Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bert Johnson, Professor of Political Science, Middlebury College

Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for president, in 1984 and 1988, were unsuccessful but historic. The civil rights activist and organizer, who died on Feb. 17, 2026, helped pave the way for Barack Obama’s election a generation later as the nation’s first – and so far only – African American president.

Jackson’s campaigns energized a multiracial coalition that not only provided support for other late-20th-century Democratic politicians, including President Bill Clinton, but helped create an organizing template – a so-called Rainbow Coalition combining Black, Latino, working-class white and young voters – that continues to resonate in progressive politics today.

Vermont, where I teach political science, did not look like fertile ground for Jackson when he first ran for president. Then, as now, Vermont was one of the most homogeneous, predominantly white states in the country. But if Jackson seemed like an awkward fit for a mostly rural, lily-white state, he nonetheless saw possibilities there.

He campaigned in Vermont twice in 1984, buoyantly declaring in Montpelier, the state capital, “If I win Vermont, the nation will never be the same again.”

He did not win Vermont, taking just 8% of the Democratic primary vote in 1984 but tripling his share to 26% in 1988. Appealing to voters in small, rural New England precincts was a remarkable achievement for a candidate identified with Chicago and civil rights campaigns in the South.

Jackson’s presidential ambitions coincided with a pivotal moment in Vermont politics: The state’s voting patterns were shifting left, with new residents arriving and changing the state’s culture and economy. In 1970, nearly 70% of Vermonters had been born there. By 1990, that figure had dropped by 10 percentage points.

The Vermont Rainbow Coalition, which was formed to support Jackson’s first campaign, organized a crucial constituency in a fluid time, establishing patterns that would persist for decades.

Setting the standard in Vermont

Jackson created a “People’s Platform” that would sound familiar to today’s progressives, calling for higher taxes on businesses, higher minimum wages and single-payer, universal health care.

In light of Jackson’s efforts, Vermont activists saw the potential for a durable statewide organization. Rather than disband the Vermont Rainbow Coalition after the 1984 primary, they kept the group going, endorsing candidates in campaigns for the legislature and statewide office in each of the next three election cycles. The coalition also endorsed Bernie Sanders’ failed bid for Congress in 1988.

Sanders served eight years as mayor of Burlington as an “independent socialist,” cultivating a core collection of local allies known as the Progressive Coalition who sought to wrest power away from establishment members of the city’s Board of Aldermen.

In 1992, the Vermont Rainbow Coalition merged with Burlington’s Progressive Coalition to form the statewide Progressive Coalition.

The Jackson-Sanders lineage

Sanders eventually went on to win election to the House as an independent in 1990, serving in the chamber until winning his Senate seat, also as an independent, in 2006. His presidential runs in 2016 and 2020 made him a prominent national figure and a leader among progressives.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a member of the House Democratic leadership in a stunning 2018 primary upset in New York, had been a Sanders campaign organizer and remains his close ally. On Jan. 1, 2026, Sanders swore in Zohran Mamdani – like Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic socialist – as mayor of New York City.

Sanders had endorsed Jackson for president in 1988. Years later, Jackson returned the favor.

Sanders paid tribute to Jackson at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. “Jesse Jackson is one of the very most significant political leaders in this country in the last 100 years,” Sanders said. “Jesse’s contribution to modern history is not just bringing us together – it is bringing us together around a progressive agenda.”

Not just Vermont

In Vermont, Jackson performed surprisingly well in unlikely places – taking nearly 20% of the 1984 primary vote in working-class Bakersfield and Belvidere, for example.

Today’s Vermont Progressive Party, which emerged out of the old Vermont Progressive Coalition, is one of the most successful third parties in the nation, winning official “major party” status in the state shortly after its official founding in 2000. The party has elected candidates to the state legislature, city councils and even a few statewide offices, including that of lieutenant governor.

Vermont was not alone in experiencing the catalyzing effect of Jackson’s presidential runs. Jackson had a significant mobilizing impact on Black voters nationwide. In Washington state, the Washington Rainbow Coalition started in Seattle and spread across the state between 1984 and 1996. New Jersey and Pennsylvania had their own successful and independent Rainbow Coalitions. In 2003, the Rainbow Coalition Party of Massachusetts joined the Green Party to become the Green Rainbow Party.

In my own research, I’ve investigated the durability of the “Jackson effect” in Vermont. There is no better test of what differentiates the Vermont Progressive Party from the state’s Democratic Party than the 2016 Democratic primary race for lieutenant governor, which pitted progressive David Zuckerman against two prominent, mainstream Democrats.

Zuckerman beat the Democrats most handily in towns that had voted the most heavily for Jesse Jackson in 1984, an effect that persisted even when controlling for population, partisanship and liberalism.

Many people would point to Sanders as the catalyst for Vermont’s continuing progressive movement. But Sanders and the progressives owe much to Jackson.

– ref. How Jesse Jackson set the stage for Bernie Sanders and today’s progressives – https://theconversation.com/how-jesse-jackson-set-the-stage-for-bernie-sanders-and-todays-progressives-276249

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Clark, Professor of Medieval History, University of Exeter

Henry VIII is not remembered as a loving husband. Any English schoolchild can recount the unpleasant fates of most of his six wives with the rhyme: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” But though the end of his relationships are famous, less is known about Henry in love.

Now, a rare jewel discovered by an amateur detectorist and bought by the British Museum for the national collection may force us to reconsider the king’s brutal reputation.

The jewel is a heart-shaped locket, crafted in gold with red enamel decoration, and attached to a solid gold chain. On the face are the letters H and K linked together by the stems of a Tudor rose and a pomegranate, which was the symbol of Katharine’s Spanish royal family. It is a reasonable deduction that this remarkable jewel was connected directly to Henry and the first of his wives, Katherine of Aragon.

Katherine was the subject of Henry’s first and most shocking divorce, which precipitated England’s breach with the Roman papacy and the transformation of religion which we now know as the Reformation. In many ways Katherine also suffered the worst of the king’s personal cruelty. Although not executed, she was consigned to virtual house-arrest, much of the time separated from her only living child, Mary.

If this was indeed Henry and Katherine’s jewel it could be a vital clue to quite different moment in their relationship, and to a dimension of the king’s character that his otherwise notorious conduct has completely obscured.

In late medieval and Renaissance society, monograms – the linking of people’s initials – were often created to represent a personal connection, a marriage, a betrothal or even a secret love-match. Beneath the linked letters on the locket is the French word “Toujo(u)rs”, meaning “always” – a natural choice for a pledge between lovers. Here, the letters surely stand for Henry and Katherine.

The locket’s flower and fruit decoration seal the royal connection. The pomegranate symbol swept into English public life after the two families were joined through Henry’s marriage. Decorations for the coronation of the king and queen, just two weeks after the wedding, paired the Tudor rose with golden pomegranates. A woodblock print published to mark the occasion under the title A Joyful Meditation to All England, showed Henry and Katherine receiving their crowns under a twin canopy of the flower and the fruit.

Accounts of textiles commissioned for the royal household show dozens of different pieces – upholstery, wall-hangings, and livery to be worn by servants – all featuring the rose and the pomegranate prominently in their design.

Devoted designs

The decoration of the heart pendant is matched in a wide variety of treasures described in Henry’s household inventories. These contain descriptions of a bag of crimson satin, a silver comb case and standing cup all marked in the same way for the king and his queen. These lists also identify several collars or necklaces – described by the archaic term carkeynes – with heart-shaped pendants. One of these, coloured blue, is also inscribed, “H K”.

Henry spent prodigiously on beautiful, bespoke furnishings, but jewellery was his greatest passion. The inventories of his jewels and plate (gold, gilt and silver objets d’art) compiled shortly after his death in January 1547 record almost 4,000 individual pieces.

This Tudor heart pendant is a prime example of this level of investment. The locket itself is formed from 24-carat gold; the wide chain found with it is weighty and long – more than 40cm. Together they amount to 317 grams of precious metal. It is no wonder that the British Museum’s purchase price was £3.5 million.

It is clear from his wardrobe accounts – which record the purchase of decorative pieces for his household – that Henry took a personal interest in the material and design of many of these pieces. Surviving examples of designs for jewellery drawn by Hans Holbein, the German artist active at Henry’s court in the 1530s and early 1540s, may have come from a pattern book made to influence, or illustrate, the king’s developing tastes. He bought, or commissioned pieces, not only for his own household but also as gifts – often marking the new year – to family members and court favourites.

This may well be the origin of the heart pendant. Since it came to light, it has been spoken of as associated with Henry’s great pageant in the Pas-de-Calais in 1520, the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold. Here he, Katherine and his court staged a ceremonial meeting with the French King, François I. A great many furnishings from the royal residences and chapels did cross the Channel to decorate the pop-up canvas palace and tents.

But I am convinced the message conveyed by this jewel is not political but profoundly personal. Toujours is an expression of deep, heartfelt attachment. An alternative theory, advanced by the British Museum itself, is that the pendant was made to mark the betrothal in October 1518 of Katherine’s only living child, Princess Mary, aged two, to the eight-month-old heir to the French throne.

But given the presence of pieces of very similar design in the royal household soon after the marriage and coronation, it must be possible that the pendant belongs to the early years of Henry and Katherine’s relationship. At first, she and the king were inseparable. Five months from the wedding she was pregnant. She conceived again each year from 1510 to 1513. One of these pregnancies resulted in a son, named Henry, born in January 1511. He lived for a little under two months.

In the late summer of that year, the king and queen embarked on a progress through the Thames Valley and on into the West Midlands, culminating at Warwick. It was in a Warwickshire field that the detectorist, Charlie Clarke, uncovered the heart pendant in 2019.

Could it be that a jewel gifted to Katherine at the time of the birth of Henry’s longed-for male heir was carried with the royal party – as so many of their personal jewels were – as they made their way into Warwickshire? It gives the locket an edge not just of romance, but of tragedy. Here, perhaps, Katherine was parted from a present that was, already, a memento mori of her lost son.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

– ref. Heart-shaped locket discovery offers rare glimpse into Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon’s marriage – https://theconversation.com/heart-shaped-locket-discovery-offers-rare-glimpse-into-henry-viii-and-katharine-of-aragons-marriage-276123

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damian Tobin, Lecturer in International Business, University College Cork

After the US captured Venezuela’s president at the start of 2026, Donald Trump promised to “unleash” the country’s oil supply. He wanted companies to invest US$100 billion (£74 billion) to get hold of it.

Big oil though, seems less than keen on that idea, appearing to consider Venezuela too expensive or risky. Exxon Mobil’s unenthusiastic response, describing Venezuela as “uninvestible”, even earned a personal rebuke from Trump.

So maybe Trump misunderstood how big oil works, and thought of oil firms as the quintessential risk takers – the ultimate exploiters of uncertainty. Perhaps he had in mind Daniel Day Lewis’s character in the film There Will be Blood, who was willing to risk everything to get his hands of more of the black stuff.

But while that may have been true for some oil firms in the early 1900s, in the 21st century, nothing could be further from the truth. Big oil in 2026 does not like uncertainty. It prefers to invest in what it knows, like plastics and petrochemicals. It does not want to get involved with things as uncertain as Venezuela and green energy.

This idea is backed by my own research on the international oil industry, which shows that large oil companies tend to base their business strategies on long term oil production.

And South American countries play only a minor role in this outlook. Instead, big oil is focused on two key areas: shale oil in the US, and expanding petrochemical production in Asia.

The low cost of shale oil extraction gives it significant cost advantages as a raw material for refineries, while Asia’s growing share of global manufacturing provides a growth market for petrochemicals.

This in turn is linked to oil companies seeking to exploit growing demand for plastics (and lower demand for transport fuels) as part of a clear and long term path to profit. That path is what matters most to oil companies, and Trump’s plan for Venezuela (nor the green transition for that matter) does not provide it.

The priority of profit is also the reason why governments who want greener or cheaper energy cannot rely on powerful oil companies to help them out.

Strength in oil

Underpinning the oil industry’s extreme strength in the global economy is its captive market, where consumer choice is limited to a small number of producers. In the case of the oil market, those consumers are nation states. And even those with large oil reserves of their own need the companies’ technology to refine it.

Venezuela’s oil reserves were once part of this international captive market. But research has shown that not oil is equal. And the range of products which can be manufactured from a barrel of it depends on a mix of geological characteristics and technical capabilities.

So while Venezuela produces more crude oil then it consumes, it needs to import fuels and petrochemicals to meet the needs of its economy. This is because it lacks the refineries to produce these products domestically.

International companies in the oil refining and services sectors control key technology and intellectual property in this area. Without their participation, Venezuela’s crude will remain unsuitable for international refineries.

This fundamental inequality around access to advanced refining technology means there is little relationship between a country’s oil reserves and whether or not it needs to import oil products.

Big oil may yet decide to stump up the investment required to open Venezuela’s oil industry if suitable guarantees are provided. But such state sponsored access places the risk with tax-payers, when those kind of guarantees could be better deployed in the development of clean energy.

And while society needs large firms to invest, politicians need to direct this investment towards productive opportunities. More cheap oil, petrochemicals and plastics are not the answer.

Governments need to recognise that the problem with oil companies is not that they take too many risks, but rather that they take insufficient risks in areas where investment is needed most. For as my research also shows, the retreat of the oil companies from green investment has been matched by a ramping up of their investment in high emission and heavily polluting plastics and petrochemicals.

