (thermoreceptors) located centrally (in the organs) and peripherally in the skin.
Thermoreceptors detect changes in body temperature, sending signals back to the hypothalamus. These signals will either activate sweating to cool the body or shivering to warm the body.
Anyone, regardless of age or gender, can experience night sweats. But women experience night sweats more often than men, largely because menopause and associated changing hormone levels are a leading cause.
Approximately 80% of women experience hot flashes (also called hot flushes) or night sweats after menopause (when periods have ceased for 12 months) and during perimenopause (the time leading up to it).
While both hot flashes and night sweats produce a feeling of overheating, they are different experiences associated with menopause. Hot flashes occur during the day, are transient episodes of flushing and may involve sweating. Night sweats occur at night and involve an intense period of sweating. Changing oestrogen levels are thought to impact norepinephrine and serotonin levels, two neurotransmitters that influence temperature regulation in the hypothalamus.
Hormones also influence night sweats in men, particularly those with low testosterone levels, known as hypogonadism. Around 38% of men aged 45 years or older have low testosterone levels but it can affect men at any age.
Night sweats that come with other symptoms could be a sign of illness. Shutterstock
When fighting infection, our body temperature often rises. This can stimulate sweating to cool and decrease body temperature.
Minor infections like the common cold can cause night sweats. They are also a symptom of serious infections such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and diseases such as Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. However, night sweats are rarely the only symptom present.
Medications such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), corticosteroids, thyroid hormone replacement and methadone can cause night sweats. These medications affect parts of the brain and neurotransmitters that control and stimulate sweating.
Regular alcohol (particularly alcohol dependence) and recreational drug use can also increase the risk of night sweats.
Stress, snoring and strenuous exercise
Night sweats are commonly reported by people with anxiety.
Psychological stress activates the body’s fight or flight system releasing neurotransmitters that increase heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. This causes the body to heat up, at which point it starts sweating to cool the body back down. Night sweats may also increase anxiety, causing more sweating which in turn leads to less sleep and more anxiety.
If anxiety causes night sweats and this causes distress, it’s best to get up, move around and engage in a calming routine, preferably in a dark or dimly lit room.
Night sweats have similarly been connected with sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnoea, where the airway is repeatedly blocked during sleep and there is loud snoring. About one third of people with obstructive sleep apnoea regularly experience night sweats. The exact cause is undetermined but research shows it is linked with low blood oxygen levels (hypoxemia) and/or high blood pressure.
People who snore have a higher likelihood of night sweats. Shutterstock
People can experience night sweats after high-intensity workouts. Vigorous exercise can stimulate the thyroid, increasing basal metabolic rate and body temperature for up to 14 hours post exercise. So night sweats can occur even after a vigorous morning workout.
Night sweats can indicate overtraining and/or under-fuelling. If not enough calories are consumed to support the increase in training, blood sugar could drop and you could experience hypoglycaemia, which can cause night sweats.
When to seek help and 5 things to try
There are numerous health conditions and medications that can cause night sweats and interfere with sleep.
If night sweats are regular, distressing, interfere with sleep or are accompanied by symptoms such as fatigue or weight loss (not related to lifestyle or diet changes) talk to a doctor to help determine the cause. They might suggest alternative medications to any you’re taking or recommend tests or investigations.
In the meantime, you can try the following ideas:
1. sleep in a cool room and use a fan if needed
2. don’t overdress for bed. Wear breathable cotton or linen pyjamas
3. choose lightweight bedding you can kick off. Avoid synthetic fibres and flannel bedding
4. consider a cooling mattress or pillow and avoid those (such as foam ones) that can limit airflow
5. avoid spicy foods, caffeine or alcohol before bed.
Linda Grosser 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.
You might have noticed it after sliding on a rock in a Melbourne creek. Or it could have been wading through a Northern Territory waterhole. It’s slime, and our rivers are full of it. That’s a good thing.
Wherever there are hard surfaces like snags and rocks in our rivers, you’ll find slime. Or, as ecologists call it, biofilm. Biofilms consist of communities of microorganisms that include algae, cyanobacteria, bacteria, fungi and protozoa. Together, they’re fixed in a matrix of natural polymers made by bacteria and other tiny creatures. It’s this matrix which gives the slippery, slimy texture we encounter when swimming in rivers.
Biofilms play an important role in our freshwater ecosystems. They underpin healthy rivers by forming the base of freshwater food webs.