Addressing this will not be easy. It will requires strong supranational coordination among states to influence the sector, by increasing the costs of oil production and limiting the construction of new infrastructure. But that’s a very different approach to trying to “unleash” the oil supply of a whole nation.

– ref. Why big oil is not interested in Venezuela – https://theconversation.com/why-big-oil-is-not-interested-in-venezuela-275763

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

This is an article in our Guide to the Classics series.

I first encountered William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies in my final year of primary school in the UK. A long-term staple of English and Australian classrooms, it invites debate about human nature, morality and the creeping dangers of unchecked power and herd behaviour.

The cover of the edition I read bore an ink drawing of a severed pig’s head, its eyes closed, blood streaming from its mouth. The vivid, disturbing image remains fresh in my mind decades later. It felt less like an illustration than a portent.

Set during wartime, Lord of the Flies tells the tale of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical desert island after the plane evacuating them crashes. With no adults to guide them, the boys attempt to build a makeshift social order, establishing rules and electing a leader. But the fragile system soon teeters and collapses. Fear and resentment take hold. Violence follows.

Among the younger boys, rumours circulate about a threatening presence on the island. The idea of a “beast” begins to influence behaviour, lending form to anxieties that might otherwise have remained diffuse and unspoken.

At the centre of the mounting tension is a struggle between Ralph and another boy, Jack. Ralph remains committed to rules and procedure – to the maintenance of order and the hope of rescue. Jack, on the other hand, grows increasingly impatient with the idea of restraint. Hunting becomes his priority, and with it comes a very different model of leadership, one grounded less in consent than in command.

Stuck in the middle is Piggy – an asthmatic, overweight and bespectacled boy whose real name we never learn. Intellectually alert, he grasps the symbolic importance of objects and concepts more clearly than most. But he is mocked, interrupted, and continually sidelined. In certain respects, Piggy serves as a barometer of the group’s moral health – and as a measure of Ralph’s character. To defend Piggy is to defend reason itself.

I remember our faltering discussions revolving around what I now recognise as an age-old question: nature or nurture? Were the murderous schoolboys shaped by their circumstances, or were those circumstances merely revealing something already present?

Golding, a schoolteacher deeply marked by his Navy service in World War Two, wrote his novel to say,

you think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country. It could happen here.

Its stark warning about the thin veneer of civilisation – and the speed with which it can give way – continues to resonate in our age of resurgent authoritarianism (including in the United States), routine atrocity (including Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine) and an increasingly feverish public sphere.

A new BBC adaptation of the novel, by Adolescence creator Jack Thorne, is now streaming, to mixed reviews. He told the ABC he sees resonances between the “climate of populism and hate” Golding was writing about in the early days of the Cold War, and our current moment.

The adolescent cruelty and rage he drew on to write his portrait of young toxic masculinity are infused into his Lord of the Flies.

A moral fable

Golding studied the sciences before switching to English literature and training as a teacher. His early career was interrupted by World War Two. In the Royal Navy, he served in the North Atlantic and took part in the D-Day landings at Normandy. He later described the conflict as “the great formative experience” of his life.

When he returned to teaching, he began drafting what would become Lord of the Flies. Former pupils at the provincial grammar school where he taught classics recalled their schoolmaster intently writing at his desk during lessons. There, he composed his despondent fable about the collapse of order among boys not unlike them.

In a 1965 essay, Golding insisted Lord of the Files was not a realist novel in the conventional sense, but a fable – and therefore unapologetically moral. As he put it: “The fabulist is a moralist. He cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it.”

Golding knew this was deeply unfashionable, acknowledging most audiences “do not much like moral lessons”. But he stood by the approach, “with all its drawbacks and difficulties” – and knew “the pill has to be sugared, has to be witty or entertaining, or engaging in some way or other”.

Ironically, he famously came to detest the book that bought him fame and fortune, dismissing it later as “boring and crude”. He went on to write 12 other novels, winning the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage. In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Human nature, revealed

The marooned schoolboys in the novel must decide how to look after and govern themselves. They start by attempting to reproduce the structures of the world they have left behind. An assembly is called and rules are agreed upon. A conch shell becomes a symbol of authority, granting the one who holds it the right to speak. A signal fire is lit in the hope of rescue.

At first, there is a real sense of possibility. The island appears abundant and beautiful. Freed from classrooms and the drudgery of routine, the boys experience a surge of excitement. Golding’s description of Ralph, one of the novel’s primary figures, captures that early exhiliration:

He patted the palm trunk softly; and forced at last to believe in the reality of the island, laughed delightedly again, and stood on his head.

But then things start to fall apart. Consensus proves difficult to maintain. Discipline falters. Responsibilities are shirked.

As allegiances shift, the boys divide and the balance of power alters. It unfolds gradually, through small concessions and the accumulated weight of slights and petty grievances. The island, once a setting for adventure, becomes an arena in which a darker understanding of human nature is revealed.

The names of Golding’s central protagonists are key to unlocking the work, written in the dying days of the British Empire. Ralph and Jack are borrowed from R.M. Ballanyte’s 1857 novel The Coral Island, a Victorian narrative in which a trio of shipwrecked English boys embody pluck, Christian virtue and imperial confidence.

In Ballantyne’s book, evil is external. It arrives in the guise of cannibals and pirates. The danger lies beyond the boys, not within them. Their moral certainty remains intact. Steadfast, they take solace in their own innate goodness. The island tests their ingenuity, but not their character.

Golding challenged those assumptions. Ballantyne’s island, he observed, belonged to the 19th century. His would belong to the 20th. If the earlier tale reflected what he called the “smugness” of its age, Lord of the Flies would interrogate the confidence of his own.

‘What one man could do to another’

The “truth” of the novel stemmed from Golding’s profound disillusionment. Before World War II, he believed in what he called “the perfectibility of social man” – the idea that the correct social structures would “produce goodwill” and that injustice could be cured through “reorganization” and reform. But after 1945, he understood “what one man could do to another”.

He was reflecting on the decades between the two world wars in Europe – the rise of fascism and the consolidation of autocratic regimes in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. What disturbed him more deeply than “one man killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him” was “the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states”.

These crimes, he stressed, were carried out “skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind”.

Western civilisation had neither eliminated cruelty, nor prevented brutality. In some cases, it had rendered them systematic and efficient. The problem had nothing to do with political systems or failed institutions. The problem was humanity.

He had come to believe “man was sick – not exceptional man, but average man”. He said “the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into”.

He was clear about his book’s message:

if humanity has a future on this planet of hundred million years, it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies.

– ref. ‘It could happen here’: Lord of the Flies took its lessons from Hitler’s Germany. They speak to now – https://theconversation.com/it-could-happen-here-lord-of-the-flies-took-its-lessons-from-hitlers-germany-they-speak-to-now-275672

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastian Maslow, Associate Professor, International Relations, Contemporary Japanese Politics & Society, University of Tokyo

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and her ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) got a historic landslide victory in last week’s parliamentary elections.

This marks the first time since its founding in 1955 that the conservative LDP controls a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house. If necessary, Takaichi’s cabinet could also overrule any opposition in the upper house of the Diet (Japan’s parliament), where her coalition still lacks a majority.

Given this, Takaichi now has a massive mandate to push her agenda. This includes boosting defence spending, strengthening the military and even potentially revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, which constrains the role of the Self-Defence Forces and forbids going to war.

So, does this mean Japan could become a more militarised state under Takaichi? And if so, what are the implications for regional security?

Countering China’s rise

Takaichi has portrayed herself as Japan’s Margaret Thatcher and the standard-bearer of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s legacy.

Abe, who led the LDP back to power in 2012, had pledged to “restore a strong Japan”. During his eight-year rule, Japan adopted a so-called “proactive pacifism”. Under this new security strategy, Japan began to depart from its postwar pacifism through a number of ways:

• strengthening the military
• lifting bans on arms exports
• building new security partnerships (including with NATO, the European Union and the Quad)
• consolidating its alliance with the United States.

In 2014, a new interpretation of the constitution also permitted Japan to engage in “collective self defence”, or aid an ally under attack.

Takaichi now sees her job as continuing Abe’s work. And her direction is clear.

Shortly after becoming prime minister last year, Takaichi triggered a spat with Beijing when she suggested Japan would come to Taiwan’s defence if it was attacked by China. Beijing retaliated with economic pressure and coercive rhetoric, but Takaichi refused to back down.

Neither Takaichi nor China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are in a hurry to improve diplomatic relations.

Beijing has urged Chinese tourists not to travel to Japan and warned that Takaichi’s moves threaten regional security and the international order.

Takaichi, meanwhile, is hoping an assertive China will help her overcome domestic opposition to her security agenda. So far, the public supports her government, too. In a poll after the election, 69% approved of her cabinet’s performance.

How Takaichi wants to transform Japan’s military

Takaichi’s government will soon begin work on a revision of its National Security Strategy from 2022. It is likely to adopt her declared “crisis management” approach, combining security and economic objectives with industrial policy.

Despite mounting public debt, Takaichi has already increased defence spending to 2% of Japan’s GDP ahead of schedule, and has pledged to spend more.

Her government is also considering acquiring nuclear submarines and has announced plans to further deregulate arms exports, ultimately allowing the transfer of lethal weapons.

Japan has already permitted the export of Patriot PAC-3 air defence missile systems to the United States to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine and Israel. Japan has also agreed to sell Mogami-class frigates to Australia and has signed deals with Italy and the United Kingdom to co-develop a next-generation fighter jet.

In addition, Japan is participating in a NATO-led initiative to supply Ukraine with military equipment. While Japan’s involvement is limited to non-lethal arms, this could lead to more defence cooperation with NATO overall.

On the domestic intelligence front, Takaichi has pledged to pass a new anti-spy law, establish a National Intelligence Bureau modelled on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and issue a national intelligence strategy.

These initiatives are intended to bolster the country’s intelligence capabilities, which have often been hindered by bureaucratic infighting. The long-term aim is eventually joining the “Five Eyes” network.

Stronger ties with the Trump administration

Faced with threats from China, North Korea and Russia, Japan has little choice but to maintain its security alliance with the US.

At the top of Takaichi’s agenda, therefore, is managing the US–Japan alliance in the era of the so-called “Donroe doctrine”. This is Trump’s new security strategy that shifts the focus of US security towards the Western hemisphere, potentially distracting from the Indo-Pacific.

Trump endorsed Takaichi during her election campaign. And when she goes to Washington on March 19, she will likely attempt to influence the White House’s China agenda before Trump visits Beijing in April.

In order to offset the potential impact of a trade deal between the US and China, Takaichi could also use her new political capital to accelerate the implementation of Japan’s own US$550 billion (A$777 billion) investment pledge in the US.

Big challenges ahead

Ten years ago, Angela Merkel, then-chancellor of Germany, was hailed as the “new leader of the free world”. Now, Takaichi is being celebrated as the “world’s most powerful woman”.

How she uses her new-found power to manoeuvre in a world of great-power rivalry and uncertain alliances will define her legacy and shape the region for years to come.

– ref. Make Japan strong again: Sanae Takaichi’s plan to transform her country’s military – https://theconversation.com/make-japan-strong-again-sanae-takaichis-plan-to-transform-her-countrys-military-275676

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marten Risius, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland

Online chat service Discord has announced it will begin testing age verification for some users, joining a growing list of platforms trying to work out who is actually behind the screen.

The move comes as governments around the world push for stronger protections of young people online. The United Kingdom and France have imposed age verification for visitors of adult content pages. Australia now mandates that social media platforms ensure their account holders are older than 16.

Many people feel immediately uneasy about online age or ID checks. Will the log-in process become more time consuming? Will proving how old we are mean giving up anonymity and force us to hand over sensitive documents to private tech firms?

Will mandatory age verification impact our ability to browse, speak and participate online, making us “transparent citizens” tracked by corporations or the government?

These concerns are not unfounded. In fact, research points to even more risks. Sharing identity-related data makes breaches or identity theft more likely. Age verification systems could be abused for surveillance or lead to discrimination, especially for marginalised groups.

However, our research shows it is possible to provide truly anonymous, safe age checks online.

Not all age assurance works the same

Age assurance is the umbrella term for all kinds of methods that can help determine someone’s age online. This includes age verification – proving the user’s age, often with an official ID.

How age assurance is put into practice differs vastly across jurisdictions and platforms. The Australian government demands firms must take “reasonable steps” to prevent kids from making social media accounts, but the age assurance methods can vary.

The government of France provides more guidance, but still leaves implementation of age proofs to third parties. The European Union is actively preparing a reference implementation for an age verification solution, albeit it has not put age restriction policies in place yet.

To keep things simple, platforms are increasingly turning to facial age estimation. Users are asked to scan their face so an algorithm can guess how old they are.

At first, this may sound less intrusive than showing a government-issued ID. In practice, it often requires handing over highly sensitive biometric data to private companies. Unlike a password, your face can’t be changed if the data is stolen. Such age estimation is also prone to errors.

There is a plethora of alternative age assurance tech. These include user behaviour analysis, payment-based verification, document scans (such as government-issued IDs), video-based verification services involving these documents, and electronic attestations – such as the electronic passports familiar from border control at airports.

There’s no need to share sensitive data

One highly secure approach allows users to prove a single fact – such as being over 18 – not only with high certainty, but without revealing their name, address, or even date of birth. It’s based on cryptographic digital attestations.

For example, the German eID exchanges data directly between a microprocessor in a person’s plastic “eID card” and the platform. The microprocessor proves it belongs to a government-issued eID via a cryptographic key, which is shared with 9,999 other eIDs. This means the only thing a platform learns is that one of 10,000 potential people signed up.

When the service sends the current date and minimum age required to the eID, the microprocessor uses the date of birth, computes the current age and simply responds whether the user is old enough.

The EU digital identity and Google wallets are working on a slightly different approach. It doesn’t rely on special microprocessors built into physical cards, but on hardware components common in mobile phones.

This makes the approach more broadly applicable. These solutions involve highly advanced cryptography that communicates to the platform that a person possesses a digital document proving they’re older than 18, but without revealing any further details.

As you can see, age verification systems can be designed with unlinkability at their core. That means neither the government nor the platform can track a user’s activities despite being able to accurately verify their age.

The real issue isn’t age verification – it’s who runs it

If any government is serious about age assurance, the technical design will matter more than the policy itself.

Privacy-friendly age verification is complex and expensive. It will require governments to invest in the technical details, ensuring the age verification is robust while meeting privacy expectations.

And the software code will need to be open-access to allow for peer review. Transparency is the strongest safeguard against false promises made by the government or hidden attacks by cyber criminals trying to steal the data.

Government involvement must also convincingly resist looming threats of “function creep”, where the scope of data capture through an age verification infrastructure can quickly be changed through political decisions. There is no technical safeguard against such abuse – and governments need to earn their citizens’ trust in future legislation.

Indeed, the stakes are high: a single data breach can easily destroy public trust. If citizens don’t trust the age verification tool, they may just circumvent age controls altogether, as has happened in France.

The bigger picture

The internet is entering a new phase. For years, platforms avoided knowing the age of their users. That appears no longer politically or socially sustainable.

The real choice is not between safety and privacy. It is between two very different technical paths. One path normalises biometric (face, fingerprint and similar) checks, expanding the amount of sensitive data handed to private companies.

The alternative uses advanced cryptographic solutions that confirm age while protecting anonymity.

Age verification does not have to end anonymous participation online. Done properly, it could be the technology that protects it.

– ref. Age verification online can be done safely and privately. Here’s how – https://theconversation.com/age-verification-online-can-be-done-safely-and-privately-heres-how-276104

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Fuerbach, Professor, Photonics Research Centre, Macquarie University

Scientists at Microsoft Research in the United States have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books’ worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square.

In a paper published today in Nature, the researchers say their tests suggest the data will be readable for more than 10,000 years.

What tiny pulses of light can do

The new system, called Silica, uses extremely short flashes of laser light to inscribe bits of information into a block of ordinary glass.

These pulses are called “ultrashort” for a reason. Each one lasts mere quadrillionths of a second (aka femtoseconds or 10^–15 s).

To get your head around that: comparing ten femtoseconds to a single minute is like comparing one minute to the entire age of the universe.

These incredibly short flashes can be used to generate even shorter bursts of light lasting attoseconds (a thousandth of a femtosecond or 10^–18 s).

These attosecond bursts can be used to observe the motion of electrons inside atoms and molecules – and in 2023 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for pioneering work in this area, to Ferenc Krausz (coincidentally my former PhD supervisor), Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini.

Writing in glass

Femtosecond laser pulses also have a practical technological application. They can be used to make changes deep inside transparent materials such as glass.

These lasers produce light of a wavelength that normally passes through glass without interaction. However, when ultrashort pulses of this light are tightly focused on a particular region, it produces an intense electric field that alters the molecular structure of the glass in the focal zone.

This means only a tiny three-dimensional volume, often less than a millionth of a metre to a side, is affected. This is called a “voxel”, which can be made at precisely controlled positions in the glass.

Decades of research

The idea of using laser-written voxels for three-dimensional data storage is not new.

Eric Mazur and co-workers at Harvard University in the US investigated volumetric optical storage back in the 1990s. Their groundbreaking work demonstrated that permanent data structures could be inscribed into common glass using femtosecond lasers.

In 2014, Peter Kazansky and colleagues at the University of Southampton in the UK reported data storage in fused quartz glass with a “seemingly unlimited lifetime”. This helped to to establish the idea of ultra-stable glass-based memory devices.

In 2024, Kazansky spun out a company called SPhotonix to commercialise what they describe as “5D glass nanostructuring”. Their vision of a “5D memory crystal” even made its way into popular culture: a similar device appeared in the latest Mission Impossible film, The Final Reckoning, portrayed as a secure vault capable of containing a powerful but sinister AI.

A complete system

The Silica project does not claim to have made a new scientific breakthrough. Instead the team presents the first comprehensive demonstration of a practical real-world technology.

Their work brings together all the key elements of such a storage platform based on femtosecond lasers and glass. It includes encoding data, writing, reading, decoding and error correction. The work explores different strategies for reliability, writing speed, energy efficiency and data density, and involves systematic assessments of the data lifetime.

Silica looked at two main types of laser-written voxels.

The first consists of tiny elongated void-like features created by laser-driven “micro-explosions” inside the glass. These allow an extremely high storage density of 1.59 gigabits per cubic millimetre.

The second type involves making subtle changes in the local refractive index of the glass. These can be written faster, using less energy – but each cubic millimetre of glass can hold less data. This method can write about 65.9 megabits per second, and the authors say this could be increased with more laser beams.

Finally, accelerated ageing experiments suggest that the written data, even in the case of the more sensitive phase voxels, could remain stable for more than 10,000 years. This vastly exceeds the lifetime of conventional archival storage media such as magnetic tape or hard drives.

The future

When I began my PhD in the late 1990s at the Vienna University of Technology, we were one of only a handful of laboratories worldwide that had the expertise to build lasers capable of generating femtosecond pulses.

Today, after decades of technological development, ultrafast lasers with the reliability, power and repetition rates required for industrial use can be purchased off the shelf.

Dense, fast and energy-efficient archival data storage is an exciting real-world application of these lasers. As ultrafast photonics continues to mature, I have no doubt more applications will follow. Exciting times ahead.

– ref. Is this glass square the long, long future of data storage? – https://theconversation.com/is-this-glass-square-the-long-long-future-of-data-storage-276263

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Graham, Associate Professor in Digital Media, Queensland University of Technology

A new study published today in Nature has found that X’s algorithm – the hidden system or “recipe” that governs which posts appear in your feed and in which order – shifts users’ political opinions in a more conservative direction.

Led by Germain Gauthier from Bocconi University in Italy, it is a rare, real-world randomised experimental study on a major social media platform. And it builds on a growing body of research that shows how these platforms can shape people’s political attitudes.

Two different algorithms

The researchers randomly assigned 4,965 active US-based X users to one of two groups.

The first group used X’s default “For You” feed. This features an algorithm that selects and ranks posts it thinks users will be more likely to engage with, including posts from accounts that they don’t necessarily follow.

The second group used a chronological feed. This only shows posts from accounts users follow, displayed in the order they were posted. The experiment ran for seven weeks during 2023.

Users who switched from the chronological feed to the “For You” feed were 4.7 percentage points more likely to prioritise policy issues favoured by US Republicans (for example, crime, inflation and immigration). They were also more likely to view the criminal investigation into US President Donald Trump as unacceptable.

They also shifted in a more pro-Russia direction in regards to the war in Ukraine. For example, these users became 7.4 percentage points less likely to view Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy positively, and scored slightly higher on a pro-Russian attitude index overall.

The researchers also examined how the algorithm produced these effects.

They found evidence that the algorithm increased the share of right-leaning content by 2.9 percentage points overall (and 2.5 points among political posts), compared with the chronological feed.

It also significantly demoted the share of posts from traditional news organisations’ accounts while promoting or boosting posts from political activists.

One of the most concerning findings of the study is the longer-term effects of X’s algorithmic feed. The study showed the algorithm nudged users towards following more right-leaning accounts, and that the new following patterns endured even after switching back to the chronological feed.

In other words, turning the algorithm off didn’t simply “reset” what people see. It had a longer-lasting impact beyond its day-to-day effects.

One piece of a much bigger picture

This new study supports findings of similar studies.

For example, a study in 2022, before Elon Musk had bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, found the platform’s algorithmic systems amplified content from the mainstream political right more than the left in six out of the seven countries.

An experimental study from 2025 re-ranked X feeds to reduce exposure to content that expresses antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. They found this shifted feelings towards their political opponents by more than two points on a 0–100 “feeling thermometer”. This is a shift the authors argued would have normally taken about three years to occur organically in the general population.

My own research offers another piece of evidence to this picture of algorithmic bias on X. Along with my colleague Mark Andrejevic, I analysed engagement data (such as likes and reposts) from prominent political accounts during the final stages of the 2024 US election.

Our findings unearthed a sudden and unusual spike in engagement with Musk’s account after his endorsement of Trump on July 13 – the day of the assassination attempt on Trump. Views on Musk’s posts surged by 138%, retweets by 238%, and likes by 186%. This far outstripped increases on other accounts.

After July 13, right-leaning accounts on X gained significantly greater visibility than progressive ones. The “playing field” for attention and engagement on the platform was tilted thereafter towards right-leaning accounts – a trend that continued for the remainder of the time period we analysed in that study.

Not a niche product

This matters because we are not talking about a niche product.

X has more than 400 million users globally. It has become embedded as infrastructure – a key source of political and social communication. And once technical systems become infrastructure, they can become invisible – like background objects that we barely think about, but which shape society at its foundations and can be exploited under our noses.

Think of the overpass bridges Robert Moses designed in New York in the 1930s. These seemed like inert objects. But they were designed to be very low, to exclude people of colour from taking buses to recreation areas in Long Island.

Similar to this, the design and governance of social media platforms also has real consequences.

The point is that X’s algorithms are not neutral tools. They are an editorial force, shaping what people know, whom they pay attention to, who the outgroup is and what “we” should do about or to them – and, as this new study shows, what people come to believe.

The age of taking platform companies at their word about the design and effects of their own algorithms must come to an end. Governments around the world – including in Australia where the eSafety Commissioner has powers to drive “algorithmic transparency and accountability” and require that platforms report on how their algorithms contribute to or reduce harms – need to mandate genuine transparency over how these systems work.

When infrastructure become harmful or unsafe, nobody bats an eye when governments do something to protect us. The same needs to happen urgently for social media infrastructures.

– ref. A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right-wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly – https://theconversation.com/a-few-weeks-of-xs-algorithm-can-make-you-more-right-wing-and-it-doesnt-wear-off-quickly-276153

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Radisic, Fellow at the Centre for Space, Cyberspace and Data Law; Senior Teaching Fellow, Faculty of Law, Bond University

On January 30 2026, SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission for a megaconstellation of up to one million satellites to power data centres in space.

The proposal envisions satellites operating between 500 and 2,000 kilometres in low Earth orbit. Some of the orbits are designed for near-constant exposure to sunlight. The public can currently submit comments on this proposal.

SpaceX’s filing is just the latest among exponentially growing satellite megaconstellation proposals. Such satellites operate with a single purpose and have short replacement life cycles of about five years.

As of February 2026, approximately 14,000 active satellites are in orbit. An additional 1.23 million proposed satellite projects are in various stages of development.

The approval process for these satellites focuses almost entirely on the limited technical info companies have to submit to regulators.

Cultural, spiritual, and most environmental impacts aren’t taken into account – but they should be.

The night sky will drastically change

At this scale of growth, the night sky will change permanently and globally for generations to come.

Satellites in low Earth orbit reflect sunlight for about two hours after sunset and before sunrise. Despite engineering efforts to make them less bright, truck-sized satellites from many megaconstellations look like moving points in the night sky. Projections show future satellites will significantly increase this light pollution.

In 2021, astronomers estimated that in less than a decade, 1 in every 15 points of light in the night sky would be a moving satellite. That estimate only included the 65,000 megaconstellation satellites proposed at the time.

Once deployed at a scale of millions, the impacts on the night sky may not be easily reversed.

While the average satellite only lasts about five years, companies design these megaconstellations for nearly continuous replacement and expansion. This locks in a continuous, industrialised presence in the night sky.

All this is causing a space-based “shifting baseline syndrome”, where each new generation accepts a progressively more degraded night sky. Criss-crossing satellites become the new normal.

And for the first time in human history, this shifting baseline means kids today won’t grow up with the same night sky every previous generation of humanity had access to.

Houston, we have a ‘mega’ problem

Concerns over the sheer volume of proposed satellites come from many sides.

Scientific concerns include bright reflections and radio emissions from satellites that will disrupt astronomy.

Industry experts also note traffic management and logistical concerns. There’s currently no form of unified space traffic management in the same way that exists in aviation, for example.

Megaconstellations also increase the risk of Kessler syndrome, a runaway chain reaction of collisions. There are already 50,000 pieces of debris in orbit that are ten centimetres or larger. If satellites stopped all collision avoidance manoeuvres, the latest data shows we can expect a major collision in 3.8 days.

Major cultural concerns abound, too. Satellite light pollution will negatively impact Indigenous uses of the night sky for longstanding oral traditions, navigation, hunting, and spiritual traditions.