Our new research explores how these common but unsung communities change over time. We found that biofilms are most nutritious when new – less than six weeks old. After that, their food value declines.
This is what a 73-day-old biofilm looks like after being pulled from a lowland river. Author provided, CC BY-ND
Why are biofilms important?
Without slime, rivers would lack a fundamental source of food for animals. That sounds like a big statement, but it’s true.
Algae take energy from the sun and convert it into new biomass through photosynthesis. Bacteria and fungi break down organic debris, from dead leaves to dead fish, and recycle the nutrients. Tiny invertebrate grazers such as zooplankton and macroinvertebrates feed on biofilms. In turn, they become food for larger predators such as fish, platypus and turtles.
Not all biofilms offer the same quality of food. And different communities of biofilm grow under different physical conditions.
When the water level goes up in a river, rocks and dead trees at the surface are submerged and biofilms colonise this new habitat. It happens very quickly. Bacteria arrive first, followed by algae in the next few weeks.
Biofilms undergo natural changes in community composition over time, influenced by physical disturbance (such as scouring when water flow is high, or sedimentation from low flows) or chemical changes, such as additional nutrients from runoff.
These disturbances often lead to periods of collapse and recolonisation by new organisms. Biofilms are thought to become a poorer source of food for animals as they get older. That’s because older biofilm communities become dominated by cyanobacteria and filamentous algae, which aren’t as nutritious as a food for animals.
So what makes good slime?
For the discerning invertebrate, the best biofilm is one containing lots of algae – especially diatoms and green algae. These are rich sources of omega 3 fatty acids, molecules essential for animal growth and reproduction. (That’s why the food supplement industry likes to sell us products rich in omega 3s).
Mayfly nymphs, such as this Offadens spp. (Baetidae) scrape algae and fine detritus from submerged rocks, wood and macrophytes in rivers. Chris Davey, CC BY-ND
Having high quality food is one thing. But the food also needs to be easy to get. In the study of food webs, we often use a theory called ecological energetics. Put simply, this suggests the success of an animal population is limited by how hard it is for individuals to obtain sufficient food for growth and reproduction.
You might have long-chain omega 3 fatty acids present, but buried under a pile of less edible microorganisms and detritus. The effort may simply not be worth the reward.
To date, we have a poor understanding of when biofilms hit their peak food value for animals. That’s what we set out to find.
What did we find?
Many of our rivers are regulated by dams and weirs. That means we can alter water levels to cover rocks and snags with water and trigger growth of new biofilms.
If we know how long it takes for biofilms to reach optimum quality, we can manage water levels to improve food value and benefit both biofilm grazers and the fish that eat them.
In our study, we sank wooden redgum blocks 20 centimetres under the surface of three rivers. Then we sampled the biofilm for 73 days, taking DNA to assess how the proportions of algae, cyanobacteria and fungi varied over time.
We developed a novel approach to assess food value, accounting for both quality of fatty acid profiles and their availability in space.
Redgum blocks give biofilm communities something to grow on.
What did we find? Food value for animals peaked between 24 and 43 days after the blocks were submerged.
After 43 days, the food value of biofilms declined. Filamentous algae and cyanobacteria numbers increased as the biofilms aged, while green algae and diatoms abundance decreased. The amount of slimy-feeling natural polymers also increased over time, making our once-delicious biofilms even less nutritious.
So what does this mean? Water agencies are increasingly using environmental flows to support freshwater fish and animal populations. A widely used application for environmental water is to raise water levels in rivers and weirs to inundate new hard surfaces to grow new biofilms.
Now we know that after six weeks the food value of biofilms for animals declines – and that can help managers find the best ways of using environmental water to produce a biofilm bonanza for invertebrates and everything that eats them.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By André O. Hudson, Dean of the College of Science, Professor of Biochemistry, Rochester Institute of Technology
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Almost since antibiotics were first discovered, we’ve been aware bacteria can learn how to overcome these medicines, a phenomenon known as antimicrobial resistance.
The World Health Organization says we’re currently losing to the bugs, with resistance increasing and too few new antibiotics in the pipeline.
We wanted to know whether experts around the world think we will still have effective antibiotics in 50 years. Seven out of seven experts said yes.
André O. Hudson receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Lori L. Burrows receives research grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Glyconet, and the Ontario Research Fund.
Roy Robins-Browne has received funding from The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, The Australian Research Council, the Bill and Melinda Gates Research Foundation and The US National Institutes of Health.