Launching so many satellites uses up vast amounts of fossil fuels, damaging the ozone layer. After the satellites have served their purpose, the end-of-life plan is to burn them up in the atmosphere. This poses another environmental concern – depositing vast quantities of metals into the stratosphere, causing ozone depletion and other potentially harmful chemical reactions.

All this feeds into legal concerns. Under international space law, countries – not companies – are liable for harm caused by their space objects.

Space lawyers are increasingly trying to understand if international space law can actually hold corporations or private individuals accountable. This is especially important as the risk of damage, death or permanent environmental damage grows.

Read more: Property and sovereignty in space − as countries and companies take to the stars, they could run into disputes

We can no longer ignore the gaps in regulation

Currently, the main regulations concerning satellite proposals are technical, such as deciding which radio frequencies they will use. At national levels, regulators focus on launch safety, lessening environmental impacts on Earth, and liability if something goes wrong.

What these regulations don’t capture is how hundreds of thousands of bright satellites change the night sky for scientific study, navigation, Indigenous teaching and ceremony, and cultural continuity.

These are not traditional “environmental” harms, nor are they technical engineering concerns. They’re cultural impacts that fall into a regulatory blind spot.

This is why the world needs a Dark Skies Impact Assessment, as proposed by space lawyers Gregory Radisic and Natalie Gillespie.

It’s a systematic way to identify, document, and meaningfully consider all the impacts of a proposed satellite constellation before it goes ahead.

How would such an assessment work?

First, evidence must be gathered from all stakeholders. Astronomers (both amateur and professional), atmospheric scientists, environmental researchers, cultural scholars, affected communities, and industry all bring their perspectives.

Second, it’s essential to model any cumulative effects of the satellites. Assessments should analyse how constellations will change night sky visibility and skyglow, orbital congestion, and the risk of casualties on the ground.

Third, it will define clear criteria for when unobstructed sky visibility is critical for science, navigation, education, cultural practice, and shared human heritage.

Fourth, it must include mitigation pathways such as brightness reduction, orbital design changes, and deployment adjustments to lessen harm. This should include incentives for using as few satellites as possible for a given project.

Finally, the findings must be transparent, independently reviewable, and directly tied to licensing and policy decisions.

It’s not a veto tool

A Dark Skies Impact Assessment doesn’t prevent space development. It clarifies trade-offs and improves decision making.

It can lead to design choices that reduce brightness and visual interference, orbital configurations that lessen cultural impact, earlier and more meaningful consultation, and cultural considerations where harm can’t be avoided.

Most importantly, it ensures that communities affected by satellite constellations aren’t finding out about them after approval has already been granted and bright lights crawl across their skies.

The question is not whether the night sky will change – it’s already changing. Now is the time for governments and international institutions to design fair processes before those changes become permanent.

– ref. Too many satellites? Earth’s orbit is on track for a catastrophe – but we can stop it – https://theconversation.com/too-many-satellites-earths-orbit-is-on-track-for-a-catastrophe-but-we-can-stop-it-275430

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian A. Wright, Associate Professor in Environmental Science, Western Sydney University

There’s little worse as a pool lifeguard than hearing the words “code brown” come through your radio. For swimmers on a hot day, there’s also little worse than being told to immediately get out of the water because there’s poo floating in the pool.

During hot summers, public pools in Australia are often crowded with families and children. The risk of “code brown” incidents at your local pool is probably substantial.

So how is a public pool cleaned after poo or vomit accidentally ends up in the water – and how long before it’s safe to get back in?

The short answer is: it depends. Let’s dive in.

The dangers of poo in the pool

Contaminated swimming pools are hazardous for swimmers. They have been linked to outbreaks of “crypto”, short for cryptosporidiosis. It’s a highly contagious gastric illness and has unpleasant symptoms including diarrhoea, stomach cramps, fever, nausea and vomiting.

New crypto cases are monitored as it’s a notifiable disease in Australia. If multiple cases are traced to a swimming pool, the pool will be closed for extra cleaning and chlorine treatment.

There are other pathogens, such as viruses, that can infect swimmers using pools exposed to poo or vomit incidents. For example, one study in the United States found rapid onset vomiting and diarrhoea (acute gastroenteritis) affect 28% of swimmers who’d used a norovirus-contaminated swimming pool.

Dealing with an ‘aquatic incident’

Responses for a code brown or vomit follow the official health guidelines for public swimming pools under state or territory public health laws.

However, the specific protocol for the staff will also differ depending on the age of the pool, the type of filtration system, chemicals used for disinfecting the water, and … the type of the poo.

Broadly speaking, if a solid stool or vomit is found, the pool is closed and the poo or vomit must be scooped out using a pool scoop or bucket. Then, it should be discarded down the sewer.

When all the particulates have been removed, a pool vacuum is placed in the water for additional cleaning, and the chlorine concentration is raised for an extended period to disinfect the entire pool.

A pool can be reopened once all of the water has been through the pool’s filtration system. This is known as pool “turnover”. How long this takes depends on the age of the pool and its filtration system. Older pools may take eight hours or longer, but newer pools can be as quick as 25 minutes.

Generally, when staff have followed all the proper guidelines, you can assume the water is safe to swim again when the pool is reopened.

Sometimes, you need superchlorination

The protocol changes for loose stool or diarrhoea. The pool is still closed to the public and the particles are scooped out as best as possible.

Then, the chlorine levels are raised and kept at a higher-than-normal level for a bit over a day. This is called shock superchlorination. After this the chlorine levels fall back to safe swimming levels, the other pool chemicals are rebalanced, and the pool reopened.

Chlorine is one of the most common types of disinfectants used in public swimming pools. You might hear lifeguards talk about free chlorine and total chlorine when referring to pool water quality.

Free chlorine is the “active” part of chlorine. Once it makes contact and kills potentially harmful germs (such as bacteria, protozoa or virus), the chlorine is “inactivated” upon reacting with various compounds, and turns into combined chlorine.

In fact, that strong chlorine smell around swimming pools comes from combined chlorine products called chloramines. These are produced when free chlorine reacts with substances such as urine or perspiration in the water.

Lifeguards also monitor pool water quality throughout the day, performing manual checks and keeping an eye on automatic measurements.

On busy days chlorine might be checked every three hours to ensure levels are maintained within specific ranges to maintain optimal pool water quality. This is known as “balancing the water”.

Don’t go to the pool when sick

It’s important to take precautions when visiting a pool to ensure that you and everyone around you stays healthy during and after your visit.

The best way to do this is to not visit the pool if you’re feeling unwell or have had diarrhoea in the past two weeks, or if you have been diagnosed with cryptosporidiosis or infections such as E. coli, shigella or viruses.

Swimming can be fun and exciting for kids who might forget about a bathroom break. Parents should take their babies and toddlers to the toilet every 20–30 minutes to prevent accidents from occurring.

For babies and toddlers, swim nappies are encouraged to prevent accidental code browns. However, the disposable option are usually not effective at containing urine or poo. Reusable swim nappies are a far better option, designed to provide a snug fit.

If you see a poo or vomit at the pool, get out of the water and tell a lifeguard or staff member immediately. Then, follow all directions given by staff members and seek medical attention if you feel unwell in the days following the incident.

– ref. After ‘code brown’, how long before the pool is safe again? Water quality experts explain – https://theconversation.com/after-code-brown-how-long-before-the-pool-is-safe-again-water-quality-experts-explain-274856

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

After a coup by the Liberals’ conservative faction, the party has dumped its first female leader Sussan Ley, who had dire polling, in favour of Angus Taylor.

Jane Hume, from the moderate side of the party, won the position of deputy leader. Before entering politics Hume worked in the financial sector. Her win in last week’s ballot came after a turbulent year for her, with mistakes in the election campaign, and then being removed from the frontbench by Ley.

Now back in a big way, Hume takes the shadow portfolio of employment, industrial relations, productivity and deregulation, which will give her a major role in the economic debate.

On her new roles, Hume says she wants to get Australia’s industrial relations system working for employees and employers:

I can understand why previous Coalition governments have been timid on industrial relations reform. They are still scarred by WorkChoices back in 2007. And that’s an easy slogan, I think, for Labor governments to throw, or Labor oppositions to throw, at Liberals and at the Coalition. I’m really not interested in revisiting WorkChoices.

I’m very much interested in looking at job opportunities and career opportunities. What is it that my kids and their kids are going to be looking for in a workplace? […] How do we get our industrial relations system working for both employees and employers? And to some extent, I think that requires a new level of imagination. We want workplace flexibility.

On what a Coalition childcare policy may look like, Hume points to restoring choice and rejecting “dependency” in Labor’s one-size-fits-all approach to childcare:

I do think that there has been an objective, if you like, of dependency that has been part of the Labor Party’s tactics of government, but that’s not healthy. And we can see it in something like childcare.

We need to make sure that we encourage innovation and aspiration, that we reward effort so that when people want to step up and say, hey, I’d really like to start a business, I’d like to really start a family, I’m going to work really hard so that I can send my child to the school that I choose, that there are opportunities for families and individuals to do exactly that.

[A] one-size-fits-all approach [makes] the place a little greyer. I’d like to inject some optimism and some colour back into the Australian economy and to society.

On women in the Liberal party, Hume says the party needs to attract more women but rejects the idea of quotas, saying she’s proud to have made it on merit alone:

I fundamentally believe that we need more women in parliament from every party, not just the Liberal Party. Women’s voices are more than 50% of the Australian population. It’s really important that their voices are heard loudly and clearly in the places where decisions get made about their lives. And I have always been a champion of women within my party.

When we talk about female representation, it’s almost like people say the word “quotas” in the same breath and it’s not that binary. […] There are so many different ways of doing this and quotas is only one way. And it’s one that doesn’t necessarily suit the culture or the nature of the Liberal Party.

I think that the women that I know within the Liberal Party, both those that aspire to be in parliament and those that are already there, would feel a level of insult if they felt that they needed special dispensation just for their presence. […] I love the fact that I know that I got to where I am on merit alone and that my female colleagues did the same. It makes us more powerful, more confident and more able to do our jobs.

Asked whether the Liberals need to run a female candidate in the Farrer by-election to maximise their competitiveness, Hume says a women candidate be “terrific” but stresses the decision is up to the party organisation.

There’s no doubt that female candidates are hard workers, they’re great communicators, they feel very representative of the community and they tend to know their communities extremely well.

I’d like to see female candidates in every seat across the country because the more women we have in parliament, the better represented women’s voices are.

Reflecting on how she has changed in her nearly 10 years in parliament Hume said she was surprised how little of her business experience translated to politics:

I think I’m far less naive. I did come in bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, nothing but a ponytail and a dream. And I did feel at that stage too that perhaps my business experience would translate over easily to politics. They are very different beasts.

In business, when teams work together, […] you can be part of the boat that rises on the tide. Politics is a little bit more of a zero-sum game, one in one out. You’re either the party of government or the party of opposition, you’re in the ministry, or you are out of the ministry. […] Because of that, it can create interesting relationships, challenges that perhaps I hadn’t expected before I entered parliament. But I love it. […] What I didn’t realise, but I love most about the job, is that every single day is different.

I think it’s a far better workplace now than it was when I first arrived. It’s far more welcoming to newcomers and to those that might not necessarily fit the cookie-cutter mould of an Australian politician.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: New Liberal Deputy Jane Hume on why she wants a woman contesting every seat – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-new-liberal-deputy-jane-hume-on-why-she-wants-a-woman-contesting-every-seat-276271

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Johra Kayeser Fatima, Senior Lecturer, Marketing, University of Canberra

In Australia, around 16% of major road accidents (such as multi-vehicle crashes and pedestrian collisions) involve distracted driving.

Distracted driving happens when people shift their attention from the primary task of driving to a secondary task such as using a mobile phone or eating.

We recently examined the specific effects of different distraction types on driving performance – and discovered some carried a greater risk than others.

What we studied

Driving distractions that cause accidents can happen for any of these reasons:

• auditory distractions, such as listening to music, having a conversation or hearing a baby cry

• visual distractions, such as looking at a navigator or passengers

• cognitive distractions such as thinking, daydreaming, or future planning

• behavioural distractions such as texting, calling, fixing a mirror or eating/drinking.

In our study we used a driving simulator in a controlled laboratory setting to systematically manipulate distraction conditions and assess their impact on driving.

The simulator had three screens with nearly 180° peripheral vision in a driving scenario.

We distracted participants in four ways. We:

• called their mobile phone while they were driving (auditory distraction)

• asked them to locate a specific key of a computer keyboard located in front of them, which was a part of the driving simulator (visual distraction, as drivers need to look at the key by moving their eyes from road on the screen)

• engaged them in a conversation (cognitive distraction)

• instructed them to move a cup from one side of their driving seat to the other (behavioural distraction).

We studied 103 Australian drivers aged 16–82 in the Australian Capital Territory, using a road deviation measure to reflect the “sway” of the vehicle.

How did these distractions impact driving?

Participants’ driving was worse when they were involved in listening (auditory distraction) and when they were asked to do a task (behavioural distraction) compared with the other two types of distractions (cognitive and visual).

The reason is likely to be that our brains struggle to concentrate on driving and deal with these distractions at the same time. The result? An increased risk of making a mistake on the road.

The results did surprise us. Before the study, we assumed visual distractions would impact drivers most but that was not the case with our results.

A possible explanation is that when drivers intentionally look away from the road, they mentally predict what will likely to take place during the next few seconds. This is an internal decision.

That is not the case for most auditory distractions – these are largely created by others and often happen unexpectedly, like a baby crying or hearing a favourite song on the radio. Drivers may not be mentally prepared for this type of distraction.

Also, audio distractions can happen any time, even in a complex driving moment (such as high traffic or merging). Drivers are less likely to take their eyes off the road in these complex moments.

It must be noted these four distractions can be interrelated (a phone ringing is mainly an auditory distraction but it also sparks the brain to do something, which is cognitive). And you may also look at your phone, which is is a visual distraction.

In our study, we used verbal conversations as a measure of cognitive distractions but drivers can also be cognitively distracted by thinking about problems or being in a hurry.

Our study supports previous research investigating in-vehicle distractions.

Mobile phone usage is the big one – a United States study found using (not just hearing it ring) a phone while driving increases the chances of a collision by up to four times.

Australian research found non technology-based activities – such as eating, drinking, smoking and interacting with passengers – all have the potential to increase crash risk as well.

So, how do we make our roads safer?

Our findings suggest there are a few key takeaways for drivers, educators, government bodies and road safety organisations.

On an individual level, drivers need to be aware of the auditory and behavioural distractions they face, and the potential impact on road safety. We found people often don’t know which distractions negatively influence their driving the most.

While many drivers talk with passengers, it can affect their locus of control and driving behaviour. They therefore need to be mindful of the level of noise inside the vehicle and try to avoid arguments or noisy conversations.

Podcasts and audio books can have a similar effect on driving performance.

Inside vehicle distractions are increasing with the rapid growth of technologies such as smartphones, smart watches and navigation systems. It is therefore essential drivers are also aware of how to use (or not to use) these gadgets safely.

Read more: Yes, those big touchscreens in cars are dangerous and buttons are coming back

Road safety organisations and government bodies must develop road safety promotions that highlight inside vehicle distractions (in particular, auditory and behavioural types). Often, these promotions only focus on external distractions such as poor weather, road conditions and pedestrian behaviour.

We would like to acknowledge Hilmi Khan, research assistant in this project for his contribution.

– ref. Using your phone while driving is dangerous. What about listening to music or eating? – https://theconversation.com/using-your-phone-while-driving-is-dangerous-what-about-listening-to-music-or-eating-273236

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Troy McEwan, Professor of Clinical and Forensic Psychology, Swinburne University of Technology

In 2024, 38 Australian women were murdered by a partner or ex-partner. Thankfully, new data show the number of women killed by intimate partners has reduced to 32 over the most recent reporting period. The annual rate to June 2025 was among the lowest on record.

Nonetheless, more needs to be done to get the number of intimate partner homicides to zero. Thanks to tireless advocacy by many, the federal government has a target to reduce female victims of homicide by 25% per year. It’s part of the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children.

One common way of trying to prevent intimate partner and family homicide is through risk assessment and management. Risk assessments are used by police, family violence sector agencies and others to prioritise cases where harm seems most likely.

Sadly, our new research, published in the Journal of Family Violence, suggests it’s almost impossible to use these risk assessments to accurately predict who will attempt to kill their partner.

How do we assess risk?

Completing a risk assessment involves identifying the presence of “risk factors” in a potential perpetrator: characteristics that are thought to be associated with increased risk of homicide.

Past research has found women who are killed by a partner are more likely than abused women generally to have experienced things like strangulation, stalking, controlling behaviour and threats to kill.

Because they are more common in homicide cases, many people believe these kinds of characteristics are risk factors that can help them predict future homicide. Unfortunately, that’s not true.

Homicide is (thankfully) extremely rare. In Victoria, there were about 18 family violence-related homicides for every 100,000 family violence reports made to police in 2024–25.

Because it’s so rare, it’s virtually impossible to predict who might be a victim of homicide, or who will commit a homicide, even when lots of risk factors are present.

Our research

Our recent research showed this in a population of nearly 40,000 family violence reports recorded by Victoria Police.

We followed every person for 12 months in police databases to see who was involved in a subsequent family violence homicide or an incident that could have resulted in death (such as a very serious assault).

We tested the most commonly identified risk factors for intimate partner homicide to see if any of them alone, or combined, could predict a fatal or near fatal outcome.

We found none of them could. More than 99% of people with these risk factors were not involved in a fatal or near fatal attack in the 12 months we followed them.

For example, police recorded that 7,337 people had, in the past, threatened their partner or family member with serious harm or death. Among those who did go on to very seriously harm or kill, about 22% had previously made such threats.

However, 99.84% of those who had made a threat did not kill or attempt to kill a partner or family member in the 12 months after the police risk assessment.

The same is true of those who used jealous and controlling behaviour towards a partner or family member. Police recorded 12,123 people as having done this, and of those who very seriously harmed or killed, 29% had a history of jealous and controlling behaviour.

But again, 99.87% of people with jealous and controlling behaviour at the time of the original police report did not go on to kill or seriously harm.

The same was true of strangulation, stalking, and other risk factors for homicide.

We then tested whether combinations of these risk factors could predict homicide, with similar outcomes. Whichever way we looked at the data, the result was the same – every previously assumed risk factor or combination of risk factors got it wrong more than 99% of the time.

It’s possible we could have made more accurate predictions if we followed people for a longer period, say ten years.

But, while more homicides would have occurred, the overall rate of lethal and near lethal violence would have still been extremely low. Even more importantly, the results would not mean much in practice because risk assessments tend to guide responses in the short to medium term, not over many years.

What’s behind this?

We got these results because fatal or near fatal violence is very rare. It was only present in 55 cases in our sample of nearly 40,000 police reports.

While 55 deaths are of course 55 too many, all the risk factors we examined were unfortunately much more common.

Access to firearms was the least common factor, recorded in about 1,300 family violence cases. The most common factor, the perpetrator having identified mental health problems, was present in around 13,500 family violence cases.

Together, this means that even when a risk factor is present, most of those with it do not go on to use fatal or near-fatal violence.

These results don’t mean we should stop paying attention to strangulation, stalking or threats to kill. They do mean we should stop thinking these behaviours can help us predict homicide.

Of course, we must respond when these awful behaviours are identified and prevent people who’ve done such things from causing further harm.

But risk management should not be based on the idea that all people who act in this way are likely to kill, when the reality is that the overwhelming majority will not.

In some circumstances, very intrusive risk management is warranted to ensure immediate safety (such as remanding the person who has been violent). But in most cases, the presence of these risk factors doesn’t indicate that a homicide is imminent.

Rather, they indicate the need for interventions that can reduce family violence and its harms. Examples include psychological treatments that can change emotions and thoughts linked to violence, mental health and substance use treatment where it is required, effective multi-service collaborations, and wrap-around victim support services.

The evidence suggests while prediction is not possible, prevention is. The best way forward is not to create a false expectation that we can ever know who will kill.

Instead, we must adopt evidence-based preventative strategies and fund them fully, so they are available to everyone who needs them. Perhaps then the goal of zero intimate partner or family homicides will be closer to a reality.

The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

– ref. Can we predict domestic homicide? New research suggests we can’t – https://theconversation.com/can-we-predict-domestic-homicide-new-research-suggests-we-cant-268290

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Australian National University; The University of Western Australia; Victoria University

While the world is focused on the fate of a ruined Gaza, Israel has accelerated its creeping annexation of the West Bank.

Israeli legislative moves, security operations, settlement expansion and support of settlers’ violence are forcing the Palestinians out of their lands at an unprecedented rate.

US President Donald Trump has publicly opposed Israel’s annexation of the occupied territory, but he may not be able to stop it – unless he acts now and acts decisively.

Creeping annexation

Last July, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) passed a resolution in support of the annexation of the West Bank. It was non-binding, but clearly signalled where the legislative body stood on the issue.

Then, when US Vice President JD Vance was visiting Israel in October, the Knesset approved two bills calling for the formal annexation of the territory. Vance called the move a “very stupid political stunt” intended to embarrass him.

The bills were aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s avowed opposition to the creation of an independent Palestinian state on his watch.

Then, earlier this month, the Israeli security cabinet approved a series of measures that furthered the de facto annexation of the West Bank.

The measures, pushed by the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and Defence Minister Israel Katz, are designed to remove any “legal obstacles” to the expansion of Israeli power across the territory, in violation of international law.

The measures provide more immunity for Israelis – the settlers, in particular – to purchase and own land in the West Bank.

They also give the Israeli state control over some historical and religious sites and limit further the Palestinian Authority’s administrative functions in the zones that are supposed to be under its jurisdiction under the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Netanyahu’s broader ambitions

The moves came at a crucial time in US-Israel relations. In January, the Trump administration announced the start of phase two of the US-brokered ceasefire in Gaza. Immediately after the measures were approved, Netanyahu made his sixth visit to the United States in a year to ensure Trump remains aligned with his course of action.

Netanyahu wants the fate of the Gaza Strip to be shaped according to his vision of Israel’s interests. He has been very vocal about his ambition for a “Greater Israel” stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Netanyahu also remains adamant Israel stays the most powerful actor in the region. Israel has already degraded the capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah, the two main regional proxies of its chief adversary, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has also widened its military footprint in both Lebanon and Syria.

Now, Netanyahu is determined to see a favourable regime change in Tehran. While Trump wants a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, Netanyahu is significantly less supportive of such an outcome.

He has repeatedly stressed the need for a US-led military campaign to not only dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, but also degrade its missile capability and force it to severe ties with its proxies.

He regards this as the only way to remove the “existential threat” posed by the Iranian regime.

What will Trump do?

The new Israeli measures in the West Bank will no doubt embolden settlers to engage in more violent acts against the Palestinians. The stories coming out of the territory show how Israel is rapidly slicing away the Palestinians’ territorial, social and cultural existence.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says more than 37,000 Palestinians were displaced in the West Bank in 2025, with record-high levels of violence.

The United Nations and the European Union have strongly condemned the new Israeli measures and settler violence.

However, Netanyahu and his extremist ministers have, as usual, brushed aside international criticisms and ignored the illegality of Israeli occupation under international law.

They have instead accelerated efforts to make the internationally backed two-state solution an impossibility. The recent measures help establish deeper “facts on the ground” that render the annexation of the West Bank a fait accompli. This would give Trump no other option but to go along with it.

Yet, Trump has the power and leverage to restrain Netanyahu. And he can stand firm behind his own stated opposition to West Bank annexation.

As an unpredictable, transactional leader, the president may even go so far as to attack Iran on behalf of Netanyahu in return for Netanyahu holding back from formal annexation of the West Bank.

Trump now faces the biggest tests of his presidency. The first is how he will manage Netanyahu, whom he has praised as a “war hero”. The second is how he will settle the conflict with Iran – whether it will be a deal or yet another devastating war.

– ref. Israel is accelerating its creeping annexation of the West Bank. Can Donald Trump stop it? – https://theconversation.com/israel-is-accelerating-its-creeping-annexation-of-the-west-bank-can-donald-trump-stop-it-276074

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matevz (Matt) Raskovic, Professor of International Business & Strategy, Auckland University of Technology

On the face of it, New Zealand’s positive placing in a newly-released scorecard of perceived corruption seems reassuring.

The country remains among the world’s least corrupt in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), published annually by global civil society organisation Transparency International.

But the 2025 rankings hide a more troubling story. New Zealand’s score has been falling for a decade, even as its position near the top holds.

The index scores more than 180 countries on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 means very clean. With a score of 81, New Zealand now sits joint fourth with Norway, after a two-point drop from last year.

That pattern reflects not just mounting challenges at home, but a wider global shift that is dragging down even top-performing countries.

A decade ago, a dozen nations would have earned “A-grade” rankings at the top of the board. Today, that group – including Denmark (scoring 89), Finland (88), Singapore (84), Sweden (80) and Switzerland (80) – has nearly halved.

Some might argue a top-four ranking is still strong, especially when two-thirds of countries receive failing grades (below 50). But that misses the broader point.

New Zealand’s score has fallen from 91 in 2015 to 81 today. If that trend continues, it risks slipping out of the top tier altogether.

A global slide

At a global level, the picture is also deteriorating. The average CPI score fell by one point this year to a historic low of 42. That may not sound like much, but it is the first drop in a decade – and from an already low baseline, even small declines are notable.

There is now a clear pattern of gradual but noticeable slips among top performers, including New Zealand, Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom. The United States is the only other country near the top to have seen a drop as steep as New Zealand’s, with its score falling from 76 in 2015 to 64 today.

For Aotearoa, that global slide has real-world consequences. Falling in the corruption rankings weakens “Brand New Zealand” and makes the country potentially less attractive to investors, tourists, skilled migrants and trading partners.

Around 30% of New Zealand’s exports go to countries with CPI scores above 70, including Australia, Japan, Singapore and the UK – markets where reputation and trust carry weight.

At the same time, about a third of New Zealand’s exports go to countries with CPI scores below 50, including China and several Southeast Asian nations.

In those markets, strong domestic integrity systems and robust safeguards in trade relationships are even more important, to ensure foreign corrupt practices do not spill back into New Zealand.

NZ’s lingering weak points

Several reports have laid out where New Zealand’s anti-corruption framework is falling short.

They point to the absence of a national anti-corruption strategy and a central agency. This comes alongside lax lobbying rules, inadequate reporting on political donations and gaps in electoral safeguards.