Fidelma Fitzpatrick, Juliana Côrrea, Raúl Rivas González, and Yori Yuliandra 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.
This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.
For those people focused on meeting the profound challenge of shifting our economies from fossil fuels to clean energy sources, recent headlines from Europe have made alarming reading.
In September, after five months of fierce controversy, Germany’s ruling coalition managed to pass a law banning new gas boilers in homes and beginning a phase-out of existing ones. Yet public protests and likely electoral setbacks in some parts of the country have forced the government to soften the new law.
That same month, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also delayed bans on gas boilers, along with new petrol and diesel cars. Climate activists like Al Gore were dismayed, but Sunak said: “If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people” (for net zero policies).
These conflicts all show that achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 requires not only technology and policy changes but an understanding of the human element – the individuals, workers and communities whose lives will be profoundly affected by these changes.
To transform our energy system, all of us will need to join forces to make fundamental changes in our lifestyles. But these changes cannot fall on everyone in the same way; they must be in line with what is called a “just transition”.
The notion of a “just transition” emerged from the US labour movement in the 1980s as a means to shield workers from the impact of new pollution regulations that potentially threatened their jobs. Today, it has gained prominence as a fundamental principle for achieving climate goals.
The concept proposes a comprehensive approach that ensures a fair distribution of both the benefits and burdens of any significant economic transition. Properly implemented, it enables governments and other stakeholders to avoid a backlash from the wider population as they seek to enact sweeping and necessary change.
The risk of such a backlash is real. Uncomfortable realities about the fairness of proposed solutions to climate change are emerging. London’s recent expansion of its ultra-low emissions zone to encompass all the city’s boroughs provoked strong protests.
Media coverage pitted supporters of the initiative against drivers from low socio-economic backgrounds who struggle to afford low-emissions vehicles and face paying penalties for older, high-emitting cars.
Public discourse concerning the energy transition typically centres around the energy trilemma: ensuring a secure energy supply, reducing carbon emissions, and keeping prices affordable for consumers. Yet vital distributional and equity aspects both between and within nations are far less often addressed.
The potential inequality of climate policies
The problem is made worse by the rising cost of living, which falls harder on low-income households. In Australia, large- and small-scale energy policies have driven up network costs associated with renewable investments. Low-income households now spend twice the amount of their disposable income on energy than average-income households do. An increasing number of households are falling into energy debt as they are unable to pay their energy bills.
What’s more, research shows that households without access to solar power, many of whom are on low incomes, largely fund government-backed renewable energy programs, since the costs of funding these programs are distributed through energy bills.
In these programs, governments assure renewable energy developers a fixed energy price to secure their support to provide renewable energy. Consumers who can afford to install solar get cheap power; those who cannot are left paying the difference in their bills.
These pressures help to explain why trust in the energy sector has eroded. The sector needs to put people and communities first in the delivery of products and services.
Australia’s fairness challenge
Australia’s task in ensuring a just transition is not easy, when policymakers already have much to do to deliver an integrated climate and energy policy. While our effort on climate change compared to other countries has improved on last year, it still ranks 55th in the Climate Change Performance Index, below the USA and China, and its performance is categorised as “very low”.
One risk is that as Australia falls behind other countries in its energy transition, if it were to suddenly accelerate its net zero ambitions to keep up with the pace of change elsewhere, it could lose sight of the transition costs imposed on different groups.
For example, to-date mining workers have borne the brunt of costs associated with the transition to renewable energy. Areas with recently closed coal-fired power stations have experienced an average increase in their unemployment rate of around 0.7%, holding other factors constant. Hardest hit have been regions heavily reliant on coal mining and coal-based power generation, such as Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, and Queensland’s Mackay and Fitzroy regions.
People in these areas around the world need plans that help them to learn new skills and find new jobs, and encourage new ways to start businesses and make money. Without such alternatives, people often struggle not only to find jobs and pay bills but to sustain their physical and mental health.
Governments can reduce the risk climate change poses to their security and reputation by conducting an honest accounting of how green policies affect people’s wallets. They need to be brave and release information on the less visible aspects of the transition, such as rising unemployment in areas traditionally reliant on coal, and higher energy prices for those who rely on grid energy.
The race against time to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 makes the concept of a “just transition” not a far-fetched dream but a dire necessity. Only by addressing the financial and fairness concerns of hard-pressed individuals, workers, and communities is Australia’s journey to a net-zero future assured.