Successive governments have been slow to address these issues. The current government has faced scrutiny over the role of well-resourced lobby groups – including the tobacco and gun lobbies – and millions of dollars in political donations from the property industry.

Several high-profile fraud cases have rattled sectors ranging from construction and building inspection to infrastructure, health, procurement and IT. There have also been concerns about judicial appeal processes being bypassed through ministerial approval or alternative resolution mechanisms.

More recently, local election breaches and allegations of misuse of personal data in national elections have further eroded public trust in politics – something playing out alongside declining trust in news media.

Formulas and fixes

To stop sliding further down the global rankings, New Zealand requires a dedicated anti-corruption strategy – one focused more on prevention than response.

New Zealand is now the only one of its four other key security partners without a central anti-corruption agency, after Australia established its own in 2023. Since then, Australia’s CPI score has risen by two points.

A similar body in New Zealand could strengthen information-sharing, improve early-warning systems and provide ongoing oversight of integrity risks.

There is also a need for more competitive markets and stronger checks and balances to help counter the influence of special interest groups.

It is ironic that much of New Zealand’s drop in the 2025 CPI index has stemmed from growing concern from business leaders about public sector conduct, including how public contracts and licences are awarded.

While the government pitches itself as “business friendly”, limited competition across retail, construction and banking helps explain why more business leaders feel the market is not working for everyone.

US academic Robert Klitgaard, a leading authority on anti-corruption, devised a simple formula: “corruption equals monopoly power plus discretion minus transparency”. By that equation, New Zealand would need to address monopoly power across several sectors, reduce ministerial discretion and fast-tracking processes, and increase political transparency.

In an election year, politicians should understand that the public’s satisfaction with the political system is mainly driven by the interplay between how well the economy is performing and perceptions of injustice and corruption.

There are of course trade-offs between the two. But given the steady drop in New Zealand’s index score over the past decade, any government will need to pay more attention to fighting real or perceived corruption more effectively.

– ref. NZ is slowly slipping on the global corruption index. Is it time for an anti-corruption agency? – https://theconversation.com/nz-is-slowly-slipping-on-the-global-corruption-index-is-it-time-for-an-anti-corruption-agency-275781

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lakshini Gunasekera, PhD Candidate in Neurology, Monash University

A migraine attack is not just a “bad headache”.

Migraine is a debilitating neurological condition which can cause nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light or sound, in addition to severe headaches.

Migraine affects roughly five million Australians, but few people understand the different stages of a migraine attack.

Knowing the four distinct phases can help you recognise the symptoms and manage pain at each stage.

Phase 1: Premonitory

The first phase of migraine development is the “premonitory” or “prodrome” phase. It functions like a warning period which begins 24 to 48 hours before a migraine attack fully sets in.

The premonitory phase has a lot to do with the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the part of the brain which regulates key functions such as body temperature, appetite, mood and sleep.

When a person experiences a migraine attack, their hypothalamus becomes abnormally activated. The hypothalamus is connected to other parts of the brain with different functions, so this abnormal activation can also disrupt how those parts function.

This can lead to symptoms such as poor concentration, food cravings, irritability and insomnia. If you notice these early signs, you’re more likely to “catch” the start of a migraine attack and be able to treat it early.

Phase 2: Aura

The second phase of a migraine attack is called “aura”. Aura refers to various neurological symptoms which affect your vision, speech or ability to feel sensations. Visual auras, which mainly affect your vision, are the most common kind.

Visual aura symptoms can include seeing flashing lights, swirling shapes or blind spots. A sensory aura can lead to numbness or tingling in your face or limbs. In severe cases, people may even have trouble speaking.

Research suggests a process called cortical spreading depression contributes to aura symptoms. During this process, a wave of electrical activity spreads very slowly through the brain and can impact how certain brain regions function.

Only 30% of people experience migraine with aura.

Phase 3: Headache

The third phase of a migraine attack is the headache. This is when people typically experience a throbbing or pulsating headache, alongside other symptoms like nausea and sensitivity to light and sound.

This phase usually lasts between four and 72 hours if untreated.

When different brain networks become activated during a migraine attack, other symptoms can develop in addition to headache.

When the medulla or “vomit centre” of the brain is abnormally activated, it can lead to nausea and vomiting.

The trigeminal nerve, the nerve which allows you to feel sensations on your face, can also become abnormally activated. This causes the release of chemicals which may be perceived by the brain as pain.

One of these chemicals is a protein called calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP). Some injectable types of migraine medication block this protein to reduce pain.

Phase 4: Postdrome

The fourth and final phase is the “postdrome”. It is also known as the “migraine hangover”.

During this recovery phase, your brain is working hard to return to its normal functioning. That is why you may feel even more fatigued or have difficulty concentrating after a migraine attack.

So, how can I manage a migraine attack?

It helps to know the symptoms and stages of migraine development.

If you have predictable symptoms, particularly during the premonitory phase, it’s best to carry pain medications or anti-nausea tablets with you. That way you can treat early symptoms as soon as they arise. It can also be a sign to rest, ideally before the headache phase sets in.

In the aura phase, taking migraine-specific pain medications such as triptans, aspirin or anti-inflammatory pain killers may stop the headache phase from starting.

If you have more than four migraine attacks each month, you may also consider taking preventive medications. These are usually daily tablets which help control the baseline level of head pain you experience. Injectable options are also available.

Finally, don’t ignore the postdrome phase. If you push yourself too hard during this recovery period, you may experience overlapping migraine attacks. This is when one migraine attack starts before the last one resolves itself. Overlapping migraine attacks are much harder to treat.

You may also experience other symptoms related to the migraine attack. These can include dizziness, neck pain, or ringing in the ears. If you have any of these additional symptoms, you should consult your neurologist to check they are not caused by a more serious underlying condition.

And if you are a woman who experiences migraine with aura, speak to your doctor before starting hormone-based contraception. This is because you may need different treatment than someone who does not experience aura symptoms.

By understanding the different phases and symptoms of migraine, you will be better equipped to tackle any future attacks that come.

Read more: Why is migraine more common in women than men?

– ref. Migraine is more than just a headache. A neurologist explains the 4 stages – https://theconversation.com/migraine-is-more-than-just-a-headache-a-neurologist-explains-the-4-stages-267973

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yuting Zhang, Professor of Health Economics, The University of Melbourne

Consumers will soon have a clearer picture of how specialists’ fees compare if legislation before parliament is passed.

New legislation would allow the government to publish details on the revamped Medical Costs Finder website about what individual specialists charge.

It’s a step forward for transparency, and will go part-way to relieving bill shock.

But our new research, which has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in the Australian Economic Review, suggests how transparency alone won’t be enough to rein in specialists’ fees.

We also show how far specialists’ fees have risen since Medicare began.

What is the Medical Costs Finder website?

The Medical Costs Finder website cost A$24 million to build. It relies on specialists voluntarily uploading their fees. But by the end of 2025, only about 88 individual doctors had done so.

If the bill passes, new legislation would allow the government to upload billing data that’s routinely collected for Medicare claims. This would allow patients to compare out-of-pocket costs before they even book an appointment.

With more fee information, patients would have informed discussions with their GPs about where they are referred.

However, transparency may have unintended consequences.

Some doctors might charge more once they see their neighbours charging higher rates.

There is also the persistent perception that higher price equals better quality, which is often not true.

So the website also needs to report measures of quality health care, such as clinical outcomes and wait times for an appointment. Without this, transparency might inadvertently encourage some patients to choose more expensive doctors, wrongly assuming they will get better care.

Ideally, fees and waiting times should be provided at the doctor level, rather than at postcode level as it is currently done. That’s because fees can vary substantially within a postcode.

Read more: No control, no regulation. Why private specialist fees can leave patients with huge medical bills

We need to make fees fairer

To truly fix the system, we also need to make Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) fees fairer. These are fees the Australian government sets for providing certain services.

In 2014–2019 the then government froze indexation of the MBS rebate for specialists. This proved a fundamental failure. It led to the schedule fee falling behind the cost of practice, providing a legitimate excuse for specialists to charge higher gaps to maintain (or increase) real incomes.

This set a precedent where fees for some specialities have run out of control, substantially higher than they would be if they had been properly indexed since Medicare started in 1984.

For example, mean fees for an initial consultation with a specialist (Medicare code 104) are now 34% higher than inflation would predict. This is an average across all specialities billing 104 but the rise in some specialities is substantially higher. Psychiatrist fees (code 296) are 77% higher.

This chart outlines how much fees for initial consultations with various specialists have risen since 1984. It also shows how much MBS fees would have risen in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or another measure, the Producer Price Index (PPI).

So to make Medicare fees sustainable, they should be calculated based on the real-world expenses of running a clinic, including rent, staff, advanced training, and the time a doctor provides.

To keep these payments fair over time, they should be updated every year to match inflation and the rising costs of medical technology.

What else could we do to make fees fairer?

We propose specialists be invited to participate in a “fair fees” scheme, agreeing to charge the MBS fee or a set percentage above it. Those who participate would display a sign of certification, and their patients would receive a Medicare rebate.

Those who choose not to participate would be required to advise patients upfront that no Medicare rebate will be available for their services. This uses the public subsidy as a powerful regulatory lever to protect patients from excessive charges.

The government can also encourage fair pricing by offering higher subsidies to doctors who work in regional areas where medical care is harder to find.

Other options include paying specialists a single fee for an entire treatment based on how well the patient recovers, rather than for every single test or appointment. This rewards specialists who provide high-quality care and successful results rather than those who simply process the highest number of patients. This ensures patients pay for a successful health outcome rather than being charged for every individual test or unnecessary follow-up appointment without knowing the full costs.

Even if the government does not currently have the budget to fully cover “fair” rebates, it could control specialists’ fees, as occurs in other countries.

In the past, Australian government policy has focused almost exclusively on setting rebates rather than regulating fees. This may have been because of perceived constitutional constraints. But fees can be regulated in ways that would withstand legal challenges.

In a nutshell

The proposed legislation for greater transparency for specialists’ fees is a necessary start, but it is only the first chapter.

To ensure a health system that is truly fair, we must address the underlying economics of specialist pricing and ensure Medicare remains a guarantee of affordable care, not just a small discount on an ever-rising bill.

– ref. How to make specialists’ fees fair? It’ll take more than a revamped website – https://theconversation.com/how-to-make-specialists-fees-fair-itll-take-more-than-a-revamped-website-275919

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Terence C. Cheng, Associate Professor, Centre for Health Economics, Monash University

Around 15 million Australians with private health insurance will pay more from April 1, after the federal government approved a 4.41% average premium increase, the largest in nine years.

For a typical family, that means several hundred dollars more a year, on top of a household budget already stretched by rising rents, energy prices and grocery costs.

The premium increase once again outpaces general inflation, which rose to 3.8% in the 12 months to December 2025.

With insurers posting strong profits, many people are asking: is this increase actually justified?

How are premium increases decided?

Each year, private health insurers apply to the federal health minister for approval to raise their premiums. These rises kick in each April.

Australia’s financial regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, assesses the applications first. Insurers must show projected changes in revenue and claims costs, alongside data on their financial performance.

It then goes to the Minister for Health for approval. Under the Private Health Insurance Act 2007, the minister must approve the change unless it’s against the public interest.

This year, Health Minister Mark Butler said he asked insurers to resubmit their applications multiple times before reaching a final decision. But the approved average of 4.41% was still the highest since 2017.

Individual funds varied considerably in how much they are approved to raise their premiums. NIB was approved at 5.5%, Medibank at 5.1% and Bupa at 4.8% – all above the industry average. HBF came in at just 2.1%.

Each insurer’s approved increase reflects its own financial circumstances, including how much it’s paying out in claims, the age and health profile of its members, its financial reserves, and how efficiently it’s run.

How much are companies paying and profiting?

To understand the 4.41% increase, it helps to look at what insurers have been paying out in recent years.

“Benefits” is the industry term for the money paid back to members to cover their medical costs, such as hospital stays and dental appointments.

When benefits grow faster than premiums, insurer margins get squeezed.

Each year insurers request to increase their premiums based on their forecast of benefit payouts in the coming year. But these don’t always align, or may not be approved.

Total benefits paid, covering both hospital treatments and general treatments (such as dental and physiotherapy) grew 10.2% in 2023 and a further 7.6% in 2024.

Over those same years, approved premium increases were just 2.9% and 3.0%. So insurer payouts were growing at roughly double the rate of what they were collecting.

To understand why, we need to go back to the early COVID years. In 2020, elective surgeries were cancelled and people avoided medical appointments. Total benefits paid dropped by 5.5%, even as premiums kept rolling in. Insurers built up large surpluses.

Then, from 2021, that pent-up demand came flooding back. Benefits jumped 8.3% in 2021, against a premium increase of just 2.7%, the lowest on record at the time.

Before COVID, the system was roughly in balance. Benefits grew 3.1% in 2019, broadly in line with the 3.25% premium increase that year.

The escalating premium increases approved for 2025 (3.7%) and 2026 (4.4%) suggest insurers are now trying to claw back that balance.

So is the 4.41% increase justified?

On pure claims-cost grounds, there seems to be a case for increasing premiums. Benefits have grown at roughly double the rate of premiums for two years.

As Australia’s population ages and undergoes elective surgery at a greater rate, we’re likely to see a rise in benefits paid in the coming years.

But the industry’s high profit figures complicate the story.

Industry-wide profit after tax was A$1.39 billion in 2018. It dipped during COVID to around $951 million, then rebounded to $1.98 billion in 2022, the highest in recent years, before settling at $1.59 billion in 2023. That is still well above pre-pandemic levels.

Over the five years to June 2024, net industry profits rose by 48%. Medibank alone posted an operating profit of $741.5 million in 2024–25.

Gross margin, a measure of how much revenue is left after paying claims, tells a similar story. It held at around 14% and 13% in 2019 and 2020, then surged to 18.8% in 2022. By 2023, margins had begun to ease downward, at 17%.

Balancing profits and controls

Insurers are not in financial trouble, with profits remaining large, though cracks are beginning to emerge in the industry.

But the bumper years of 2021 and 2022 have passed. Claims are rising faster than premiums, and margins are tightening. A 4.41% increase looks like an attempt to bring revenue back into line with the real and rising cost of what Australians are claiming.

In the United States, health insurers are legally required to return at least 85 cents in every premium dollar to members in large group markets, a rule introduced under the Affordable Care Act.

Australian insurers briefly fell short of that benchmark in 2022, returning only 81 cents per dollar and in 2023, returning 83 cents per dollar.

Imposing a requirement requiring insurers to return a set percentage of premiums as benefits could give consumers greater peace of mind that premiums are being used for care, not profits.

This would bring Australian regulation closer in line with international best practice.

Read more: Will my private health insurance cover my surgery? What if my claim is rejected?

– ref. Private health insurance premiums will rise 4.41% this year. But is it justified? – https://theconversation.com/private-health-insurance-premiums-will-rise-4-41-this-year-but-is-it-justified-275567

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eleonora Feletto, Principal Research Fellow and and Cancer Epidemiologist, University of Sydney

Bowel cancer has been making headlines around the world, following the death last week of actor James Van Der Beek. The former Dawson’s Creek actor was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at age 45.

Bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer, develops when cells in any part of the large intestine grow in an uncontrolled way.

In 2025, it was estimated to be the fifth most commonly diagnosed cancer in Australia. Roughly one in every 21 men and one in every 25 women are projected to be diagnosed with bowel cancer by the age of 85.

Our research from 2019 shows rates of bowel cancer are increasing among younger Australians.

So if you’re a younger person, should you be worried about bowel cancer? And how can you reduce your risk of developing it?

Who’s most at risk?

Australia has one of the highest overall rates of bowel cancer internationally. It’s also the second most common cause of cancer-related death.

About half of all bowel cancer cases appear to be linked to lifestyle-related factors. These include alcohol consumption, smoking, physical inactivity, diets high in red and processed meat, and low fibre intake.

The remaining cases are influenced by factors you can’t control. These include genetics, inflammatory bowel disease, and older age.

Current research suggests the average Australian has a one in 23 chance of being diagnosed with bowel cancer by the age of 85.

Our research from 2019 investigated bowel and rectal cancer in people aged 50 and below. Between 1982 and 2014, the average rates of both cancers in this age group increased by between 1% and 9% per year, a worrying trend.

It’s unclear what is driving this increase. But current evidence suggests lifestyle changes over time (such as poorer diet, increased alcohol intake and physical inactivity) may contribute to it.

However, we also tend to diagnose younger people later. This is because we either don’t recognise bowel cancer symptoms or attribute them to other, often more benign conditions.

In contrast, rates of bowel cancer in Australians over 50 have fallen since the 1990s. This is likely due to factors such as screening and advancements in treatment.

Despite these opposing trends, bowel cancer is still more common in older adults. In 2021, there were 1,884 cases recorded in people under 50 compared to 13,020 in people over 50.

Are there ways to reduce my risk of developing bowel cancer?

Yes. Here are three.

1. Do a poo test

Bowel cancer is one of the few cancers we can successfully screen for.

We can use screening to find and remove a polyp before it develops into cancer. We can also use screening to diagnose cancers at a very early stage, when treatment is simpler and survival rates can be as high as 90%.

In Australia, we’ve adopted the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program. Under this program, people can complete a free at-home stool (poo) test every two years. This test detects small traces of blood in the stool which may indicate a polyp or cancer.

Originally the program offered this test to people aged between 50 and 74. However, only 41.7% of eligible Australians did the test from 2022 to 2023. That means many people who could benefit from early detection missed out.

During 2022 and 2023, the Australian government supported a revision to the national guidelines for population screening of bowel cancer. Given the rising rates of bowel cancer among younger Australians, the guidelines now recommend beginning bowel cancer screening at age 45.

As of July 2024, people aged between 45 and 49 can request a stool (poo) kit as part of the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program. In the first six months of the expanded program, 77,000 eligible Australians aged 45 to 49 requested a kit.

Younger Australians must opt-in to screening by requesting a kit through the National Cancer Screening Register. But if your family has a history of bowel cancer, a screening colonoscopy might be more appropriate. It’s important to discuss this with your GP.

2. Look out for symptoms

Bowel cancer often has no symptoms in the early stages, which is why screening is so effective. But in some cases, you might notice the following symptoms:

• changes in bowel habits, which last more than a few weeks
• visible blood in stool
• persistent abdominal pain
• unexplained weight loss
• anaemia, a medical condition where you don’t have enough red blood cells or haemoglobin to carry oxygen around your body.

If you experience any of these symptoms, speak to a GP.

It’s also important to tell your GP if you have any family history of bowel cancer. This is particularly true for younger people. Having even one close relative diagnosed under age 60 increases your own risk.

3. Prioritise healthy living

You can reduce your risk of developing bowel cancer just by adopting a healthier lifestyle. Some helpful changes you can make are:

• following a healthy diet centred around wholegrains, legumes, and vegetables while limiting processed meat consumption
• staying active, aiming to do at least 30 minutes of activity most days
• limiting alcohol consumption
• quitting smoking.

So no matter how old you are, small actions including screening regularly, noticing symptoms, and living healthily, can help reduce your risk of developing bowel cancer.

– ref. Bowel cancer rates are rising among young people – but they can reduce their risk – https://theconversation.com/bowel-cancer-rates-are-rising-among-young-people-but-they-can-reduce-their-risk-276053

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, Adelaide University

Osteoarthritis is a common degenerative joint disease that causes pain, stiffness and swelling, and reduces your range of motion. It often affects the knees, hips and hands, although it can also occur in other joints throughout the body.

If you’ve been diagnosed with osteoarthritis, your doctor has probably recommended exercise. This has become standard treatment advice in recent years.

However, a new review suggests exercise might not be as beneficial as first thought.

But when you take a closer look at the study, there are reasons to be cautious. So it shouldn’t prompt you to ditch your exercise regimen.

What the review did

The research team conducted an “umbrella review” – an overview of systematic reviews, which collate and analyse the findings from individual studies to answer a specific question. Reviewing previously published systematic reviews provides an even bigger snapshot of a given research topic.

After searching thousands of studies, they included five major systematic reviews (comprised of 100 individual studies, with 8,631 patients) before adding another 28 recent trials (involving another 4,360 patients).

Using this data, they looked at the effect of exercise on knee, hip and hand osteoarthritis, and compared it to several alternatives, including doing nothing, placebo (fake) treatments, education, manual therapy, painkillers, injections and surgery.

Read more: What’s the difference between osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis?

What did they find?

Compared to doing nothing and placebos, they found that exercise resulted in small reductions in pain in the hip, knee and hand: between 6 and 12 points on a 100-point scale.

However, exercise did not seem to improve function any more than either of these comparisons.

For knee and hip osteoarthritis, there was evidence that exercise was just as effective at reducing pain and improving function as medicines such as ibuprofen and corticosteroids, which are injected into the joint to reduce inflammation. These also reduced pain by around 5–10%.

The researchers concluded exercise was less effective at improving pain and function than a total joint replacement in people with knee and hip osteoarthritis.

What were the limitations?

First, the authors lumped all types of exercise together. This means strength training, aerobic exercise, stretching, aquatic exercise and tai chi were all considered to be the same.

This is crucial, because we know not all exercise is created equal. Previous reviews have shown, for example, that aerobic exercise might be best for reducing pain and function in people with knee osteoarthritis, while stretching was least effective.

Similarly, the authors didn’t consider the clinical status of the patients. Evidence has shown people with more severe pain and worse function at the start of an intervention see better responses to exercise than those with less pain and good function.

Second, the review treated both supervised and unsupervised exercise the same.

However, research shows supervised training results in much better outcomes than unsupervised – likely because a trainer is there to help push the patient along.

Third, the authors didn’t account for the duration of the exercise, and most study periods were quite short: around 12 weeks.

It’s likely that sticking to an exercise regime over the long term will have better results, leading to a larger scope for improvement than if you just did something for a few weeks.

As such, the results of this review may not accurately reflect the benefits of exercise in people with osteoarthritis who commit to consistent exercise as an ongoing part of their weekly routine (which is often recommended).

Finally, the review didn’t account for the dose of exercise the studies used. Improvements in pain and function seem to increase with total weekly exercise in people with osteoarthritis. One review, for example, found the optimal benefits occurred at around 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week.

These limitations suggest this new review likely undersells the benefits of exercise for osteoarthritis.

Less pain and better physical and mental health

Putting aside the limitations of the review, the small reductions in pain the review reports might still have a positive impact on someone’s life. A 10% reduction in pain could make a meaningful difference to your ability to move around, work, socialise and care for others.

The review also found exercise can reduce pain to the same extent as non-steriodal anti-inflammatory medications and corticosteroids – without the side-effects or the costs.

Exercise can also improve heart health, enhance your mood, help with weight management and reduce the risk of chronic diseases, such as cancer and diabetes.

These factors can have a huge impact on your health and happiness.

What should you do now?

Based on the findings of this new review, you should be confident that any type of exercise will lead to some degree of pain relief.

However, based on prior evidence, it’s likely you can get even greater overall health benefits from exercising if you stick with it.

The best type of exercise is the one that gets done. If you enjoy being outdoors and walking, then this is going to be a great choice as it will improve all aspects of your health as well as reduce pain.

And if pain permits, don’t be afraid to occasionally challenge yourself by upping the intensity to the point where holding a conversation starts to become difficult.

If going to the gym is more your thing, lifting weights will also bring significant overall health benefits – especially if you stick to it long term.

– ref. Does exercise really work for osteoarthritis? – https://theconversation.com/does-exercise-really-work-for-osteoarthritis-276058

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David C. Barker, Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, American University School of Public Affairs

The Mueller report was supposed to settle, once and for all, the controversy over whether the Trump team colluded with Russians or obstructed justice.

Clearly it has not.

Reactions to the report have ranged from “total exoneration!” to “impeach now!”

Shouldn’t nearly 700 hundred pages of details, after almost two years of waiting, have helped the nation to achieve a consensus over what happened?

Well, no.

As the German philosopher Goethe said in the early 1800s, “Each sees what is present in their heart.”

Since 2013 – long before Donald Trump was even a candidate – we have been studying the “dueling facts” phenomenon: the tendency for Red and Blue America to perceive reality in starkly different ways.

Based on that work, we expected the report to settle next to nothing.

The conflicting factual assertions that have emerged since the report’s release highlight just how easy it is for citizens to believe what they want, regardless of what Robert Mueller, William Barr or anyone else has to say about it.

Dueling facts in American democracy

Our research has led us to several conclusions about the future of political discourse in the U.S.

The first is that dueling fact perceptions are rampant, and they are more entrenched than most people realize.

Some examples of this include conflicting perceptions about the existence of climate change, the strength of the economy, the consequences of racism, the origins of sexual orientation, the utility of minimum wage increases or gun control, the crime rate and the safety of vaccines.

This has serious implications for American democracy. As political scientists, we wonder: How can a community decide the direction they should go, if they cannot even agree on where they are? Can people holding dueling facts be brought into some semblance of consensus?

To figure that out, it is important to determine where such divergent beliefs come from in the first place.

This is the perspective we began with: If dueling fact perceptions are driven by misinformation from politicians and pundits, then one would expect things to get better by making sure that people have access to correct information – via fact-checking, for example.

We envisioned the dueling facts phenomenon as being primarily tribal, driven by cheerleading on each side for their partisan “teams.” We assumed, like most other scholars, that individuals are simply led astray by their team’s coaches (party leaders), star players (media pundits) or fellow fans (social media feeds).

But it turns out that the roots of such divergent views go much deeper.

We found that voters see the world in ways that reinforce their values and identities, irrespective of whether they have ever watched Fox News or MSNBC, and regardless of whether they have a Facebook account.

For example, according to our data from five years of national surveys from 2013 to 2017, the most important predictor of whether a person views racism as highly prevalent and influential is not her partisan identification. It is not her general ideological outlook. It is not the amount or type of media that she consumes. It is not even her own race.

It is the degree to which she prioritizes compassion as a public virtue, relative to other things like rugged individualism.

Facts rooted in values

Values not only shape what people see, but they also structure what people look for in the first place. We call this “intuitive epistemology.”

Those who care about oppression look for oppression, so they find it. Those who care about security look for threats to it, and they find them. In other words, people do not end up with the same answers because they do not begin with the same questions.

For example, the perception that vaccines cause autism – against all available empirical evidence – is now shared equally by Democrats and Republicans. Partisanship cannot account for this dueling fact perception.