Tracey Dodd is affiliated with the University of Adelaide and University of Exeter. She is also a Board Member of Green Industries SA.
Will Harvey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Linda J. Graham, Professor and Director of the Centre for Inclusive Education, Queensland University of Technology
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Suspension from school is meant to be a last resort for serious problem behaviour. Despite that, an alarming number of children are suspended every year, often at young ages, for minor reasons.
Indigenous children, those with a disability, and/or those living in out-of-home care are grossly over-represented.
So what are the alternatives to suspension and how have they worked overseas?
Prevention is better than cure. This means targeting the root problems underpinning behaviours leading to suspension and teaching children the skills they need to avoid making errors in the first place.
This approach involves screening all children in a cohort to identify issues that could lead to problems down the track (such as struggling with reading or difficulty regulating emotions).
Schools can then provide academic, social-emotional, and behavioural supports to students who need it and use data to track their progress over time.
This approach recognises several issues can be linked. For example, reading difficulties can affect a child’s self-esteem, leading to frustration, disengagement, disruptive behaviour and truancy.
The multi-tiered systems of support approach helps educators identify these children early, accurately interpret what they need and provide targeted interventions.
Students might, for example, go on a daily “reading walk” where they divide up and join a group working on a particular reading skill, such as vocabulary.
Group membership changes as soon as the focus skill is learnt and children progress to the next skill. The groups fluctuate. Difficulties are addressed early, groups are flexible and children get the support they need without being stigmatised or pigeonholed.
It is through these tiered approaches that some public school systems in the United States, such as Chicago Public Schools, have been able to reduce suspension, while improving safety and student attendance, perceptions of school climate, and academic outcomes.
A similar approach is now in place in countries like Finland.
How might this apply to behaviour?
Many incidents resulting in suspension are rooted in cognitive or emotional overwhelm. This can be prevented by providing children with reasonable adjustments (such as extra time for certain tasks or being able to work in a quiet place) and evidence-based interventions.
For example, a child could be taught to recognise the signs of overwhelm and use a “chill out” card when they need to. This card allows them to retreat – without being interrogated about it by the teacher – to a safe space. Once there, they can recover and then rejoin the fray.
In Vermont, another US state where schools are using the multi-tiered systems of support approach, classrooms have been designed to have these safe spaces.
However, teachers must also be able to detect when a child is beginning to spiral so they can intervene to diffuse situations before they escalate. This may require professional learning in inclusive practice.
But it isn’t just down to individual teachers
One of the most common reasons for suspension is coded in incident reports as “physical aggression” or “physical misconduct”. This is when children hit, kick or push.
Again, this can be the result of overwhelm, which induces a fight-or-flight response. However, it can also be a response to teasing, bullying or racism. These incidents often happen outside the classroom.
The incidence of physical aggression in schools can be reduced by:
establishing clear and consistent expectations with the input of students
valuing religious, ethnic and cultural diversity and providing meaningful opportunities for children to interact and learn about each others heritage
having more adults in the playground and reducing low-visibility areas where bullying might occur
making sure teaching is culturally responsive and respectful of First Nations students’ families, culture, languages, history and knowledge and that curriculum is relevant to the local context
implementing quality interventions that include anti-bullying programs and mental health support services
providing teachers with training and time to plan adjustments, empathise with students, use inclusive practices, manage diverse classrooms and problem-solve with support staff and parents.
Even after all this, some children will still have difficulty complying with expectations. For these children, there are alternatives to suspension.
Alternatives can reduce suspension and teacher stress
A growing body of evidence suggests an educative response works better than a punitive one.
The focus is on understanding the cause of behaviour, rather than simply suppressing it. In this model, a teacher might respond to disruptive behaviour by:
hearing the student’s perspective about the cause
explaining their own perspective and
describing the wider impacts for the student and their classmates.
The teacher and student then work towards a solution addressing the underlying issue: in this case, supporting the student to develop strategies to self-regulate.
An educative approach is better than a punitive one. Shutterstock
Parents of neurodivergent children have advocated strongly for Australian education departments to implement collaborative and proactive solutions.
One US study found training teachers in the collaborative and proactive solutions approach can reduce problem behaviour and teacher stress.
Another approach, used internationally, is known as restorative justice. The aim is to educate students about the impacts of behaviour, ensure wronged parties are heard and repair relationships.
Suspension does not provide children with the skills they need to succeed at school and it can make problem behaviour worse.
Australian schools can, with the right support and leadership from governments, take steps to reduce suspension by finding alternatives that work better for students and teachers alike.
Linda J. Graham receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Queensland Department of Education.
Callula Killingly 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.
Wes Anderson’s latest work involves four short films based on Roald Dahl stories: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is the longest, with a runtime of 39 minutes (from an 82-page story), following the altruistic journey of the eponymous character, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. A wealthy dandy transforms into a benevolent figure, giving away his gambling fortune to children’s hospitals and orphanages.
While the others may seem like lesser works, shorter in length (from shorter stories) and less ambitious in set design and locations, Anderson begins to survey more complicated aspects of Dahl rarely explored in the abundant screen adaptations.
A complicated figure
Netflix acquired the rights to Dahl’s entire catalogue in 2021 for £370 million. The first production was Matthew Marchus’s Matilda the Musical (2022) – more accurately a screen version of Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly’s award-winning stage musical adaptation.
Several more Netflix productions are slated. The Twits, an animation film written and directed by Phil Johnston, is set for a 2025 release. This will be followed by Taika Waititi writing and directing two live-action features: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its literary sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.
Dahl remains a difficult figure in history. There is Dahl the beloved author of some of the most influential and popular works ever written for children. Meanwhile, there is the complicated persona who repeatedly made unwavering racist remarks and further reduced his characters to discriminatory and sexist stereotypes.
Dahl remains a difficult figure in history. Netflix
Despite Dahl insisting to his publishers to “not so much as change a single comma in one of my books”, in February this year Puffin Books announced it would be creatively editing portions of many of his children’s novels to “ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today”.
This included removing or replacing words describing the appearance of characters (“old hags” become “old crows” in The Witches) and adding gender-neutral language (“Cloud-men” have become “Cloud-People” in James and the Giant Peach). Contemporary writers, such as Salman Rushdie, decried such liberties as a form of literary vandalism and blatant censorship.
Anderson’s Dahl shorts explore some grittier works from the author’s oeuvre without any creative rewriting. These are some of the most literal and faithful Dahl adaptations ever put on screen.
First and foremost, Dahl (played by Ralph Fiennes) becomes an onscreen character and narrator. The sight of Dahl talking directly to camera in his famous writing chair is somewhat uneasy. Which Dahl will we see? The bigot? Beloved children’s author?
In truth, we see neither in the character – but rather manifestations of both in the films themselves.
Anderson doesn’t suppress aspects of nastiness, weirdness and racism from the adapted stories underlined by darker themes and a darker tone.
Anderson doesn’t suppress aspects of nastiness, weirdness and racism. Netflix
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is the most joyous in both style and story, and a natural follow-on from Anderson’s earlier stop-motion Dahl feature adaptation, The Fantastic Mr Fox (2009).
From the altruistic Henry Sugar, things significantly go darker both tonally and thematically. The Swan is about a boy victimised to merciless bullying; The Rat Catcher involves a man (played also by Fiennes) with disgustingly filthy nails resembling claws who kills a rat with his teeth.
These characters are not punished, exposed and exiled. They are revealed for their true selves – as ugly and uncomfortable as that may be to watch.
A point of interest is the order these shorts are curated on Netflix. Each was dropped on the platform within a few days of each other, and this order remains when the films are grouped together as the Dahl adaptation package.
The final, and most confronting, of these shorts is Poison. The story is of Englishman Harry Pope (Benedict Cumberbatch) in British-ruled India, who believes he has a poisonous krait snake asleep with him in his bed. When this is proven incorrect, Dr Ganderbai (Ben Kingsley) is subjected to Harry’s racial slurs.
It is an ugly and unexpected moment that provokes the doctor to leave in stunned silence.
This adaptation has been previously adapted several times on television: in 1958 into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; in 1980 it was adapted as the fifth episode of the second series of Tales of the Unexpected.
These TV adaptations turn Harry into an alcoholic whose mind cannot be trusted. Here, Anderson is more faithful to Dahl’s story, presenting Harry as a lucid and ungrateful bigot to the doctor’s attempts to rescue him.
It is with this reprehensible and unapologetic racist attack that Anderson’s shorts conclude.
From the first film, with its vivid colours and altruistic themes, to the bleak finale of Poison, it feels as if Anderson is making a statement about the difficulties in which to regard Dahl and his cultural legacy.
In the process, he has produced some of his most challenging, complex and intriguing films to date.
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.