But when we looked at the role of core values and their associated questions, we found the strongest predictor. If someone we surveyed ranked this question highly, “Does it appear that people are committing indecent acts or degrading something sacred?” they were by far the most likely to believe that vaccines are dangerous.

Partisan identity, on the other hand, has no relationship at all with those beliefs. Because the starting points for different groups of citizens are deeply polarized, so are their ending points. And the starting points are often values rather than parties.

The stronger those commitments to their values are, the stronger the effects. Those with extreme value commitments are much more certain than others that their perceptions are correct.

What next?

Perhaps the most disappointing finding from our studies – at least from our point of view – is that there are no known fixes to this problem.

Fact-checking tends to fall flat. The voters who need to hear corrections rarely read fact-checks. And for those who might stumble across them, reports from distant and distrusted experts are no match for closely held values and defining identities.

Education is the another possible means of encouraging consensus perceptions, but it actually makes things worse.

Rather than training people how to think more reasonably, college and graduate school merely sharpen the lenses graduates use to perceive reality. In our data, those with higher levels of education are more, not less, divided. And the higher the level of training, the more tightly values and perceptions intertwine. Education provides the tools to more efficiently match their preferred values to their perceived facts.

Based on this evidence, we conclude that dueling fact perceptions (or what some have labeled “alternative facts”) are probably here to stay, and worsen.

Mueller’s muddle

We suspect that the Mueller report would have been rejected by roughly half the country, even if its conclusions had been definitive.

But with key phrases like “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” the report’s indecisiveness reinforces how difficult it can be to really know the “truth” about a lot of things.

If a respected prosecutor like Robert Mueller can’t offer a firm conclusion after two years of document dumps and interviews, what are the rest of us to do?

As with so many other things, people will go with their guts, using their heads to feel better about the choices they have already made.

Our conclusions are much more definitive than Mueller’s: We see clear evidence of collusion and obstruction. Collusion between values and facts. Obstruction of the capacity to observe and accept legitimate evidence.

So for the past couple of weeks, the chorus of “I told you so!” has rung out from the country’s Blue coastlines and from every Red mile of heartland in-between.

And with that, the U.S. continues to inch ever closer to a public square in which consensus perceptions are unavailable and facts are irrelevant.

– ref. From ‘Total exoneration!’ to ‘Impeach now!’ – the Mueller report and dueling fact perceptions – https://theconversation.com/from-total-exoneration-to-impeach-now-the-mueller-report-and-dueling-fact-perceptions-116488

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher R. Knittel, Professor of Applied Economics and Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, MIT Sloan School of Management

Fuel economy standards are an important way for the U.S. to combat climate change. However, a 2018 study conducted by the Trump administration proposes hitting the pause button on regulations, potentially leaving billions of dollars in benefits on the table.

This is a significant change from the Obama administration, which ramped up prior fuel economy standards. That administration mandated the fleet-wide fuel economy of passenger vehicles and light trucks to reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The federal government’s cost-benefit analysis, completed in January 2017, concluded that this was technologically feasible and that benefits exceeded costs by over US$90 billion.

The current administration challenges that conclusion and recommends freezing standards at model year 2020 levels through 2025. Their analysis finds that the costs exceed the benefits by over $170 billion – a difference of over $260 billion from the previous report.

Who is right? The answer matters, because fuel economy standards are the last remaining major federal regulation to fight greenhouse gas emissions. The current administration has eliminated other regulations related to clean power and is promoting coal consumption. If the Obama administration’s analysis is correct, then pausing fuel standards will cost the economy money and impact the environment. If the Trump analysis is correct, then this may be the right call. There is a lot at stake.

My colleagues and I analyzed the differences between the two reports, looking to see whether those differences are supported by research and best practices. While both studies contain flaws, we found that the Trump administration’s study contains more.

First, the Trump administration’s study doubles the “rebound effect” – it assumes that consumers will drive twice as many extra miles if they purchase an efficient car. As a result, this leads to more traffic deaths, a claim that has been repeated a number of times. Yet, there is no justification in the research literature for doubling the rebound effect, so this focus on costs associated with increased accidents and deaths is artificial.

The study’s second flaw is that it ignores the global impact of carbon emissions, only looking at the impact on the U.S. This effectively announces to the world that the U.S. does not care about climate impacts outside of its borders. This is a major difference that reduces the social cost of carbon – the economic harm due to emitting a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere – from $48 per ton globally to only $7 per ton in the U.S. This impacts the bigger picture, as it reduces the benefits of fuel standards from $27.8 billion in 2016 to $4.3 billion in 2018.

Third, the study claims that eliminating the fuel economy standards decreases the number of vehicles on the road by 6 million cars by 2029. However, this is completely inconsistent with economic theory, which predicts that tighter standards make both new and used vehicles more expensive. As standards increase vehicle prices, total fleet size should decrease over time – but the 2018 analysis claims the opposite.

In contrast, if standards are rolled back, this should increase demand for vehicles, resulting in a larger fleet. This mistake alone leads the Trump administration to claim over $90 billion of cost savings, from the fewer cars on the road, that just aren’t there.

Mistakenly assuming 6 million fewer cars on the road also means that the study’s assumptions about miles driven and fatalities from car crashes may be off, too.

Finally, the Trump administration study doubles the assumed costs of new technologies required to meet fuel standards compared to the 2017 analysis. We couldn’t find any empirical justification for that.

The Obama administration’s study found $90 billion in net benefits, while the Trump administration’s found a net loss of $186 billion. If the first analysis is right, then the U.S. is leaving this $90 billion on the table by not capturing those net benefits.

Both researchers and the administration need to take a closer look at the data, because this latest study could have a lasting impact on climate change protections in the U.S. and climate change in the world. A change this important needs to be supported by data and best practices, rather than flawed statistics.

– ref. The math on why the Trump administration’s fuel standards report is seriously flawed – https://theconversation.com/the-math-on-why-the-trump-administrations-fuel-standards-report-is-seriously-flawed-108795

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ridho Al Izzati, Junior Researcher, SMERU Research Institute

On November 5 2018, Indonesia’s incumbent presidential candidate Joko “Jokowi” Widodo released a statement claiming that the rate of poverty in rural Indonesia has declined at twice the poverty rates of cities.

But is it true?

Jokowi’s response

The Conversation contacted the Presidential Staff Office to confirm and request an explanation for Jokowi’s claim. They explained that his statement was made based on data from the Ministry of Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration, citing reports from the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) on poverty rates from March 2017 to 2018.

To verify the accuracy of Jokowi’s claim, The Conversation asked economic researcher Ridho Al Izzati from SMERU Research Institute.

Analysis

Before testing that claim, firstly, we must understand the indicators the Indonesian government uses to measure poverty. These measures were introduced by economists James Foster, Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke in 1984 to calculate poverty rates.

Those indicators include:

1. The poverty rate, the percentage of people living below the poverty line as compared with the total population. From this indicator we can figure out the number of poor people.

2. The poverty gap rate measures how far or how deep is the level of income of the impoverished population from the poverty line. This indicator is measured by calculating the average distance between the income of the poor and the poverty line. The further they are from the poverty line, the more impoverished they are.

3. The poverty severity rate measures income inequality among poor people. This indicator is the average of the squared poverty gap. This calculation is made to identify the distribution of income among poor people and how far the most impoverished is from the people who are closest to the poverty line.

Although the BPS uses all three indicators to measure poverty, the first approach is most frequently used because it’s considered the easiest and the most popular among policymakers.

If we use all three approaches to evaluate Jokowi’s statement, then his statement is not exactly accurate. Although calculations of the number of poor people along with the depth and severity of poverty are correct, the percentage of impoverished people is not accurate.

The percentage of rural poverty in March 2017 was around 13.93% and in March 2018 it became 13.2%. This means the rural poverty rate fell by 0.73 points. At the same time, urban poverty rates decreased by 0.7 points from 7.72% in March 2017 to 7.02% in March 2018. Thus, there is no significant percentage difference between the decline of poverty rates in the city and rural areas.

The number of poor people in rural villages decreased 1.29 million from 17 million people in March 2017 to 15.8 million people in March 2018 while the number of impoverished people in urban cities decreased by 500,000 people from 10.6 million in March 2017 to 10.1 million in March 2018. So, it is true that the reduction in the number of impoverished people in rural areas is twice the number of those in the cities.

Moreover, the rural poverty gap rate has declined by 0.12 points from 2.49% in March 2017 to 2.37% in March 2018. Urban poverty rates declined by 0.07 points from 1.24% in March 2017 to 1.17% in March 2018. This means that rural poverty gap rate did decline by almost twice the rate of the decline in urban poverty depth.

For the poverty severity rate, numbers from rural areas have decreased by 0.04 points from 0.67% in March 2017 to 0.63% in March 2018. In urban areas, poverty severity has declined as much as 0.02 points from 0.31% in March 2017 to 0.29% in March 2018. This implies that the decline in rural poverty severity is twice as much as in the city.

Although most of Jokowi’s statement are statistically valid, if we aim to assess his accomplishment in eradicating poverty, it would be best to measure this from the beginning of his administration, from September 2014 until March 2018 (the most recent data available).

Thus, I offer an additional analysis of Indonesia’s poverty rates from the beginning of Jokowi’s time in office. My analysis based on data provided by the BPS exhibits a different fact.

When we look at the period between September 2014 and March 2018, the decrease in urban poverty percentages are actually bigger when compared to numbers from rural villages.

The rural poverty rate in September 2014 (a month before Jokowi’s inauguration) was 13.76%. If we compare this with the numbers from March 2018, it decreased by 0.56 points.

During the same period, the rate of decline for urban poverty is actually higher than rural levels. Urban poverty rates declined by 1.14 points from 8.16% in September 2014 to 7.02% in March 2018.

Graph 1: The percentage of poverty between September 2014 and March 2018. During this period, the rate of poverty experienced a rise in March 2015 but has steadily declined since then.

However, the decrease in the number of poor people in villages is indeed greater than in the cities during Jokowi’s time in office.

During Jokowi’s administration, the number of impoverished people living in rural areas declined by as much as 1.5 million people from 17.3 million in September 2014 to 15.8 million in March 2018.

During the same time frame, the number of poor people in cities declined by 200,000 people from 10.3 million to 10.1 million.

Graph 2: The number of people struck by poverty from September 2014 to March 2018. The number rose briefly in March 2015. Afterwards, it declined before rising back up on September 2016 to March 2017. Instead, the number of impoverished people only rose on March 2015 and steadily declined significantly afterwards.

For the rate of poverty gap during Jokowi’s administration, rural numbers actually increased by 0.12 points from 2.25% to 2.37%.

The urban numbers for poverty gap declined by 0.08 points from 1.25% in September 2014 to 1.17% in March 2018.

Graph 3: Poverty gap.

The similar trend, in which the decline rate of poverty numbers in the cities is higher than in the villages, also occurs in the poverty severity rate. The rate of rural poverty severity has increased by 0.06 points from 0.57% in September 2014 to 0.63% in March 2018. The urban poverty severity rate declined by 0.02 points from 0.31% in September 2014 to 0.29% in March 2018.

Graph 4: Poverty severity rate.

The above analysis is made by taking the dynamic welfare of the population into account. A household can escape poverty at a certain year but at any time it can return to poverty. This phenomenon is known as vulnerability.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, it is valid to say that between March 2017 and March 2018, the number of impoverished people in rural areas did experience a bigger drop than those in the city. But the percentage of poverty rate showed a different story.

Secondly, if viewed as a whole from the beginning of Jokowi’s time in office, then the overall decline of poverty is actually much larger in cities than in rural villages, although in terms of numbers the decline in poverty is much bigger in rural areas.

This is due to the fact that poor people in villages outnumber those in cities; thus making poor people in villages easier to identify than in cities.

Thirdly, it is better to see the condition of poverty as a whole, not just in relation to the number of poor people but also to its depth and severity.

Many poverty eradication programs are effective in reducing the number of poor people (especially those who are close to the poverty line) but are unable to improve the welfare of those most impoverished until at least near the poverty line. This becomes important to note considering that poverty eradication policies should be able to improve the welfare of all who are suffering from poverty without leaving a single one behind. – Ridho Al Izzati

Blind peer review

After rechecking with BPS data, I can confirm that the data used by the author are correct.

However, we cannot decisively say that Jokowi’s statement is inaccurate. Jokowi’s statement would only be inaccurate if we used numbers from the entire span of his administration. But, it would still be accurate if we only limit ourselves to data from the last year.

I would like to emphasise that I agree with the writer’s notion in using the statistical data as a whole and not in sections. Therefore, to actually measure Jokowi’s success in eradicating poverty, it would be best to use data from the beginning of Jokowi’s time in office from September 2014 instead of using data from the past year only.

I would also like to note that it would be better if the writer elaborated on why the poverty gap and severity indexes need more attention. Apart from that, the writer could also add a simple illustration so that both concepts could be easier to understand. – Teguh Dartanto

The Conversation checks the validity of claims and statements made by Indonesia’s presidential candidates before the 2019 presidential election. Their statements are analysed by experts in the field, which are then subjected to a blind peer review.

– ref. Fact Check: Has the rate of rural poverty in Indonesia declined twice as much as in the cities? – https://theconversation.com/fact-check-has-the-rate-of-rural-poverty-in-indonesia-declined-twice-as-much-as-in-the-cities-107110